ut, one need not make a hero of
the pavement artist. But without going to the extreme of flouting the
centuries of culture that art inherits, as it is now fashionable in many
places to do, students will do well to study at first the early rather
than the late work of the different schools, so as to get in touch with
the simple conditions of design on which good work is built. It is
easier to study these essential qualities when they are not overlaid by
so much knowledge of visual realisation. The skeleton of the picture is
more apparent in the earlier than the later work of any school.

The finest example of the union of the primitive with the most refined
and cultured art the world has ever seen is probably the Parthenon at
Athens, a building that has been the wonder of the artistic world for
over two thousand years. Not only are the fragments of its sculptures
in the British Museum amazing, but the beauty and proportions of its
architecture are of a refinement that is, I think, never even attempted
in these days. What architect now thinks of correcting the poorness of
hard, straight lines by very slightly curving them? Or of slightly
sloping inwards the columns of his facade to add to the strength of its
appearance? The amount of these variations is of the very slightest and
bears witness to the pitch of refinement attempted. And yet, with it
all, how simple! There is something of the primitive strength of
Stonehenge in that solemn row of columns rising firmly from the steps
#without any base#. With all its magnificence, it still retains the
simplicity of the hut from which it was evolved.

Something of the same combination of primitive grandeur and strength
with exquisite refinement of visualisation is seen in the art of Michael
Angelo. His followers adopted the big, muscular type of their master,
but lost the primitive strength he expressed; and when this primitive
force was lost sight of, what a decadence set in!

This is the point at which art reaches its highest mark: when to the
primitive strength and simplicity of early art are added the infinite
refinements and graces of culture without destroying or weakening the
sublimity of the expression.

In painting, the refinement and graces of culture take the form of an
increasing truth to natural appearances, added bit by bit to the
primitive baldness of early work; until the point is reached, as it was
in the nineteenth century, when apparently the whole facts of