t haunt, does
not seek a solution. For they are dull things, in their dirty whiteness:
they are doing nothing, these creatures, merely standing or sitting or
leaning, they are looking at nothing with their pupilless white eyes,
they have no story to tell, no name to be asked. The child does not say
to them, as to the people in pictures, the splendid people in strange
colours, and holding strange things, "Who are you? why are you doing
that?" It does not even ask or answer itself whether these white things,
who seem to be all the same, are dead or alive: they are not ghosts,
they are things which, for aught the child knows or cares, have never
been born and never will die. A negation, oppressive and depressing,
that is all; and in the infinite multitude of statues in such a place
as this Vatican, their sense must become actively painful to the child.
Hence, the children we meet either rush headlong through corridor and
hall, looking neither to the right nor to the left, or let themselves
be passively led through, listless, depressed, glancing vaguely about,
looking wistfully at the little glimpses of sunlit garden outside, at
the clipped box hedges and trim orange trees in the court of the Pine
Cone. For there, outside, is life, movement, green; little hedged beds
to run round; fountains to be made to spirt aside by sticking fingers
into their pipes; walls on which to walk balanced, and benches to jump
over: there is field and food for the child's fancy, and here, within,
among all these cut stones, there is none.

Hence it is that the child, who will one day become ourselves, rarely
cares to return to these sculpture galleries; or, if it care to return
to any, it is to mixed galleries like those of Florence, where, instead
of the statues, it looks at the pictures. And out of pictures, out of
the coarse blurs of colour in picture-books, out of the black, huddled,
infinitively suggestive engravings in bible and book of travel; out of
fine glossy modern pictures which represent a definite place, or tell a
definite story; out of all this, confused with haunting impressions, of
things seen or heard of (the strange, deeply significant sights and
words of our childhood), do we get our original, never really alterable
ideas and feelings about art; for much as we may clip, trim, and bedizen
our minds with borrowed things, we can never change, never even recast
its solid material: a compact, and seemingly homogeneous soul mass,
m