ade up of tightly-pressed, crushed odds and ends of impression;
broken, confused, pounded bits of the sights and sounds and emotions
of our childhood. To the statues we return only quite late, when this
long-formed, long-moulded soul of ours has been well steeped in every
sort of eclectic and artificial culture; has been saturated with modern
art and modern criticism, with mysticism and realism and sentiment and
cynicism, with Dante and Zola, and Mozart and Wagner and Offenbach,
saturated, with every kind of critically distilled aesthetic essence,
till there is not a flavour and not a scent, good or bad, sweet or foul,
which may not be perceived in this strange soul of ours. Then we return
to the statues; and, having imbibed (like all things) a certain amount
of Hellenic, Pagan, antique feeling, we try also to assimilate the
spirit of the statues of Phidias or Praxiteles; we expound the
civilisation, the mode of thought; we trace the differences of school,
we approve and condemn, we speak marvellously well, with subtlety or
passion; we imagine all manner of occult, ineffable virtues and vices
in this antique art, we dabble deliciously in alternate purity and
impurity (this being the perfection of artistic pleasure), as we even
occasionally, for a few moments, feel actual, simple, unreasoning,
wholesome pleasure in the sight of the old broken marbles. All this
we do, and most often are therewith satisfied. Yet if, weighing our
artistic likings and dislikings, comparing together our feelings towards
so many and so various manifestations, trying to determine what is fresh
and wholesome food to our depraved aesthetic (and aesthetico-moral)
palate, and what is mere highly flavoured, spicy or nauseous drug-stuff,
if, in such a moment of doubt, we ask ourselves, overheard by no one,
whether in reality this antique art is, in the life of our feelings, at
all important, comforting, influential? we shall, for the most part,
whisper back to ourselves that it is not so in the very least. But could
it ever have been? Could this, or any art have been for us more than
merely one of a hundred feebly enjoyed, more or less exotic mental
luxuries; than an historic fossil, by study of which, as with the
bone of a pterodactyl or an ichthyosaurus, we can amuse ourselves
reconstructing the appearance and habits of a long dead, once living
civilisation? Or might these statues have been much more to us? Might
they, perhaps, have shaped and traine