ue before seeking for the beauty and
enjoyableness of a picture or a piece of music; this is the reverse of
the artistic training which every individual man or woman obtains
consciously or unconsciously in our own day; for we begin with the art
born nearest our time, then proceed to those further; we go from music
to painting, and from painting to sculpture. But humanity at large
received the opposite training in the last four-and-twenty centuries,
since humanity knew beauty in the statue before knowing beauty in the
picture, and beauty in the picture before beauty in music. The first
standard of artistic right and wrong (since architecture, being a thing
partly for use, and only partly for beauty, has a mixed morality of its
own) was the standard of sculpture. Let us see what that was, and how we
must alter and enlarge it (as humankind has done), in order to obtain
the standard of right and wrong in painting and that in music. The
statues, in our fairy tale, told the child that they had brethren in
sound, brethren which, knowing them, he should also know from the
resemblance. But first, what like are these first born of art, these
statues? What is this character in them which, found in the younger
things, in painting and music, shall show that even these are of the
same stock as the statues? What like are these statues? What a question!
it is perfectly insulting to any one of us most aesthetic creatures.
What like are these statues? Does any of us require to ask or to be
taught that? And to begin with, the very question is a gross error, an
unendurable blunder: statues, antique statues.... You think that so
simple, do you? You think, perhaps, like the people of the sixteenth
century, that there is only one kind of antique statue; know, most
impudent of ignoramuses, that there are innumerable sorts of statues
and antique statues, there are good statues and bad statues, and early
statues and late statues, there are Dedalian statues and AEginete
statues, and immediately pre-Phidian and Phidian, and immediately
post-Phidian and Praxitelian statues, and statues of the school of
Pergamus, and statues of the school of Rhodes, and Graeco-Roman statues,
and statues of the Graeco-Egyptian revival under Hadrian, and statues....
Enough, enough! We have been talking of the teachings of the statues
themselves, of the lesson which they, with their unchangeable attitude
and gesture, their lines and curves and lights and shadows of body,