in history?

Without parallel? Well, that is exactly what the Athenians did.

In the room of the Parthenon marbles, in the British Museum, you will see
a marble shield on the wall. On it there are two figures; one of a man
whose face is half hidden, the other of a man with the godlike lineaments
of Pericles. For having done this, for having introduced into a bas
relief, taken from Greek sacred history, the image of the great statesman
who was ruling Athens at the time, Phidias was flung into prison and
there, in the common gaol of Athens, died, the supreme artist of the old
world.

And do you think that this was an exceptional case? The sign of a
Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art, and this cry was
raised by the Athenian people against every great poet and thinker of
their day--AEschylus, Euripides, Socrates. It was the same with Florence
in the thirteenth century. Good handicrafts are due to guilds not to the
people. The moment the guilds lost their power and the people rushed in,
beauty and honesty of work died.

And so, never talk of an artistic people; there never has been such a
thing.

But, perhaps, you will tell me that the external beauty of the world has
almost entirely passed away from us, that the artist dwells no longer in
the midst of the lovely surroundings which, in ages past, were the
natural inheritance of every one, and that art is very difficult in this
unlovely town of ours, where, as you go to your work in the morning, or
return from it at eventide, you have to pass through street after street
of the most foolish and stupid architecture that the world has ever seen;
architecture, where every lovely Greek form is desecrated and defiled,
and every lovely Gothic form defiled and desecrated, reducing
three-fourths of the London houses to being, merely, like square boxes of
the vilest proportions, as gaunt as they are grimy, and as poor as they
are pretentious--the hall door always of the wrong colour, and the
windows of the wrong size, and where, even when wearied of the houses you
turn to contemplate the street itself, you have nothing to look at but
chimney-pot hats, men with sandwich boards, vermilion letterboxes, and do
that even at the risk of being run over by an emerald-green omnibus.

Is not art difficult, you will say to me, in such surroundings as these?
Of course it is difficult, but then art was never easy; you yourselves
would not wish it to be easy; and, besi