physical beauty, of acutest eye for
proportion and grace, with opportunities of studying the human figure
such as exist nowhere now, save among tropic savages, and gifted,
moreover, in that as in all other matters, with that innate diligence, of
which Mr. Carlyle has said, 'that genius is only an infinite capacity of
taking pains,' and we can understand somewhat of the causes which
produced those statues, human and divine, which awe and shame the
artificiality and degeneracy of our modern so-called civilisation--we can
understand somewhat of the reverence for the human form, of the careful
study of every line, the storing up for use each scattered fragment of
beauty of which the artist caught sight, even in his daily walks, and
consecrating it in his memory to the service of him or her whom he was
trying to embody in marble or in bronze. And when the fashion came in of
making statues of victors in the games, and other distinguished persons,
a new element was introduced, which had large social as well as artistic
results. The sculptor carried his usual reverence into his careful
delineation of the victor's form, while he obtained in him a model,
usually of the very highest type, for perfecting his idea of some
divinity. The possibility of gaining the right to a statue gave a fresh
impulse to all competitors in the public games, and through them to the
gymnastic training throughout all the states of Greece, which made the
Greeks the most physically able and graceful, as well as the most
beautiful people known to the history of the human race. A people who,
reverencing beauty, reverenced likewise grace or acted beauty, so utterly
and honestly, that nothing was too humble for a free man to do, if it
were not done awkwardly and ill. As an instance, Sophocles himself--over
and above his poetic genius, one of the most cultivated gentlemen, as
well as one of the most exquisite musicians, dancers, and gymnasts, and
one of the most just, pious, and gentle of all Greece--could not, by
reason of the weakness of his voice, act in his own plays, as poets were
wont to do, and had to perform only the office of stage-manager. Twice
he took part in the action, once as the blind old Thamyris playing on the
harp, and once in his own lost tragedy, the 'Nausicaa.' There in the
scene in which the Princess, as she does in Homer's 'Odyssey,' comes down
to the sea-shore with her maidens to wash the household clothes, and then
to play at ba