Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/256

 216 Journal of Philology. Hellenic art, to which they belong, precisely that first and chief o Hellenic artists by whom they were executed, to which and to whom any such line of research on the laws of form would have been pre-eminently alien. Pheidias, remember, by the right of pri- mogeniture, is the ruling spirit of Idealism in art. Of spontaneity was that Idealism begotten and nurtured : by any such system as Mr Hay's, that spontaneity would be smothered and paralysed. Pheidias copied an Idea in his own mind " ipsius in mente insi- debat species pulchritudinis eximia qusedam" (Cic.) ; later ages copied him. He created : they criticised. He was the author of Iliads : they the authors of Poetics. Doubtless, if you unsphere the spirit of Mr Hay's theories, you will find nothing discordant with what I have here said. That is a sound view of Beauty which makes it consist in that due subordination of the parts to the whole, that due relation of the parts to each other, which Mendelssohn had in his mind when he said that the Essence of Beauty was " Unity in Variety" Variety beguiling the Imagina- tion, the perception of Unity exercising the thewes and sinews of the Intellect. On such a view of Beauty Mr Hay's theory may, in spirit, be said to rest. But here, as in higher things, it is the letter that killeth, while the spirit giveth life. And accordingly I must enter a protest against any endeavour to foist upon the palmy days of Hellenic art systems of geometrical proportions incompatible, as I believe, with those higher and broader princi- ples by which the progress of ancient sculpture was ordered and governed : systems which will bear nothing of that " Felicity and Chance by which" and not by Rule " Lord Bacon believed that a painter may make a better face than ever was :" systems which take no account of that fundamental distinction between the schools of Athens and of Argos, and their respective disciples and descendants, without which you will make nonsense of the pages of Pliny, and what is worse sense of the pages of his commentators : systems in short, which may have their value as instruments for the education of the eye, and for instructions in the arts of design, but must be cast aside as matters of learned trifling and curious disputation, where they profess to be royal roads to art, and to map the mighty maze of a creative mind. And even as regards the application of such a system of propor- tions to those works of sculpture which are posterior to the Pheidian age, only partial can have been the prevalence which it