Page:The Obligations of the Universities Towards Art.djvu/29

 flatteries, individual life and its conditions engaged the sculptor's sympathies. There grew up a sense altogether novel (and it was a noble one) of dramatic interest in humble personages; 'The boxing Boys,' 'The Faun playing cymbals,' 'The fighting Gladiator,' 'The dying Goth,' serve as examples of this change of spirit. With the assertion of predominance of interest in the ways of actual men came a less ideal form, but it carried with it the miracle of noble human evolution, and it was altogether free from reversion to brute form such as some modern realists would have us accept as truth.

Compared with Greek sculpture the difference was as that between Homer, Hesiod and Aeschylus on the one side, and Virgil, Theocritus, and Horace on the other. I have no right to follow this parallel further, but my examples are offered to illustrate the truth that in the best days art and literature had the same distinctive national character. Painting in early days was little more than coloured bas-reliefs, with the relief preparation abandoned. Pliny's record is only of single figures, or if more, only of figures grouped as they might be in sculpture. We see interesting examples of such treatment from Pompeii, and the gracefulness of some of these figures enables us to understand how beautiful many of the paintings preserved in the Capitol must have been; but there could have been no complete pictures in any modern sense, for perspective had not been sufficiently mastered to enable artists to execute works such as did the advanced Italians. In what was achieved the debasements of the