What do I care for the birds pecking
at Zeuxis's grapes, or Zeuxis himself trying to draw back
Parrhasius's curtain? Imitative art is the lowest trickery. There
are twenty men in England now capable of the same sleight of hand;
and yet these are recorded as the very highest triumphs of ancient
art by the only men who have handed down to us any record of it.'
'It may be so; or again, it may not. But do not fancy, Claude, that
classic sculpture has finished its work on earth. You know that it
has taught you what Gothic art could never teach,--the ideal of
physical health and strength. Believe that it exists, and will
exist, to remind the puny town-dweller of the existence of that
ideal; to say to the artisan, every time he looks upon a statue--such
God intended you to be; such you may be; such your class will be, in
some future healthy state of civilization, when Sanitary Reform and
Social Science shall be accepted and carried out as primary duties of
a government toward the nation.
'Surely, classic sculpture remains, as a witness of the primaeval
paradise; a witness that man and woman were created at first healthy,
and strong, and fair, and innocent; just as classic literature
remains for a witness that the heathen of old were taught of God;
that we have something to learn of them, summed up in that now
obsolete word "virtue"--true and wholesome manhood, which we are
likely to forget, and are forgetting daily, under the enervating
shadow of popular superstitions.
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