call Phidias, crowns the last vital movement in the Hellenic slope. He
is a genius, but he is no oddity: he falls quite naturally into his
place as the master of the early decadence; he is the man in whom runs
rich and fast but a little coarsened the stream of inspiration that gave
life to archaic Greek sculpture. He is the Giotto--but an inferior
Giotto--of the slope that starts from the eighth century B.C.--so
inferior to the sixth century A.D.--to peter out in the bogs of
Hellenistic and Roman rubbish. Whence sprang that Hellenic impulse? As
yet we cannot tell. Probably, from the ruins of some venerable
Mediterranean civility, against the complex materialism of which it was,
in its beginnings, I dare say, a reaction. The story of its prime can be
read in fragments of archaic sculpture scattered throughout Europe, and
studied in the National Museum at Athens, where certain statues of
athletes, dating from about 600, reveal the excellences and defects of
Greek art at its best. Of its early decline in the fifth century Phidias
is the second-rate Giotto; the copies of his famous contemporaries and
immediate predecessors are too loathsome to be at all just; Praxiteles,
in the fourth century, the age of accomplished prettiness, is the
Correggio, or whatever delightful trifler your feeling for art and
chronology may suggest. Fifth and fourth century architecture forbid us
to forget the greatness of the Greeks in the golden age of their
intellectual and political history. The descent from sensitive, though
always rather finikin, drawing through the tasteful and accomplished to
the feebly forcible may be followed in the pots and vases of the sixth,
fifth, fourth, and third centuries. In the long sands and flats of Roman
realism the stream of Greek inspiration is lost for ever.

Before the death of Marcus Aurelius, Europe was as weary of materialism
as England before the death of Victoria. But what power was to destroy a
machine that had enslaved men so completely that they dared not conceive