would feel the pleasure he himself enjoyed while consuming the sweet
fruit. Here, among the works of Egyptian antiquity, there is imminent
danger of falling under the tyranny of the canon of proportions which can
be expressed in figures, or merely even the demands of the style hallowed
by thousands of years, but in a subject like the 'Fig-eater' such a
reproach is not to be feared. He speaks his own intelligible language,
and whoever reproduces it without turning to the right or left has won,
for he has created a work whose value every true friend of art, no matter
to what school he belongs, prizes highly.

"To me personally such works of living reality are cordially welcome.
Yet art neither can nor will be satisfied with snatches of what is
close at hand; but you are late-born, sons of a time when the two great
tendencies of art have nearly reached the limits of what is attainable
to them. You were everywhere confronted with completed work, and you
are right when you refuse to sink to mere imitators of earlier works,
and therefore return to Nature, with which we Hellenes, and perhaps the
Egyptians also, began. The latter forgot her; the former--we Greeks--
continued to cling to her closely."

"Some few," Hermon eagerly interrupted the other, "still think it worth
the trouble to take from her what she alone can bestow. They save
themselves the toilsome search for the model which others so successfully
used before them, and bronze and marble still keep wonderfully well.
Bring out the old masterpieces. Take the head from this one, the arm
from that, etc. The pupil impresses the proportions on his mind. Only
so far as the longing for the beautiful permits do even the better ones
remain faithful to Nature, not a finger's breadth more."

"Quite right," the other went on calmly. "But your objection only