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T H E N EIW           PA t T H.
PUBLISHED BY THE
Society for the Advancement of
TRUTH IN ART.
"Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are,
Nook Ad1 "             and the things that shall be hereafter."
     L  iarc 1IS
SCULPTURE.
PAPER IV.-OF THE PRESENT TIME.
IN the course of this article we have
considered the sculpture left us by the
Greeks, that of the Middle Ages, and
that of the Renaissance while yet in
its strength. The reader who has fol-
lowed thus far will have perceived
that the writer has sought no display
of original ideas, but only such state-
ment of truths easily ascertainable and
conclusions not to be avoided as may
help us in our answer to the inquiry
with which we began, What ought our
sculptors to do for us ?
It behoves us to guard sedulously
and to study continually the fragments
we possess of Greek sculpture. They
are the work< of stronger and healthier
men than we, trying with all their
might to embody their ideas of perfect
health and strength. The beauty of
form thus attained is unmatched in
Art, and altogether unapproached by
anything we can see in life. As long
as inen lead artificial and unhealthy
lives,-as long as the seeds of disease
are uneradicated, and the results re-
main of our own and our fathers' care-
lessness and vice, so long will it be
well for us to study Greek statues, that
Wve may see how beautiful our bodies
were meant to be.
Is it, therefore, well for the sculptor
to study Greek statues ? Ought he to
ase them as rmodels for his work. ?
Experience has proved the vanity of
thle attempt.  For the attempt has
been often enough made. The follow-
ers of the classic seem to have reasoned
thus;-The Greeks studied the living
body of man and reached this splendid
ideal; now, if we study this ideal,
these marble gods and heroes, to what
perfection shall we not attain? at all
events, here is safety, in the study not
of feeble humanity, but of these super-
human exemplars. The case can be
plausibly stated. But the result has
always been failure, failure to produce
anything Greek or anything good. In
some cases, and especially among the
sixteenth century sculptors of inferior
ability, a certain resemblance has been
attained to some of the third-rate an-
tiques, left us from days of the Empire,
executed in bad times for art by Greeks
resident in the Imperial City, or work-
ing to please her luxurious and trivial
nobility. But there is nothing modern
that is at all like good Greek sculpture,
whether colossal or miniature, com-
plete or in relief, associated or alone.
And this result is complete failure.
For, from the days when his critics
reproached Buonarotti that his work
was not so good as the antique, and he
hid-as the story goes-a statue of his
in the ground, which, being discovered,
was declared a very fine antique in-
deed, to the days when Canova gave
the enraptured world his Graces and
Nymphs, the striving of the classical
men has been to do not as the Greek
I