And this strain of the Greek temperament in sculpture is a very different thing from the motive of the so-called “classic” school. The latter drew its primary inspiration from Roman sculpture, in a search for something supposedly heroic, that would fit the genius of the new republicanism which had arisen out of the chaos of the Revolution. It was at first grandiloquent, but, growing senile, fell to babbling of the abstract beauty of line and form, always without direct reference to nature and gradually with the increased formalism that grew from the perpetuation of certain arbitrary rules and precedents. Such “classic” statues, when they are the work of a master, have their beauty, but it is inert, without the thrill of life; when the work of a mere practitioner, they are unspeakably jejune and paltry. Both kinds are alike in their divorce from nature-study, from the inspiration which it gives to an intimate appreciation of line and form. They will not show the fluidity of line, the delicate surprises of curve, the infinite subtleties of modelling that invite caress, the texture and quality of flesh, nor the mingling of firm and supple in the form, the pliant movement adjusted to the action of the figure--in a word, the stir of life within the material. Warner gives us this sensation and with so choice an instinct for the exact point at which the naturalism should melt into plastic immobility, with a love so keen and unalloyed for the manifestations of nature and in a spirit so seriously jocund, that we recognise, as I have said, his affinity with the old Greek ideal. We may trace it also in his feeling for the monumental rather than for the picturesque; for those qualities in sculpture which belong to it preëminently, as opposed to those which it derives by analogy from painting. It appears in the alto-relievo, “Cupid and Psyche,” most conspicuously, because the subject might have been treated differently. The modern sculptor, working from the background to the front plane by repeated superlayers of clay, can introduce a variety of subtly differentiated planes, and may become absorbed in this composition of light and shade, producing an effect which we can describe as full of colour and which is exceedingly beautiful. The artist of old time, however, graving the marble, wood or metal, started with the form of the figures under his hand, absorbed himself in them and regarded the open spaces of his composition, when he reached them, simply as a background. Instead of a quasi-pictorial subtlety of light and shade he strove for a purely sculptural tangibility of modelled form. It is this insistence upon form which is so conspicuous in the “Psyche”; in the contrast between the child’s podgy softness and the maiden’s long, lithe, firm figure.