The primary conception of art in its productive energy is as a certain inspiration. How did that inspiration work in those whom we acknowledge to have received it in fullest measure? If we think a moment we shall say, "Involuntarily"--by a sort of _possession_ rather than a voluntary intellectual effort. The sculpture of the Greeks, their tragedies and their temples, were all wrought simply, without effort, without conscious travailing, by a natural evolution, not by a potent egg-hatching process of instructive criticism and morbid self-inspection and consulting of previous models, native and foreign. Architectural motives were gathered from Egypt and the East, from Phoenicia and Anatolia, but they were worked in as material, not copied as patterns; and the architecture is as original as if no one had ever built before. Phidias and Praxiteles and the rest shaped and chiselled, aiming at perfection no doubt, trying to do their best, but without troubling themselves as to what that best "ought" to be. Criticism was rife in Athens of all places, but it was a criticism of things existing, not of things problematically desirable. Statue and temple-front were criticised, not sculptor and architect--surely not sculpture and architecture in the abstract. Not sculptors and architects, that is, when the question was of their works. The men came in for their share of criticism, but on a different count. Theseus and Athene were judged as works of art, not as lame though interesting revelations of Phidias's soul. And be sure no faintest sin of the chisel was excused on the plea that Phidias meant more than he could express, and so bungled in the expression. Nor was the plea advanced that such bungling after the infinite was better than simple perfection in the attainable. An artist was called upon to be an artist, not a poet nor a philosopher nor a moralist. When Plato confounded them all in a splendid confusion of criticism the fruit-time had gone by. There was left but to expatiate on the hoard which summer had bequeathed, or to speculate, if he chose, on the possible yield of a future and most problematical year.