‘I can well believe it. Simple lines in a landscape are of the same value as the naked parts of a richly-clothed figure. They act both as contrasts and as indications of the original substratum of the figure; but to say that severe simplicity is the highest ideal is mere pedantry and Manicheism.’ ‘Oh, everything is Manicheism with you, Claude!’ ‘And no wonder, while the world is as full of it now as it was in the thirteenth century. But let that pass. This craving after so-called classic art, whether it be Manicheism or not, is certainly a fighting against God,—a contempt of everything which He has taught us artists since the introduction of Christianity. I abominate this setting up of Sculpture above Painting, of the Greeks above the Italians,—as if all Eastern civilization, all Christian truth, had taught art nothing,—as if there was not more real beauty in a French cathedral or a Venetian palazzo than in a dozen Parthenons, and more soul in one Rafaelle, or Titian either, than in all the Greek statues of the Tribune or Vatican.’ ‘You have changed your creed, I see, and, like all converts, are somewhat fierce and fanatical. You used to believe in Zeuxis and Parrhasius in old times.’ ‘Yes, as long as I believed in Fuseli’s “Lectures;” but when I saw at Pompeii the ancient paintings which still remain to us, my faith in their powers received its first shock; and when I re-read in the Lectures of Fuseli and his school all their extravagant praises of the Greek painters, and separated their few facts fairly out from among the floods of rant on which they floated, I came to the conclusion that the ancients knew as little of colour or chiaroscuro as they did of perspective, and as little of spiritual expression as they did of landscape-painting. What do I care for the birds pecking at Zeuxis’s grapes, or Zeuxis himself trying to draw back Parrhasius’s curtain? Imitative art is the lowest trickery. There are twenty men in England now capable of the same sleight of hand; and yet these are recorded as the very highest triumphs of ancient art by the only men who have handed down to us any record of it.’ ‘It may be so; or again, it may not. But do not fancy, Claude, that classic sculpture has finished its work on earth. You know that it has taught you what Gothic art could never teach,—the ideal of physical health and strength. Believe that it exists, and will exist, to remind the puny town-dweller of the existence of that ideal; to say to the artisan, every time he looks upon a statue—such God intended you to be; such you may be; such your class will be, in some future healthy state of civilization, when Sanitary Reform and Social Science shall be accepted and carried out as primary duties of a government toward the nation.