art, is fine when it makes a man's face as like a man's face as it can. Hold to that. All kinds of nonsense are talked to you, now-a-days, ingeniously and irrelevantly about art. Therefore, for the most part of the day, shut your ears, and keep your eyes open: and understand primarily, what you 5 may, I fancy, understand easily, that the greatest masters of all greatest schools-Phidias, Donatello, Titian, Velasquez, or Sir Joshua Reynolds-all tried to make human creatures as like human creatures as they could; and that anything less like humanity than their work, is not so good as theirs. Get that well driven into your heads; and don't let it out again, at your peril.

ΤΟ

Having got it well in, you may then farther understand, safely, that there is a great deal of secondary work in pots, and pans, and floors, and carpets, and shawls, and archi- 15 tectural ornament, which ought, essentially, to be unlike reality, and to depend for its charm on quite other qualities than imitative ones

...

Granted, however, that these tresses may be finely placed, still they are not like a lion's mane. So we come back to the 20 question,-if the face is to be like a man's face, why is not the lion's mane to be like a lion's mane? Well, because it can't be like a lion's mane without too much trouble;-and inconvenience after that, and poor success, after all. Too much trouble, in cutting the die into fine fringes and jags; in- 25 convenience after that,-because fringes and jags would spoil the surface of a coin; poor success after all,-because, though you can easily stamp cheeks and foreheads smooth at a blow, you can't stamp projecting tresses fine at a blow, whatever pains you take with your die.

So your Greek uses his common sense, wastes no time, loses no skill, and says to you, "Here are beautifully set tresses, which I have carefully designed and easily stamped. Enjoy them; and if you cannot understand that they mean lion's mane, heaven mend your wits."

See then, you have in this work, well-founded knowledge,

30

35

simple and right aims, thorough mastery of handicraft, splendid invention in arrangement, unerring common sense in treatment,-merits, these, I think, exemplary enough to justify our tormenting you a little with Greek Art. But it 5 has one merit more than these, the greatest of all. It always means something worth saying. Not merely worth saying for that time only, but for all time. What do you think this helmet of lion's hide is always given to Hercules for? You can't suppose it means only that he once killed a lion, and Io always carried the skin afterwards to show that he had, as Indian sportsmen send home stuffed rugs, with claws at the corners, and a lump in the middle which one tumbles over every time one stirs the fire. What was this Nemean Lion, whose spoils were evermore to cover Hercules from 15 the cold? Not merely a large specimen of Felis Leo, ranging the fields of Nemea, be sure of that. This Nemean cub was one of a bad litter. Born of Typhon and Echidna,-of the whirlwind and the snake,-Cerberus his brother, the Hydra of Lerna his sister,-it must have been difficult to get his 20 hide off him. He had to be found in darkness too, and dealt upon without weapons, by grip at the throat-arrows and club of no avail against him. What does all that mean?

It means that the Nemean Lion is the first great adversary of life, whatever that may be-to Hercules, or to any of us, 25 then or now. The first monster we have to strangle, or be destroyed by, fighting in the dark, and with none to help us, only Athena standing by to encourage with her smile. Every man's Nemean Lion lies in wait for him somewhere. The slothful man says, there is a lion in the path. He says well. 30 The quiet unslothful man says the same, and knows it too. But they differ in their farther reading of the text. The slothful man says, I shall be slain, and the unslothful, Ir shall be. It is the first ugly and strong enemy that rises against us, all future victory depending on victory over that. 35 Kill it; and through all the rest of life, what was once dread

ful is your armour and you are clothed with that conquest

for every other, and helmed with its crest of fortitude for

evermore.

Alas, we have most of us to walk bare-headed; but that is the meaning of the story of Nemea,-worth laying to heart and thinking of, sometimes, when you see a dish garnished 5 with parsley, which was the crown at the Nemean games.

WALTER PATER

THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE1

[Extract]

As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he overtook by the wayside a poor aged man, and, as he seemed weary with the road, helped him on with the burden which he carried, a certain distance. And as the man told his story, it 10 chanced that he named the place, a little place in the neighbourhood of a great city, where Florian had passed his earliest years, but which he had never since seen, and, the story told, went forward on his journey comforted. And that night, like a reward for his pity, a dream of that place came 15 to Florian, a dream which did for him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true aspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he had 20 lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season; only, with tints more musically blent on wall and floor, and some finer light and shadow running in and out along its curves and angles, and with all its little carv- 25 ings daintier. He awoke with a sigh at the thought of almost thirty years which lay between him and that place, yet with

1 Reprinted by permission of Macmillan & Co., Limited, and Dodd, Mead & Company, publishers.

a flutter of pleasure still within him at the fair light, as if it were a smile, upon it. And it happened that this accident of his dream was just the thing needed for the beginning of a certain design he then had in view, the noting, namely, of 5 some things in the story of his spirit-in that process of brain-building by which we are, each one of us, what we are. With the image of the place so clear and favourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself therein, and how his thoughts had grown up to him. In that half-spiritualised house he Io could watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of

the soul which had come to be there-of which indeed, through the law which makes the material objects about them so large an element in children's lives, it had actually become a part; inward and outward being woven through 15 and through each other into one inextricable texture-half, tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows how far. In the house and garden of his dream he saw a child moving, and could divide the main 20 streams at least of the winds that had played on him, and study so the first stage in that mental journey.

The old house, as when Florian talked of it afterwards he always called it (as all children do, who can recollect a change of home, soon enough but not too soon to mark a 25 period in their lives), really was an old house; and an element of French descent in its inmates-descent from Watteau, the old court-painter, one of whose gallant pieces still hung in one of the rooms-might explain, together with some other things, a noticeable trimness and comely whiteness about 30 everything there-the curtains, the couches, the paint on the walls with which the light and shadow played so delicately; might explain also the tolerance of the great poplar in the garden, a tree most often despised by English people, but which French people love, having observed a certain fresh 35 way its leaves have of dealing with the wind, making it sound, in never so slight a stirring of the air, like running water.

The old-fashioned, low wainscoting went round the rooms, and up the staircase with carved balusters and shadowy angles, landing half-way up at a broad window, with a swallow's nest below the sill, and the blossom of an old pear-tree showing across it in late April, against the blue, below which 5 the perfumed juice of the find of fallen fruit in autumn was so fresh. At the next turning came the closet which held on its deep shelves the best china. Little angel faces and reedy flutings stood out round the fireplace of the children's room. And on the top of the house, above the large attic, where the 10 white mice ran in the twilight-an infinite, unexplored wonderland of childish treasures, glass beads, empty scent-bottles still sweet, thrums of coloured silks, among its lumber-a flat space of roof, railed round, gave a view of the neighbouring steeples; for the house, as I said, stood near a great city, 15 which sent up heavenwards, over the twisting weather-vanes, not seldom, its beds of rolling cloud and smoke, touched with storm or sunshine. But the child of whom I am writing did not hate the fog because of the crimson lights which fell from it sometimes upon the chimneys, and the whites which 20 gleamed through its openings, on summer mornings, on turret or pavement. For it is false to suppose that a child's sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special fineness, in the objects which present themselves to it, though this indeed comes to be the rule with most of us in later life; 25 earlier, in some degree, we see inwardly; and the child finds for itself, and with unstinted delight, a difference for the sense, in those whites and reds through the smoke on very homely buildings, and in the gold of the dandelions at the roadside, just beyond the houses, where not a handful of 30 earth is virgin and untouched, in the lack of better ministries to its desire of beauty.

This house then stood not far beyond the gloom and rumours of the town, among high garden-walls, bright all summer-time with Golden-rod, and brown-and-golden Wall- 35 flower-Flos Parietis, as the children's Latin-reading father