182 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

Ideal or not. For example, the Architecture of Egypt, her pyramids and temples, cumbrous and inelegant, but imposing from their vastness and their gloom, express the ideal of Sense or Matter-elevated and purified indeed, and nearly approaching the Intellectual, but Material still; we think of them as of natural scenery, in association with caves or mountains, or vast periods of time; their voice is as the voice of the sea, or as that of “many peoples,” shouting in unison:-But the Sculpture of Greece is the voice of Intellect and Thought, communing with itself in solitude, feeding on beauty and yearning after truth:-While the Painting of Christendom-(and we must remember that the glories of Christianity, in the full extent of the term, are yet to come)-is that of an immortal Spirit, conversing with its God. And as if to mark more forcibly the fact of continuous progress towards perfection, it is observable that although each of the three arts peculiarly reflects and characterises one of the three epochs, each art of later growth has been preceded in its rise, progress, and decline, by an antecedent correspondent development of its elder sister or sisters-Sculpture, in Greece, by that of Architecture-Painting, in Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If Sculpture and Painting stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting by that of Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in equal stature and perfection.”-Vol. i. pp. xii.-xiv.

13. The reader must, we think, at once perceive the bold fallacy of this forced analogy-the comparison of the architecture of one nation with the sculpture of another, and the painting of a third, and the assumption as a proof of difference in moral character, of changes necessarily wrought, always in the same order, by the advance of mere mechanical experience. Architecture must precede sculpture, not because sense precedes intellect, but because men must build houses before they adorn chambers, and raise shrines before they inaugurate idols; and sculpture must precede painting, because men must learn forms in the solid before they can project them on a flat surface, and must learn to conceive designs in light and shade before they can conceive them in colour, and must learn to treat subjects under positive colour and in narrow groups, before they can treat them under atmospheric effect and in receding masses, and all these are mere necessities of practice, and have no more connexion with any divisions of the human mind than the equally paramount necessities that men must gather stones before they build walls, or grind corn before they

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