Greek Papyri in the British Museum: Catalogue, with Texts, vol. III

for ' Pliny's essent is Plato's T<3 ovn ov and Aristotle's TO TL y)v uvai, which is not in the least like artistic realism or representational fidelity to natural appearances; and his viderentur refers to TO. <f>aiv6fi.eva, which is the very thing which we nowadays call reality. ' (Of course, to the artist, the appearance is the reality.) Even Praxiteles, on this view, has already started on the fatal slope of excessive attention to representational detail; incidentally, this lends a special contemporary interest and application po Plato's criticism of art as mere imitation. Spiritual decadence sets in, inevitably, according to Professor Rhys Carpenter's theory, at the moment when, and in so far as, the formal content (derived from but in essence differing from those general mental images of which archaic art supplies the un-realistic copy) becomes diminished and obscured by too much insistence upon realism in imitating the actual appearance of objects. (The converse would also be just as possible; but Greek artists seldom, if ever, allowed themselves to lose touch with reality, once approached, in the direction of an artificial and therefore unsatisfactory devotion to ' pure form ' ; and so the discussion of that possibility does not directly arise.) But this consideration of the general nature of the methods of the Greek sculptors (which must be judged in its full extentin the book itself, and not from our bald and unconvincing summary) does not exhaust Professor Rhys Carpenter's contribution to the Aesthetics of Greek Art. It would even be true to say that the main object of his book is to analyse, as he does for architecture as well as for sculpture, the actual working out of those principles of wise limitation of scope by which the Greeks were able so quickly and so surely to approach and achieve absolute perfection. The nature and value of the conventions of oneand two-dimensional design (in the form respectively of pure line and of ' pattern '), the problems of the relation of line to mass, of chiaroscuro and so forth, are all most ably dealt with in regard more especially to sculpture; and the special uses of the Orders, in architecture, as forming a sort of artificial world of recognisable shapes by the special variation and constructional arrangement of which architectural emotion can be aroused with the least possible disturbance of the spectator's concentration upon a purely visual effect: all this and much more, into which we cannot now enter, is given us with the greatest clarity of language and precision of thought. The argument often makes a strenuous demand on one's power of concentration; it is none the worse for that. There is no detailed index or table of contents to help one out; but there is a very excellent marginal summary. Last, but by no means least, Professor Rhys Carpenter must be praised for evading throughout that death-trap which has closed over so many art-critics—from Aristotle to Mr. Berenson—that, namely, of paying more attention to the emotions to be aroused in the cultured spectator than to what is really the only important matter, the object and methods of the artist himself.