evil necessities; and the sense of a sort of negative vandalism always clings to them, specially to the galleries of statues, so uninhabited, so utterly sepulchral. Going to a gallery of sculpture, we must be prepared to isolate what we wish to enjoy, to make for it a fitting habitation in our fancy: it is like going to read a page of Homer, or the Georgics, or Shelley, in some great musty, dusty library, redolent of crumbling parchment and forgotten rubbish. Such is this Vatican, even for us accustomed to it and knowing what we do and do not want: for us grown-up creatures, familiar with such matters, and with powers of impression quite deadened by culture. What, therefore, must not this Vatican be for a child: a quite small, ignorant barbarian such as has never before set its feet in a gallery, to whom art and antiquity have been mere names, to whom all this world of tintless stone can give but a confused, huge, overpowering impression of dreariness and vacuity. An impression composed of negative things: of silence and absence of colour, of lifelessness, of not knowing what it all is or all means; a sense of void and of unattractive mystery which chills, numbs the little soul into a sort of emotionless, inactive discomfort. What we were, how we felt, how we understood and vaguely guessed things, as children, we can none of us know. The recollection of ourselves when we were so different from ourselves, this tradition handed down from a dim, far-off creature of whom we know, without feeling it, that he, was our ego, this mysterious tradition remains to us only in fragments, has been printed into our memory only by desultory patches: at one point we can read, at another the ink has not taken; we know as distinctly as the sensation and impressions of this very morning this or that sensation or impression of so many, many years ago; and we ask ourselves at the same time—"how did such another thing affect our mind?"—with the utter hopelessness of answer with which we should try to look into the soul of a dog or a cat. Thus it is with our small barbarian child in the Vatican: how did it feel? Alas, we should, in order to know, first have to find that little obscure, puzzled soul again; and where is it gone? this thing which may once have been ourselves, whither has it disappeared, when has it been extinguished? So we can only speculate and reconstruct on a general basis. Certain it is that to this child, to any child, this Vatican must have been the most desolate, the most unintelligible of places. For, strange as it may seem, this clear and simple art of sculpture, born when the world was young and had not yet learned to think and talk in symbolical riddles, this apparently so outspoken art is, to the childish soul of our days, the most silent art of any. To the child, the modern child, it is speechless; it knows not a word of the language understood by the child's fancy. For this fancy language of our modern child is the language of colour, of movement, of sound, of suggestion, of all the broken words of modern thought and feeling: and the statue has none of these. The child does not recognise in it anything familiar: these naked, or half-naked, limbs are things which the child has never seen, at least, never observed; they do not, in their unfamiliarity, their vagueness, constitute an individual character; the dress, the furrowed face, the coloured hair, the beard, these are the things which the child knows, and by which it recognises; but in these vague, white things, with their rounded white cheek, and clotted white hair, with their fold of white drapery about them, the child recognises nothing: men? women? it does not ask: for it, they are mere things, figures cut out of stone. And thus, in their vagueness, their unfamiliarity, they seem also to be all alike, even as, on first acquaintance, we sometimes ask ourselves whether those sisters or brothers we know are four or only three; for in the unknown there is no diversity. Mysterious things, therefore, these statues for the child; but theirs is a mystery of mere vacuity, one which does not haunt, does not seek a solution. For they are dull things, in their dirty whiteness: they are doing nothing, these creatures, merely standing or sitting or leaning, they are looking at nothing with their pupilless white eyes, they have no story to tell, no name to be asked. The child does not say to them, as to the people in pictures, the splendid people in strange colours, and holding strange things, "Who are you? why are you doing that?" It does not even ask or answer itself whether these white things, who seem to be all the same, are dead or alive: they are not ghosts, they are things which, for aught the child knows or cares, have never been born and never will die. A negation, oppressive and depressing, that is all; and in the infinite multitude of statues in such a place as this Vatican, their sense must become actively painful to the child. Hence, the children we meet either rush headlong through corridor and hall, looking neither to the right nor to the left, or let themselves be passively led through, listless, depressed, glancing vaguely about, looking wistfully at the little glimpses of sunlit garden outside, at the clipped box hedges and trim orange trees in the court of the Pine Cone. For there, outside, is life, movement, green; little hedged beds to run round; fountains to be made to spirt aside by sticking fingers into their pipes; walls on which to walk balanced, and benches to jump over: there is field and food for the child's fancy, and here, within, among all these cut stones, there is none.

Hence it is that the child, who will one day become ourselves, rarely cares to return to these sculpture galleries; or, if it care to return to any, it is to mixed galleries like those of Florence, where, instead of the statues, it looks at the pictures. And out of pictures, out of the coarse blurs of colour in picture-books, out of the black, huddled, infinitively suggestive engravings in bible and book of travel; out of fine glossy modern pictures which represent a definite place, or tell a definite story; out of all this, confused with haunting impressions, of things seen or heard of (the strange, deeply significant sights and words of our childhood), do we get our original, never really alterable ideas and feelings about art; for much as we may clip, trim, and bedizen our minds with borrowed things, we can never change, never even recast its solid material: a compact, and seemingly homogeneous soul mass, made up of tightly-pressed, crushed odds and ends of impression; broken, confused, pounded bits of the sights and sounds and emotions of our childhood. To the statues we return only quite late, when this long-formed, long-moulded soul of ours has been well steeped in every sort of eclectic and artificial culture; has been saturated with modern art and modern criticism, with mysticism and realism and sentiment and cynicism, with Dante and Zola, and Mozart and Wagner and Offenbach, saturated, with every kind of critically distilled æsthetic essence, till there is not a flavour and not a scent, good or bad, sweet or foul, which may not be perceived in this strange soul of ours. Then we return to the statues; and, having imbibed (like all things) a certain amount of Hellenic, Pagan, antique feeling, we try also to assimilate the spirit of the statues of Phidias or Praxiteles; we expound the civilisation, the mode of thought; we trace the differences of school, we approve and condemn, we speak marvellously well, with subtlety or passion; we imagine all manner of occult, ineffable virtues and vices in this antique art, we dabble deliciously in alternate purity and impurity (this being the perfection of artistic pleasure), as we even occasionally, for a few moments, feel actual, simple, unreasoning, wholesome pleasure in the sight of the old broken marbles. All this we do, and most often are therewith satisfied. Yet if, weighing our artistic likings and dislikings, comparing together our feelings towards so many and so various manifestations, trying to determine what is fresh