and, as the dross to the metal, just so little essential are the archaisms you speak of to the early art, and just so easily can they be cast aside.  But bethink you, Kosmon.  Is Hellenic art without archaisms?  And that feature of it held to be its crowning perfection—­its head—­is not that a very marked one?  And, is it not so completely opposed to the artist’s experience in the forms of nature that—­except in subjects from Greek history and mythology—­he dares not use it—­at least without modifying it so as to destroy its Hellenism?

Sophon. Then Hellenic Art is like a musical bell with a flaw in it; before it can be serviceable it must be broken up and recast.  If its sum of beauty—­its line of lines, the facial angle, must be destroyed—­as it undoubtedly must,—­before it can be used for the general purposes of art, then its claims over early mediaeval art, in respect of form, are small indeed.  But is it not altogether a great archaism?

Kalon. Oh, Sophon! weighty as are the reasons urged against Hellenic art by Christian and yourself, they are not weighty enough to outbalance its beauty, at least to me:  at present they may have set its sun in gloom; yet I know that that obscuration, like a dark foreground to a bright distance, will make its rising again only the more surpassingly glorious.  I admire its exquisite creations, because they are beautiful, and noble, and perfect, and they elevate me because I think them so; and their silent capabilities, like the stardust of heaven before the intellectual insight, resolve themselves into new worlds of thoughts and things so ever as I contemplate their perfections:  like a prolonged music, full of sweet yet melancholy cadences, they have sunk into my heart—­my brain—­my soul—­never, never to cease while life shall hold with me.  But, for all that, my hands are not full; and, whithersoever the happy seed shall require me, I am not for withholding plough or spade, planting or watering; and that which I am called in the spirit to do—­will I do manfully and with my whole strength.

Sophon. Kalon, the conclusion of your speech is better than the commencement.  It is better to sacrifice myrrh and frankincense than virtue and wisdom, thoughts than deeds.  Would that all men were as ready as yourself to dispark their little selfish enclosures, and burn out all their hedges of prickly briers and brambles—­turning the evil into the good—­the seed-catching into the seed-nourishing.  Of the too consumptions let us prefer the active, benevolent, and purifying one of fire, to the passive, self-eating, and corrupting one of rust:  one half minute’s clear shining may touch some watching and waiting soul, and through him kindle whole ages of light.