Now, if you turn round and bear to the right in the Egyptian Gallery at the British Museum, you will find a broad passage lined with statues that seem very much more familiar to you than those which you are just leaving behind; and, in the distance, you will espy the maimed figures of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon. In a moment you will be in the Elgin Room, and everywhere about you you will see all that remains of the ancient temple of Athens which is worth seeing.
If you have not been to Athens, you must not suppose that you have missed much, as far as the Parthenon is concerned. Unless you are very modern and very romantic, and can take pleasure in visiting a gruesome ruin by moonlight, you would be only depressed and disappointed by the decayed and ugly mass of stones that now stands like a battered skeleton on the Acropolis. You may take it, therefore, that, as you stand in the Elgin Room, you have around you the best that the Parthenon could yield after its partial destruction and dismantlement in 1687 by the victorious Veneto-German army. And what is it that you see?
Remember that you are a man of the twentieth century A.D., and that you have just been bored to extinction by a walk in the Egyptian Gallery. Remember, too, that you have very few fixed opinions about Art, and that the artistic condition of your continent is one of chaos and anarchy.
In spite of all this, however, you will walk up to the horse's head at the extreme right of the Eastern pediment of the Parthenon, and the two thousand and four hundred years that separate you from it will vanish as by magic.
For years I have taken men, women and children up to this horse's head. In some cases these people have been technical connoisseurs of a horse's points; in others they have been mere bourgeois people, indifferent both to the art of Greece and to equine anatomy; and with the children I was concerned with raw manhood that cared not a jot for Art, and whose one sole, savage instinct was to recognize and classify what was before them.
If you supposed, however, that the verdict of these different people was anything but unanimous, you would be vastly mistaken. The children cried with delight. Their powers of recognizing things was stimulated to the utmost. One of them told me it was like a real bus-horse. The connoisseurs of a horse's points began to draw plausible conclusions from the existing head as to the probable conformation of the body which the artist had deliberately omitted, and the bourgeois people declared that they loved the fascinating softness and convincing looseness of the mouth.—All of them were charmed. All of them understood. Not one of them felt that this horse held itself aloof from them and kept its distance, as the austere Egyptian lions had done. And all of them were children of the twentieth century A.D., and over two thousand years separated them from the objects they were inspecting.
Their comments on the Parthenon Frieze were much the same. Once or twice one of them would say that there was a monotonous similarity of feature in the men and in the horses—a comment which immediately revealed to me that 2,400 years had indeed wrought some change. On the whole, however, the attitude of those I escorted amazed me; for, with but few exceptions, it was one of sympathy and understanding. I will not say that I did not stimulate their interest a good deal, by making them feel that their criticism was valuable to me; I will not pretend that if they had been alone they would have troubled to concentrate their minds to any great extent upon the exhibits around them; but this I will affirm, with absolute confidence: that if all the men, women and children who stream through the Elgin Room daily were given the same stimulus to exercise their critical faculty, and were similarly induced to give particular attention to all they saw, the sympathy and understanding which I observed among the groups of visitors I escorted would be found to be a fairly general, if not a common occurrence.
