[318]. The use of gold in this way, viz., to add brilliancy to bodies standing freely in the open, has nothing in common with its employment in Magian art to provide glittering backgrounds for figures seen in dim interiors.
[319]. The Chinese also attach enormous importance to the patinas of their old bronzes, which, owing to the different alloys used and the strong chemical characters of the soil, are of infinite variety and natural intricacy. They too, in later phases, have come to the production of artificial patina.—Tr.
[320]. Pausanias, it should be observed, was neither by date nor by origin a Greek.—Tr.
[321]. “In places, as you stand on it, the great towered and embattled enceinte produces an illusion: it looks as if it were still equipped and defended. One vivid challenge at any rate it flings down before you; it compels you to make up your mind on the matter of restoration. For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed however splendid.... After that, I am free to say that the restoration of Carcassonne is a splendid achievement.” (Henry James, “A Little Tour in France,” xxiii.) Yet if ever there was a reconstruction carried out with piety and scholarship as well as skill, it was Viollet-le-Duc’s reconstruction of these old town-walls.—Tr.
[322]. Home, an English philosopher of the 18th Century, declared in a lecture on English parks that Gothic ruins represented the triumph of time over power, Classical ruins that of barbarism over taste. It was that age that first discovered the beauty of the ruin-studded Rhine, which was thenceforward the historic river of the Germans.
[323]. English readers will very likely think of the case of Shaw’s “Back to Methuselah,” with its extreme contrast of the cheaply-satirical present-day scene and the noble and tragic scenes of far past and far future.—Tr.
[324]. One need only contrast the Greek artist with Rubens and Rabelais.
[325]. Of whom one of his mistresses remarked that he “smelt like a carcass” (qu’il puait comme une charogne). Note also how the musician generally has a reputation for uncleanliness.
[326]. From the solemn canon of Polycletus to the elegance of Lysippus the same process of lightening is going on in the body-build as that which brought the column from the Doric to the Corinthian order. The Euclidean feeling was beginning to relax.