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"Speak," replied Her to the inevitable, while Proclus began: "Hitherto your art imitated, not without success, what your eyes showed you, and if this was filled with the warm breath of life, your work succeeded All respect to your Boy Eating Figs, in whose presence you would feel the pleasure he hi the works of Egyptian antiquity, there is i under the tyranny of the canon of proportions which can be expressed in figures, or merely even the demands of the style hallowed by thousands of years, but in a subject like the 'Fig-eater' such a reproach is not to be feared He speaks his own intelligible language, and whoever reproduces it without turning to the right or left has won, for he has created a hose value every true friend of art, no hly

"Toreality are cordially welcome Yet art neither can nor will be satisfied with snatches of what is close at hand; but you are late-born, sons of a tireat tendencies of art have nearly reached the limits of what is attainable to them You were everywhere confronted with coht when you refuse to sink to mere imitators of earlier works, and therefore return to Nature, hich we Hellenes, and perhaps the Egyptians also, began The latter forgot her; the for to her closely"

"Soerly interrupted the other, "still think it worth the trouble to take from her what she alone can bestow They save themselves the toilsome search for the model which others so successfully used before the out the old masterpieces Take the head from this one, the arm from that, etc The pupil iing for the beautiful permits do even the better ones reer's breadth ht," the other went on caloal How many who care only for applause content themselves to-day, unfortunately, with Nature at second hand! Without returning to her eternally fresh, inexhaustible spring, they draw froreat ancients dug for them"

"I know these many," Hermon wrathfully exclaimed "They are the brothers of the Homeric poets, who take verses from the Iliad and Odyssey to piece out from them their own pitiful poems"