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else, and not unfrequently they had no other inception than desire on the
part of some member of the coterie to find a job for a young sculptor to
whom his daughter was engaged. Statues so begotten could never be
anything but deformities, and this is the way in which they are sure to
be begotten, as soon as the art of making them at all has become widely
practised.

I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a
very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to
decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they
cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living
organism--better dead than dying. There is no way of making an aged art
young again; it must be born anew and grow up from infancy as a new
thing, working out its own salvation from effort to effort in all fear
and trembling.

The Erewhonians five hundred years ago understood nothing of all this--I
doubt whether they even do so now. They wanted to get the nearest thing
they could to a stuffed man whose stuffing should not grow mouldy. They
should have had some such an establishment as our Madame Tussaud's, where
the figures wear real clothes, and are painted up to nature. Such an
institution might have been made self-supporting, for people might have
been made to pay before going in. As it was, they had let their poor
cold grimy colourless heroes and heroines loaf about in squares and in
corners of streets in all weathers, without any attempt at artistic
sanitation--for there was no provision for burying their dead works of
art out of their sight--no drainage, so to speak, whereby statues that
had been sufficiently assimilated, so as to form part of the residuary
impression of the country, might be carried away out of the system. Hence
they put them up with a light heart on the cackling of their coteries,
and they and their children had to live, often enough, with some wordy
windbag whose cowardice had cost the country untold loss in blood and
money.

At last the evil reached such a pitch that the people rose, and with
indiscriminate fury destroyed good and bad alike. Most of what was
destroyed was bad, but some few works were good, and the sculptors of to-
day wring their hands over some of the fragments that have been preserved
in museums up and down the country. For a couple of hundred years or so,
not a statue was made from one end of the kingdom to the other, but the
instinct for having stuffed men and women was so strong, that people at
length again began to try to make them. Not knowing how to make them,
and having no academics to mislead them, the earliest sculptors of this
period thought things out for themselves, and again produced works that
were full of interest, so that in three or four generations they reached
a perfection hardly if at all inferior to that of several hundred years
earlier.

On this the same evils recurred.

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