chap, in ‘ Play' of Stirface 185
in any irregularity and ‘ play ’ of effect, produced partly by
surface texture, and partly by an absence of definite circum-
scribing lines, and the consequent melting of one part of a
composition into another, the demarcation being felt rather
than seen. Regular and decided forms, as in carved
ornament, are now voted ‘ hard ’; clearness and finish in
marble-cutting are not admired beside a sensitively varied
surface, where delicate lights and shades flicker across the
form. ‘ Brush-work,’—or the actual texture of paint applied
by strokes in this or that direction, or with this or that
amount of pigment,—is greatly in demand as an element in
pictorial effect. The ‘ mark of the tool ’ is exacted on all
objects of industrial art. Even the stone-mason is to be
pressed into the service of the new connoisseurship, and a
high authority on art matters even maintained on a recent
public occasion that architectural mouldings should not run
on a level line but be somewhat ‘ wavy ’ and free ! What is
the value in art, we are obliged to ask, of this surface-play,
this irregularity and suggestiveness ? Is it really as potent
a factor in our artistic enjoyment as these modern critics
appear to believe ?
It is doubtless a just artistic instinct that revolts from
over-rigid formality, and that craves in art for some element
of suggestion, some stimulus to the imagination. It is easy
however to suffer this feeling to run too far, and such
extreme statements as the one just quoted inevitably pro-
voke criticism. We may for example appeal at once to the
practice of the Greeks. In Greek plastic work there is
very little dependence on these accidental qualities of
texture. The form is perfectly clear and distinct, the
surface brought up to a very high degree of smoothness,
though not polished. Thus, on the Parthenon fragments-
as, for example, the further side of the horse’s head of
Selene, or the parts about the navel of the ‘ Ilyssus,’—