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How far then must we go back to find the birth of the art of sculpture? In other words, when did man first awaken to a sense of the real beauty of human form; and, under the impulse of this feeling, when did he first seek to perpetuate the fleeting beauties he saw around him, and the still more fleeting imaginations which these beauties evoked? Where must we begin if we would determine the various human influences—social, political, and religious—which have determined the course of sculpture as an art?

The man in the street answers readily enough—and he is quite right—“Fifth Century Greece.” He is satisfied that, speaking in general terms, it was not until after Marathon and Salamis that

“Human hands first mimicked, and then mocked With moulded limbs more lovely than its own, The human form, till marble grew divine.”

The average man, who has none of the yearnings of the archæologist, sees the interest of some of the plastic art of the earlier civilisations. He even grants it a certain beauty. Yet he knows that it is not what he expects to find in a gallery of sculpture. In Babylonia, the art was too closely identified with architecture to ever attain a vigorous independent growth. In Egypt, the conventionalities that resulted from the influence of an all-powerful priesthood and an extremely narrow emotional and intellectual experience, proved too strong for the native sculptor. The brilliant civilisation that existed during the second millennium in pre-Hellenic Greece and the islands and coasts of the Ægean, was too short-lived to allow of any art reaching maturity. It was only when the final defeat of the Persians permitted the Greeks to devote their great intellectual gifts to the task that the workers proved the full capabilities of stone and bronze as mediums of emotional expression, and “marble grew divine.”