a low ebb in Ireland, one of the few men who might
yet have done something to better these conditions has been taken away. It is almost needless to say that under existing art conditions in Ireland no artist could hope to achieve anything like the success which Frank O'Meara achieved in the more congenial, because more sympathetic, art atmosphere of France. There, as has been indicated, he became nothing less than one of the pioneers in the art movement of to-day. It was his hope, had he lived, to be enabled, in his native land, to devote himself, in the ripe years of his manhood, to doing something to better the art conditions of his country, and thus help to make it possible for an Irishman to be true to art without the necessity of expatriating himself
THE NIKE OF SAMOTHRACE.
ON the landing just lialf-way up the main stair- case at the Louvre, one's attention is arrested by a very beautiful and commanding figure with flying drapery and outstretched wings, every line and curve of whose form is expressive of motion, strength, and life. A goddess type, radiant with energy and absolute youth — such indeed she seems, this victorious 'Nike,' dating from the centuries before Christ ; fashioned by the wonderful hand and brain of some Hellenic sculptor, in all likelihood a pupil of the great Pheidias, in any case undoubtedly inspired by his creative genius. Does she not, in truth, seem to be of the immortal race, raised above human needs and weaknesses, as she literally enough is above the common clay, on this stone figurehead of some old-world trireme? By whom was she fashioned, and for what occasion ? It is assumed that the statue was executed to commemorate a victory won off Salamis by Demetrius Poliorcetes somewhere about the year 306 b.c; but of the master nothing whatever is known, the breadth of conception, the style, dignity, and poetic truth alone serving to connect it with a period subsequent to the great Pheidian era, more akin, as Mr. Murray thinks, to that of the sculptures in the ' Museum,' the well- knoi ' Reliefs from Priene,' the frieze of Magnesia in the Louvre, and that of Pergamus in Berlin. As he admits, all these differ in important respects, yet nevertheless he contrives to detect a fundamental base for them all — a certain strain of realism in their greater energy of movement, which has been grafted, as it were, on the abstract generalisations of the art of the Periclean age — a racial resemblance, in short, which incorporates them in one great group but little removed in artistic perfection from that of the greatest period of Hellenic art. The figure is headless; yet, guided by the design on some ancient coins of Demetrius Poliorcetes — whence the reconstruction of the marble, found in fragments, has been effected — we may surmise that the head was set on the bust in such a way that the fiice inclined upward and outward, following in the direction of the raised right shoulder ; for this and the play of the supple torso suggest that the hand and arm were raised; and probably too she held a trumpet in her hand, which was raised to her lips.
Yet despite the headless condition of this beautiful figure, it hardly seems to lose in interest as other less abstract conceptions might and do. This may be in part due to the loveliness and dignity of physical form ; the technical splendour, as if the work were wrought by a Titan's hand ; in part also to that nobly idealised and generalised character of Attic art, which, in its foremost development, cul- minated in the achievement of a high abstract of mental and physical beauty, qualities which are nowhere more perfectly united than in the Venus of Milo, the Hermes of Praxiteles, or in those other mutilated, draped, and lieadless torsos by Plieidias at the Museum known as ' The Fates.' For they, in their recumbent grace, subtle and refined modelling of sinew, flesh, and bone, seem to be the embodi- ment of so much intellect, that when we have looked upon the wide-eyed calmness of the passionless heads of tlie Partlienon frieze, it seems almost possible to predicate from them the attributes of these. Not, however, that this implies that the head is not the dominant organ of the mass. Only that it, with the trunk and limbs, is of equal physical develop- ment, and part of an organic whole, whose parts maintain towards one another mutually dependent and harmonious relations, in which the physique is made to express the brain capacity of a healthily balanced noble type, as fully as it sums up the mental expansiveness of the sculptor himself.
For the old Greek, gifted as he was with keen and single-hearted power of observation, interpreted mental forces and physical facts as he conceived of them, as things to be defined as good or ill, and massed by simple forms and general lines; so that his projections become for us on that very account
