Nevertheless a
candid critic would be forced to admit that, in spite of clumsiness,
they both mean staying.
So much for the two sitters; now let us turn to the artist who sketched
them. Who was he, and when did he live? Well, his name, like that of
many other old masters, is quite unknown to us; but what does that
matter so long as his work itself lives and survives? Like the Comtists
he has managed to obtain objective immortality. The work, after all, is
for the most part all we ever have to go upon. 'I have my own theory
about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,' said Lewis Carroll (of
'Alice in Wonderland') once in Christ Church common room: 'it is that
they weren't really written by Homer, but by another person of the same
name.' There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the
authenticity of great works. All we know about the supposed Homer (if
anything) is that he was the reputed author of the two unapproachable
Greek epics; and all we know directly about my old master, viewed
personally, is that he once carved with a rude flint flake on a fragment
of reindeer horn these two clumsy prehistoric horses. Yet by putting two
and two together we can make, not four, as might be naturally expected,
but a fairly connected history of the old master himself and what Mr.
Herbert Spencer would no doubt playfully term 'his environment.'
The work of art was dug up from under the firm concreted floor of a cave
in the Dordogne.
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