Eros of Praxiteles and the
Athene of Scopas, like the Cena of Leonardo and the Martyr of Titian,
are beyond our reach, and with all our industry we shall hardly recover
the ninety tragedies of Aeschylus. But the moment within the soul of
the artist which these works enshrined, which by their inception and
completion they did but strengthen and prolong, that moment of vision
has not passed away. It has become part of the eternal, as the
aspirations, fortitudes, heroisms, endurances, great aims which Rome or
Hellas impersonates have become part of the eternal. Man, born into a
world which was not made for him, is perplexed, until in such moments
the end for which he was himself fashioned is revealed. The artist,
the hero, and the prophet give of their peace unto the world. Yet is
this gift but a secondary thing, and subject to cause, and time, and
change.

In the consummation of the life of a State the world-soul realizes
itself in a moment analogous to this moment in art. The form perishes,
nation, city, empire; but the creative thought, the soul of the State,
endures. As the marble or poem represents the supreme hour in the
individual life, the ideal long pursued imaged there, perfect or
imperfect, so the State represents the ideal pursued by the race. It
is the embodiment in living immaterial substance of the creative
purpose of the race, of the individual, and ultimately of the Divine.
The State is immaterial; no visible form betrays it. Athene or Roma
are but the arbitrary emblems of an invisible, ever changing life, most
subtle, most complex, yet indivisibly one, woven each day anew from
myriads of aspirations, designs, ideals, recorded or unrecorded. Those
heroic personalities, a Hildebrand, a Napoleon, a Cromwell, a
Richelieu, who usurp the attributes of the State, do but interpret the
State to itself, rudely or faultlessly. Philip and Alexander, Baber
and Akbar, are the men who respond to, who feel more profoundly than
other men, the ideal, the impulse which beats at the heart of the race.
The divine thought is in them more immanent than in other men. To
Akbar the vision of the continent from Himalaya to either sea, all
brought to the feet of Mohammed, of Islam, impersonated in himself, is
an ethereal vision like that which leads Alexander eastward beyond the
Tigris to spread far the name of Hellas. Akbar started as his
grandfather had started, and Baber's faith was not less sincere.[10]
But the con