In Modern Sculpture this deification of the human form is either
expressly banished from the artist's aim, or at least he is not quite in
earnest with it. For instance, in Mr. Palmer's White Captive,--exhibited
not long since in Boston,--the sculptor's account of his work is, that
it portrays an American girl captured by Indians and bound to a tree. We
have to take with us the history and the circumstances: a Christian
woman of the nineteenth century, dragged from her civilized home and
helpless in the hands of savages. This is not at all incidental to the
work, but the work is incidental to it. It is a story which the figure
helps to tell. This is no universal type of womanhood, nor even American
womanhood. American women do not stand naked in the streets, but go
about clothed and active on their errands of duty and pleasure; if we
must needs represent one naked, we must invent some such accident, some
extraordinary dislocation of all usual relations and circumstances. In
place of the antique harmony of character and situation, we have here a
painful incongruity that no study or skill can obviate.

Nor has Modern Sculpture any better success, when, instead of the
pretence of history, it adopts the pretence of personification. Its
highest result in this direction is, perhaps, Thorwaldsen's bas-relief
of Night,--a pretty parlor-ornament. There is a fatal sense of unreality
about works of this kind that even Thorwaldsen's genius was unable to
remove. They are toys, and it seems rather flat to have toys so cumbrous
and so costly.

The reason of this insipidity is, that the ideality aimed at is all on
the outside. There is no soul in these bodies, but only an abstraction;
and so the body remains an abstraction, too. In each case the radical
defect is the same, namely, that the interest is external to the form:
they do not coalesce, but are only arbitrarily connected. We cannot have
these ideal forms, because we do not believe in them. We do not believe
in gods and goddesses, but in men and women; that is, we do not at last
really identify the character with its manifestation. Such was the
fascination of beauty to the Greek mind, that it banished all other
considerations. What mattered it to Praxiteles whether his Satyr was a
useful member of society or not, or whether the young Apollo stood thus
idle and listless for an instant or for a millennium, as long as he was
so beautiful? And the charm so penetrated their works th