to be
clearness and regularity, but better things are in store for it. It must
become opaque and shapeless in order to be fitted for higher
transformations. The leaf must be cramped to make the flower. Homer's
heroes must hoe potatoes and keep shop before the higher civilization of
the race can be reached.

The Greek ideal is an endeavor to ignore the imperfections of natural
existence. The ideal life is to be rich, strong, powerful, eloquent,
high-born, famous. It was a glorification of the earthly, not by
transcending, but by keeping its limitations out of sight. But this is
only making the limitation essential and irrevocable, so that it infects
the ideal also, which in this very avoidance submits to recognize it.
The statue is not _less_, but more, a thing than the natural body. Life
is not mere exclusion of decay, but organization of it, so that the fury
of corruption passes into fresh vital power. It is a cycle of changes,
the type and show of which are the circulation, constantly removing
effete particles and building up new, and therein giving its hue to the
flesh. But sculpture supposes the current checked, and one aspect fit to
stand for all the rest. The statue is not only a particle, but an
isolated particle, and must first of all divert attention from its
fragmentariness. Mr. Garbett has remarked that plants should not be
copied in sculpture, because the plant is not seen entire, but is partly
hidden in the ground. But the point is not the being seen or not, but
the suggestion of incompleteness. The same remark applies to animals,
and even to man, unless his relations to the world, as an individual
among individuals, can be kept out of sight.

But the finite thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant
perfection is atrophy,--as some poisons are said to kill by arresting
the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the
expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that
these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The
chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,--or, as Plato says, the human to
become godlike by taking away here and adding there,--but remains a
radical incongruity of Nature, never to be escaped from. It brings death
and dissolution to the fair shapes of the earlier world,--for the
worship of form is justified only so long as the mind thinks forms and
not ideas.

The statue may embody an infinite meaning, but to the artist form