retty certainly only the work of his pupils. But there are two
things that tell us something about his standing: (1) all
antiquity bears witness to the prevailing quality of his
conceptions; their sublimity. (2) He was thrown into prison on a
charge of impiety, and died there, in 442.

Here you will note the progress downward. Aeschylus had been so
charged, and tried--but acquitted. Pheidias, so charged, was
imprisoned. Forty-three years later Socrates, so charged, was
condemned to drink the hemlock. Of Aeschylus and Socrates we can
speak with certainty: they were the Soul's elect men. Was
Pheidias too? Athens certainly was turning away from the Soul;
and his fate is a kind of half-way point between the fates of the
others. He appears in good company. And that note of sublimity
in his work bears witness somewhat.

We have the work of his pupils, and know that in their hands the
marble--Pheidias himself worked mostly in gold and ivory--had
become docile and obedient, to flow into whatever forms they
designed for it. We know what strength, what beauty, what
tremendous energy, are in those Elgin marbles. All the figures
are real, but idealized: beautiful men and horses, in fullest
most vigorous action, suddenly frozen into stone. The men are
more beautiful than human; but they are human. They are
splendid unspoiled human beings, reared for utmost bodily
perfection; athletes whose whole training had been, you may say,
to music: they are music expressed in terms of the human body.
Yes; but already the beauty of the body outshone the majesty of
the Soul. It was the beauty of the body the artists aimed at
expressing: a perfect body--and a sound mind in it: a perfectly
healthy mind in it, no doubt (be cause you cannot have a really
sound and beautiful body without a sound healthy mind)--was the
ideal they sought and saw. Very well, so far; but, you see,
Art has ceased to be sacred, and the handmaid of the Mysteries;
it bothers itself no longer with the other side of the sky.

In Pheidias' own work we might have seen the influx at that
moment when, shining through the soul plane, its rays fell full
on the physical, to impress and impregnate that with the splendor
of the Soul. We might have seen that it was still the Soul that
held his attention, although the body was known thoroughly and
mastered: that it was the light he aimed to express, not the
thing it illumined. In the work of his pupils, the pre