el that we have
reason to be thankful that they were allowed to do what else had
never been done; and, which not done, all posterity would have
suffered to the last throe of time. And, if they have not made a
thorough perfection--a spiritual as well as a physical one--forget
not that, at least, they have made this physical representation a
finished one. They took it from the Egyptians, rude, clumsy, and
seated; its head stony--pinned to its chest; its hands tied to its
side, and its legs joined; they shaped it, beautiful, majestic, and
erect; elevated its head; breathed into it animal fire; gave movement
and action to its arms and hands; opened its legs and made it
walk--made it human at all points--the radical impersonation of
physical and sensuous beauty. And, if the god has receded into the
past and become a "pale, shadowy, and shapeless vision of lust,
revenge, and impotence," the human lives on graceful, vigorous, and
deathless, as at first, and excites in us admiration as unbounded as
ever followed it of old in Greece or Italy.

_Christian._ Yes, Kosmon, yes! they are flourished all over with the
rhetoric of the body; but nowhere is to be seen in them that diviner
poetry, the oratory of the soul! Truly they are a splendid casket
enclosing nothing--at least nothing now of importance to us; for what
they once contained, the world, when stirred with nobler matter,
disregarded, and left to perish. But, Kosmon, we cannot discuss
probabilities. Our question is--not whether the Greeks only could
have made such masterpieces of nature and art; but whether their
works are of that kind the _most fitted_ to carry forward to a more
ultimate perfection that idea which is peculiarly our's. All art,
more or less, is a species of symbolism; and the Hellenic,
notwithstanding its more universal method of typification, was fully
as symbolic as the Egyptian; and hence its language is not only dead,
but forgotten, and is now past recovery: and, if it were not, what
purpose would be served by its republication? For, for whom does the
artist work? The inevitable answer is, "For his nation!" His statue,
or picture, poem, or music, must be made up and out of them; they are
at once his exemplars, his audience, and his worshippers; and he is
their mirror in which they behold themselves as they are: he breathes
them vitally as an atmosphere, and they breathe him. Zeus, Athene,
Heracles, Prometheus, Agamemnon, Orestes, the House of Oedipus,