y in making her an
individual--that is, a clearly outlined, distinct personality. This, you
have often told me, is just wherein I am usually most successful. But
here, I admit, I am baffled. Demeter hovered before me as a kindly
dispenser of good gifts, a faithful, loving wife. Daphne's head expresses
this; but in modelling the body I lost sight of the whole creation.
While, for instance, in my fig-eater, every toe, every scrap of the
tattered garments, belongs to the street urchin whom I wished to
represent, in the goddess everything came by chance as the model
suggested it, and you know that I used several. Had the Demeter from head
to foot resembled Daphne, who has so much in common with our goddess, the
statue would have been harmonious, complete, and you would perhaps have
been the first to acknowledge it."

"By no means," Myrtilus eagerly interrupted. "What our statues of the
gods are we two know best: a wooden block, covered with gold and sheets
of ivory. But to tens of thousands the statue of the divinity must be
much more. When they raise their hearts, eyes, hands to it in prayer,
they must be possessed by the idea of the deity which animated us while
creating it, and with which we, as it were, permeated it. If it shows
them only a woman endowed with praiseworthy qualities--"

"Then," interrupted Hermon, "the worshipper should thank the sculptor;
for is it not more profitable to him to be encouraged by the statue to
emulate the human virtues whose successful embodiment it shows him than
to strive for the aid of the botchwork of human hands, which possesses as
much or as little power as the wood, gold, and ivory that compose it? If
the worshipper does not appeal to the statue, but to the goddess, I fear
it will be no less futile. So I shall consider it no blemish if you see
in my Demeter a mortal woman, and no goddess; nay, it reconciles me in
some degree to her weaknesses, to which I by no means close my eyes. I,
too--I confess it--often feel a great desire to give the power of
imagination greater play, and I know the divinities in whom I have lost
faith as well as any one; for I, too, was once a child, and few have ever
prayed to them more fervently, but with the increasing impulse toward
liberty came the perception: There are no gods, and whoever bows to the
power of the immortals makes himself a slave. So what I banished from
life I will also remove from art, and model nothing which might not meet
me to-day