ight. "The abysmal deeps of personality"
have never yet been sounded by mere human plummets. The most that
microscope and scalpel can perform is to lay bare tissue and direct
attention to peculiarities of structure. In the long-run we find that
the current opinion formed by successive generations remains true in
its grand outlines. That large collective portrait of the hero, slowly
emerging from sympathies and censures, from judgments and panegyrics,
seems dim indeed and visionary, when compared with some sharply
indented description by a brilliant literary craftsman. It has the
vagueness of a photograph produced by superimposing many negatives of
the same face one upon the other. It lacks the pungent piquancy of an
etching. Yet this is what we must abide by; for this is spiritually
and generically veracious.

At the end, then, a sound critic returns to think of Michelangelo, not
as Parlagreco and Lombroso show him, nor even as the minute
examination of letters and of poems proves him to have been, but as
tradition and the total tenor of his life display him to our
admiration. Incalculable, incomprehensible, incommensurable: yes, all
souls, the least and greatest, attack them as we will, are that. But
definite in solitary sublimity, like a supreme mountain seen from a
vast distance, soaring over shadowy hills and misty plains into the
clear ether of immortal fame.

Viewed thus, he lives for ever as the type and symbol of a man,
much-suffering, continually labouring, gifted with keen but rarely
indulged passions, whose energies from boyhood to extreme old age were
dedicated with unswerving purpose to the service of one master,
plastic art. On his death-bed he may have felt, like Browning, in that
sweetest of his poems, "other heights in other lives, God willing."
But, for this earthly pilgrimage, he was contented to leave the
ensample of a noble nature made perfect and completed in itself by
addiction to one commanding impulse. We cannot cite another hero of
the modern world who more fully and with greater intensity realised
the main end of human life, which is self-effectuation,
self-realisation, self-manifestation in one of the many lines of
labour to which men may be called and chosen. Had we more of such
individualities, the symphony of civilisation would be infinitely
glorious; for nothing is more certain than that God and the world
cannot be better served than by each specific self pushing forward to
its own per