at something of
it reaches down even to us, and holds us as long as we look upon them.
But as soon as we quit the magic circle, the illusion vanishes,--Apollo
is a handsome vagabond whom we incline to send about his business. He
ought to be slaying Pythons and drying up swamps, instead of loitering
here.

We do not believe in gods, nor quite as the ancients did in heroes,--but
in representative men, that is, in ideas, and in men as representing
them. Washington is not to us what Achilles or Agamemnon was to the
Greeks. The form of Achilles would do as well for a god; the antiquaries
do not know whether the Ludovisi Mars was not an Achilles,--perhaps
nobody ever knew. But in all our veneration of Washington, it is not his
person we revere, but his virtues,--precisely the impersonal part of
him, or his person only from association. There is nothing incongruous
in this association as it exists in the mind, any more than there would
have been in his presence, because of the overpowering sense of his
character and history, to which all the outward show of the man is
constantly subordinate. But if we isolate this by making a statue of
him, we have only an apotheosis of cocked-hat and small-clothes, in
which we see what it really was to us. This awkward prominence of the
costume does not come from the accident of modern dress, but from our
unconscious repugnance to petrifying the man in one of his aspects. It
is a touch of grave humor in the genius of Art, thus to give us just
what we ask for, though not what we want.

The Greeks could have portrait-statues, because all they looked for in
the man they saw in his form, and, seeing it, could portray it. If the
modern sculptor truly saw in the figure of Washington all that the name
means to him, he could make a statue worthy to be placed by the side of
the Sophocles and the Phocion. These were true portraits, no doubt; thus
it was that these men appeared to their fellow-citizens; but it does not
follow that they would have appeared so to us. What they saw is there;
it is a reality both for them and for us; but the literal identification
of it with the form belongs to them, not to us, and our mimicry of it
can result only in these abstraction's. For us it is elsewhere, beyond
these finite shapes, on which, by an illusion, it seemed to rest. The
Greek statues are tropes, which we gladly allow in their original use,
but, repeated, they become flat and pedantic. Hence the air of
ca