ricature in modern portrait-statues; for caricature does not
necessarily imply falsification, but only that what is given is
insisted on at the expense of more important truth.

To the view of the early Christian ages, too, the body is old clothes,
ready to be cast off at any moment, good only as means to something
higher. It might seem that Christianity should give a higher value to
the body, since it was believed to have been inhabited by God himself.
But the Passion was a fact of equal importance with the Incarnation.
This honor could be allowed to matter only for an instant, and on the
condition of immediate resumption. That the Highest should suffer death
as a man might well seem to the Greeks foolishness. To the understanding
it is the utmost conceivable contradiction. Yet it is only a more
complete statement of what is involved in the Greek worship of beauty.
_The complete incarnation of Spirit_, which is the definition of beauty,
demands equally that there be no point it does not inhabit, and none in
which it abides. The transience of things is no defect in them, but only
the affirmation of their reality through the incessant casting-off of
its inadequate manifestations. It is not from the excellence, but from
the impotence of its nature, that the stone endures and does not pass
away as the plant and the animal. The higher the organization, the more
rapid and thorough the circulation.

The same truth holds in Art, also, and drives it to forsake these
beautiful petrifactions and seek an expression less bound to the
material. Ideal form is good so far as it brings together in one compact
image what in Nature is scattered and partial; but it is an ideality of
the surface only, not of the substance. It shuts out the defect of this
or that form, but not of Form itself. The Greek ideal is after all _a
thing_, and its impassive perfection a stony death.

The justification is, that the sculptor did not say quite what he meant.
He said flesh, but he meant spirit, and this is what the Greek statues
mean to us. The modern sculptor does not mean spirit, and knows that he
does not; and so, with all his efforts, he gives us only the outside. Is
it asked, Whence this divorce of flesh and spirit? why not give both at
once as Nature does? Then we must do as Nature does, and make our forms
as fluid as hers. But this the sculptor contravenes at the outset. To
follow Nature, he should make his statue of snow. To make it of stone i