There are two considerations which may have misled Mr. Powers.  One, a pecuniary one, which he should have disposed of as did Agassiz, when such was advanced to induce him to give lyceum lectures:—­“Sir, I cannot afford to make money!” The other may have been the weight of the prevailing error that portrait-sculpture is a less honorable branch of Art.

Less than what?  The historical?  What finer history than Titian’s Paul III., Raphael’s Leo X., Albert Duerer’s head of himself?  What finer than the Pericles, the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, the Demosthenes of the Vatican, Chantrey’s Scott, Houdon’s Voltaire, Powers’s Jackson?—­Heroic? what more heroic than the Lateran Sophocles, the Venetian Colleoni, or Rauch’s statue of Frederick the Great?—­Poetical?  What picture more sweetly poetical than Raphael’s head of himself in the Uffizi, or Giotto’s Dante in the Bargello?  What ideal statue surpasses in poetical power Michel Angelo’s De’ Medici in the San Lorenzo Chapel?  What ideal head is more beautiful than the Townley Clytie of the British Museum, or the Young Augustus of the Vatican?  What grander than Da Vinci’s portrait of himself?

No,—­when the sculptor has wrought the adequate representation of the individual in its best estate, he may rest assured that he has achieved “high Art.”

Let us not be unjust to Mr. Powers’s ideal works.  In the qualities of chasteness of conception, delicacy of treatment, temperate grace, and that rarer, finer quality of dignified repose, they have not been surpassed since the time of Greek Art.  When the subject chosen has not been foreign to the artist’s nature, as in the “Eve,” nor foreign to the Art’s province, as in the “California,” his success has been very like a triumph.

But the success has not been that which he was entitled to grasp; the seeming triumph has precluded a real victory.  We must believe that the highest lessons of ancient Art have, in a great measure, been unrecognized by Mr. Powers.  The external has been studied.  No man can talk more justly of that exquisite line of the Venus de’ Medici’s temple and cheek, or point out more discriminatingly the beauties of the Milo statue, or detect more quickly the truths of the antique busts.  He has discovered, also, somewhat of the great secret of repose,—­has perceived that it is essential, in some wise, to all greatness in Art, more particularly in his own department of sculpture.  But beyond that simple recognition of the fact, what?  That repose is dependent on power to act, and must be great in proportion to mightiness of power?  No, he could not have seen this; else had his Webster come to us less questionable in intent, less remote in its merits from the massive self-possession of the man.