forms of the happy Olympians, high above the cares and turmoil of the finite, self-centred and independent.  It is the Paradise age of the world, before the knowledge of good and evil, before sin and death came; the worship of the Visible, when God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.  Hence the air of repose, of eternal duration, that marks these figures.  They have nothing to regret or to hope, no past or future, but only a timeless existence.

It is from this essential self-sufficingness, not from fancied rules, that Sculpture is limited with respect to dramatic expression, that is, expression of passing feeling, accidental action, not identified with the form.  In the best period the first requisite was that the interest should be thoroughly identified with the shape in which it is manifested, and not imparted, as by history, association, etc.  The decline began when this lofty isolation was felt as negative, needing to have interest and expression added to it.  But whatever was added only emphasized without curing the defect.  Even the “awful diagonal” of the Laocooen and the godlike triumph of the Belvedere Apollo show a lower age.  Why triumph, if he was supreme before?  These are casual incidents only, examples of what might happen as well to anybody, not the adequate conclusive embodiment of an idea.  The more elaborately the meaning is wrought into the form, the more evident that they are not originally identical.

In Modern Sculpture this deification of the human form is either expressly banished from the artist’s aim, or at least he is not quite in earnest with it.  For instance, in Mr. Palmer’s White Captive,—­exhibited not long since in Boston,—­the sculptor’s account of his work is, that it portrays an American girl captured by Indians and bound to a tree.  We have to take with us the history and the circumstances:  a Christian woman of the nineteenth century, dragged from her civilized home and helpless in the hands of savages.  This is not at all incidental to the work, but the work is incidental to it.  It is a story which the figure helps to tell.  This is no universal type of womanhood, nor even American womanhood.  American women do not stand naked in the streets, but go about clothed and active on their errands of duty and pleasure; if we must needs represent one naked, we must invent some such accident, some extraordinary dislocation of all usual relations and circumstances.  In place of the antique harmony of character and situation, we have here a painful incongruity that no study or skill can obviate.

Nor has Modern Sculpture any better success, when, instead of the pretence of history, it adopts the pretence of personification.  Its highest result in this direction is, perhaps, Thorwaldsen’s bas-relief of Night,—­a pretty parlor-ornament.  There is a fatal sense of unreality about works of this kind that even Thorwaldsen’s genius was unable to remove.  They are toys, and it seems rather flat to have toys so cumbrous and so costly.