The reason of this insipidity is, that the ideality aimed at is all on the outside.  There is no soul in these bodies, but only an abstraction; and so the body remains an abstraction, too.  In each case the radical defect is the same, namely, that the interest is external to the form:  they do not coalesce, but are only arbitrarily connected.  We cannot have these ideal forms, because we do not believe in them.  We do not believe in gods and goddesses, but in men and women; that is, we do not at last really identify the character with its manifestation.  Such was the fascination of beauty to the Greek mind, that it banished all other considerations.  What mattered it to Praxiteles whether his Satyr was a useful member of society or not, or whether the young Apollo stood thus idle and listless for an instant or for a millennium, as long as he was so beautiful?  And the charm so penetrated their works that 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