Art is not to be blamed for idealizing, for this is only completing what Nature begins.  But the completion of the design is also its limitation.  It is final to the artist as well as to the theme, and cannot yield to further expansion.  In Nature there is no such pretence of finality, and so her work, though never complete, is never convicted of defect.  Her circuits are never closed; she does not aim to cure the defect in the thing, but in something else.  Each in turn she abandons, and appeals to a future success, which never is, but always about to be.  The reason is, that the scope of each is wider than immediately appears.  It is not simple completeness that is aimed at, but ascent to higher levels, so that the consummation it demands, if granted, would cut it off from more vital connections elsewhere.  The ideal of the crystal seems to be clearness and regularity, but better things are in store for it.  It must become opaque and shapeless in order to be fitted for higher transformations.  The leaf must be cramped to make the flower.  Homer’s heroes must hoe potatoes and keep shop before the higher civilization of the race can be reached.

The Greek ideal is an endeavor to ignore the imperfections of natural existence.  The ideal life is to be rich, strong, powerful, eloquent, high-born, famous.  It was a glorification of the earthly, not by transcending, but by keeping its limitations out of sight.  But this is only making the limitation essential and irrevocable, so that it infects the ideal also, which in this very avoidance submits to recognize it.  The statue is not less, but more, a thing than the natural body.  Life is not mere exclusion of decay, but organization of it, so that the fury of corruption passes into fresh vital power.  It is a cycle of changes, the type and show of which are the circulation, constantly removing effete particles and building up new, and therein giving its hue to the flesh.  But sculpture supposes the current checked, and one aspect fit to stand for all the rest.  The statue is not only a particle, but an isolated particle, and must first of all divert attention from its fragmentariness.  Mr. Garbett has remarked that plants should not be copied in sculpture, because the plant is not seen entire, but is partly hidden in the ground.  But the point is not the being seen or not, but the suggestion of incompleteness.  The same remark applies to animals, and even to man, unless his relations to the world, as an individual among individuals, can be kept out of sight.

But the finite thus isolated is not honored, but degraded.  This stagnant perfection is atrophy,—­as some poisons are said to kill by arresting the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the expense of their life.  The new era is marked by the perception that these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended.  The chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,—­or, as Plato says, the human to become godlike by taking away here and adding there,—­but remains a radical incongruity of Nature, never to be escaped from.  It brings death and dissolution to the fair shapes of the earlier world,—­for the worship of form is justified only so long as the mind thinks forms and not ideas.