134. Still, as I have said, there is no reason why sculpture, even for simplest persons, should confine itself to imagery of fish, or fowl, or four-footed things.
We go back to our first principle: we ought to carve nothing but what is honorable. And you are offended, at this moment, with my fish, (as I believe, when the first sculptures appeared on the windows of this museum, offense was taken at the unnecessary introduction of cats,) these dissatisfactions being properly felt by your "νους τωντιμιωτατων." For indeed, in all cases, our right judgment must depend on our wish to give honor only to things and creatures that deserve it.
135. And now I must state to you another principle of veracity, both in sculpture, and all following arts, of wider scope than any hitherto examined. We have seen that sculpture is to be a true representation of true internal form. Much more is it to be a representation of true internal emotion. You must carve only what you yourself see as you see it; but, much more, you must carve only what you yourself feel, as you feel it. You may no more endeavor to feel through other men's souls, than to see with other men's eyes. Whereas generally now, in Europe and America, every man's energy is bent upon acquiring some false emotion, not his own, but belonging to the past, or to other persons, because he has been taught that such and such a result of it will be fine. Every attempted sentiment in relation to art is hypocritical; our notions of sublimity, of grace, or pious serenity, are all secondhand: and we are practically incapable of designing so much as a bell-handle or a door-knocker, without borrowing the first notion of it from those who are gone—where we shall not wake them with our knocking. I would we could.
136. In the midst of this desolation we have nothing to count on for real growth but what we can find of honest liking and longing, in ourselves and in others. We must discover, if we would healthily advance, what things are verily τιμιωτατα among us; and if we delight to honor the dishonorable, consider how, in future, we may better bestow our likings. Now it appears to me, from all our popular declarations, that we, at present, honor nothing so much as liberty and independence; and no person so much as the Free man and Self-made man, who will be ruled by no one, and has been taught, or helped, by no one. And the reason I chose a fish for you as the first subject of sculpture, was that in men who are free and self-made, you have the nearest approach, humanly possible, to the state of the fish, and finely organized ἑρπετον. You get the exact phrase in Habakkuk, if you take the Septuagint text,—"ποιησεις τους ανθρωπους ὡς τους ιχθυας της θαλασσης, και ὡς τα ερπετα τα ουκ εχοντα ἡλουμενον." "Thou wilt make men as the fishes of the sea, and as the reptile things, that have no ruler over them." And it chanced that as I was preparing this Lecture, one of our most able and popular prints gave me a wood-cut of the 'self-made man,' specified as such, so vigorously drawn, and with so few touches, that Phidias or Turner himself could scarcely have done it better; so that I had only to ask my assistant to enlarge it with accuracy, and it became comparable with my fish at once. Of course it is not given by the caricaturist as an admirable face; only, I am enabled by his skill to set before you, without any suspicion of unfairness on my part, the expression to which the life we profess to think most honorable, naturally leads. If we were to take the hat off, you see how nearly the profile corresponds with that of the typical fish.
137. Such, then, being the definition, by your best popular art, of the ideal of feature at which we are gradually arriving by self-manufacture: when I place opposite to it (in Plate VIII.) the profile of a man not in anywise self-made, neither by the law of his own will, nor by the love of his own interest—nor capable, for a moment, of any kind of 'Independence,' or of the idea of independence; but wholly dependent upon, and subjected to, external influence of just law, wise teaching, and trusted love and truth, in his fellow-spirits;—setting before you, I say, this profile of a God-made, instead of a self-made, man, I know that you will feel, on the instant, that you are brought into contact with the vital elements of human art; and that this, the sculpture of the good, is indeed the only permissible sculpture.
138. A God-made man, I say. The face, indeed, stands as a symbol of more than man in its sculptor's mind. For as I gave you, to lead your first effort in the form of leaves, the scepter of Apollo, so this, which I give you as the first type of rightness in the form of flesh, is the countenance of the holder of that scepter, the Sun-God of Syracuse. But there is nothing in the face (nor did the Greek suppose there was) more perfect than might be seen in the daily beauty of the creatures the Sun-God shone upon, and whom his strength and honor animated. This is not an ideal, but a quite literally true, face of a Greek youth; nay, I will undertake to show you that it is not supremely beautiful, and even to surpass it altogether with the literal portrait of an Italian one. It is in verity no more than the form habitually taken by the features of a well-educated young Athenian or Sicilian citizen; and the one requirement for the sculptors of to-day is not, as it has been thought, to invent the same ideal, but merely to see the same reality.
VIII.
THE APOLLO OF SYRACUSE, AND THE SELF-MADE MAN.
IX.
APOLLO CHRYSOCOMES OF CLAZOMENÆ.