Where the human form is the theme, the aim must of course be to give its typical perfection. No naturalist describes the defects of his specimens, though it may happen that all are imperfect. Comparatively few persons ever saw our robin in the plumage in which it is always described. Only in early spring, not very commonly then, is the black of the head and tail seen pure. But no one hesitates to call this the true color. The sculptor does not reproduce the peculiarities of his model, but aims to give ideal form as the most natural form of man.
But in Painting, and especially in Landscape, it seems less easy to fix upon any ideal, not only from the multifariousness of the details, but, above all, from the elusiveness of the standard. We might agree upon an ideal of human beauty, but hardly upon the ideal of anything else. The sophist in the Hippias Major was prepared to define the beauty of a maiden, or of a mare; but he was confounded when it was required that the beauty of a pipkin should be deducible from the same principle, and yet worse when it was shown to involve that a wooden spoon was more beautiful than a gold one.
What you see in the woods and mountains depends on what you go for and what you carry with you. We may go to them as to a quarry or a wood-pile, or for pleasantness,—the cool spring and the plane-tree shade, as the ancients did,—or to see fine trees, waterfalls, mountains. To many persons the beauty of any scene is measured by its abundance in such specimens of streams, mountains, waterfalls, etc. Of course the connection is demonstrable enough: one collocation of features is more readily suggestive of beauty than another. We expect to find the scenery of a hill-country more attractive than a sand-desert. But comparing a landscape with a statue, or even Painting generally with Sculpture, the connection between a happy effect and any definite arrangement of lines is much looser, and depends on the combination rather than the ingredients. It is in every one's experience that an accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to the meagrest landscape—a bare marsh, a scraggy hill-pasture—a charm of which the separate features, or the whole, at another time, give no hint. Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a deeper feeling than the most famous scenes. We learn from such experiences that the difference between one patch of earth and another is wholly superficial, and indicates not so much anything in it as a greater or less dulness in us. The celebrated panoramas and points of view are not the favorite haunts of great painters. They do not need to travel far for their subjects. Mr. Ruskin tells us that Turner did not paint the high Alps, nor the cumulus, the grandest form of cloud. Calame gives us the nooks and lanes, the rocks and hills, of Switzerland, rather than the high peaks; Lambinet, an apple-orchard, a row of pollard-elms, or a weedy pond,—not cataracts or forests. This is not affectation or timidity, but an instinct that the famous scenes are no breaks in the order of Nature,—that what is seen in them is visible elsewhere as well, only not so obvious, and that the office of Art is not to parrot what is already distinct, but to reveal it where it is obscure. This makes the inspiration of the artist; this is the source of all his power, and alone distinguishes him from the topographer and view-maker.
This transcendentalism is more evident in Painting, as the later and more developed form; but it is common to all Art, and may be read also in the Greek sculptures. The experience of every one who with some practice of eye comes for the first time to see the best antiques is not that he falls at once to admiring the perfection of their anatomy, and wondering at the symmetry and complete development of the men and women of those days, but rather that he is carried away from all comparison and criticism into a solitude from which returning he discovers that his previous acquaintance with Sculpture was with masks only, and that the meaning of plastic art as a capital interest of the human mind is now for the first time made known to him. He sees that it was no whim of the Greeks, but an instinct of the infinity it typifies, that made them take the human form as alone possessing beauty enough to stand by itself. Not the images of their deities alone, but all their statues were gods. The charm of the Lizard-Slayer of Praxiteles, or of those immortal riders that swept along the friezes of the Parthenon, is something quite distinct from the beauty of a naked boy playing with an arrow, or a troop of Athenian citizens on horseback. These are the deathless 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 Laocoön 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.
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 for them and for us; but the literal identification of it with the form belongs to them, not to us, and our mimicry of it can result only in these abstraction's. For us it is elsewhere, beyond these finite shapes, on which, by an illusion, it seemed to rest. The Greek statues are tropes, which we gladly allow in their original use, but, repeated, they become flat and pedantic. Hence the air of caricature in modern portrait-statues; for caricature does not necessarily imply falsification, but only that what is given is insisted on at the expense of more important truth.