It is therefore a question open to argument and involving considerations of infinite delicacy and moment, in morals and in art, whether the old Greek legends, endued as they are with an imperishable vitality derived from their abstract youth, may not be susceptible of a treatment in modern art analogous to that which they have received in modern poetry, where the significant myth, or the ideal character, without losing its classic grace, has been animated with a purer sentiment, and developed into a higher expressiveness. Wordsworth’s Dion and Laodomia; Shelley’s version of the Hymn to Mercury; Goethe’s Iphigenia; Lord Byron’s Prometheus; Keats’s Hyperion; Barry Cornwall’s Proserpina; are instances of what I mean in poetry. To do the same thing in art, requires that our sculptors should stand in the same relation to Phidias and Praxiteles, that our greatest poets bear to Homer or Euripides; that they should be themselves poets and interpreters, not mere translators and imitators. Further, we all know, that there is often a necessity for conveying abstract ideas in the forms of art. We have then recourse to allegory; yet allegorical statues are generally cold and conventional and addressed to the intellect merely. Now there are occasions, in which an abstract quality or thought is far more impressively and intelligibly conveyed by an _impersonation_ than by a _personification_. I mean, that Aristides might express the idea of justice; Penelope, that of conjugal faith; Jonathan and David (or Pylades and Orestes), friendship; Rizpah, devotion to the memory of the dead; Iphigenia, the voluntary sacrifice for a good cause; and so of many others; and such figures would have this advantage, that with the significance of a symbol they would combine all the powers of a sympathetic reality. [Illustration] HELEN. I have never seen any statue of Helen, ancient or modern. Treated in the right spirit, I can hardly conceive a diviner subject for a sculptor. It would be a great mistake to represent the Greek Helen merely as a beautiful and alluring woman. This, at least, is not the Homeric conception of the character, which has a wonderful and fascinating individuality, requiring the utmost delicacy and poetic feeling to comprehend, and rare artistic skill to realise. The oft-told story of the Grecian painter, who, to create a Helen, assembled some twenty of the fairest models he could find, and took from each a limb or a feature, in order to compose from their separate beauties an ideal of perfection,—this story, if it were true, would only prove that even Zeuxis could make a great mistake. Such a combination of heterogeneous elements would be psychologically and artistically false, and would never give us a Helen.