But, judging the life-work of the Danish sculptor in its broadest aspects, the only possible verdict is that which must also be passed upon Canova. Both men preferred to echo an earlier art. They made no attempt to realize nature afresh. This acceptance of a purely artificial creed, based upon their admiration for their Greek predecessors, entailed an abandonment of the personal standpoint which alone gives an art the highest value. [Illustration: THORVALDSEN VENUS Duke of Devonshire’s Collection, Chatsworth] THE SCULPTURE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Why Canova and Thorvaldsen should have found this necessary in an age which was full of pregnant thought and feeling, is hard to say. One can only note a similar tendency in other branches of European activity in the latter years of the eighteenth century. The painter David, for instance, was content to work to a pseudo-Greek standard, instead of constructing a fresh one, fitted to the new state of things in France. The great picture in the Louvre, “The Intervention of the Sabine Women,” is almost icy on account of the artist’s pre-occupation with the externals of classical art. Were it not for the evidence of David’s portraits one would regard the painter of the “Sabine Women” as entirely lacking in human emotion. As it is, we know that the assumption of classical externals is merely the outcome of a bad habit. A similar tendency to pose in the outworn robes of an earlier civilization was a common fault among the men and women who sought to bring the ideals of the French Revolution home to Europe. Witness the days which the National Assembly devoted to the unending wrangle over the precise wording of the “Rights of Man.” The time was wasted, not because the Declaration really forwarded the ideal of equality before the law and the abolition of all class distinctions, but because the founders of the American Republic had framed a similar Declaration of Rights. The civic dinners in Paris in imitation of the Spartan manner were equally mere poses. Parisians sat, surrounded by their servants, at tables spread in the very streets, while fashionable hostesses called upon passers-by to note “how we love equality.” The tendency which led the Parisians to such follies, led Canova, Thorvaldsen, and Flaxman to follow a pseudo-classic style instead of allowing the passions and thoughts astir in their souls to find an adequate method of expression. This initial error deprived even their most ambitious works of that almost mystical appeal which gives the statuary of the greatest Hellenes and Florentines its unique value. Though full of grace and charm, their marbles impress us at once as devoid of either deep feeling or high thinking.