There is a wealth of worldy wisdom in the saying “Close sits my shirt, but closer my skin.” It reminds us that the relation of the individual to society answers many a riddle. The Athens of the fifth century has furnished us with one great type of individualism—that in which the citizen was willing simply to add his unit to the energy directed by the State. In its sculpture we saw the consequences of a social system which rested upon a foundation essentially unselfish. But, after all, such social altruism is unnatural. Individuality _does_ stand for a dominant passion in humanity. The Athenian communal spirit lasted for a few short years. Then, like many another truly great ideal, it vanished, and with it the school of sculpture to which it had given birth. After 400 B.C. the Hellenic sculptor found himself in a new world of thought and emotion. The Greek to whom he appealed looked to marble and bronze to express ideals entirely different from those which had been potent fifty years earlier. It would not have been surprising had the sculptor of the later age been overwhelmed by the sense of the achievements of the earlier era. We could have pardoned a half-century of decadent workmanship, while a method suited to the new ideas was being evolved. As a matter of fact, the Greek sculptor passed from one to the other without perceptible effort. The succession of great artists was unbroken. Nevertheless, the break with the old epoch was complete. Indeed, it will ever be one of the mysteries of art how human craftsmanship could successfully express thoughts and emotions so diverse by the same medium. There was the same sleepless criticism of nature, the same overpowering impulse towards generalisation, which gave the keynote to the sculpture of the fifth century. But the younger school found fresh themes for plastic expression. It drew new passions from the pulsating humanity in the city-states. That the Greek sculptor passed so easily from the one to the other is a sure proof of the natural bias of the Hellenic genius towards sculpture. It shows that for one century and a half, at any rate, Greece was peopled by a race of sculptors. Many individuals lacked the technical resources of the craftsman, but the average Athenian thought in terms of marble or bronze. Denied an outlet in one direction, the natural impulse found it elsewhere. The result was a new melody, a harmony equally perfect—so true is it that the poet-soul of a nation of artists has “but to be struck, and the sound it yields will be music.”