This sketch gives us the heart of the Kipling style. Certain as the day—cocksure, some might say. Photographically true? In a sense only. Emphatic? As emphatic as capitals and apostrophes can make it. Imaginative? Yes. If imagination be the faculty for creating a mental image. These are the characteristics alike of the Kipling portrait and the statue of “Nerva.” The sculptor is as emphatic in his message and as certain in his delivery as the poet of English Imperialism. He has not given a transcript of reality but has deepened the essential lines until they speak with telling effect. It is true that we miss the philosophical calm with which a Greek sculptor would have treated such a subject as the imperial jurist Nerva. But, in some ways we must admit that the Roman portraitist is to be rated higher. If the impression that one is gazing upon reality is the proper object of the portrait sculptor, the Roman gives us the more life-like picture. But if the artist’s first function is to show us nature, so that we may form our own judgment as to what is essential and organic by the aid of his insight, then the Greek who carved the very soul of men was the truer artist. “Do you remember your mother, my dear?” was the question put to the under-fed, under-clothed, Bermondsey waif. “Yes, she was a stout woman, what beat me.” It was a Roman answer, Roman in its magnificent brevity and extraordinary directness. It typifies the artistic method of a society which can spend no energy upon the production of men devoted to pigment mixing and marble cutting for no better purpose than to dream dreams. Something had to be sacrificed. The price Rome chose to pay was that broad view of the world of nature and humanity which alone produces an idealistic art like that of Greece. This is why when Rome finally began to express its thoughts and emotions through marble and bronze it chose a very different method to that of the Hellene. In Greece, the sculptor had needed men and women, gods and heroes; Rome contented herself with one branch of the art—that of sculpture-portraiture. Instead of expressing herself by means of flesh and muscle, limbs and trunk, Rome concentrated all her attention upon the human face. THE REACTION UNDER HADRIAN (117 A.D. TO 138 A.D.) Surely it will be admitted that the facts and the historical explanation fall beautifully into line. If further proof of the direct connection between the ideas fostered by Roman imperialism and the national school of portraiture is necessary, it is to be found in the tendency to revert to a more Hellenic style when the imperialistic wave recedes. [Illustration: ANTINOUS Vatican, Rome]