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. To the view of the early Christian ages, too, the body is old clothes, ready to be cast off at any moment, good only as means to something higher. It might seem that Christianity should give a higher value to the body, since it was believed to have been inhabited by God himself. But the Passion was a fact of equal importance with the Incarnation. This honor could be allowed to matter only for an instant, and on the condition of immediate resumption. That the Highest should suffer death as a man might well seem to the Greeks foolishness. To the understanding it is the utmost conceivable contradiction. Yet it is only a more complete statement of what is involved in the Greek worship of beauty. _The complete incarnation of Spirit_, which is the definition of beauty, demands equally that there be no point it does not inhabit, and none in which it abides. The transience of things is no defect in them, but only the affirmation of their reality through the incessant casting-off of its inadequate manifestations. It is not from the excellence, but from the impotence of its nature, that the stone endures and does not pass away as the plant and the animal. The higher the organization, the more rapid and thorough the circulation. The same truth holds in Art, also, and drives it to forsake these beautiful petrifactions and seek an expression less bound to the material. Ideal form is good so far as it brings together in one compact image what in Nature is scattered and partial; but it is an ideality of the surface only, not of the substance. It shuts out the defect of this or that form, but not of Form itself. The Greek ideal is after all _a thing_, and its impassive perfection a stony death.