The principles that apply to the use of historical, literary, and symbolic themes in painting hold with increased force in sculpture. We must admit the right of the sculptor to illustrate simple and well-known historical or fictitious situations. At the same time, however, we must remember that a work of this kind is subject to a twofold standard: first and indispensable, the sculptural, is the form animate and beautiful; then, are the life and action appropriate to the idea? The first is alone absolutely unequivocal. The second, on the other hand, is largely relative; for unless the sculptor has carried out the idea in so masterly a fashion that we can think of no other possibility--as Phidias is said to have done with his statue of Zeus--there must always be something arbitrary about any particular representation. This arbitrary element is increased in symbolic sculpture. You can perhaps depict an actual or fictitious human situation by means of sculptured bodies and make your image seem inevitable; but how can you make bodies the vehicles of abstractions? Moreover, sculpture is a realistic art; it presents us with the semblance of living forms, and if these forms are monstrous or are shown accomplishing impossible things, they cannot escape a certain aspect of the ridiculous. I have in mind Rodin's "Man and His Thought." If the man were only represented fashioning the figure with his hands, his hands guided by his thought; but the hands are inactive, and the figure grows by thought alone! Or consider "The Hand of God" by the same artist. To say that we are in the hands of God is a good metaphorical way of expressing our dependence upon the Destiny that shapes our ends; but it is another thing to exhibit us as actually enfolded by a hand. The more sensitive we are to the beauty of the body and of the mind, so far as manifest through the body, the better content we shall be with normal sculpture and the less urgently we shall demand symbolism. Of course all statues may become symbolic, as all works of art may, in the sense of possessing a universal meaning won by generalizing their individual significance. Symbolic in this legitimate way were the statues of the Greek gods; thus Aphrodite, who was lovely, became Love, and Athena, who was wise, became Wisdom. But there is nothing arbitrary in such symbolism. CHAPTER XIII BEAUTY IN THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS: ARCHITECTURE