image of the hero, and the saint, lending him from its plenitude all that his abstract self seemed to want. It is on the tide of national and human enthusiasm that the individual artist is lifted up to realise the full significance of his ideal figure, and his imaginative craft can only be inspired by the vigour and warmth of the collective passion for noble ends and high action. Nowhere it would seem is the ideal of personality and many-sided individuality more adequately realised. Here, at last, the whole truth of life, the indwelling of individual and universal in one body, seems to be realised. But it is realised in an ideal. It is--if we analyse it--a synthesis of three elements; partly in the material reality which serves as bodily vehicle; partly in the conception and technique of the artist; partly in the general mind which inspires both the material and the form with its own larger life. It is--as its name implies--an artificial product--a synthesis of elements which tend to fall apart. Technique varies, conceptions lose their interest, the tone of general culture alters, and materials are dependent on locality. When that happens, the work of art is left high and dry: no longer a living God, but a dead idol, still wondrous, but speaking no more its human language. So it is with the heroic figures who rise into the purer air of universal history. They also--so far as they live with a personal power--are works of art: works of real-idealism. For all history which deserves the name, and is not mere abstract dry-as-dust chronicle (as to the possibility of which utter aridity there may be legitimate doubts), is a work of fiction or invention, of reconstruction. It seeks to understand its characters. But to understand them it is not (and as historical art cannot be) content with a mere reference to motives acting on them from outside. It seeks to understand them with and in their times--to see in them the full measure of contemporary life and thought which elsewhere has found so meagre expression. Such is the artistic completion of personality in the ideal,--whether in what is called history, or what is called art. It exaggerates a truth, because it loses sight of the background. And that background, which helps to constitute such ideal personality, is no constant element. The centuries and generations as they roll contribute their varying quota to set, as they say, the historical character in its true light, in its fulness and truth of reality. And thus this personality of the great leaders of human life is only an image and a sign--a fruit of development, no bare fact which remains unchanged and always the same. It is rather a personification than a personality. It incarnates the living spirit who is universal and eternal in the limits of a sensuously-defined individual, and indeed incarnates there only so much as the generation it speaks to can see of complete truth. It is only