licence and mere selfness from its creations. Theologians make a distinction between the acts of God and all that man in his folly and capriciousness accomplishes. The plastic Ideal is, however, exalted above such questions. It stands at the very centre of this blessedness and free necessity for which neither the abstraction of the universal nor the caprice of the particular are valid or significant. This insight into the consummate plastic union of the divine and human was pre-eminently native to Greece. We fail to grasp Greece at her heart and centre in her poets and orators, historians and philosophers, unless, as the key to our problem, we are already possessed of an insight into the Ideal of sculpture, and can contemplate from the standpoint of plastic art both the figures of her epic and dramatic heroes and her actual statesmen and philosophers. For characters in her practical life, no less than poets and thinkers, possessed also in the palmy days of Greece, this plastic, universal, and yet individual character, stamped with one mint, whether we look at its external or more personal features. They stand up big and free, a self-subsistent growth, on the basis of their essentially substantive individuality; a growth of their own making, built up into that which they ultimately became and intended to be. In particular the period of Pericles was rich in such characters. Pericles himself was one of them. We may add Pheidias, Plato, and pre-eminently Sophocles. So, too, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Socrates, everyone with his own type, not one of them impairing the quality of the rest; all are out-and-out artistic natures, ideal artists in the work of self-creation, personalities of one mould, works of art, which stand before us like figures of immortal gods, in whom we can detect no taint of Time and mortality. We may find a similar plastic subsistency in the artistic perfections of the bodily frames of the victors at the Olympic games; nay, even in the apparition of Phryne[152] herself, who, as the fairest woman, came from the sea naked before all the world. CHAPTER II THE IDEAL OF SCULPTURE