Through
their gradations of shade, their exquisite intervals, they project in an
external form that which is most inward in humour, passion, sentiment.
Between architecture and the romantic arts of painting, music, and
poetry, comes sculpture, which, unlike architecture, deals immediately
with man, while it contrasts with the romantic arts, because it is not
self-analytical. It has to do more exclusively than any other art with
the human form, itself one entire medium of spiritual expression,
trembling, blushing, melting into dew, with inward excitement. That
spirituality which only lurks about architecture as a volatile effect, in
sculpture takes up the whole given material, and penetrates it with an
imaginative motive; and at first sight sculpture, with its solidity of
form, seems a thing more real and full than the faint, abstract world of
poetry or painting. Still the fact is the reverse. Discourse and action
show man as he is, more directly than the springing of the muscles and
the moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has command.
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