es is not
that he falls at once to admiring the perfection of their anatomy, and
wondering at the symmetry and complete development of the men and women
of those days, but rather that he is carried away from all comparison
and criticism into a solitude from which returning he discovers that his
previous acquaintance with Sculpture was with masks only, and that the
meaning of plastic art as a capital interest of the human mind is now
for the first time made known to him. He sees that it was no whim of the
Greeks, but an instinct of the infinity it typifies, that made them take
the human form as alone possessing beauty enough to stand by itself. Not
the images of their deities alone, but all their statues were gods. The
charm of the Lizard-Slayer of Praxiteles, or of those immortal riders
that swept along the friezes of the Parthenon, is something quite
distinct from the beauty of a naked boy playing with an arrow, or a
troop of Athenian citizens on horseback. These are the deathless forms
of the happy Olympians, high above the cares and turmoil of the finite,
self-centred and independent. It is the Paradise age of the world,
before the knowledge of good and evil, before sin and death came; the
worship of the Visible, when God saw everything that he had made, and,
behold, it was very good. Hence the air of repose, of eternal duration,
that marks these figures. They have nothing to regret or to hope, no
past or future, but only a timeless existence.

It is from this essential self-sufficingness, not from fancied rules,
that Sculpture is limited with respect to dramatic expression, that is,
expression of passing feeling, accidental action, not identified with
the form. In the best period the first requisite was that the interest
should be thoroughly identified with the shape in which it is
manifested, and not imparted, as by history, association, etc. The
decline began when this lofty isolation was felt as negative, needing to
have interest and expression added to it. But whatever was added only
emphasized without curing the defect. Even the "awful diagonal" of the
Laocooen and the godlike triumph of the Belvedere Apollo show a lower
age. Why triumph, if he was supreme before? These are casual incidents
only, examples of what might happen as well to anybody, not the adequate
conclusive embodiment of an idea. The more elaborately the meaning is
wrought into the form, the more evident that they are not originally
identical.