and excellent in proportion to the universality of the
disposition and the unlimited character of the bias thereby presented to
our mind. This truth can be applied to works in various branches of art,
and also to different works in the same branch. We leave a grand musical
performance with our feelings excited, the reading of a noble poem with a
quickened imagination, a beautiful statue or building with an awakened
understanding; but a man would not choose an opportune moment who
attempted to invite us to abstract thinking after a high musical
enjoyment, or to attend to a prosaic affair of common life after a high
poetical enjoyment, or to kindle our imagination and astonish our
feelings directly after inspecting a fine statue or edifice. The reason
of this is, that music, by its matter, even when most spiritual, presents
a greater affinity with the senses than is permitted by aesthetic
liberty; it is because even the most happy poetry, having for its medium
the arbitrary and contingent play of the imagination, always shares in it
more than the intimate necessity of the really beautiful allows; it is
because the best sculpture touches on severe science by what is
determinate in its conception. However, these particular affinities are
lost in proportion as the works of these three kinds of art rise to a
greater elevation, and it is a natural and necessary consequence of their
perfection, that, without confounding their objective limits, the
different arts come to resemble each other more and more, in the action
which they exercise on the mind. At its highest degree of ennobling,
music ought to become a form, and act on us with the calm power of an
antique statue; in its most elevated perfection, the plastic art ought to
become music and move us by the immediate action exercised on the mind by
the senses; in its most complete development, poetry ought both to stir
us powerfully like music and like plastic art to surround us with a
peaceful light. In each art, the perfect style consists exactly in
knowing how to remove specific limits, while sacrificing at the same time
the particular advantages of the art, and to give it by a wise use of
what belongs to it specially a more general character.

Nor is it only the limits inherent in the specific character of each kind
of art that the artist ought to overstep in putting his hand to the work;
he must also triumph over those which are inherent in the particular
subject of which