try
a dexterous recalling of these, together with the profound, joyful
sensuousness of motion: each of these may be a medium for the ideal: it
is partly accident which in any individual case makes the born artist,
poet, or painter rather than sculptor. But as the mind itself has had an
historical development, one form of art, by the very limitations of its
material, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any one
phase of its experience. Different attitudes of the imagination have a
native affinity with different types of sensuous form, so that they
combine, with completeness and ease. The arts may thus be ranged in a
series, which corresponds to a series of developments in the human mind
itself. Architecture, which begins in a practical need, can only express
by vague hint or symbol the spirit or mind of the artist. He closes his
sadness over him, or wanders in the perplexed intricacies of things, or
projects his purpose from him clean-cut and sincere, or bares himself to
the sunlight. But these spiritualities, felt rather than seen, can but
lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to be gathered from it
by reflexion; their expression is not really sensuous at all. As human
form is not the subject with which it deals, architecture is the mode in
which the artistic effort centres, when the thoughts of man concerning
himself are still indistinct, when he is still little preoccupied with
those harmonies, storms, victories, of the unseen and intellectual world,
which, wrought out into the bodily form, give it an interest and
significance communicable to it alone. The art of Egypt, with its supreme
architectural effects, is, according to Hegel's beautiful comparison, a
Memnon waiting for the day, the day of the Greek spirit, the humanistic
spirit, with its power of speech. Again, painting, music, and poetry,
with their endless power of complexity, are the special arts of the
romantic and modern ages. Into these, with the utmost attenuation of
detail, may be translated every delicacy of thought and feeling,
incidental to a consciousness brooding with delight over itself. 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