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. Painting,
by the flushing of colour in the face and dilatation of light in the
eye--music, by its subtle range of tones--can refine most delicately upon
a single moment of passion, unravelling its finest threads.

But why should sculpture thus limit itself to pure form? Because, by this
limitation, it becomes a perfect medium of expression for one peculiar
motive of the imaginative intellect. It therefore renounces all these
attributes of its material which do not help forward that motive. It has
had, indeed, from the beginning an unfixed claim to colour; but this
element of colour in it has always been more or less conventional, with
no melting or modulation of tones, never admitting more than a very
limited realism. It was maintained chiefly as a religious tradition. In
proportion as the art of sculpture ceased to be merely decorative, and
subordinate to architecture, it threw itself upon pure form. It renounces
the power of expression by sinking or heightening tones. In it, no member
of the human form is more significant than the rest; the eye is wide, and
without pupil; the lips and brow are hardly less significant than hands,
and breasts, and feet. The limitation of its resources is part of its
pride it has no backgrounds, no sky or atmosphere, to suggest and
interpret a train of feeling; a little of suggested motion, and much of
pure light on its gleaming surfaces, with pure form--only these. And it
gains more than it loses by this limitation to its own distinguishing
motives; it unveils man in the repose of his unchanging characteristics.
Its white light, purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and
passion, reveals, not what is accidental in man, but the god in him, as
opposed to man's restless