age
that will preoccupy the arts. For such a task the most adequate art is
evidently sculpture, for sculpture is the most complete of imitations.
In no other art can apprehension render itself so exhaustively and with
such recuperative force. Sculpture retains form and colour, with all
that both can suggest, and it retains them in their integrity, leaving
the observer free to resurvey them from any point of view and drink in
their quality exhaustively.

[Sidenote: Reproduction by acting ephemera.]

The movement and speech which are wanting, the stage may be called upon
to supply; but it cannot supply them without a terrible sacrifice, for
it cannot give permanence to it expression. Acting is for this reason an
inferior art, not perhaps in difficulty and certainly not in effect, but
inferior in dignity, since the effort of art is to keep what is
interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal, and this ideal
is half frustrated if the representation is itself fleeting and the
rendering has no firmer subsistence than the inspiration that gave it
birth. By making himself, almost in his entirety, the medium of his art,
the actor is morally diminished, and as little of him remains in his
work, when this is good, as of his work in history. He lends himself
without interest, and after being Brutus at one moment and Falstaff at
another, he is not more truly himself. He is abolished by his creations,
which nevertheless cannot survive him.

[Sidenote: High demands of sculpture.]

Being so adequate a rendering of its object, sculpture demands a perfect
mastery over it and is correspondingly difficult. It requires taste and
training above every other art; for not only must the material form be
reproduced, but its motor suggestions and moral expression must be
rendered; things which in the model itself are at best transitory, and
which may never be found there if a heroic or ideal theme is proposed.
The sculptor is obliged to have caught on the wing attitudes momentarily
achieved or vaguely imagined; yet these must grow firm and harmonious
under his hand. Nor is this enough; for sculpture is more dependent than
other arts on its model. If the statue is to be ideal, _i.e._, if it is
to express the possible motions and vital character of its subject, the
model must itself be refined. Training must have cut in the flesh those
lines which are to make the language and eloquence of the marble.
Trivial and vulgar forms, such as