It followed that the Greek ideal expressed itself pre-eminently in
sculpture. All art has a sensuous element, colour, form, sound--in
poetry a dexterous recalling of these, together with the profound,
joyful sensuousness of motion, and each [210] of them 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 that
development. Different attitudes of the imagination have a native
affinity with different types of sensuous form, so that they
combine together, 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, indeed, 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
[211] communicable to it alone.
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