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 passion or sentiment.
Between architecture and those romantic arts of painting, music,
and poetry, comes sculpture, which, unlike architecture, deals
immediately with man, while it contrasts with the romantic 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 play of [212] the muscles and
the moulding of the flesh; and over these poetry has command.
Pages:
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218