Sculpture [216] finds the secret of its
power in presenting these types, in their broad, central, incisive
lines. This it effects not by accumulation of detail, but by
abstracting from it. All that is accidental, all that distracts the
simple effect upon us of the supreme types of humanity, all traces
in them of the commonness of the world, it gradually purges
away.
Works of art produced under this law, and only these, are really
characterised by Hellenic generality or breadth. In every
direction it is a law of restraint. It keeps passion always below
that degree of intensity at which it must necessarily be transitory,
never winding up the features to one note of anger, or desire, or
surprise. In some of the feebler allegorical designs of the middle
age, we find isolated qualities portrayed as by so many masks; its
religious art has familiarised us with faces fixed immovably into
blank types of placid reverie. Men and women, again, in the
hurry of life, often wear the sharp impress of one absorbing
motive, from which it is said death sets their features free. All
such instances may be ranged under the grotesque; and the
Hellenic ideal has nothing in common with the grotesque. It
allows passion to play lightly over the surface of the individual
form, losing thereby nothing of its central impassivity, its depth
and repose. To all but the highest culture, the reserved faces of
the gods will ever have something of insipidity.
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