Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/218

 208 FINE ARTS Ana- which the movement is represented as arrested in some logies particular point of time ; nor any abstract idea, but only and con- fjg ures or groups in which the abstract idea, as for example between release, captivity, mercy, is illustrated in the concrete shape the three of allegory. The whole field of thought, of propositions, imitative arguments, injunctions, and exhortations, is open to poetry arls&amp;lt; but closed to sculpture and painting. Poetry, by its com mand over the regions of the understanding, of abstrac tion, of the movement and succession of things in time, by its power of instantaneously associating one delightful image with another from the remotest regions of the mind, by its names for every shade of feeling and experience, exercises a sovereignty a hundred times more extended than that of either of the two arts of manual imitation. But on the other hand, words do not as a rule bear any sensible resemblance to the things of which they are the signs. There are few things that words do not stand for or cannot call up ; but they stand for things, as it were, only at second hand, and call them up only in idea, and not in actual presentment to the senses. And just in this lies the strength of painting and sculpture, that though there are countless things which they cannot represent at all, and countless more which they can only represent by suggestion more or less ambiguous, yet there are a few things which they represent more effect ually and directly than poetry can represent any thing at all. These are, for sculpture, the forms or configurations of things, which that art represents directly to the senses both of sight and touch ; and for painting the forms or configura tions, colours, and relative positions of things, which the art represents to the sense of sight, directly so far as regards surface appearances, and indirectly so far as regards solidity. For many delicate qualities and differences in these visible relations of things, there are no words at all the vocabulary of colours, for instance, is in all languages surprisingly scanty and primitive. And those visible qualities for which words exist, the words still call up indistinctly and at second hand. Poetry is almost as powerless to bring before the mind s eye with precision a particular shade of red or blue, as sculpture is to relate a continuous experience, or painting to enforce an exhortation or embellish an abstract proposi tion. The wise poet, as has been justly remarked, when he wants to produce a vivid impression of the beauty of a visi ble thing, does not attempt to catalogue or describe its sta tionary beauties. In representing the perfections of form in a bride s slender foot, the speaking art, poetry, would find itself distanced by either of the shaping arts, painting or sculpture ; the wise poet calls up the charm of such a foot by describing it not at rest but in motion, and in the feet which &quot; Beneath the petticoat, Like little mice, went in and out,&quot; leaves us an image which baflles the power of the other arts. Shakespeare, when he wants to make us realize the perfections of Perdita, puts into the mouth of Florizel, not, as a bad poet would have done, a description of her lilies and carnations, and the other charms which a painter could make us realize better, but the praises of her ways and movements ; and with the final touch When you do dance, I wish you A wave o the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that,&quot; Ii3 leaves upon the mind a twofold image of beauty in motion, of which one-half might be the despair of those painters who designed the dancing maidens of the walls of Ilerculaneum, and the other half the despair of all artists who in modern times have tried to fix upon their canvas the buoyancy and grace of dancing waves. The difference between the means and capacities of re presentation proper to the shaping arts of sculpture and painting, and thoso proper to the speaking art of poetry, which we have unsystematically glanced at in the above, I-aw of were for a long while overlooked or misunderstood. The j^ e. ir re maxim of Simonides, that poetry was a kind of articulate a painting, and painting a kind of mute poetry, was vaguely accepted until the days of Lessing, and first overthrown by the famous treatise of that writer on the Laocoon. Following in the main the lines laid down by Lessing, other writers have worked out the conditions of representation or imitation proper, not only to sculpture and painting as dis tinguished from poetry, but to sculpture as distinguished from painting, until there is perhaps no part of artistic theory so well or so generally understood as this. The chief points, with some of which we have become acquainted already, may really all be condensed under the simple law, that the more direct and complete the imitation effected ly any art, the less is the range and number of phenomena ivhich that art can imitate. Thus sculpture in the round imitates its objects much more completely and fully than any other single art, reproducing one whole set of their re lations which no other art attempts to reproduce at all, namely, their solid relations in space. Precisely for this reason, such sculpture is limited to a narrow class of objects. As we have seen, it must represent human or animal figures ; nothing else has enough of organic beauty and perfection, or enough of universal interest. It must represent such figures in combinations and with accessories comparatively simple, on pain of puzzling and embarrassing the eye with a complexity and entanglement of masses and lights and shadows ; and in attitudes comparatively quiet, on pain of violating, or appearing to violate, the conditions of mechani- ! cal stability. Being a stationary or space-art, it can only represent a single action, which it fixes and perpetuates for ever ; and it must therefore choose for that action one as significant and full of interest as is consistent with due observation of the above laws of simplicity and stability. Such actions, and the facial expressions accompanying them, must not be those of sharp crisis or transition, because sudden movement or flitting expression, thus arrested and perpetuated in full and solid imitation by bronze or marble, would be displeasing and not pleasing to the spectator. They must be actions and expressions in some degree settled, collected, and capable of continuance, and in their collected- ness must at the same time suggest to the spectator as much as possible of the circumstances which have led up to them and those which will next ensue. These conditions evi dently bring within a very narrow range the phenomena with which this art can deal, and explain why, as a matter of fact, by far the greater number of statues represent simply a single figure in repose, with the addition of one or two symbolic or customary attributes. Paint the statue and you bring the imitation to a still further point of completeness by the addition of local colour; but you do not thereby lighten in any degree the restrictions which are inevitably laid upon sculpture so long as it undertakes to reproduce in full the third or solid dimension of bodies. You only begin to lighten its restrictions when you begin to relieve it of that duty. We have traced how sculpture in relief, which is satisfied with only a partial reproduction of the third dimension, is free to introduce a larger range of objects, bringing forward secondary figures and accessories, indicating distant planes, indulging even in some violence and complexity of motion, since limbs attached to a background do not alarm the spectator by any idea of danger or fragility ; though for the due effect of the work, and the pleasurable distinctness and diversity of its lights and shadows, such complexity must not, even in relief, be carried too far. And so by degrees we arrive at painting, in which the third dimension is dis missed altogether, and nothing is actually reproduced, in full or partially, except the effect made by the appearance of natural objects upon the retina of the eye. The conse-