Page:Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (IA memoirsofmargare01fullrich).pdf/345

Rh life, and sympathized with the sensible people who were tired of hearing all the young ladies of Boston sighing like furnace after being beautiful. Beauty was something very different from prettiness, and a microscopic vision missed the grand whole. The fine arts were our compensation for not being able to live out our poesy, amid the conflicting and disturbing forces of this moral world in which we are. In sculpture, the heights to which our being comes are represented; and its nature is such as to allow us to leave out all that vulgarizes, — all that bridges over to the actual from the ideal. She dwelt long upon sculpture, which seems her favorite art. That was grand, when a man first thought to engrave his idea of man upon a stone, the most unyielding and material of materials, — the backbone of this phenomenal earth, — and, when he did not succeed, that he persevered; and so, at last, by repeated efforts, the Apollo came to be.

“But, no; music she thought the greatest of arts, — expressing what was most interior, — what was too fine to be put into any material grosser than air; conveying from soul to soul the most secret motions of feeling and thought. This was the only fine art which might be thought to be flourishing now. The others had had their day. This was advancing upon a higher intellectual ground.

“Of painting she spoke, but not so well. She seemed to think painting worked more by illusion than sculpture. It involved more prose, from its representing more objects. She said nothing adequate about color.

“She dwelt upon the histrionic art as the most complete, its organ being the most flexible and powerful.

“She then spoke of life, as the art, of which these all