Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/372

360 may threaten the rest of the system and readiness to apply the remedies. It is one of the prerogatives of science to cure the wounds which itself inflicts, and it will do this in the present case by means of a better regulated education, through a more complete understanding of hygiene and gymnastics, and generally by a more methodical application of the laws that regulate the harmonious development of the organs. While there is doubtless something admirable in the motionless purity of forms, in proportion, and in the perfect adaptation of the organs to their functions which constitute plastic beauty, supreme and really poetic beauty, nevertheless, lies pre-eminently in expression and movement. To the modern age, the face is still the most beautiful part of the man, and that is constantly tending, by the development of the nervous system, of intelligence and morality, to become more expressive. By virtue of the mutual dependence of the organs, the man of future ages, if the development of his nervous system continues in a manner compatible with bis general vigor, will wear in his very physiognomy the steadily brightening reflection of intelligence, "and infinity of thought in the depth of his eyes." Even if the body is less sturdy and less handsome than the bodies of the athletes of Polycletus and the fleshy giants of Rubens, the head will have acquired a superior beauty. Are a brow radiant with living thought and eyes through which the soul is shining of no value from the plastic point of view? Intelligence ultimately impresses its mark upon the whole body, which, if less fitted under its predominance for the combat or the race, gains nevertheless a beauty peculiarly its own. Beauty, in short, will be intellectualized, and the same will be the case with art. Now, if modern art and poetry are to live chiefly by expression; if the head and thought are already assuming an increasing importance in the works of our epoch; if movement, the visible sign of thought, is finally to animate everything with it, as in the works of Michael Angelo and Puget—will art be destroyed in undergoing the transformation? We might say, borrowing the terminology of contemporary science, that the ancients were mainly acquainted with "static" art, while modern art, with its movement and expression, is "dynamic." Following in its course the evolution of human beauty, art tends to rise, as it were, from the limbs to the face and the brain.

History also, as well as physiology, has furnished some specious arguments against the future of art. The development of particular arts seems frequently connected with particular manners and a particular social condition. M. Taine believes that many arts now languishing are threatened with starvation in the future. M. Renan says the reign of sculpture was over when men ceased to go half naked. Epic poetry disappeared when the age of individual heroism passed away, and can not coexist with artillery. Every art, except music, is thus dependent upon a past state; and music, too, which may be regarded as the art of the nineteenth century, will some day have run its course.