Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/373

Rh The art most compromised in modern times is sculpture. Victor Cousin said, before M. Renan, that there could be no "modern sculpture" with the manners of our days. Admitting that sculpture is declining, the progress of science has had nothing to do with producing this condition. On the other hand, ancient sculpture lived by science. The ancient artists were more learned in the technics of their art than modern artists. In the renascence, Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo were great scientific geniuses. Instead of killing sculpture, it is modern science which will finally be capable of rejuvenating it. Nothing, for example, has been of more value to art than the investigations of such men as Darwin upon the expression of the emotions. Ruskin has written that the sculptor can not be allowed to lack the knowledge or neglect the expression of anatomical detail; but that which is the end to the anatomist is for the sculptor the means. Detail is to him not simply a matter of curiosity or a subject of investigation, but the final element of expression and grace. The change of manners has not produced and will not produce the disappearance of statuary. We may not have another Venus of Milo or Hermes of Praxiteles. But no one can assert that the sculptor may not become capable of embodying in stone ideas and poetic emotions which the Greeks, with all the plastic perfection they attained, could not translate or even conceive. Praxiteles could not have imagined Michael Angelo's "Night" or "Aurora," any more than Michael Angelo could have executed some of the works of Praxiteles.

Painting enjoys a still greater promise of vitality and advancement. Color is eternal. No Newton, with his explanations of the aërial arch of the rainbow, will be able to break it up or to do away with it. The sense of color has even grown since antiquity. The Greeks were without words to describe a considerable number of colors which we distinguish; and their artists had certainly not as fine perceptions of color as Titian or Delacroix. Mankind seems to have been all the time growing more sensible to the language of tints, and to all the plays of light. Here, certainly, is an open road for art.

The language of sounds is likewise inexhaustible. The idea of melody responds to a particular mental and moral condition of man which changes from age to age; it will, therefore, change and make new advances with man himself. A class of musicians like Chopin, Schumann, and Berlioz have expressed feelings congenial to our epoch, and corresponding with a condition of the nervous system which Handel, Bach, and Haydn could hardly have understood. Mr. Spencer has shown that music is a development of accent made by the voice under the influence of passion. The variations of tone, the modulations natural to the human voice, grow refined as the nervous organization becomes more delicate. Musical melody following the variations of human accents is capable of taking on as many shades as