Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/205

Rh hint or symbol the spirit or mind of the artist. He closes his sadness over him, or wanders in the perplexed intricacies of things, or projects his purpose from him clean-cut and sincere, or bares himself to the sunlight. But these spiritualities, felt rather than seen, can but lurk about architectural form as volatile effects, to be gathered from it by reflection; their expression is not really sensuous at all. As human form is not the subject with which it deals, architecture is the mode in which the artistic effort centres when the thoughts of man concerning himself are still indistinct, when he is still little preoccupied with those harmonies, storms, victories of the unseen intellectual world, which wrought out into the bodily form, give it an interest and significance communicable to it alone. The art of Egypt, with its supreme architectural effects, is, according to Hegel's beautiful comparison, a Memnon waiting for the day, the day of the Greek spirit, the humanistic spirit, with its power of speech. Again, painting, music, poetry, with their endless power of complexity, are the special arts of the romantic and modem ages. Into these, with the utmost attenuation of detail, may be translated every delicacy of thought and feeling incidental to a consciousness brooding with delight over itself. Through their gradations of shade, their exquisite intervals, they project in an