Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/78

56 and unspirituality of pure form. But it involved for the most part the sacrifice of what we call expression; and a system of abstraction which aimed always at the broad and general type, which purged away from the individual all that belonged only to him, all the accidents of a particular time and place, left the Greek sculptor only a narrow and passionless range of effects: and when Michelangelo came, with a genius spiritualised by the reverie of the middle age, penetrated by its spirit of inwardness and introspection, Uving not a mere outward life like the Greek, but a life full of inward experiences, sorrows, consolations, a system which sacrificed what was inward could not satisfy him. To him, lover and student of Greek sculpture as he was, work which did not bring what was inward to the surface, which was not concerned with individual expression, character, feeling, the special history of the special soul, was not worth doing at all.

And so, in a way quite personal and peculiar to himself, which often is, and always seems, the effect of accident, he secured for his work individuality and intensity of expression, while he avoided a too hard realism, that tendency which the representation of feeling in sculpture always has to harden into caricature. What time and accident, its centuries of darkness, under the furrows of the 'little Melian