In addition to definite expressions of countenance[147] physiognomy presents us with much that merely passes momentarily across the features and indicates the human mood. A sudden smile, an instantaneous outburst of anger, a quickly repressed expression of scorn, are a few of many examples. In particular, the mouth and eyes possess most mobility and resource in seizing and making apparent every shifting mood of soul-life. Changes of this character, which are compatible with the art of painting, the sculptor must exclude. Sculpture must rather concentrate its attention on the permanent traits of spiritual expression, and retain and disclose such in the posture and configuration of the body no less than in the face.
(c) The task of sculpture, then, essentially consists in this, that it implants that which is of substantive spiritual import in that form of individuality which is not yet essentially particularized in the narrow subjective sense within the figure of a man, and contributes to the same such a harmony, that it is only that which is universal and permanent in the bodily shapes correspondent with the life of Spirit which is made to appear therein, while that which is accidental or mutable is brushed aside, albeit a certain mode of individuality is not absent from its forms.
An accord of this complete nature between what is ideal and what is external, the goal of sculpture, in short, offers us a point of transition to the third point which we have still to discuss.
3. SCULPTURE AS THE ART OF THE CLASSICAL IDEAL
The conclusion that most immediately follows upon the above observations is this, that sculpture in a way, and to an extent unrivalled by any other art, remains constant to the Ideal[148]. In other words, from one point of view it is free of the symbolical type both by virtue of the translucency of a content, which clearly grasps itself as Spirit, and on account of the fact that it is able to disclose such a content with absolute mastery. And so, too, from another it refuses as yet to enter into the subjective aspect of the personal life, to which the external form is indifferent. Consequently it forms the focus of classical art. No doubt both the symbolical and romantic types of architecture and painting were shown to be adapted to classical ideality; but the Ideal, in its genuine sphere, is not the supreme principle of these types of art, inasmuch as they do not, as is the case with sculpture, take for their object self-subsistent individuality, character, that is, throughout objective, in other words, the beauty that is both free and inevitable[149]. The configuration of sculpture must, however, entirely proceed from the pure spiritual energy of an imagination and thought that denudes its content of all the haphazard features of personal life and bodily presence; it must have no leanings for idiosyncrasies, or any place for the mere emotion, desire, and variety of accidental impulse and pleasantry[150]. What the artist has at his disposal for his most elevated creations is simply, as we have seen, the bodily presentment of Spirit in what is exclusively the general configuration of the organic structure of the human form. His invention is therefore restricted to promoting on the broadest lines the harmony between what is ideal and what is external, and partly to making, in however an inobtrusive way, the individuality of the presentment accommodate itself to and interfuse with the truly substantive character of his design[151]. Sculpture must give form, just as the gods create in their own sphere according to eternal ideas, within what is in other respects the world of reality, but exclude as rejected residue all licence and mere selfness from its creations. Theologians make a distinction between the acts of God and all that man in his folly and capriciousness accomplishes. The plastic Ideal is, however, exalted above such questions. It stands at the very centre of this blessedness and free necessity for which neither the abstraction of the universal nor the caprice of the particular are valid or significant.
This insight into the consummate plastic union of the divine and human was pre-eminently native to Greece. We fail to grasp Greece at her heart and centre in her poets and orators, historians and philosophers, unless, as the key to our problem, we are already possessed of an insight into the Ideal of sculpture, and can contemplate from the standpoint of plastic art both the figures of her epic and dramatic heroes and her actual statesmen and philosophers. For characters in her practical life, no less than poets and thinkers, possessed also in the palmy days of Greece, this plastic, universal, and yet individual character, stamped with one mint, whether we look at its external or more personal features. They stand up big and free, a self-subsistent growth, on the basis of their essentially substantive individuality; a growth of their own making, built up into that which they ultimately became and intended to be. In particular the period of Pericles was rich in such characters. Pericles himself was one of them. We may add Pheidias, Plato, and pre-eminently Sophocles. So, too, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Socrates, everyone with his own type, not one of them impairing the quality of the rest; all are out-and-out artistic natures, ideal artists in the work of self-creation, personalities of one mould, works of art, which stand before us like figures of immortal gods, in whom we can detect no taint of Time and mortality. We may find a similar plastic subsistency in the artistic perfections of the bodily frames of the victors at the Olympic games; nay, even in the apparition of Phryne[152] herself, who, as the fairest woman, came from the sea naked before all the world.