A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE.
AND ON CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN HISTORY AND POETRY CONSIDERED AS SUBJECTS OF MODERN ART.
1848.
I Should begin by admitting the position laid down by Frederick Schlegel, that art and nature are not identical. “Men,” he says, “traduce nature, who falsely give her the epithet of artistic;” for though nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend all nature. Nature, in her sources of pleasures and contemplation is infinite; and art, as her reflection in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in her powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of art and its capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite, has circumscribed the bounds of finite art; the one is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if poetic art in the interpreting of nature share in her infinitude, yet in representing nature through material, form, and colour, she is,—oh, how limited!
If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of limitation as determined as the musical scale, narrowest of all are the limitations of sculpture, to which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place; and it is in regard to sculpture, we find most frequently those mistakes which arise from a want of knowledge of the true principles of art.
Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the limitations of the art of sculpture as to the management of the material in giving form and expression; its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection of the complex and conventional; its bounded capabilities as to choice of subject; must we also admit, with some of the most celebrated critics of art, that there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek? And that every deviation from pure Greek art must be regarded as a depravation and perversion of the powers and subjects of sculpture? I do not see that this follows.
It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the term of its development. In so far as regards the principles of beauty and execution, it can go no farther. We may stand and look at the relics of the Parthenon in awe and in despair; we can do neither more, nor better. But we have not done with Greek sculpture. What in it is purely ideal, is eternal; what is conventional, is in accordance with the primal conditions of all imitative art. Therefore though it may have reached the point at which development stops, and though its capability of adaptation be limited by necessary laws; still its all-beautiful, its immortal imagery is ever near us and around us; still “doth the old feeling bring back the old names,” and with the old names, the forms; still, in those old familiar forms we continue to clothe all that is loveliest in visible nature; still, in all our associations with Greek art—
| “’Tis Jupiter who brings whate’er is great, And Venus who brings every thing that’s fair.” |
That the supreme beauty of Greek art—that the majestic significance of the classical myths—will ever be to the educated mind and eye as things indifferent and worn out, I cannot believe.