As the Graces round the throne of Venus, so music, painting, sculpture, wait as handmaids round the throne of Poetry. "They from her golden urn draw light," as planets drink the sunbeams; and in return they array the divinity which created and inspired them, in those sounds, and hues, and forms, through which she is revealed to our mortal senses. The pleasure, the illusion, produced by music, when it is the voice of poetry, is, for the moment, by far the most complete and intoxicating, but also the most transient. Painting, with its lovely colours blending into life, and all its "silent poesy of form," is a source of pleasure more lasting, more intellectual. Beyond both, is sculpture, the noblest, the least illusive, the most enduring of the imitative arts, because it charms us not by what it seems to be, but by what it is; because if the pleasure it imparts be less exciting, the impression it leaves is more profound and permanent; because it is, or ought to be, the abstract idea of power, beauty, sentiment, made visible in the cold, pure, impassive, and almost eternal marble.
It seems to me that the grand secret of that grace of repose which we see developed in the antique statues, may be defined as the presence of thought, and the absence of volition. The moment we have, in sculpture, the expression of will, or effort, we have the idea of something fixed in its place by an external cause, and a consequent diminution of the effect of internal power. This is not well expressed, I fear. Perhaps I might illustrate the thought thus: the Venus de Medici looks as if she were content to stand on her pedestal and be worshipped; Canova's Hebe looks as if she would fain step off the pedestal—if she could: the Apollo Belvedere, as if he could step from his pedestal—if he would.
Among the Greeks, in the best ages of sculpture, and in all their very finest statues, this seems to be the presiding principle—viz. that in sculpture the repose of suspended motion, or of subsided motion, is graceful; but arrested motion, and all effort, to be avoided. When the ancients did express motion, they made it flowing or continuous, as in the frieze of the Parthenon.
ALONE.
IN THE GALLERY OF SCULPTURE AT MUNICH.
Ye pale and glorious forms, to whom was given
All that we mortals covet under heaven—
Beauty, renown, and immortality,
And worship!—in your passive grandeur, ye.
There's nothing new in life, and nothing old;