Music-Painting-Sculpture. Poetry is no fourth art; it but embraces and embodies them all in its correspondent divisions of—
Rhythm-Description-Form.
The 'Body' draws its life from the world of matter made by God, by an assimilation of the elements suited to and prepared for its needs.
The 'Spirit' lives by an analogous process; but its proper food is the wisdom of God.
In a like manner lives the 'Soul;' its tender instincts are to be pastured upon the love of God.
Oh, marvellous condescension! The Infinite deigns to be appropriated as the source of all life and growth by the finite!
In close connection with the threefold being of man, stand the Fine Arts.
'Body.' Sculpture is the art of corporeal form, appealing to the eye as the necessary medium for satisfying the corporeal sense of touch. It gratifies this sense that 'ideal beauty' should breathe through solid, tangible, and material forms. For the triune man longs for perfection in his triune being. It should not astonish us that this art attained its greatest perfection in the ages of classical antiquity; and that music and painting, the symbolic arts of soul and spirit, should have attained their highest excellence only after the advent of our sublime ideal Christ.
'Spirit.' As seeing is the sense holding the closest relation with the spirit or intellect, and light is the most spiritual element of nature,—so painting, addressing itself to the spirit of man, must be regarded as the most spiritual of the arts. Classic art became romantic during the Christian era; Christianity impressed it with an almost painful longing for the divine. Classic beauty was indeed there, but with the expression of inadequacy to its internal consciousness, oppressed with the grief of its fallen existence, and with the sadness of an infinite longing on its ethereal countenance.
'Soul.' Music, addressing itself through the ear to the emotions, is the art of the longing, divining, loving soul. It never excites abstract or antagonistic thought; it unites humanity in concrete feeling. It certainly cannot be denied that sounds address themselves immediately to the feelings; that the tones of the voice are highly sympathetic; that the sighs, groans, shrieks, cries of a sufferer affect us far more vividly than the mere sight of the same degree of suffering.