like that which life gives, in place of the abstractness and
partiality inherent in Sculpture. This makes the interest of the fact of
life,--that it is the presence of the soul,--the unity established amid
the sundered particularity of matter. In free motion a new centre is
declared, whereby the inertia of the body, its gravitation to a centre
outside of it, is set aside. In sensibility this new centre declares
itself supreme, superseding the passive indifference of extension. The
whole pervades each part, each testifies to the whole and may stand for
it. But the statue, having no such internal unity, is less able to
dispense with outward completeness. All the sides must be given, so that
the whole cannot be seen at one view, but only successively, as an
aggregate.

In the earlier Greek statues the head remains lifeless, abstract, whilst
the limbs are full of expression. In a contrary spirit, more akin to
modern ideas, the Norse myth relates that Skadi, having her choice of a
husband from among all the gods, but having to choose by the feet alone,
meaning to take Baldur, got by mistake Niordr, an inferior deity. This
does not seem so strange to us; but a Greek would have wondered that the
daughter of a wise Titan should not know the feet of Apollo from those
of Nereus. It was said of Taglioni that she put mind into her legs. But
to the modern way of thinking this is clearly exceptional. It is in the
face, and especially in the eye, that we look to see the soul present
and at work, and not merely in its effects as character. As types of
character, the lineaments of the face were explored by the later Greek
Art as profoundly as the rest of the body. But the statue is
sightless,--its eyes do not meet ours, but seem forever brooding over a
world into which the present and its interests do not enter. To the
Greek this was no defect; but to us the omission seems to affect the
most vital point of all, since our conception of the soul involves its
eternity, that is, that it lives always in the present, is not too fine
to exist, secure that it is bound neither by past nor future, but
capable of revolutionizing the character at all moments. Here is the
ground of the remarkable difference that meets us already in the reliefs
of the later classic times. In the reliefs of the best age the figures
are always in profile and in action. Complete personification being out
of the question, it is expressly avoided,--each figure waives atte