and what was the subject
of the Pheidian statues on the Parthenon? Do the three graceful
figures of a basrelief which exists at Naples and in the Villa Albani,
represent Orpheus, Hermes, and Eurydice, or Antiope and her two sons?
Was the winged and sworded genius upon the Ephesus column meant for a
genius of Death or a genius of Love?

This dimness of significance indicates the limitation of sculpture,
and inclines some of those who feel its charm to assert that the
sculptor seeks to convey no intellectual meaning, that he is satisfied
with the creation of beautiful form. There is sense in this revolt
against the faith which holds that art is nothing but a mode of
spiritual presentation. Truly the artist aims at producing beauty, is
satisfied if he conveys delight. But it is impossible to escape from
the certainty that, while he is creating forms of beauty, he means
something; and that something, that theme for which he finds the form,
is part of the world's spiritual heritage. Only the crudest works of
plastic art, capricci and arabesques, have no intellectual content;
and even these are good in so far as they convey the playfulness of
fancy.

Painting employs colours upon surfaces--walls, panels, canvas. What
has been said about sculpture will apply in a great measure to this
art. The human form, the world around us, the works of man's hands,
are represented in painting, not for their own sake merely, but with
a view to bringing thought, feeling, action, home to the consciousness
of the spectator from the artist's consciousness on which they have
been impressed. Painting can tell a story better than sculpture, can
represent more complicated feelings, can suggest thoughts of a subtler
intricacy. Through colour, it can play, like music, directly on
powerful but vague emotion. It is deficient in fulness and roundness
of concrete reality. A statue stands before us, the soul incarnate in
ideal form, fixed and frozen for eternity. The picture is a reflection
cast upon a magic glass; not less permanent, but reduced to a shadow
of reality. To follow these distinctions farther would be alien from
the present purpose. It is enough to repeat that, within their several
spheres, according to their several strengths and weaknesses, both
sculpture and painting present the spirit to us only as the spirit
shows itself immersed in things of sense. The light of a lamp enclosed
within an alabaster vase is still lamplight, though shorn