poem entitled Le Byron de nos Jours, we have a single moment of
passion thrown into relief in this exquisite way. Those two jaded
Parisians are not intrinsically interesting; they only begin to interest
us when thrown into a choice situation. But to discriminate that moment,
to make it appreciable by us, that we may "find" it, what a cobweb of
allusions, what double and treble reflexions of the mind upon itself,
what an artificial light is constructed and broken over the chosen
situation; on how fine a needle's point that little world of passion is
balanced! Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of
a central motive; we receive from it the impression of one imaginative
tone, of a single creative act.

To produce such effects at all requires all the resources of painting,
with its power of indirect expression, of subordinate but significant
detail, its atmosphere, its foregrounds and backgrounds. To produce them
in a pre-eminent degree requires all the resources of poetry, language in
its most purged form, its remote associations and suggestions, its double
and treble lights. These appliances sculpture cannot command. In it,
therefore, not the special situation, but the type, the general character
of the subject to be delineated, is all-important. In poetry and
painting, the situation predominates over the character; in sculpture,
the character over the situation. Excluded by the limitations of its
material from the development of exquisite situations, it has to choose
from a select number of types intrinsically interesting--interesting,
that is, independently of any special situation into which they may be
thrown. Sculpture finds the secret of its power in presenting these
types, in their broad, central, incisive lines. This it effects not by
accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from it. All that is
accidental, all that distracts the simple effect upon us of the supreme
types of humanity, all traces in them of the commonness of the world, it
gradually purges away.

Works of art produced under this law, and only these, are really
characterised by Hellenic generality or breadth. In every direction it is
a law of limitation; it keeps passion always below that degree of
intensity at which it must necessarily be transitory, never winding up
the features to one note of anger, or desire, or surprise. In some of the
feebler allegorical designs of the middle age, we find isolated qualities
portrayed