whole figure.

The artist ignorant of fundamental principles, who has correctly made a statue in rest, must study the whole over again to produce one in the act of taking one step.

The peculiar work of sculpture is the ideal perfection of organic form, and its highest end, formal beauty in repose. Painting alone approaches to competition with it in this, its proper field. But colors, depending as they do upon so many modifications of light and of feeling, for their existence, necessarily suggest the idea of change, while the statue, in simplicity of actual form, which although it also changes in the course of time, is more associated in our minds with permanency, can attain its noblest results without those glowing signs of transitory emotion.

Though portrait statues and busts are historically valuable, it is not by them that the art is to be estimated. The most beautiful living form comes short, in some respect, of what the cultivated mind can conceive of perfection; but the statue, truly embodying the same style of beauty, carries to perfection all that we admire, while it omits everything that can offend. Statuary is even more fastidious than poetry, in rejecting all that fails of beauty. A long poem may contain many a blemish and yet be of admitted excellence, its merits being so great and striking as to retain their place in the mind when the faults are forgotten, or pardoned, for the sake of the associated excellence; a statue is taken in by the at once, and any want of

eye

harmony immediately detected. The distinct perception of a single particular, as wrong, impairs the pleasure to be derived from all the rest; for we can not think of the work without remembering the blemish. If the design was beautiful, we grieve that it should have been marred; and if the fault is in the design, no excellence of execution can atone for it. In what the mind is only called upon to conceive, its own conceptions may help out the work of the artist, but that which is presented to the faithful eyes, must have in itself all the merit for which it is to have credit. To give its proper satisfaction, a piece of sculpture must actually present what seems to the observing mind the perfection of that particular style of form to which it belongs. With anything else than form and the ideas thereby conveyed, it has nothing to do, and the imagination demands nothing more of it.

Art is not, in any department, a promiscuous following of nature, but differs from nature by aiming at a separation of elements, which, in nature, are blended together. Nature, like her creator, is infinite. Art is finite-constructed on the principle of the human mind

-one thing at a time. In nature we have perspective, and light, and shade, and color, and form, and motion, and sound, combined; but, in the midst of that wilderness of complicated beauty, the imagination labors to conceive of one of these elements suffered to develop itself to perfection. It separates perspective, and establishes the art of drawing; it separates sound, and

evolves the art of music; it separates form, and carrying out the peculiar features thereof to ideal beauty, constructs the art of statuary. Consequently, it is at variance with the primary object of the art, to introduce any other element. The legitimate design is not to present a figure that shall look just like some actual figure in nature, or that possesses as many as possible of the sensible qualities of the natural, but to embody the ideal perfection of form alone. Letting everything else go, for the time, the mind wishes to contemplate this one matter-how purely beautiful form can be— and wishes that it may not be embarrassed in, nor diverted from, that occupation, by the combination therewith of other notions. For the same reason that in a speech the whole must turn on one idea-that a tragedy should have but one plot—a statue should present the perfection of but one great element of beauty.

AH arts are not equally limited in the number of their elements, but all are equally limited to unity of conception. Painting is equally limited to the effects of light and distance, and music to the beautiful in sound. When any of them attempt a close imitation of nature they become childish; because, in the aggregate, they can never equal nature, can never be anything better than toys, in comparison with her living productions. The works of nature are perfect, and can not be improved upon as such. It is only by taking one of her elements and making it human-by conferring

upon it a degree of separate excellence which she never gives, but which imagination conceives and desires to realize, that art can offer any worthy gratification to an enlightened mind. Each art, thus confined by the bounds of its own field, has yet a range for effort, greater than the genius of man can ever fill. Sculpture is the most definite and limited, perhaps, of all, and yet no human mind can embrace all the varieties of pleasing form, and of ideas, thereby expressible, which really occur, and the perfection of which, individually, it belongs to the art to present. Perhaps every healthy man and woman is possessed of some feature in face or figure, which, if suited with the entire accordance of all the rest, would present a new variety of beautiful expression. No one figure can be assumed as including in itself all the elements of human beauty; a fact clearly defined before the mind of antiquity. The statues of Grecian gods are as readily distinguished from each other as living men. The sublime repose in conscious sovereignty, of Jupiter, the strength of Hercules, the majestic grace of Apollo, are all beautiful, but markedly diverse. And besides the human figure, the possible beautiful in animal bodies is of great variety. The deer-like elasticity of the horses of Phidias, and the fiery strength of those of Lysippus, are far from having exhausted the possible beauty of that noble animal.

Of all materials employed in sculpture, the best for effecting the great end of the art is marble. Its pure

white is, in effect, the utter negation of color, or, at least, excludes that notion from the mind, together with all its associated notions of passion, and changeability, and mortality, confining it to the single conception of form.

The beauty of drapery is inferior, of course, to that of a figure, which breathes meaning from every limb; but there are objections to entire nudity, arising from the habits of modern society, which, I think, the artist should not disregard. Even the indulgence granted by the freer customs of ancient Greece was not without question of its delicacy and propriety. The people of Cos rejected the most beautiful work of Praxiteles on that very ground, preferring to pay the same price for a draped statue of less celebrity. It is undeniable, that to a northern mind, brought up to virtuous purity, there is something inexpressibly painful in the idea of such personal exposure, and that which would be avoided like death, in oneself, can not be conceived of in another with pleasure. Indeed, no truly modest eye, brought up to our habits, can look upon a nude statue for the first time, without a shock painfully unpleasant. The most truly delicate will, indeed, say least about it, and exhibit least appearance of embarrassment, but it will be deeply felt; and that feeling is not one to be despised in an æsthetic any more than in a moral point of view. The eye may become accustomed to the nude, and learn to enjoy the beauty without a thought of impropriety; still, I think that