The more plainly spiritual types, physically rendered, are most
often shown in some such mood or act expressive in itself of the soul
whose habit lives in the form it has moulded. It is not that the plastic
and pictorial arts cannot spiritualize the stone and the canvas as well
as humanize it bodily; equally with the poetic art they reveal
character, but within narrower bounds. The limitation of these arts in
embodying personality is one of scope, not of intention; and though it
springs out of their use of material forms, it does so in a peculiar
way. It is not the employment of a physical medium of communication that
differentiates them, for a physical medium of some sort is the only
means of exchange between mind and mind; neither is it the employment of
a physical basis, for all art, being concrete, rests on a physical
basis--the world of imagination is exhaled from things that are. The
physical basis of a drama, for instance, is manifest when it is enacted
on the stage; but it is substantially the same whether beheld in thought
or ocularly.
The fact is that the limitation of sculpture and painting and their
kindred arts results from their use of the physical basis of life only
partially, and not as a whole as literature uses it.
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