There is, however, a limit to the domain of sculpture.  This art deals most successfully with personified generalities.  It is also strong in the presentation of incarnate character.  But when it attempts to tell a story, we often seek in vain its meaning.  Battles of Amazons or Centaurs upon basreliefs, indeed, are unmistakable.  The subject is indicated here by some external sign.  The group of Laocoon appeals at once to a reader of Virgil, and the divine vengeance of Leto’s children upon Niobe is manifest in the Uffizzi marbles.  But who are the several heroes of the AEginetan pediment, 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