beauty” ever present to his mind,—­so that the matter in hand occupies him only in its superficial aspects.  What he sought on all hands, in his endless questioning of the human frame, his impatience of drapery, the furious haste to reach the live surface, and the tender modulation of it when it is reached, was to make the flesh itself speak and reveal the soul present at all points alike and at once.  Nothing could have satisfied him but to impart to the marble itself that omnipresence of spirit of which animal life furnishes the hint.  In this Titanic attempt the means were in open and direct contradiction to the end.  It was a violation of the wise moderation of Sculpture, whose rigid and colorless material pointedly declines a rivalry it could not sustain.  Else why not color the stone?  The hue of flesh is the most direct assertion of life, but at the same time a direct negative to that totality and emphasis of the particular shape on which Sculpture relies.  The color of the flesh comes from its transparency to the circulation,—­the eternal flux of matter coming to the surface in this its highest form.  It is the display in matter itself of what its true nature is,—­not to resist, but to embody change,—­to reduce itself to mere appearance, and be taken up without residuum in the momentary manifestation, and then at once give place to fresh manifestations.

That the earlier practice of coloring statues was given up just when the need would seem to be the greatest shows its incompatibility with the fundamental conditions of the art.  In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries statues were still painted and gilded.  Afterwards, color is restricted to parts not directly affected by the circulation, the hair and the eyes; and at last, when Sculpture is given over to pictorial effect and is about to yield entirely to Painting, it is wholly relinquished.  Evidently it was felt that to color a statue in imitation of flesh would only enforce the fact that it is stone.

What Art was now aiming at was not the mere appearance of life, but a unity like that which life gives, in place of the abstractness and partiality inherent in Sculpture.  This makes the interest of the fact of life,—­that it is the presence of the soul,—­the unity established amid the sundered particularity of matter.  In free motion a new centre is declared, whereby the inertia of the body, its gravitation to a centre outside of it, is set aside.  In sensibility this new centre declares itself supreme, superseding the passive indifference of extension.  The whole pervades each part, each testifies to the whole and may stand for it.  But the statue, having no such internal unity, is less able to dispense with outward completeness.  All the sides must be given, so that the whole cannot be seen at one view, but only successively, as an aggregate.