EXPEESSION, CHARACTERISATION 147 



case, sculptor and painter aimed consciously at expressing 

 certain thoughts and certain emotions. 



Another list of examples might be adduced from antique 

 and modern masterpieces, in which the expression of ideas 

 would not be so obvious. I will select the Apoxyomenos of 

 the Vatican (a young athlete scraping his right arm with the 

 strigil), and Tintoretto's Bacchus and Ariadne. Personally, I 

 prefer this statue and this picture to any other statues and 

 any other pictures I have seen ; and I am well aware that 

 they affect me intellectually and emotionally, only in the 

 same subtle way as music does. In other words, they express 

 things vaguer, more remote, but not less real to the soul, 

 than thought and language do. The secret of their power, 

 is the communication of a mood. This does not, then, 

 reverse the position that the figurative arts are arts of 

 expression. Definitely or vaguely, with deliberate intention 

 or by spontaneous suggestiveness, the work of art speaks to 

 our spirit. 



To be dramatic is not the prime function of the figurative 

 arts. They cannot imitate the suffering depicted on the face 

 of a man who is being tortured to death. They cannot rival 

 the natural look of terror in a man threatened with sudden 

 assassination. They cannot do these things with success, and 

 therefore they ought to refrain from the attempt. That 

 is the reason why the Laocoon, though dramatically and 

 realistically feeble, exceeds the bounds of sculpturesque 

 expression, while Titian's Peter Martyr trembled dangerously 

 on the verge of the theatrical. But within their limits of 

 harmonious beauty, of composition and of rhythmic repose, 

 these arts can suggest action, passion, struggle, aspiration, 

 anguish, with a penetrative depth which rescues such motions 

 of the soul from the sphere of the transitory, and confers on 

 them the permanence of style. 



Since the publication by Lessing of his Laocoon, this 

 limitation of the plastic arts has been accepted as axiomatic, 

 and its truth is daily proved by the study of the best work. 

 I believe, however, that the same principle might equally well 

 be deduced from the fact on which I have so often insisted, 



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