Art in itself, if not necessarily typical, is essentially a suggester of something subtler than that which it embodies to the sense.What Pliny tells us of a great painter of old, is true of most great painters; "their works express something beyond the works,"--"more felt than understood." This belongs to the concentration of intellect which high art demands, and which, of all the arts, sculpture best illustrates.Take Thorwaldsen's Statue of Mercury,--it is but a single figure, yet it tells to those conversant with mythology a whole legend.The god has removed the pipe from his lips, because he has already lulled to sleep the Argus, whom you do not see.He is pressing his heel against his sword, because the moment is come when he may slay his victim.Apply the principle of this noble concentration of art to the moral writer: he, too, gives to your eye but a single figure; yet each attitude, each expression, may refer to events and truths you must have the learning to remember, the acuteness to penetrate, or the imagination to conjecture.But to a classical judge of sculpture, would not the exquisite pleasure of discovering the all not told in Thorwaldsen's masterpiece be destroyed if the artist had engraved in detail his meaning at the base of the statue? Is it not the same with the typical sense which the artist in words conveys? The pleasure of divining art in each is the noble exercise of all by whom art is worthily regarded.
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