A subtler function of the non-verbal arts is to communicate matter that could not go by any other road, especially certain sorts of sentiment which are thus perpetuated and diffused. One of the simplest and most fruitful examples of this is the depiction of human forms and faces which embody, as if by living presence, the nobler feelings and aspirations of the time. Such works, in painting or sculpture, remain as symbols by the aid of which like sentiments grow up in the minds of whomsoever become familiar with them. Sentiment is cumulative in human history in the same manner as thought, though less definitely and surely, and Christian feeling, as it grew and flourished in the Middle Ages, was fostered by painting as much, perhaps, as by the Scriptures. And so Greek sculpture, from the time of the humanists down through Winckelmann and Goethe to the present day, has been a channel by which Greek sentiment has flowed into modern life. This record of human feeling in expressive forms and faces, as in the madonnas and saints of Raphael, is called by some critics “illustration”; and they distinguish it from “decoration,” which includes all those elements in a work of art which exist not to transmit something else but for their own more immediate value, such as beauty of color, form, composition and suggested movement. This latter is communication also, appealing to vivid but otherwise inarticulate phases of human instinct. Each art can convey a unique kind of sentiment and has “its own peculiar and incommunicable sensuous charm, its own special mode of reaching the imagination.” In a picture the most characteristic thing is “that true pictorial quality ... the inventive or creative handling of pure line and color, which, as almost always in Dutch painting, as often also in the works of Titian or Veronese, is quite independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject it accompanies” in music “the musical charm—that essential music, which presents no words, no matter of sentiment or thought, separable from the special form in which it is conveyed to us.”[29] And so with architecture, an art peculiarly close to social organization, so that in many cases—as in the Place of Venice—the spirit of a social system has been visibly raised up in stone. It needs no argument, I suppose, to show that these arts are no less essential to the growth of the human spirit than literature or government. FOOTNOTES: [23] On the probability that song preceded speech, see Darwin, Descent of Man, chap. 19. [24] Decline and Fall, Milman-Smith edition, i, 354. [25] The Cambridge Modern History, i, 684, 685. [26] Milton, Areopagitica. [27] Bacon, Antitheta on Studies. [28] Decline and Fall, Milman-Smith edition, iii, 428. [29] Walter Pater, Essay on the School of Giorgione. CHAPTER VIII MODERN COMMUNICATION: ENLARGEMENT AND ANIMATION