These several sorts of types make an ascending series from the predominantly physical to the predominantly spiritual; but, from the present point of view, the arts which embody their creations in a material form should not be opposed to literature which employs the least interrelation of sensation, as if the former had a physical and the last a spiritual content. All types have one common element, they express personality; they have for the mind a spiritual meaning, what they contain of human character; they differ here only in fulness of representation. The most purely physical types imply spiritual qualities, choice, will, command,--all the life which was a condition precedent to the bodily perfection that was its flower; and, though the eye rests on the beautiful form, it may discern through it the human soul of the athlete as in life; and, moreover, the figure may be represented in some significant act, or mood even, but this last is rare. The more plainly spiritual types, physically rendered, are most often shown in some such mood or act expressive in itself of the soul whose habit lives in the form it has moulded. It is not that the plastic and pictorial arts cannot spiritualize the stone and the canvas as well as humanize it bodily; equally with the poetic art they reveal character, but within narrower bounds. The limitation of these arts in embodying personality is one of scope, not of intention; and though it springs out of their use of material forms, it does so in a peculiar way. It is not the employment of a physical medium of communication that differentiates them, for a physical medium of some sort is the only means of exchange between mind and mind; neither is it the employment of a physical basis, for all art, being concrete, rests on a physical basis--the world of imagination is exhaled from things that are. The physical basis of a drama, for instance, is manifest when it is enacted on the stage; but it is substantially the same whether beheld in thought or ocularly.
The fact is that the limitation of sculpture and painting and their kindred arts results from their use of the physical basis of life only partially, and not as a whole as literature uses it. They set forth their works in the single element of space; they exclude the changes that take place in time. The types they show are arrested, each in its moment; or if a story is told by a series of representations, it is a succession of such moments of arrested life. The method is that of the camera; what is given is a fixed state. But literature renders life in movement; it revolves life through its moments as rapidly as on the retina of sense; its method is that of the kinetoscope. It holds under its command change, growth, the entire energy of life in action; it can chase mood with mood, link act to act. It alone can speak the word, which is the most powerful instrument of man. Hence the types it shows by presenting moods, words, and acts with the least obstruction of matter and the slightest obligation to the active senses, are the most complete. They have broken the bonds of the flesh, of moment and place. They exhibit themselves in actions; they speak, and in dialogue and soliloquy set forth their states of mind lying before, or accompanying, or following their actions, thus interpreting these more fully. Action by itself reveals character; speech illumines it, and casts upon the action also a forward and a backward light. The lapse of time, binding all together, adds the continuous life of the soul. This large compass, which is the greatest reached by any art, rests on the wider command and more flexible control which literature exercises over that physical basis which is the common foundation of all the arts. Hence it abounds in complex types, just as other arts present simple types with more frequency. All types, however, in so far as they appeal to the mind and interpret the inward world, under which aspect alone they are now considered, have their physical nature, materially or imaginatively, even though it be solely visible beauty, in order to express personality.