Angels' Wings Author:Edward Carpenter Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. textit{The Human Body in its Relation to Art textit{" T?ACH part to the service of the Whole." -"- Nowhere do we find this principle more completely carri... more »ed out than in the human Body— the healthy human Body; and so the body in some sense provides a key to the understanding of Art. Perhaps we may look upon it as one of the most perfect of art-products. For every part relates itself to some emotion or utterance. The feet are for swiftness, the hands for mastery and skill; the lips—the eyes—ah ! what do they not convey textit{? the heart, the bowels, the lungs, thrill with feeling; they vibrate and pant and yearn and burn in response to and expression of the lightning-flashes and slow auroral changes of the inner self—that inner self which is continually emerging, coming nearer to its expression—like the figure in Michel Angelo's statue of Day, whose brow and eyes gleam on us from the half-chiselled stone. The body is the sign of what Man has attained to express so far. As the body of Man is more beautiful than that of the Animals, just so far has man reached a fuller self-expression than the animals. To look upon it—the whole body, not the face only—and to relate what you see to the inner meanings, to absorb insensibly all its lessons; not to reason too much about the matter, for it escapes analysis, but to gaze and absorb ; is to learn much about Art. And it is not the textit{form only, but the movement; and not the movement only, but every indication or need proceeding from physiological structure. One of the most primitive of the arts is Dancing. It is a language rooted in the body. The savage leaps from the circle of his mates seated on the ground, and dances. It is a dance of exultation, a dance of love, a dance of war and menace. Instinct provides him with ...« less