Laocoon

To return, then, to my road, if a saunterer can be said to have a road.

What I have been saying of bodily objects in general applies with even more force to those which are beautiful.

Physical beauty results from the harmonious action of various parts which can be taken in at a glance. It therefore requires that these parts should lie near together; and, since things whose parts lie near together are the proper subjects of painting, this art and this alone can imitate physical beauty.

The poet, who must necessarily detail in succession the elements of beauty, should therefore desist entirely from the description of physical beauty as such. He must feel that these elements arranged in a series cannot possibly produce the same effect as in juxtaposition; that the concentrating glance which we try to cast back over them immediately after their enumeration, gives us no harmonious picture; and that to conceive the effect of certain eyes, a certain mouth and nose taken together, unless we can recall a similar combination of such parts in nature or art, surpasses the power of human imagination.

Here again Homer is the model of all models. He says, Nireus was fair; Achilles was fairer; Helen was of godlike beauty. But he is nowhere betrayed into a more detailed description of these beauties. Yet the whole poem is based upon the loveliness of Helen. How a modern poet would have revelled in descriptions of it!

Even Constantinus Manasses sought to adorn his bald chronicle with a picture of Helen. I must thank him for the attempt, for I really should not know where else to turn for so striking an example of the folly of venturing on what Homer’s wisdom forbore to undertake. When I read in him:^[127]

it is like seeing stones rolled up a mountain,^[128] on whose summit they are to be built into a gorgeous edifice; but which all roll down of themselves on the other side. What picture does this crowd of words leave behind? How did Helen look? No two readers out of a thousand would receive the same impression of her.

But political verses by a monk are, it is true, no poetry. Let us hear Ariosto describe his enchantress Alcina:^[129]—

Milton, speaking of Pandemonium, says:—

Praise of one, then, is not always praise of the other. A work of art may merit great approbation without redounding much to the credit of the artist; and, again, an artist may justly claim our admiration, even when his work does not entirely satisfy us. By bearing this in mind we can often reconcile contradictory judgments, as in the present case. Dolce, in his dialogues on painting, makes Aretino speak in terms of the highest praise of the above-quoted stanzas,^[130] while I select them as an instance of painting without picture. We are both right. Dolce admires the knowledge of physical beauty which the poet shows: I consider only the effect which this knowledge, conveyed in words, produces on my imagination. Dolce concludes from this knowledge that good poets are no less good painters: I, judging from the effect, conclude that what painters can best express by lines and colors is least capable of expression in words. Dolce recommends Ariosto’s description to all painters as a perfect model of a beautiful woman: I recommend it to all poets as the most instructive of warnings not to attempt, with still greater want of success, what could not but fail when tried by an Ariosto.

It may be that when the poet says,—

he proves himself to have had a complete knowledge of the laws of perspective, such as only the most industrious artist can acquire from a study of nature and of ancient art.^[131]

In the words,—

he may show himself to be a perfect master of color,—a very Titian.^[132] His comparing Alcina’s hair to gold, instead of calling it golden hair, may be taken as proof that he objected to the use of actual gold in coloring.^[133] We may even discover in the descending nose the profile of those old Greek noses, afterwards borrowed by Roman artists from the Greek masterpieces.^[134] Of what use is all this insight and learning to us readers who want to fancy we are looking at a beautiful woman, and desire to feel that gentle quickening of the pulses which accompanies the sight of actual beauty? The poet may know the relations from which beauty springs, but does that make us know them? Or, if we know them, does he show them to us here? or does he help us in the least to call up a vivid image of them?

what sort of a picture do these general formulæ give us? In the mouth of a drawing-master, directing his pupils’ attention to the beauties of the academic model, they might have some meaning. For the students would have but to look at the model to see the fitting bounds of the gay forehead, the fine cut of the nose, and the slenderness of the pretty hand. But in the poem I see nothing, and am only tormented by the futility of all my attempts to see any thing.

In this respect Virgil, by imitating Homer’s reticence, has achieved tolerable success. His Dido is only the most beautiful (pulcherrima) Dido. Any further details which he may give, have reference to her rich ornaments and magnificent dress.

If, on this account, any should apply to him what the old artist said to one of his pupils who had painted a gayly decked Helen,—“Since you could not paint her beautiful, you have painted her rich,”—Virgil would answer: “I am not to blame that I could not paint her beautiful. The fault lies in the limits of my art, within which it is my merit to have kept.”

I must not forget here the two odes of Anacreon wherein he analyzes the beauty of his mistress and of Bathyllus.^[136] The device which he uses entirely justifies the analysis. He imagines that he has before him a painter who is working from his description. “Thus paint me the hair,” he says; “thus the brow, the eyes, the mouth; thus the neck and bosom, the thighs and hands.” As the artist could execute but one detail at a time, the poet was obliged to give them to him thus piecemeal. His object is not to make us see and feel, in these spoken directions to the painter, the whole beauty of the beloved object. He is conscious of the inadequacy of all verbal expression; and for that reason summons to his aid the expression of art, whose power of illusion he so extols, that the whole song seems rather a eulogium of art than of his lady. He sees not the picture but herself, and fancies she is about to open her mouth to speak.

So, too, in his ode to Bathyllus, the praises of the beautiful boy are so mingled with praises of art and the artist, that we are in doubt in whose honor the song was really written. He selects the most beautiful parts from various pictures, the parts for which the pictures were remarkable. He takes the neck from an Adonis, breast and hands from a Mercury, the thighs from a Pollux, the belly from a Bacchus, until he has the whole Bathyllus as a finished Apollo from the artist’s hand.

Thus Lucian, to give an idea of the beauty of Panthea, points to the most beautiful female statues by the old sculptors.^[137] What is this but a confession that here language of itself is powerless; that poetry stammers, and eloquence grows dumb, unless art serve as interpreter.