Difficult Books

From Part 2

Be it truth or fable that Love made the first attempt
in the imitative arts, thus much is certain: that she
never tired of guiding the hand of the great masters
of antiquity. For although painting, as the art
which reproduces objects upon flat surfaces, is now
practised in the broadest sense of that definition,
yet the wise Greek set much narrower bounds to it.
He confined it strictly to the imitation of beauty.
The Greek artist represented nothing that was not
beautiful. Even the vulgarly beautiful, the beauty
of inferior types, he copied only incidentally for ,
practice or recreation. The perfection of the subject
must charm in his work. He was too great to require
the beholders to be satisfied with the mere barren
pleasure arising from a successful likeness or from
consideration of the artist's skill. Nothing in his
art was dearer to him or seemed to him more noble
than the ends of art.

"Who would want to paint you when no one wants to look
at you?" says an old epigrammatist to a misshapen man.
Many a modern artist would say, "No matter how misshapen
you are, I will paint you. Though people may not like
to look at you, they will be glad to look at my picture.
not as a portrait of you, but as proof of my skill in
making so close a copy of such a monster.”

From Part 3

But, as already observed, the realm of art has in
modern times been greatly enlarged. Its imitations
are allowed to extend over all visible nature, of
which beauty constitutes but a small part. Truth
and expression are taken as its first. . . . As nature
always sacrifices beauty to higher ends, so should
the artist subordinate it to his general purpose, and
not pursue it further than truth and expression allow.
Enough that truth and expression convert what is
unsightly in nature into a beauty of art.

Allowing this idea to pass unchallenged at present
for whatever it is worth, are there not other
independent considerations which should set bounds
to expression, and prevent the artist from choosing
for his imitation the culminating point of any action?

The single moment of time to which art must confine
itself, will lead us, I think, to such considerations.
Since the artist can use but a single moment
of ever-changing nature, and the painter must further
confine his study of this one moment to a single
point of view, while their works are made not simply
to be looked at, but to be contemplated long and
often, . . . most fruitful moment and the most fruitful
aspect. . . Now that only is fruitful which allows
free play to the imagination. The more we see the more we
must be able to imagine ; and the more we imagine,
the more we must think we see. But no moment in
the whole course of an action is so disadvantageous
in this respect as that of its culmination. There is
nothing beyond, and to present the uttermost to the
eye is to bind the wings of Fancy, and compel her,
since she cannot soar beyond the impression made on
the senses, to employ herself with feebler images, shun-
ning as her limit the visible fulness already expressed.
When, for instance, Laocoon sighs, imagination can
hear him cry ; but if he cry, imagination can neither
mount a step higher, nor fall a step lower, without
seeing him in a more endurable, and therefore less
interesting, condition. We hear him merely groan-
ing, or we see him already dead.
/ Again, since this single moment receives from art

(^an__unchanging duration, it should express nothing
essentially transitory !j All phenomena, whose nature
it is suddenly to bt'S^ out and as suddenly to dis-
appear, which can remain as they are but for a
moment ; all such phenomena, whether agreeable or
otherwise, acquire through the perpetuity conferred
upon them by art such an unnatural appearance,
that the impression they produce becomes weaker
with every fresh observation, till the whole subject
at last wearies or disgusts us. La Mettrie, who had
himself painted and engraved as a second Democ-
ritus, laughs only the first time we look at him.
Looked at again, the philosopher becomes a buffoon,
and his laugh a grimace. So it is with a cry. Pain,
which is so violent as to extort a scream, either soon
abates or it must destroy the sufferer. Again, if a
man of firmness and endurance cry, he does nDt do
so unceasingly, and only this apparent continuity in
art makes the cry degenerate into womanish weak-
ness or childish . impatience. This, at least, the
sculptor of the Laocoon had to guard against,
even had a cry not been an offence against beauty,
and were suffering without beauty a legitimate sub-
ject of art.

From Part 4

A REVIEW of the reasons here alleged for the mod-
eration observed by the sculptor of the Laocoon in
the expression of bodily pain, shows them to lie
wholly in the peculiar object of his art and its
necessary limitations. Scarce one of them would
be applicable to poetry.

Without inquiring here how far the poet can sue
ceed in describing physical beauty, so much at least
is clear, that since the whole infinite realm of per-
fection lies open for his imitation, this visible cover-
ing under which perfection becomes beauty will be
one of his least significant means of interesting us
in his characters. Indeed, he often neglects it
altogether, feeling sure that if his hero have gained
our favor, his nobler qualities will either so engross^
us that we shall not think of his body, or have so
won us that, if we think of it, we shall naturally
attribute to him a beautiful, or, at least, no unsightly
one. Least of all will he have reference to the eye.
in every detail not especially addressed to the sense
of sight. When Virgil's Laocoon screams, who stops
to think that a scream necessitates an open mouth,
and that an open mouth is ugly? Enough that
" clamores horrendos ad sidera toUit " is fine to the
ear, no matter what its effect on the eyec^Whoever
requires a beautiful picture has missed the whole
intention of the poe^

Further^nothing obliges the poet to concentrate 7^
his picture into a single moment.^ He can take up
every action, if he will, from its origin, and carry it
through all possible changes to its issue. Every
change, which would require from the painter a
separate picture, costs him but a single touch; a
touch, perhaps, which, taken by itself, might offend
the imagination, but which, anticipated, as it has
been, by what preceded, and softened and atoned for
by what follows, loses its individual effect in the
admirable result of the whole. Thus were it really
unbecoming in a man to cry out in the extremity of
bodily pain, how can this' momentary weakness lower
in our estimation a character whose virtues have
previously won our regard ? Virgil's Laocoon cries ;
but this screaming Laocoon is the same we know
and love as the most far-seeing of patriots and the
tenderest of fathers. We do not attribute the cry
to his character, but solely to his intolerable suffer-
ings. We hear in it only those, nor could they have
been made sensible to us in any other way.

Who blames the poet, then? Rather must we
acknowledge that he was right in introducing the
cry^ as the sculptor was in omitting it.

From Part 16

But I will try to prove my conclusions by starting
from first principles.

I argue thus. If it be true that painting employs
wholly different signs or means of imitation from
poetry, — the one using forms and colors in space,
the other articulate sounds in time, — and if signs
must unquestionably stand in convenient relation
with the thing signified, then signs arranged side by
side can represent only, objects existing side by side,
or whose parts so exist, while consecutive signs can
express only objects which succeed each other, or
whose parts succeed each other, in time.

Objects which exist side by side, or whose parts
so exist, are called bodies. Consequently bodies
with their visible properties are the peculiar subjects
of painting.

Objects which succeed each other, or whose parts
succeed each other in time, are actions. Consequently
actions are the peculiar subjects of poetry. . . .
bodies, however, exist not only in space, but
also in time. They continue, and, at any moment of
their continuance, may assume a different appearance
and stand in different relations) Every one of
these momentary appearances and groupings was
the result of a preceding, may become the cause of
a following, and is therefore the centre of a present,
action. Consequently painting can imitate actions
also, but only as they are suggested through forms.

Actions, on the other hand, cannot exist indepen-
dently, but must always be joined to certain agents.
In so far as those agents are bodies or are regarded
as such, poetry describes . . bodies, but only indi-'
rectly through actions.

Painting, in its coexistent compositions, can use
but a single moment of an action, and must there-
fore choose the most pregnant one, the one most
suggestive of what has gone before and what is to
follow.

Poetry, in its progressive imitations, can use but a
single attribute of bodies, and must choose that one
which gives the most vivid picture of the body as
exercised in this particular action.

Hence the rule for the employment of a single
descriptive epithet, and . the cause of the rare occur-
rence of descriptions of physical objects.

-- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laökoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry