Why may not each individual have already existed once in this world? 95. Is this hypothesis so absurd because it is the oldest, or because the human mind hit upon it before the mental powers had been dissipated and weakened by the sophistry of the schools? 96. Why may not I already have taken all the steps towards perfection which mere temporal rewards and punishments can induce man to take? 97. And why not again all those which the prospects of eternal reward so strongly aid us to perform? 98. Why should I not return as often as I am fitted to acquire new knowledge and new capacities? Do I take away with me so much at once that it is perhaps not worth the while to come again? 99. Or because I forget that I have been here? Well for me that I forget it! The remembrance of my former state would permit me to make only a poor use of the present. And what I must forget now, have I forgotten it forever? 100. Lost? Or because too much time would thereby be lost to me? What have I then to lose? Is not all eternity mine? Io THE DIFFERING SPHERES OF POETRY AND PAINTING From Laocoön F IT be true that painting uses for its imitations wholly different means or signs from poetry,- namely, forms and colors in space instead of articulate tones in time, if it be incontestable that these signs must bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then coexistent signs can represent only coexistent objects, and successive signs only successive objects. Coexistent objects are called bodies; consequently bodies with their visible attributes are the proper objects of painting. Successive objects are called in general actions; consequently actions are the proper objects of poetry. Bodies exist, however, not only in space, but also in time. They continue, and at every moment of their duration appear differently and in different relations to each other. Each of these momentary appearances and relations is the effect of a preceding and can be the cause of a succeeding one, and therefore the centre of an action; consequently painting can imitate actions, but only suggestively through bodies. On the other hand, actions cannot exist in themselves, but must inhere in certain beings. So far as these beings are bodies or are regarded as bodies, poetry describes bodies, but only suggestively through actions. Painting can use in its coexistent compositions only a single moment of the action; and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, which will render what precedes and follows most comprehensible. In like manner poetry in its progressive imitations can use only a single property of bodies; and must therefore choose the one that awakens the most sensible image of the body, for the purpose to which it is to be put. Hence the rule of singleness in picturesque epithets and of frugality in descriptions of material objects. I should have less confidence in this dry deduction, if it were not fully confirmed by the practice of Homer; or if it were not rather the practice of Homer, from which I have derived it. The grand style of the Greeks can be determined and elucidated only by these principles, which are also justified by the opposite style of so many modern poets, who wish to vie with the painter in provinces in which they are necessarily surpassed by him. Homer has usually but one stroke for one thing. A ship is to him now the black ship, now the hollow ship, now the swift ship, at most the well-rowed black ship. Further than this he does not indulge in any word-painting of the ship. But he makes a minute picture of the starting, the sailing, or the landing of the ship; a picture from which the painter who wishes to put it all on canvas would be obliged to make half a dozen pictures. THE LIMITATIONS OF "WORD-PAINTING" From Laocoön> HAT I have been saying of corporeal objects in general Wapplies even more forcibly to beautiful ones. Physical beauty results from the harmony of a number of parts which can be embraced in one glance. It is therefore essential that those parts should be close together; and since things whose parts are close together are the proper subjects of painting, that art alone can represent physical beauty. The poet, who can only set down one after another the elements of the beautiful object, should therefore abstain wholly from the description of physical beauty by itself. He ought to feel that these elements arranged in sequence cannot possibly produce the same effect as if in juxtaposition; that the comprehensive glance we try to throw back over them at the end of the enumeration produces no harmonious picture; and that it transcends the power of human imagination to realize the effect of a given pair of eyes, a given nose, and a given mouth together, unless we can call to mind a like combination in nature or art. Here again Homer is the model of models. He says-Nireus was handsome; Achilles was very handsome; Helen was of godlike beauty. But he is nowhere enticed into giving a minuter detail of their beauties. Yet the whole poem is based on Helen's loveliness. How a modern poet would have reveled in specifications of it! Even Constantine Manasses tried to adorn his bare Chronicle with a portrait of Helen. I feel grateful to him for the attempt; for really I should not know where else to turn for so striking an example of the folly of venturing on what Homer's wise judgment refrained from undertaking. When I read in his book "She was a woman passing fair, fine-browed, finest complex ioned, Fine-cheeked, fine-featured, full-eyed, snowy-skinned, The countenance most charming, the eye blooming; As if one stained ivory with splendid purple. Her neck long, passing white, whence in legend it is like seeing stones rolled up a mountain, on whose crest they are to be built into a noble structure, but all of which roll down the other side. What picture does this huddle of words leave with us? How did Helen look? No two readers in a thousand would have the same mental image of her. Virgil, by imitating Homer's self-restraint, has achieved a fair success. His Dido is only the very beautiful (pulcherrima) Dido. All the other details he gives refer to her rich ornaments and superb apparel. If on this account any one turned against him what the old artist said to one of his pupils who had 9024 painted an elaborately dressed Helen,-"You have painted her rich because you could not paint her lovely," - Virgil would answer: “I am not to blame that I could not paint her lovely. The fault is in the limitations of my art, and it is to my credit that I have kept within them." I LESSING'S ESTIMATE OF HIMSELF In the Concluding Number of the 'Hamburg Dramaturgy› AM neither an actor nor a poet. People have honored me occasionally with the latter title, but it is because they have misunderstood me. The few dramatic attempts which I have ventured upon do not justify this generosity. Not every one who takes a brush in his hand and dabbles in colors is a painter. The earliest of these attempts of mine were dashed off in those years when desire and dexterity are easily mistaken for genius. If there is anything tolerable in those of a later date, I am conscious that I owe it all to criticism alone. I do not feel in myself that living fountain that rises by its own strength, and by its own force shoots up in jets so rich, so fresh, so pure! I am obliged to press it all up out of myself with forcing-pump and pipes. I should be so poor, so cold, and so short-sighted if I had not learned in some measure modestly to borrow foreign treasures, to warm myself at another's fire, and to strengthen my sight with the lenses of art. I have therefore always been ashamed and vexed when I have read or heard anything derogatory to criticism. Criticism, it is said, stifles genius; whereas I flatter myself I have received from it something very nearly akin to genius. I am a lame man, who cannot be edified by a lampoon against crutches. Criticism, we may add, is like the crutch too in this respect,that it helps the cripple move from place to place, but can never make a racer of him. If through criticism I have produced something better than a man of my talents could have produced without its aid, still it costs me so much time, I must be so free from other pursuits and so uninterrupted by involuntary diversions, I must have all my reading so at command, must be able at every step so quietly to run over all the observations I have ever made of manners and passions, that no one in the world could be more unsuited than I, to be a worker whose task it should be to supply a theatre with novelties. CHARLES LEVER (1806-1872) HE wonderful flow of animal spirits in Lever's novels is an expression of the warm vital force of the man, who was joyous in his childhood and dowered with good things in his youth. An Irishman,-born August 21st, 1806, in Dublin,- his folk were of English descent. Charles-or Charles James, as his full name ran - was a handsome, merry, and clever lad, who rode his pony to school and gave his schoolmasters some bad quarters of an hour by his escapades. Fencing and love-making too he liked, when the time came. With this temperament and with his personal attraction, it is easy to understand that at Trinity College in his native city, where he took his degree, his life was a gay one. But along with social aptitudes, he early developed diligence in literary work, writing tales and ballads many during undergraduate days. His particular literary idols were the Waverley novels. "I can remember the time," he wrote to a friend, "when as freshmen we went about talking to each other of Ivanhoe' and Kenilworth,' and when the glorious spirit of these novels had so possessed us, that our romance elevated and warmed us to unconscious imitation of the noble thoughts and deeds we had been reading." CHARLES LEVER From Trinity College Lever went to Göttingen for further study, took a degree there, and saw society so broadly that, writing as "Cornelius O'Dowd" - his pen-name in Blackwood's - he could say of himself, with some truth behind the whimsical exaggeration: "I know everybody worth knowing in Europe. I have been everywhere, eaten everything, and seen everything. There's not a railway guard doesn't give a recognition to me; not a waiter, from the Trois Frères to the Wilde Mann, doesn't trail his napkin to earth as he sees me. Ministers speak up when I stroll into the Chamber, and prima donnas soar above the orchestra as I enter the pit." Returning to Dublin, Lever took a medical degree, and practiced with success in the North of Ireland, - his courage during the cholera XVI-565 |