The plastic arts especially, besides the infallible influence which they exercise upon the national character, are capable of an effect which demands the closest inspection of the law. As beautiful men produced beautiful statues, so the latter reacted upon the former, and the state became indebted to beautiful statues for beautiful men. But with us the tender imaginative power of the mother is supposed to shew itself only in the production of monsters.

In this point of view I think I can detect some truth in certain stories, which are generally rejected as pure inventions. The mothers of Aristodemus, Alexander the Great, Scipio, and Augustus, all dreamed, during their pregnancy, that they had intercourse with a serpent. The serpent was a token of divinity(3), and the beautiful statues and paintings of Bacchus, Apollo, Mercury, or Hercules, were seldom without one. These honourable wives had by day feasted their eyes upon the God, and the confusing dream recalled the reptile's form. Thus I at the same time establish the truth of the vision, and expose the real value of the interpretation, which the pride of their sons, and the shamelessness of flatterers put upon it for there must have been a reason why the adulterous phantasy should always have been a serpent.

But I am digressing; all I want to establish is, that, among the ancients, beauty was the highest law of the plastic arts. And this once proved, it is a

necessary consequence that everything else over which their range could be at the same time extended, if incompatible with beauty, gave way entirely to it, if compatible, was at least subordinate. I will abide by my expression. There are passions, and degrees of passion, which are expressed by the ugliest possible contortions of countenance, and throw the whole body into such a forced position, that all the beautiful lines, which cover its surface in a quiet attitude, are lost. From all such emotions the ancient masters either abstained entirely, or reduced them to that lower degree, in which they are capable of a certain measure of beauty.

Rage and despair disgrace none of their productions; I dare maintain that they have never painted a Fury(4).

Indignation was softened down to seriousness. In poetry it was the indignant Jupiter who hurled the lightning, in art it was only the serious. Grief was lessened into mournfulness; and where this softening could find no place, where mere grief would have been as lowering as disfiguring, what did Timanthes? All know his painting of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, in which he has imparted to all the bystanders that peculiar degree of sorrow which becomes them, but has concealed the face of the father, who should have shown it more than all. On this many clever criticisms have been passed. He had, says one, so exhausted

e

his powers in the sorrowful faces of the bystanders that he despaired of giving a more sorrowful one to the father. By so doing he confessed, says another, that the pain of a father under such circumstances, is beyond all expression. For my part, I see no incapacity either of artist or art in it. With the degree of passion the correspondent lines of countenance are also strengthened; in the highest degree they are most decided, and nothing in art is easier than their expression. But Timanthes knew the limits within which the graces had confined his art. He knew that the grief which became Agamemnon, as a father, must have been expressed by contortions, at all times ugly; but so far as dignity and beauty could be combined with the expression of such a feeling, so far he pushed it. True, he would fain have passed over the ugly, fain have softened it; but since his piece did not admit either of its omission or diminution, what was left him but its concealment ? He left to conjecture, what he might not paint. In short, this concealment is a sacrifice, which the artist made to beauty; and is an instance, not how expression may exceed the capacity of art, but how it should be subjected to art's first law, the law of beauty.

And now, if we apply this to Laocoon, the principle for which I am searching is clear. The master

f Summi mæroris acerbitatem arte exprimi non posse confessus est. Valerius Maximus viii. 11.

aimed at the highest beauty compatible with the adopted circumstances of bodily pain. The latter, in all its disfiguring violence, could not be combined with the former; therefore he must reduce it; he must soften shrieks into sighs, not because a shriek would have betrayed an ignoble soul, but because it would have produced the most hideous contortions of the countenance. For only imagine the mouth of Laocoon to be forced open, and then judge! Let him shriek, and look at him! It was a form which inspired compassion, for it displayed beauty and pain at once. It has grown into an ugly and horrible shape from which we gladly avert our eyes; for the sight of pain excites annoyance, unless the beauty of the suffering object change that annoyance into the sweet feeling of compassion.

The mere wide opening of the mouth, setting aside the forced and disagreeable manner in which the other parts of the face are displaced and distorted by it, is in painting a spot, and in sculpture a cavity; both which produce the worst possible effect. Montfaucon displayed little taste, when he pronounced an old bearded head with a gaping mouth to be a bust of Jupiter, uttering oracles. Is a god obliged to shout when he divulges the future? Would a pleasing outline of the mouth have made his answers suspected? Neither do I believe Valerius, when he says that in that picture of Timanthes, (which now Antiquit. Expl. T. 1. p. 50.

alas our imaginations are left to draw), Ajax was represented as shrieking(5). Far worse masters, in a period when art was already degenerate, did not once allow the wildest barbarians, though fallen beneath the sword of the conqueror, filled with affright, and seized by the terrors of death, to open their mouths and shriek.h

It is certain that this softening down of extreme bodily pain to a lower degree of feeling is perceptible in several productions of ancient art. The suffering Hercules in the poisoned garment, the work of an unknown old master, was not the Hercules of Sophocles, whose shrieks are so horrible that the rocks of Locris, and headlands of Eubæa resound therewith. It was gloomy rather than wild. The Philoctetes of Pythagoras of Leontini appeared to impart his pain to the beholder, yet this effect would have been destroyed by the least ugliness of feature. I may be asked how I know that this master executed a statue of Philoctetes? From a passage in Pliny, so manifestly either interpolated or mutilated, that it ought not to have awaited my amendment(6).

h Bellorii Admiranda, Tab. 11, 12,

i Plinius, xxxiv. 19. 36.