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.

CHAPTER III.

"Its

BUT, as has been already mentioned, art has in modern times been allotted a far wider sphere. "imitations, it is said, extend over the whole of visible nature, of which the beautiful is but a small "part: and as nature herself is ever ready to sacri"fice beauty to higher aims, so likewise the artist "must render it subordinate to his general design, "and not pursue it farther than truth and expression "permit. Enough that, through these two, what "is most ugly in nature has been changed into a "beauty of art."

But even if we should leave this idea, whatever its value, for the present undisputed; would there not arise other considerations independent of it, which would compel the artist to put certain limits to expression, and prevent him from ever drawing it at its highest intensity?

I believe the fact, that it is to a single moment that the material limits of art confine all its imitations, will lead us to similar views.

If the artist, out of ever-varying nature, can only make use of a single moment, and the painter especially can only use this moment from one point of view, whilst their works are intended to stand the

test not only of a passing glance, but of long and repeated contemplation, it is clear that this moment, and the point from which this moment is viewed, cannot be chosen too happily. Now that only is a happy choice, which allows the imagination free scope. The longer we gaze, the more must our imagination add; and the more our imagination adds, the more we must believe we see. In the whole course of a feeling there is no moment which possesses this advantage so little as its highest stage. There is nothing beyond this; and the presentation of extremes to the eye clips the wings of fancy, prevents her from soaring beyond the impression of the senses, and compels her to occupy herself with weaker images; further than these she ventures not, but shrinks from the visible fulness of expression as her limit. Thus, if Laocoon sighs, the imagination can hear him shriek; but if he shrieks, it can neither rise above nor descend below this representation, without seeing him in a condition which, as it will be more endurable, becomes less interesting. It either hears him merely moaning, or sees him already dead.

Furthermore, this single moment receives through | art an unchangeable duration; therefore it must not express anything, of which we can only think as transitory. All appearances, to whose very being, ' according to our ideas, it is essential, that they suddenly break forth, and as suddenly vanish, that they can be what they are, but for a moment; all such

C

appearances, be they pleasing or be they horrible, receive, through the prolongation which art gives them, such an unnatural character, that at every repeated glance the impression they make grows weaker and weaker, and at last fills us with dislike or disgust of the whole object. La Mettrie, who had himself painted and engraved as a second Democritus, laughs only the first time we look at him. Look at him oftener, and he grows from a philosopher into a fool. His laugh becomes a grin. So it is with shrieks; the violent pain which compels their utterance soon either subsides, or destroys its suffering subject altogether. If, therefore, even the most patient and resolute man shrieks, he does not do so unremittingly; and it is only the seeming continuance of his cries in art, which turns them into effeminate impotence or childish petulance. These last, at least, the artist of Laocoon would have avoided, even if beauty were not injured by a shriek, and were not an essential condition of art.

Among the ancient painters, Timomachus seems to have delighted in selecting subjects suited to the display of extreme passion. His raving Ajax, and infanticide Medea were celebrated paintings; but, from the descriptions we possess of them, it is plain that he thoroughly understood and judiciously combined that point, at which the beholder is rather led to the conception of the extreme than actually sees it, with that appearance with which we do not asso