_Coroll._ When Spenser dragged into light the entrails of the serpent,
slain by the Red-cross Knight, he dreamt a butcher's dream and not a
poet's: and Fletcher,[10] or his partner, when rummaging the surgeon's
box of cataplasms and trusses to assuage hunger, solicited the grunt of
an applauding sty.
87. Sympathy and disgust are the lines that separate terror from horror:
though we shudder at, we scarcely pity what we abominate.
_Coroll._--Rowe, when he congratulates the ghost on bidding Hamlet spare
his mother, accuses _her_ of a crime with which the poet never charged
her: that Shakspeare might be hurried on to horror let the "vile jelly"
witness, which Cornwall treads from Gloster's bleeding sockets.
88. Expression animates, convulses, or absorbs form. The Apollo is
animated; the warrior of Agasias is agitated; the Laocoon is convulsed;
the Niobe is absorbed.
89. The being seized by an enormous passion, be it joy or grief, hope or
despair, loses the character of its own individual expression, and is
absorbed by the power of the feature that attracts it: Niobe and her
family are assimilated by extreme anguish; Ugolino is petrified by the
fate that sweeps his sons; and every metamorphosis from that of Clytie
to the transfusion of Gianni Fucci[11] tells a new allegory of
sympathetic power.
90. Reject with indignant incredulity all self-congratulations of
conscious villainy, though they be uttered by Richard or by Iago.
91. The axe, the wheel, saw-dust, and the blood-stained sheet are not
legitimate substitutes of terror.
92. All division diminishes, all mixtures impair the simplicity and
clearness of expression.
93. The epoch which discovered expression, or what the Greeks called
"manners,"[12] is marked by Pliny as that which gave importance and
effect to art.
_Coroll._--Homer invested his heroes with ideal powers, but copied
nature in delineating their moral character. Achilles, the irresistible
in arms, clad in celestial armour, is a splendid being, created by
himself; Achilles the fool of passions, is the real man delivered to him
by tradition.
That the plastic artist should have had an aim beyond the poet is
improbable, because the poet, in general, furnished him with materials;
he composed his man of beauty and ideal limbs, not to obscure, but to
invigorate his character and our attention.
The limbs, the form of Ajax hurling defiance from the sea-swept rock
unto the murky sky, were, no doubt, exquisite; but if the artist
mitigated his expression, the indignation due to blasphemy from the
spectator gave way to sterner indignation at the injustice of his gods.
The expression of the ancients, from the heights and depths of the
sublime, descended and emerged to search every nook of the human breast;
from the ambrosial locks of Zeus, and the maternal phantom fluttering
round Ulysses,[13] to the half-slain mother, shuddering lest the infant
should suck the blood from her palsied nipple, and the fond attention of
Penelope dwelling on the relation of her returned son.[14]
The expression of the ancients explored nature even in the mute
recesses, in the sullen organs of the brute; from the Argus of Ulysses,
to the lamb, the symbol of expiatory resignation, on an altar, and to
the untameable feature of the toad.
The expression of the ancients roamed all the fields of licit and
illicit pleasure; from the petulance with which Ctesilochus exhibited
the pangs of a Jupiter delivered by celestial midwives, to the
libidinous sports of Parrhasius, and from these to the indecent
caricature[15] which furnished Crassus with a repartee.
The ancients extended expression even to the colour of their materials
in sculpture: to express the remorse of Athamas, Aristonidas the Theban
mixed metals; and Alcon formed a Hercules of iron, to express the
perseverance of the God.[16]
94. Invention, before it attends to composition, group, or contrast,
classes its subject and ascertains what kind of impression it is to make
on the whole.
95. Invention never suffers the action to expire, nor the spectator's
fancy to consume itself in preparation, or stagnate into repose: it
neither begins from the egg, nor coldly gathers the remains; for action
and interest terminate together.
96. The middle moment, the moment of suspense, the crisis, is the moment
of importance, big with the past and pregnant with the future: we rush
from the flames with the Warrior of Agasias, and look forward to his
enemy; or we hang in suspense over the wound of the Expiring
Soldier,[17] and poise with every drop which yet remains of life.
97. Distinguish between the hero and the actor; between exertions of
study and effects of impulse.
98. Know that expression has its classes. The frown of the Hercynian
phantom may repress the ardour, but cannot subdue the dignity of
Drusus;[18] the terror of the Centurion at the Resurrection[19] is not
the panic of his soldiers; the palpitation of Hamlet cannot degenerate
into vulgar fright.
_Coroll._--Of all the eclectics, Domenichino alone composed for
expression; but his expression compared with Raffaello's is the
expression of Theocritus compared with that of Homer. A detail of pretty
images is rather calculated to diminish than to enforce energy with the
whole: a lovely child taking refuge in the bosom of a lovely mother is
an idea of nature, and pleasing in a lowly or domestic subject; but
amidst the terrors of martyrdom, it is a shred tacked to a purple robe.
In touching the circle that surrounds the Ananias of Raffaelle, you
touch the electric chain; an irresistible spark darts from the last as
from the first, and penetrates and subdues. At the Martyrdom of St.
Agnes,[20] you saunter amidst the mob of a lane, where the silly chat of
neighbouring gossips announces a topic as silly, till you find, with
indignation, that instead of a broken pot, or a petty theft, you are to
witness a scene for which Heaven opens, the angels descend, and Jesus
rises from his throne.
99. Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command
over the eye.
_Coroll._--On beauty, unsupported by vigour and expression, Homer dwells
less than on active deformity; he tells us, in three lines, that Nireus
led three ships, his parentage, his form, his effeminacy; but opens in
Thersites a source of comedy and entertainment.
Raffaelle not only subjected beauty to expression, but, at the command
of invention, degraded it into a handmaid of deformity: thus the flowers
of infancy and youth, virility and age, are scattered round the
temple-gate, to impress us more by comparison with the distorted beings
that crawl before and defy the powers of every other hand but the one
delegated by Omnipotence.[21]