The first who compared painting with poetry was a man of fine feeling,
who was conscious of a similar effect produced on himself by both arts.
Both, he perceived, represent absent things as present, give us the
appearance as the reality. Both produce illusion, and the illusion of
both is pleasing.
A second sought to analyze the nature of this pleasure, and found its
source to be in both cases the same. Beauty, our first idea of which is
derived from corporeal objects, has universal laws which admit of wide
application. They may be extended to actions and thoughts as well as to
forms.
A third, pondering upon the value and distribution of these laws, found
that some obtained more in painting, others in poetry: that in regard to
the latter, therefore, poetry can come to the aid of painting; in regard
to the former, painting to the aid of poetry, by illustration and
example.
The first was the amateur; the second, the philosopher; the third, the
critic.
The first two could not well make a false use of their feeling or their
conclusions, whereas with the critic all depends on the right
application of his principles in particular cases. And, since there are
fifty ingenious critics to one of penetration, it would be a wonder if
the application were, in every case, made with the caution indispensable
to an exact adjustment of the scales between the two arts.
If Apelles and Protogenes, in their lost works on painting, fixed and
illustrated its rules from the already established laws of poetry, we
may be sure they did so with the same moderation and exactness with
which Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian, in their still existing
writings, apply the principles and experiences of painting to eloquence
and poetry. It is the prerogative of the ancients in nothing either to
exceed or fall short.
But we moderns have in many cases thought to surpass the ancients by
transforming their pleasure-paths into highways, though at the risk of
reducing the shorter and safer highways to such paths as lead through
deserts.
The dazzling antithesis of the Greek Voltaire, that painting is dumb
poetry, and poetry speaking painting, stood in no text-book. It was one
of those conceits, occurring frequently in Simonides, the inexactness
and falsity of which we feel constrained to overlook for the sake of the
evident truth they contain.
The ancients, however, did not overlook them. They confined the saying
of Simonides to the effect produced by the two arts, not failing to lay
stress upon the fact that, notwithstanding the perfect similarity of
their effects, the arts themselves differ both in the objects and in the
methods of their imitation, ὕλῃ καὶ τρόποις μιμήσεως.
But, as if no such difference existed, many modern critics have drawn
the crudest conclusions possible from this agreement between painting
and poetry. At one time they confine poetry within the narrower limits
of painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide sphere
of poetry. Whatever is right in one must be permitted to the other;
whatever pleases or displeases in one is necessarily pleasing or
displeasing in the other. Full of this idea they, with great assurance,
give utterance to the shallowest judgments, whenever they find that poet
and painter have treated the same subject in a different way. Such
variations they take to be faults, and charge them on painter or poet,
according as their taste more inclines to the one art or the other.
This fault-finding criticism has partially misled the virtuosos
themselves. In poetry, a fondness for description, and in painting, a
fancy for allegory, has arisen from the desire to make the one a
speaking picture without really knowing what it can and ought to paint,
and the other a dumb poem, without having considered in how far painting
can express universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and
degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.
To combat that false taste and those ill-grounded criticisms is the
chief object of the following chapters. Their origin was accidental, and
in their growth they have rather followed the course of my reading than
been systematically developed from general principles. They are,
therefore, not so much a book as irregular _collectanea_ for one.
Yet I flatter myself that, even in this form, they will not be wholly
without value. We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. No
nation in the world surpasses us in the faculty of deducing from a
couple of definitions whatever conclusions we please, in most fair and
logical order.
Baumgarten acknowledged that he was indebted to Gesner’s dictionary for
a large proportion of the examples in his “Æsthetics.” If my reasoning
be less close than that of Baumgarten, my examples will, at least, savor
more of the fountain.
Since I made the Laocoon my point of departure, and return to it more
than once in the course of my essay, I wished him to have a share in the
title-page. Other slight digressions on various points in the history of
ancient art, contribute less to the general design of my work, and have
been retained only because I never can hope to find a better place for
them.
Further, I would state that, under the name of painting, I include the
plastic arts generally; as, under that of poetry, I may have allowed
myself sometimes to embrace those other arts, whose imitation is
progressive.