When we speak of an artist as imitating a poet or a poet an artist, we
may mean one of two things,—either that one makes the work of the other
his actual model, or that the same original is before them both, and one
borrows from the other the manner of copying it.
When Virgil describes the shield of Æneas, his imitation of the artist
who made the shield is of the former kind. The work of art, not what it
represents, is his model. Even if he describe the devices upon it they
are described as part of the shield, not as independently existing
objects. Had Virgil, on the other hand, copied the group of the Laocoon,
this would have been an imitation of the second kind. He would then have
been copying, not the actual group, but what the group represents, and
would have borrowed from the marble only the details of his copy.
In imitations of the first kind the poet is an originator, in those of
the second a copyist. The first is part of the universal imitation which
constitutes the very essence of his art, and his work is that of a
genius, whether his model be nature or the product of other arts. The
second degrades him utterly. Instead of the thing itself, he imitates
its imitations, and gives us a lifeless reflection of another’s genius
for original touches of his own.
In the by no means rare cases where poet and artist must study their
common original from the same point of view, their copies cannot but
coincide in many respects, although there may have been no manner of
imitation or emulation between them. These coincidences among
contemporaneous artists and poets may lead to mutual illustrations of
things no longer present to us. But to try to help out these
illustrations by tracing design where was only chance, and especially by
attributing to the poet at every detail a reference to this statue or
that picture, is doing him very doubtful service. Nor is the reader a
gainer by a process which renders the beautiful passages perfectly
intelligible, no doubt, but at the sacrifice of all their life.
This is the design and the mistake of a famous English work by the Rev.
Mr. Spence, entitled, “Polymetis; or, An inquiry concerning the
agreement between the works of the Roman poets and the remains of the
ancient artists, being an attempt to illustrate them mutually from one
another.”[47] Spence has brought to his work great classical learning
and a thorough knowledge of the surviving works of ancient art. His
design of using these as means to explain the Roman poets, and making
the poets in turn throw light on works of art hitherto imperfectly
understood, has been in many instances happily accomplished. But I
nevertheless maintain that to every reader of taste his book must be
intolerable.
When Valerius Flaccus describes the winged thunderbolts on the shields
of the Roman soldiers,—
Nec primus radios, miles Romane, corusci
Fulminis et rutilas scutis diffuderis alas,
the description is naturally made more intelligible to me by seeing the
representation of such a shield on an ancient monument.[48] It is
possible that the old armorers represented Mars upon helmets and shields
in the same hovering attitude that Addison thought he saw him in with
Rhea on an ancient coin,[49] and that Juvenal had such a helmet or
shield in mind in that allusion of his which, till Addison, had been a
puzzle to all commentators.
The passage in Ovid where the wearied Cephalus invokes Aura, the cooling
zephyr,—
“Aura ... venias ...
Meque juves, intresque sinus, gratissima, nostros,”
and his Procris takes this Aura for the name of a rival,—this passage, I
confess, seems to me more natural when I see that the ancients in their
works of art personified the gentle breezes, and, under the name Auræ,
worshipped certain female sylphs.[50]
I acknowledge that when Juvenal compares an idle patrician to a
Hermes-column, we should hardly perceive the point of the comparison
unless we had seen such a column and knew it to be a poorly cut pillar,
bearing the head, or at most the trunk, of the god, and, owing to the
want of hands and feet, suggesting the idea of inactivity.[51]
Illustrations of this kind are not to be despised, though neither always
necessary nor always conclusive. Either the poet regarded the work of
art not as a copy but as an independent original, or both artist and
poet were embodying certain accepted ideas. Their representations would
necessarily have many points of resemblance, which serve as so many
proofs of the universality of the ideas.
But when Tibullus describes Apollo as he appeared to him in a dream,—the
fairest of youths, his temples wreathed with the chaste laurel, Syrian
odors breathing from his golden hair that falls in ripples over his long
neck, his whole body as pink and white as the cheek of the bride when
led to her bridegroom,—why need these traits have been borrowed from
famous old pictures? Echion’s “nova nupta verecundia notabilis” may have
been in Rome and been copied thousands of times: did that prove virgin
modesty itself to have vanished from the world? Since the painter saw
it, was no poet to see it more save in the painter’s imitation?[52] Or
when another poet speaks of Vulcan as wearied and his face reddened by
the forge, did he need a picture to teach him that labor wearies and
heat reddens?[53] Or when Lucretius describes the alternations of the
seasons and brings them before us in the order of nature, with their
whole train of effects on earth and air, was Lucretius the creature of a
day? had he lived through no entire year and seen its changes, that he
must needs have taken his description from a procession of statues
representing the seasons? Did he need to learn from statues the old
poetic device of making actual beings out of such abstractions?[54] Or
Virgil’s “pontem indignatus Araxes,” that admirable poetic picture of a
river overflowing its banks and tearing down the bridge that spans
it,—do we not destroy all its beauty by making it simply a reference to
some work of art, wherein the river god was represented as actually
demolishing a bridge?[55] What do we want of such illustrations which
banish the poet from his own clearest lines to give us in his place the
reflection of some artist’s fancy?
I regret that this tasteless conceit of substituting for the creations
of the poet’s own imagination a familiarity with those of others should
have rendered a book, so useful as the Polymetis might have been made,
as offensive as the feeblest commentaries of the shallowest quibblers,
and far more derogatory to the classic authors. Still more do I regret
that Addison should in this respect have been the predecessor of Spence,
and, in his praiseworthy desire to make the old works of art serve as
interpreters, have failed to discriminate between those cases where
imitation of the artist would be becoming in the poet, and those where
it would be degrading to him.[56]