Homer treats of two different classes of beings and actions,—the visible
and the invisible. This distinction cannot be made on canvas, where
every thing is visible, and visible in precisely the same way.
When Count Caylus, therefore, makes pictures of invisible actions follow
immediately upon pictures of visible ones; and in scenes of mixed
actions, participated in by beings of both kinds, does not, and perhaps
cannot, indicate how those figures which only we who look at the picture
are supposed to see, shall be so represented that the characters in the
picture shall not see them, or at least shall not look as if they could
not help seeing them, he makes the whole series, as well as many
separate pictures, in the highest degree confused, unintelligible, and
self-contradictory.
With the book before us this difficulty might finally be overcome. The
great objection would be that, with the loss of all distinction to the
eye between the visible and the invisible beings, all the characteristic
traits must likewise disappear, which serve to elevate the higher order
of beings above the lower.
When, for instance, the gods who take different sides in the Trojan war
come at last to actual blows, the contest goes on in the poem
unseen.[86] This invisibility leaves the imagination free play to
enlarge the scene at will, and picture the gods and their movements on a
scale far grander than the measure of common humanity. But painting must
accept a visible theatre, whose various fixed parts become a scale of
measurement for the persons acting upon it. This scale is always before
the eye, and the disproportionate size of any superhuman figures makes
beings that were grand in the poem monstrous on canvas.
Minerva, on whom Mars had made the first attack, steps backward and with
mighty hand lifts from the ground an enormous stone, black and rough,
which, in old times, had required the strength of many men to be rolled
into its place and set up as a landmark.[87]
ἡ δ’ ἀναχασσαμένη λίθον εἵλετο χειρὶ παχείῃ
κείμενον ἐν πεδίῳ, μέλανα τρηχύν τε μέγαν τε,
τόν ῥ’ ἄνδρες πρότεροι θέσαν ἔμμεναι οὖρον ἀρούρης·
To obtain an adequate idea of the size of this stone, we must remember
that Homer makes his heroes twice as strong as the mightiest men of his
day, yet says they were far surpassed in strength by the men whom Nestor
had known in his youth. Now if Minerva is to hurl at Mars a stone which
it had required, not one man, but many men of the time of Nestor’s youth
to set up as a landmark, what, I ask, should be the stature of the
goddess? If her size be proportioned to that of the stone, all marvel
ceases. A being of thrice my size can, of course, throw three times as
large a stone. But if the stature of the goddess be not proportioned to
the size of the stone, the result is a palpable improbability in the
picture which cannot be atoned for by the cold consideration that a
goddess is necessarily of supernatural strength.