If it, then, be true that a poem not in itself picturesque may yet be
rich in subjects for an artist, while another in a high degree
picturesque may yield him nothing, this puts an end to the theory of
Count Caylus, that the test of a poem is its availability for the
artist, and that a poet’s rank should depend upon the number of pictures
he supplies to the painter.[98]
Far be it from us to give this theory even the sanction of our silence.
Milton would be the first to fall an innocent victim. Indeed, the
contemptuous judgment which Caylus passes upon the English poet would
seem to be the result not so much of national taste as of this assumed
rule. Milton resembles Homer, he says, in little excepting loss of
sight. Milton, it is true, can fill no picture galleries. But if, so
long as I retained my bodily eye, its sphere must be the measure of my
inward vision, then I should esteem its loss a gain, as freeing me from
such limitations.
The fact that “Paradise Lost” furnishes few subjects for a painter no
more prevents it from being the greatest epic since Homer, than the
story of the passion of Christ becomes a poem, because you can hardly
insert the head of a pin in any part of the narrative without touching
some passage which has employed a crowd of the greatest artists. The
evangelists state their facts with the dryest possible simplicity, and
the painter uses their various details while the narrators themselves
manifested not the smallest spark of genius for the picturesque. There
are picturesque and unpicturesque facts, and the historian may relate
the most picturesque without picturesqueness, as the poet can make a
picture of those least adapted to the painter’s use.
To regard the matter otherwise is to allow ourselves to be misled by the
double meaning of a word. A picture in poetry is not necessarily one
which can be transferred to canvas. But every touch, or every
combination of touches, by means of which the poet brings his subject so
vividly before us that we are more conscious of the subject than of his
words, is picturesque, and makes what we call a picture; that is, it
produces that degree of illusion which a painted picture is peculiarly
qualified to excite, and which we in fact most frequently and naturally
experience in the contemplation of the painted canvas.[99]