Complete. “Laocoon,” Chap. ii.

BE it a fable or history that Love caused the first attempt of the creative Art, thus much is certain, that it was never weary of assisting the great old Masters; for although now the scope of Painting is enlarged so as to be more especially the art which imitates bodies upon flat surfaces, yet the wise Greek placed it within much narrower limits and confined it to the imitation of beautiful bodies. His Painter painted nothing but the beautiful; even the common type of the beautiful, the beautiful of an inferior kind, was to him only an accidental object for the exercise of his practice and for his recreation. The perfection of the object itself must be the thing which enraptures him: he was too great to require of those who contemplated him that they should be content with the cold satisfaction arising from the sight of a successful resemblance, or from reflection upon the skill of the artist producing it; to his art nothing was dearer, nothing seemed to him nobler than the object and end of Art itself.

  “Who would paint you when nobody will look at you?” says the old epigrammatist of a very ugly man. Many modern artists would say, “Be as ugly as it is possible to be, I will nevertheless paint you; though no one will willingly look at you, yet they will willingly look at my picture,—not because it reproduces you, but because it is a proof of my skill which can so exactly imitate so hideous an object.”

  In truth the connection between this extravagant boasting and a fatal dexterity, which is not ennobled by the worth of the object, is only too natural; even the Greeks have had their Pauson and their Pyreicus. They had them, but they passed severe judgment upon them. Pauson, who confined himself to the beautiful of ordinary nature, whose low taste most congenially expressed the deficient and the hateful, lived in the most sordid poverty; and Pyreicus, who painted barbers’ rooms, dirty workshops, donkeys, and kitchen vegetables with all the diligence of a Dutch painter, as if such things in nature had so much fascination and were so rarely seen, obtained the nickname of Ρυπαρόγραφος (the filth painter); although the rich voluptuary bought his works at extravagant prices, thus coming to the help of their utter worthlessness by impressing upon them a fictitious value. Governments themselves have not thought it unworthy of their vigilance to restrain by force the artist within his proper sphere. The law of the Thebans, which ordered the imitation of the beautiful and forbade the imitation of the ugly, is well known. It was no law against the bungler, which it was generally supposed to be, even by Junius. It condemned the Greek Ghezzi, the unworthy trick of Art to attain a likeness through an exaggeration of the uglier parts of the original—in a word, the caricature.

  From the spirit of the beautiful also flowed the law of the Olympic judges. Every Olympian conqueror obtained a statue, but an Iconic was only granted to him who had been three times a conqueror. Portraits of the moderately successful were not allowed to abound among works of Art, for although even the portrait approached to the ideal, nevertheless the likeness was the dominant circumstance; it is the ideal of a certain man, not the ideal of a man generally.

  We smile when we hear that with the Ancients even the Arts were subjected to civil laws; but we are not always right when we smile. Unquestionably, laws should exercise no power over sciences, for the end of science is truth. Truth is necessary for the soul, and it would be tyranny to exercise the slightest compulsion with respect to the satisfaction of this essential need.

  The end of Art, on the other hand, is pleasure, and pleasure can be dispensed with; therefore, it may always depend upon the lawgiver what kind of pleasure he will allow, and what amount of each kind.

  The plastic Arts especially, over and above the certain influence which they exercise upon the character of a nation, are capable of an effect which requires the vigilant supervision of the law. If beautiful men are the cause of beautiful statues, the latter, on the other hand, have reacted upon the former, and the state has to thank beautiful men.

  With us the tender imagination of the mother appears to express itself only in monsters. From this point of view I believe that in certain ancient legends, which are generally thrown aside as untrue, there is some truth to be found. The mothers of Aristomenes, Aristodæmos, Alexander the Great, Scipio, Augustus, Galerius, all dreamed during their pregnancy that their husband was a snake. The snake was the sign of godhead, and the beautiful statues of a Bacchus, an Apollo, a Mercury, a Hercules, were seldom without snakes. These honorable wives had in the daytime fed their eyes on the god, and the bewildering dream awakened the form of the wild beast. This is how I read the dream, and despise the explanation which was given by the pride of sires and the shamelessness of flatterers; for certainly there must have been one cause why the adulterous fancy always took the form of a snake.

  But I return to my path. My only wish has been to lay down firmly the principle that with the Ancients beauty was the highest law of the imitative Arts.

  This principle being firmly established, it necessarily follows that everything else by which imitative Art can at the same time extend its influence must, if it does not harmonize with beauty, entirely give place to it, and if it does harmonize, at least be subordinate to it. Let me dwell on the consideration of Expression.

  There are passions and degrees of passion which express themselves in the countenance by the most hideous distortions, and which place the whole body in such attitudes of violence that all the fine lines which mark it in a position of repose are lost. The ancient artists either abstained from these altogether and entirely, or used them in a subordinate degree, in which they were susceptible of some measure of beauty. Rage and despair do not disgrace any of their works. I dare aver that they have never created a Fury.

  Wrath is diminished into severity. The Jupiter of the poet who hurls the thunderbolt is wrathful; the Jupiter of the artist is severe.

  Lamentation is softened into sorrow; and when this mitigation cannot take place—if the lamentation should be equally degrading and disfiguring, what did Timanthes do? His picture of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia, in which he distributed to all the bystanders their proper share of grief, but veiled the countenance of the father, which ought to manifest a grief surpassing that of all the others, is well known, and many clever things have been said about it. He had, said one critic, so exhausted himself in the physiognomy of sorrow that he despaired of being able to give an expression of greater sorrow to the father. He thereby confessed, said another critic, that the grief of a father in such a catastrophe was beyond all expression. I, for my part, see neither the incapacity of the artist nor the incapacity of the Art. As the degree of the affection becomes stronger, so do the corresponding features of the countenance; the highest degree has the most decided features, and nothing is easier for Art than to express them. But Timanthes knew the limits which the Graces had fixed to his Art. He knew that the grief which overcame Agamemnon as a father found expression in distortions, which are always hideous. So far as beauty and dignity could be combined with this expression, he went. He might easily have passed over or have softened what was hideous; but inasmuch as his composition did not permit him to do either, what resource remained but to veil it? What he might not paint he left to conjecture. In a word, this veiling is a sacrifice which the artist made to beauty. It is an example not how an artist can force expression beyond the limits of Art, but how an artist should subject it to the first law of Art,—the law of beauty.

  Apply this observation to the Laocoon, and the reason which I seek is clear. The master strove to attain the highest beauty in given circumstances of bodily anguish. It was impossible to combine the latter in all its disfiguring vehemence with the former. It was therefore necessary to diminish it; he must soften screams into sighs, not because the screaming betrayed an ignoble soul, but because it disfigured the countenance in a hideous manner. Let any one only in thought force wide open the mouth of Laocoon and judge. Let any one make him scream and then look. It was a creation which inspired sympathy, because it exhibited beauty and suffering at the same time; now it has become a hideous horrible creation from which we gladly turn away our face, because the aspect of it excites what is unpleasant in pain without the beauty in the suffering object which can change this unpleasantness into the secret feeling of sympathy.

  The mere wide-opening of the mouth—putting out of consideration how violent and disgusting the other portions of the face distorted and displaced by it would become—is in painting a blot, and in statuary a cavity, which produces the worst effect possible. Montfaucon showed little taste when he declared an old bearded head with an open mouth to be Jupiter instructing an oracle. Must a god scream when he reveals the future? Would a pleasing curve of the mouth make his speech suspicious? Neither do I believe Valerius, that Ajax, in the picture by Timanthes already mentioned, must have been represented as screaming. Far worse masters in the time of decayed Art do not allow the wildest barbarians, when suffering terror and agony of death under the sword of the conqueror, to open their mouths so as to scream.

  It is certain that this reduction of the most extreme bodily anguish to a lower scale of feeling was visible in many of the ancient works of Art. The suffering Hercules in the poisoned garment, by the hand of an unknown ancient master, was not the Hercules of Sophocles, who yelled so dreadfully that the Locrian cliffs and the Eubean promontories re-echoed with it. He was rather melancholy than mad. The Philoctetes of Pythagoras Leontinus appeared to impart his pain to the observer, an effect which the slightest feature of ugliness would have prevented. It may be asked how I know that this master had made a statue of Philoctetes?—from a passage in Pliny, which ought not to have waited for my correction, so palpably is it corrupted or mutilated.