Complete. “Laocoon,” Chap. xxi.

DOES not Poetry suffer too great a loss if we take away from her all images of corporeal beauty? Who wishes to take them away? If we seek to prevent her pursuing a particular path, by which she expects to arrive at such images, while she follows the footsteps of a sister Art, but in which she painfully wanders up and down without ever reaching the same goal: do we therefore close every other path to her, even those in which Art in her turn must follow her a great distance?

  Even Homer, who so carefully abstains from all detailed description of corporeal beauty, from whom we barely learn, even parenthetically, that Helen has white arms and beautiful hair, even this poet knows, nevertheless, how to give us an idea of her beauty, which far surpasses all that art is capable of representing to us.

  Let us only remember the passage in which Helen appears before the council of the Trojan elders. The venerable old men gaze on her, and one says to the other:—

	Οὐ νέμεσις Τρῶας καί ἐϋκνήμιδας Ἀχαιοὺς
	Τοιῇδ' ἀμφὶ γυναικὶ πολὺν χρόνον ἄλγεα πάσχειν
	Αἰνῶς ἀθανάτῆσι θεῆς εἰς ῶπα ἔοικεν

What can convey to us a more lively idea of beauty than that cold old age should think it justified the woe which had cost so much blood and so many tears?

  What Homer could not describe in detail he makes us understand by the effect: O poets! paint for us the pleasure, inclination, love, rapture, which beauty causes, and you will have painted beauty itself. Who can think that the beloved object of Sappho, at the sight of whom she confesses to have lost sense and judgment, was ugly? Who does not believe that he has seen the most beautiful and perfect form the moment he sympathizes with the emotions which only such a form can awaken?

  It is not because Ovid describes the different parts of the beautiful body of his Lesbia, in the lines—

“Quos humeros, quales vidi tetigique lacertos!” etc.,

but it is because he describes them with that inebriating voluptuousness which so readily awakens our desires, that we imagine ourselves to enjoy the sight which he enjoyed.

  Another way by which poetry attains the end of painting in the description of corporeal beauty is by changing beauty into grace. Grace is beauty in motion, and therefore less within the province of the painter than the poet. The painter can only create a presumption of motion; in reality, however, his figures are without motion. Consequently, grace with him borders on grimace. But in poetry it remains what it is,—a transitory beauty which we wish to see repeated. It comes and goes; and as we can generally more easily and more vividly remember a motion than a mere form or color, it follows that grace in the same proportions will produce a stronger impression upon us than beauty. All that in the picture of Alcina pleases and excites us is grace. The impression which her eyes make is not in consequence of their being black and fiery, but because they are—

“Pietosi à riguardar, à mover parchi”;

have a look of sweetness and languor; that love flutters round them and discharges his whole quiver from them. Her mouth charms us, not because her vermilion lips disclose two rows of choice pearl; but because they form that love-inspiring smile which of itself opens paradise upon earth; because from them come those friendly words which soften the roughest heart. Her bosom enchants us less because milk and ivory and apples are the image of their whiteness and exquisite form—but rather because we see them gently undulate like the waves on the extremest edge of the shore when a playful zephyr agitates the sea.

	“Due pome acerbe, e pur d’avorio fatte,
	Vengono e van, come onda al primo margo
	Quando piacevole aura il mar combatte.”

  I am certain that such traits of grace compressed into one or two stanzas would have produced more effect than the five others, over which Ariosto has scattered them, interweaving with them cold indications of a beautiful form, in a manner far too learned to affect our feelings.

  Anacreon himself preferred to err by an obvious impropriety, in requiring an impossibility from the painter, rather than not animate with grace the image of his mistress.

	Τρυφροῡ δ᾿ ἔσω γενειου
	Περὶ λυγδίνῳ τραχήλω
	Χάριτες πέτειντο πᾶσαι.

  “Let all the graces hover over her soft chin and her marble neck.” How did he intend this? In the most literal meaning? It was incapable of execution by the painter. The painter could give the chin its finest round—its most beautiful dimple amoris digitulo impressum (for the ἔσω appears to me to indicate a dimple), he could give the most beautiful carnation to the neck, but he could go no further. The movement of this beautiful neck, the play of the muscles by which the dimple became more or less visible, the special grace was beyond the reach of his power. The poet used the most forcible expressions of his art to make beauty visible to us, in order that the painter might make use of the most forcible expression of his art. A new illustration of our former remark that the poet, even when he speaks of works of Art, is not on that account obliged to confine himself within the boundaries of Art.