In these passages it is not description but composition that produces the picture for us.

In the description of appearance poetry is a rival of painting, and must abandon her peculiar powers. Suppose, for instance, that a painter and a poet vied with each other to describe minutely a certain flower Both would copy it with Dutch fidelity, describing stem, calyx, petals, stamens, and all the rest, with their proper colours and forms. colours and forms. So far the two-the man of words and the man of paints are on tolerably even terms.

But now let them present their respective works

to us.

The painter's picture, every detail grouped into one whole, flashes instantaneously upon the eye. In a moment we see the flower standing there before us as it might have existed at some moment of its existence. The poet's picture, on the contrary, is gradually unfolded to us by a succession of sounds. Each detail fades away before the next, and our memory feebly endeavours to group these details into a whole.

For an example let us take the description of Helen of Troy, written in Greek verse by a Greek scholar of the twelfth century, Constantius Manasses.

"She was a very beautiful woman, with lovely eyebrows and complexion,

With beautiful cheeks and face, ox eyes, snow-white skin;
Dark-eyed, tender, a grove full of charms;

White-armed, delicate, breathing beauty undisguised:
The complexion fair, the cheek rosy,

The countenance pleasing, the eye beautiful :
Inartificial loveliness, undyed, natural :

A glowing rose colour tinged her whiteness,
As if one should dye ivory with splendid purple :
Long-necked, dazzling white, whence she was often called
Swan-born lovely Helen.”*

In like manner Ariosto labours to give us an elaborate picture of the enchantress Alcina. He devotes five stanzas to it; describes her hair, cheek, forehead, teeth, lips, bosom, neck, arms, hands, feet. What is the result? Compare with Alcina, and with the Helen of Manasses, the original Helen of Troy— "divine among women," or Nausicaa, as described by Homer. Described, do I say? Homer in all his Odyssey and Iliad has never described them at all except by incidentally calling them "white-armed " and "fair-haired." And Miranda, Juliet, Imogen,— where have we found their pictures?

The first who enunciated a formal distinction between the pictorial arts (and he rather loosely classes sculpture and painting together under this head) and poetry, was the German poet and critic Lessing. Before his time, not only in Germany, but in France and England, the maxim "Ut pictura poesis" had been almost universally accepted; so much so that it was considered to be a test of a real poem whether or not it afforded material for a painter.

* Quoted by Lessing. Translated by Sir R. Phillimore.

Lessing takes as his text the well-known group of sculpture called the "Laocoon." You all know the

story. The priest of Apollo had warned the Trojans against admitting the wooden horse into the city. Two huge serpents emerge from the sea and attack the sons of the priest. He hastens to their rescue, only to be involved in the coils of the deadly reptiles; and dies in agony, uttering terrible shrieks. Thus is the scene described by the Roman poet Virgil.

How does the sculptor represent it?

:

It had been shown by Winckelmann, another great German critic, that in sculpture a single moment -the moment of chief intensity-is seized, and that all is concentrated into that moment. Consider yourselves what moment would you seize, if you wished to pourtray in sculpture the leap of Sappho; Hercules in his agony, hurling the priest Lachas into the sea; or any such energetic intense act such as the sculptor often choses? You would select a critical moment, in which there is no dispersion of intensity and energy: not a moment when the act is actually being done— but a moment into which you could concentrate everything. Consistently with this, Winckelmann states that "the expression in the figures of Greek sculpture, under every form of passion, shows a great and selfcollected soul." He affirms that Laocoon, in this group, is concentrating all his energies on the deathstruggle, that though his mouth is open, he is not represented, as Virgil represents him, uttering a long

terrific shriek. Winckelmann blames Virgil for describing this shriek, as being neither "great" nor "self-collected." It is a dispersion, not a concentration of intensity.

Now Lessing rightly says that this very want of concentration, this dispersion, this extension of time and place so fatal to sculpture, is just that which forms the chief characteristic of poetry. Thereby is extended vastly the province of poetry; thereby it is endowed with a power incomparably superior to that of sculpture and painting.

It is true that in these latter arts also we sometimes find a slight extension of time suggested. For instance, Raphael will so paint a drapery that it is evident that it has just fallen from its former position into its present folds. As we gaze at the statue of the dying gladiator (or Gaul) it does appear as if—

"His drooped head sinks gradually low,

And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow,
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one."

But extend this motion, this dispersion of restraint
a little more. Consider the pictures and sculptures
that one
one sees of acts in accomplishment: a wave
actually breaking, not poised ere it break; a blow
arrested, congealed into immobility, midway in its
downward career. Does not the thing annoy one
more every time one looks at it?

Now let us turn to what, on the contrary, poetry can effect by "extending the moment."

I have said that Homer draws no detailed picture of Helen. Yet to us she is one of the fairest in our "dreams of fair women." How has he produced this result? He has shown no picture of her beauty, but the effect of that beauty extended over a long line. Did it not cause the war of Troy? Is not the whole story of Ilium's fall due to that one cause-the beauty of Helen? Even the grey-haired elders of Priam's assembly when they see her approach, bowed down as they are with the troubles that she has brought upon them, cannot restrain their admiration. "Small blame," they say, "that Trojans and Achæans should have suffered evils so long for the sake of such a woman. She is wholly like in features to the immortal goddesses."

So much for the true poetical method of describing a woman's beauty-by extending the moment: by telling us what she said and thought; how she moved; what feelings her beauty aroused in others. But the matter does not end here.

A poet is capable of an act utterly beyond the power of the painter or sculptor. The scenes that he introduces in order to form his "entirety" may have no connection whatever in time or space with the dominant scene that he depicts. They have an ideal connection-such as we have seen may exist between the notes of music and moonlight, between a red colour and the blast of a trumpet; and as long as that ideal connection is unbroken it matters not