CHAPTER VII. WHEN it is said that the artist imitates the poet, or the poet the artist, a double meaning may be conveyed. Either the one makes the work of the other the actual object of his imitation, or, the two have the same object, and the one borrows from the other the way and manner of imitating it. When Virgil describes the shield of Æneas, he imitates the artist, who made it, according to the first signification of the term. The work of art, not what is represented upon it, is the object of his imitation; and even though he does describe the latter with the former, he describes it as a part of the shield, and not as the thing itself. If Virgil, on the contrary, had imitated the group of Laocoon, this would have been an imitation of the second kind, for he would not have imitated the group itself, but what that group represented; borrowing from the former the features only of his imitation. In the first kind of imitation the poet is original, in the second he is a plagiarist. The first is a part of that universal imitation, of which the essence of his art consists, and he works as a genius; his subject may be the work either of another art, or of nature herself. The second, on the contrary, de grades him altogether from his dignity; instead of the thing itself, he imitates imitations of it, and offers us cold reminiscences of the traits of another man's genius, for the original features of his own. If, however, the poet and the artist cannot help frequently contemplating those objects, which are common to both, from the same point of view, it must happen that in many cases their imitations harmonize, without the least copying or rivalry between the two having taken place. These coincidences between contemporary artists and poets, in the case of things which are no longer present to us, may lead to mutual illustrations. But to push this kind of illustration to such refinements that coincidence is converted into design; and to impute to the poet, especially in every trifle, a reference to this statue or that painting, is to render him a very doubtful service; and not him alone, but the reader also, to whom the most beautiful passages are by these means rendered full of meaning, at the risk, perhaps, of destroying their effect. This is at once the aim and the error of a wellknown English writer. Spence wrote his "Polymetis" with a great deal of classical learning, and an a a The first edition is of 1747, the second of 1755, and bears the title "Polymetis," or " An inquiry concerning the agreement between the works of the Roman poets and the remains of the ancient artists, being an attempt to illustrate them mutually from one another." intimate acquaintance with the extant works of ancient art. In his design of illustrating by these, the Roman poets, and of extracting from them, in return, a solution of the ancient works of art, still unexplained, he has often happily succeeded. But, in spite of this, I maintain that his book must be absolutely intolerable to every reader of taste. It is natural, when Valerius Flaccus describes the winged lightning upon the Roman shields, (Nec primus radios, miles Romane, corusci b that this description should appear far more full of meaning, if I see the representation of such a shield upon an old monument. It is quite possible that the ancient armourers may, on their helmets and shields, have represented Mars in that hovering posture above Rhea, in which Addison believed he saw him on a coin(19); and that Juvenal had such a helmet or shield in his mind, when he alluded to it by a word, which, up to the time of Addison, had been a riddle to all commentators. I myself seem to feel the passage in Ovid, where the wearied Cephalus calls upon the cooling breeze: Meque juves, intresque sinus, gratissima, nostros!" b Val. Flaccus, Lib. iv. 55.—Polymetis, Dial. vi. p. 50. and his mistress Procris takes this "Aura" to be the name of a rival-I seem, I say, to feel this passage more natural when I see, upon the works of art of the ancients, that they actually personified the gentle breezes, and under the name of "Auræ," worshipped a kind of female sylph (20). I admit that, when Juvenal compares an empty fellow of rank with a Hermes, we should have great difficulty in finding the similarity in this comparison, unless we had seen such a Hermes, and had known it to be a trumpery column, which only bears the head, or, at most, the trunk of the god, and which, from the absence of hands and feet on it, calls up the idea of inactivity (21). Illustrations of this kind are by no means to be despised, even though they should not be always necessary, or always satisfactory. The poet had the work of art before his eyes, not as an imitation, but as a thing independently existing, or else artist and poet had adopted the same conceptions, and consequently, in their representations, there must have been exhibited a harmony, from which, in turn, conclusions as to the universality of those conceptions might have been deduced. But when Tibullus paints the form of Apollo, as he appeared to him in a dream, "the beautiful youth, the temples encircled by the chaste bay; the Syrian odours exhaling from the golden locks, which floated about his slender neck; the gleaming white, and rosy redness, mingled over the whole body, as upon the tender cheeks of a bride, first being led to her beloved,"—there is no reason why these traits should have been borrowed from celebrated old paintings. The nova nupta verecundia notabilis" of Echion may have been in Rome, may have been copied a thousand, and a thousand times; but does that prove that bridal modesty itself had vanished from the world? Because the painter had seen it, was no poet ever to see it more, save in the painter's imitation ? Or, when another poet describes Vulcan as wearied, and his face, scorched by the furnace, as red and burning, must he have first learnt, from the work of a painter, that toil wearies, and heat reddens pd Or, when Lucretius describes the changes of the seasons, and in natural succession conducts them past us, with the whole train of their effects in earth and air, are we to suppose that he was an ephemeral, who had never lived through an whole year, had never experienced these changes in his own person? Are we to assume his picture to have been drawn after an ancient procession, in which the statues of the seasons were carried about? Did he, necessarily, first learn from these statues the old poetic power, by which such abstractions are converted into realities ?(22). Does not the "Pontem indignatus Araxes" of Virgil, that excellent and poetical picture of a flooded river, as it tears away the bridge Tibullus Eleg. IV. lib. iii. Polymetis, Dial. viii. page 84. d Statius Sylv. lib. v. 8. Polymetis, Dial. viii. page 81. |