sonality upon them from the observation of the effect of natural objects, such as mountains and woods, on himself; this is to him what the observation of the human voice is to the constructive musician. Before either can create he must have observed and interpreted. 9. Landscape painting, historical painting, and portraiture, are all modes of analytic or descriptive imagination; they interpret nature like a commentary; the reproduction of nature is so managed as to bring out and render clear the emotion which it inspires in the artist. He gives prominence, or otherwise draws our attention, to the features in the landscape, historical event, or human figure, which have been to him the framework of some subtil emotion, often too vague for words to reproduce; and thus makes it strike the spectator in the same way. It is requisite that the spectator should have the same capacity and interest, though not the same productive power, as the artist, in order to take pleasure in such features and such emotions. 10. Constructive painting is seen in such works as Raphael's Madonna di San Sisto; less purely in works which border on the historical, or contain landscape, such as Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. Paul Veronese stands closer still to the historical; for instance, in his Alexander and the Family of Darius in the National Gallery, and in his Marriage at Cana in the Dresden Gallery. The glory and pomp of life is however an emotion which he usually contrives to impart to his pictures; they become like a play of Shakespeare frozen into cauvass; and this imparting of emotion from the painter himself gives them a certain constructive character. VOL. I. U BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. § 42. The modes of poetry; the poetical arts. Painting. 11. Sculpture also has both modes, constructive and descriptive; but its peculiar field is marked out for it, and distinguished from that of painting, by the nature of its material and the æsthetic laws determined by that material, as pointed out in § 18. It is in the representation of solid form, and the sense of æsthetic beauty connected with it, that sculpture differs from painting. The peculiar poetry of sculpture, therefore, the domain proper to its achievements, consists in the combination of æsthetic beauty of solid form with imitation or invention of figures and actions which depend on, or owe their poetical significance to, that special kind of beauty. The distinction, then, between the subjects proper to figure painting and to sculpture is very subtil and fine. The Dying Gladiator and the portrait statue of Demosthenes in the Vatican may be taken as instances of descriptive sculpture, the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of the Capitol of constructive. Where sculpture attempts to imitate minutely natural or artificial objects, it enters on a field where painting can do the same work both better and at less expense of time and labour. The sculpture of drapery accordingly must be made entirely expressive of grace or majesty in movement or form, or else avoided altogether. § 43. 1. Poetry in its restricted and usual sense of poetical language, whether prose or verse, is the most general of all the fine arts, and covers the same ground as they do, in virtue of its instrument, language, which is the general medium of expression for everything; for instance, it covers the field of landscape painting in such verses as these, quoted by Southey from Henry More, "Vast plains with lowly cottages forlorn, and Dante's "Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro." In these cases of covering the same field with other arts, it has its own methods and rules, which Lessing has well distinguished in his Laocoon, with special reference to painting and sculpture. Yet, just as each of the other arts has a peculiar field, and can reach certain modes of emotion which no other can, so poetry also has a special field, and a very wide one, where none of the others can follow it. Wherever there is a history of definite images involved, relations of causes and consequences, trains of emotions with definite connection in their frameworks; the imagery distinguishing it from music, and the evolution in time from painting, sculpture, and architecture; there is the special domain of poetry, the art in which imaginative reasoning and emotion go hand in hand. The mind "glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," and combines into one image things distant in time and space; and in its synthetic or constructive mode it is accurately described in the same passage as "bodying forth the forms of things unknown, and giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." None of the other arts, for instance, could produce the same effect as Hamlet's speech "To be or not to be," or as Arthur's speech to Guinevere in the Idylls of the King. 2. Poetry in virtue of its instrument, language, has two elements, sound and sense, the musical and the logical, inseparably combined, not separably as in Operas and Oratorios, since every word is necessarily both at once; and hence the importance of BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. § 43. Poetry in language. BOOK I. CH. II. PART V. $43. Poetry in language. rhythm, metre, and verse, in poetry, because it is in these alone that the full weight can be given to emphasis and tone. All language is intended to be heard; reading and writing are in order to speaking and hearing. Tone, cadence, emphasis, rhythm, accent, are essential to all poetical language; and metre and verse besides to the greater part of it. But, of the two elements, the musical is always subordinate to the logical; and poetry is in this respect the converse of those kinds of music, Operas and Oratorios, for instance, which unite the two. 3. Poetry, like reasoning itself, contains both modes, analytic and synthetic. It depends on the starting point whether any particular piece of poetry is the one or the other, or whether it contains both at once. There is in this way a gradation in poetry from one mode to the other, through modes in which synthesis and analysis are combined in equal proportion. Three kinds of poetry are thus distinguished; first, narrative or descriptive poetry, which is analytic; second, dramatic poetry, which combines synthesis and analysis; third, lyrical poetry, which is the most completely synthetic or constructive. 4. It is in analytic or descriptive poetry that the transition from fancy to poetical imagination is most clearly traceable. The criterion distinctive of poetical imagination is the pleasure of dwelling on a reflective emotion. And this imagination in descriptive poetry works by a kind of personification, either direct personification of the object described, or description of the poet's feeling towards another person or towards such a personified object, yet very different from the personification of fancy. For instance, Byron describes Venice, in direct personification, "Rising with her tiara of proud towers, Such also are the following beautiful, though poetic ally venturesome, lines of Giordano Bruno, where he recalls his youth : "Sic quondam puero mihi, Mons peramcene Cicada, Cùm gremium geniale tuum primæva foveret Viscera, blandiri tua lumina sancta recordor." Such too is Wordsworth's description of sleep, "When the soft hand of sleep had closed the latch All poetical imagination is the expression of an image also is ἐχθροῖς ἀφέντες τὰν βαθύχθον αἶαν, in the Seven against Thebes, where the cadence is "Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam |