object of art, the best
tragedy, the best comedy, and the best drama would be a stenographic
report of the proceedings in a court of justice, in a family gathering,
in a popular meeting, in the Rump Congress. Even the works of artists
are not rated in proportion to their minute exactness. Neither in
painting nor in any other art do we give the precedence to that which
deceives the eye simply. Every one remembers how Zeuxis was said to have
painted grapes so faithfully that the birds came and pecked at them;
and how, Parrhasios, his rival, surpassed even this feat by painting a
curtain so natural in its appearance that Zeuxis asked him to pull it
aside and show the picture behind it. All this is not art, but mere
knack and trickery. Perhaps no painter was ever so minute as Denner.
It used to take him four years to make one portrait. He would omit
nothing,--neither the bluish lines made by the veins under the skin, nor
the little black points scattered over the nose, nor the bright spots
in the eye where neighbouring objects are reflected; the head seems to
start out from the canvas, it is so like flesh and blood. Yet who cares
for Denner's portraits? And who would not give ten times as much for one
which Van Dyck or Tintoretto might have painted in a few hours? So in
the churches of Naples and Spain we find statues coloured and draped,
saints clothed in real coats, with their skin yellow and bloodless,
their hands bleeding, and their feet bruised; and beside them Madonnas
in royal habiliments, in gala dresses of lustrous silk, adorned with
diadems, precious necklaces, bright ribbons, and elegant laces, with
their cheeks rosy, their eyes brilliant, their eyelashes sweeping. And
by this excess of literal imitation, there is awakened a feeling, not of
pleasure, but always of repugnance, often of disgust, and sometimes of
horror So in literature, the ancient Greek theatre, and the best Spanish
and English dramatists, alter on purpose the natural current of human
speech, and make their characters talk under all the restraints of rhyme
and rhythm. But we pronounce this departure from literal truth a merit
and not a defect. We consider Goethe's second "Iphigenie," written in
verse, far preferable to the first one written in prose; nay, it is the
rhythm or metre itself which communicates to the work its incomparable
beauty. In a review of Longfellow's "Dante," published last year, we
argued this very point in one of its special a