pplications; the artist
must copy his original, but he must not copy it too literally.

What then must he copy? He must copy, says Taine, the mutual relations
and interdependences of the parts of his model. And more than this,
he must render the essential characteristic of the object--that
characteristic upon which all the minor qualities depend--as salient
and conspicuous as possible. He must put into the background the
traits which conceal it, and bring into the foreground the traits which
manifest it. If he is sculpturing a group like the Laocoon, he must
strike upon the supreme moment, that in which the whole tragedy reveals
itself, and he must pass over those insignificant details of position
and movement which serve only to distract our attention and weaken our
emotions by dividing them. If he is writing a drama, he must not attempt
to give us the complete biography of his character; he must depict only
those situations which stand in direct subordination to the grand climax
or denoument. As a final result, therefore. Taine concludes that a work
of art is a concrete representation of the relations existing between
the parts of an object, with the intent to bring the essential or
dominating character thereof into prominence.

We should overrun our limits if we were to follow out the admirable
discussion in which M. Taine extends this definition to architecture
and music. These closely allied arts are distinguished from poetry,
painting, and sculpture, by appealing far less directly to the
intelligence, and far more exclusively to the emotions. Yet these arts
likewise aim, by bringing into prominence certain relations of symmetry
in form as perceived by the eye, or in aerial vibrations as perceived by
the ear, to excite in us the states of feeling with which these species
of symmetry are by subtle laws of association connected. They, too,
imitate, not literally, but under the guidance of a predominating
sentiment or emotion, relations which really exist among the phenomena
of nature. And here, too, we estimate excellence, not in proportion to
the direct, but to the indirect imitation. A Gothic cathedral is not,
as has been supposed, directly imitated from the towering vegetation of
Northern forests; but it may well be the expression of the dim sentiment
of an unseen, all-pervading Power, generated by centuries of primeval
life amid such forests. So the sounds which in a symphony of Beethoven
are woven into a web of