g when
it wishes to attain dramatic expression. The arts are limited in their
means, though boundless in their effects. Genius seeks not to combat
that which is in the essence of things; on the contrary, its superiority
consists in discovering it.--"As for you, my dear Oswald," said Corinne,
"you do not love the arts in themselves, but only on account of their
relation with mind and feeling. You are only sensible to that which
represents the sorrows of the heart. Music and poetry agree with this
disposition; whilst the arts which speak to the eyes, though their
signification be ideal, only please and interest us when the soul is
tranquil and the imagination entirely free; nor do we require, in order
to relish them, that gaiety which society inspires, but only the
serenity which beautiful weather and a fine climate diffuse over the
mind. We must be capable of feeling the universal harmony of nature in
those arts which represent external objects; this is impossible when the
soul is troubled, that harmony having been destroyed in us by
calamity."--"I know not," replied Oswald, "whether my taste in the fine
arts be confined to that alone which can recall the sufferings of the
soul; but I know, at least, that I cannot endure the representation of
physical pain. My strongest objection," continued he, "against Christian
subjects in painting, is the painful sensations excited in me by the
image of blood, wounds, and torture, notwithstanding the victims may
have been animated by the noblest enthusiasm. Philoctetus is perhaps the
only tragical subject in which bodily ills can be admitted. But with how
many poetical circumstances are his cruel pangs surrounded? They have
been caused by the arrows of Hercules. They will be healed by the son of
AEsculapius. In short, the wound is almost confounded with the moral
resentment produced in him who is struck, and cannot excite any
impression of disgust. But the figure of the boy possessed with a devil,
in Raphael's superb picture of the Transfiguration, is a disagreeable
image, and in no way possesses the dignity of the fine arts. They must
discover to us the charm of grief, as well as the melancholy of
prosperity; it is the ideal part of human destiny which they should
represent in each particular circumstance. Nothing torments the
imagination more than bloody wounds and nervous convulsions. It is
impossible in such pictures not to seek, and at the same time dread, to
find the exactness o