e
felt became a poem, what he saw a picture.

To see and to fashion into poetry were one with him, whereas his
predecessors had called out the whole artillery of Olympus--nymphs,
Oreads, Chloe, Phyllis, Damon, Aurora, Echo, and Zephyr--even the
still heavier ordnance of the old Teutonic gods and half-gods, only
to repeat stereotyped ideas, and produce descriptions of scenery,
without lyric thought and feeling.

But Goethe's genius passed through very evident stages of
development, and found forerunners in Lessing and Herder.

Lessing's mind was didactic and critical, not lyric, so that his
importance here is a negative one. In laying down the limits of
poetry and painting in _Laocoon_, he attacked the error of his day
which used poetry for pictures, debasing it to mere descriptions of
seasons, places, plants, etc.

He was dealing with fundamental principles when he said:

Simonides called painting dumb poetry, and poetry speaking
painting; but ... many modern critics have drawn the crudest
conclusions possible from this agreement between painting and
poetry. At one time they confine poetry within the narrow limits
of painting, and at another allow painting to fill the whole wide
sphere of poetry.... This fault-finding criticism has partially
misled the virtuosos themselves. In poetry a fondness for
description, and in painting a fancy for allegory, has arisen
from the desire to make the one a speaking picture without really
knowing what it can and ought to paint, and the other a dumb poem
without having considered in how far painting can express
universal ideas without abandoning its proper sphere and
degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.... Since the
artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing Nature, and
the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to
a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to
be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently
the most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect must be
chosen. Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the
imagination. The more we see, the more we must be able to
imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see.

And against descriptive poetry he said:

When a poetaster, says Horace, can do nothing else, he falls to
describing a grove, an altar, a brook winding through plea