ay in which the presence or
absence of joyfulness, in these several classes, is expressed in art.

1. Wise play. The first and noblest class hardly ever speak through art,
except seriously; they feel its nobleness too profoundly, and value the
time necessary for its production too highly, to employ it in the
rendering of trivial thoughts. The playful fancy of a moment may
innocently be expressed by the passing word; but he can hardly have
learned the preciousness of life, who passes days in the elaboration of
a jest. And, as to what regards the delineation of human character, the
nature of all noble art is to epitomize and embrace so much at once,
that its subject can never be altogether ludicrous; it must possess all
the solemnities of the whole, not the brightness of the partial, truth.
For all truth that makes us smile is partial. The novelist amuses us by
his relation of a particular incident; but the painter cannot set any
one of his characters before us without giving some glimpse of its whole
career. That of which the historian informs us in successive pages, it
is the task of the painter to inform us of at once, writing upon the
countenance not merely the expression of the moment, but the history of
the life: and the history of a life can never be a jest.

Whatever part, therefore, of the sportive energy of these men of the
highest class would be expressed in verbal wit or humor finds small
utterance through their art, and will assuredly be confined, if it occur
there at all, to scattered and trivial incidents. But so far as their
minds can recreate themselves by the imagination of strange, yet not
laughable, forms, which, either in costume, in landscape, or in any
other accessaries, may be combined with those necessary for their more
earnest purposes, we find them delighting in such inventions; and a
species of grotesqueness thence arising in all their work, which is
indeed one of its most valuable characteristics, but which is so
intimately connected with the sublime or terrible form of the grotesque,
that it will be better to notice it under that head.

Sec. XXXII. 2. Necessary play. I have dwelt much in a former portion of
this work, on the justice and desirableness of employing the minds of
inferior workmen, and of the lower orders in general, in the production
of objects of art of one kind or another. So far as men of this class
are compelled to hard manual labor for their daily bread, so far forth
their