What is that adjusting of the circumstances or personages which the poet effects for the express purpose of making his audience, by a more or less natural recital of the foregone circumstances, acquainted with the subject? What is that still more fictitious practice, the employment of explanatory prologues by the ancients, who aimed far less than is now the case at the reality of illusion? What are all these, but an aggregate of expedients, and means fictious in the truest sense of the word? But this subject will be discussed more in detail, under the head of conventions. (Part III. Chapter iv.)

It is unnecessary to enter more at length into the proofs that go to establish the incompleteness of imitation in the dramatic art. It is well known that, limited in space and time, it is prohibited from unfolding all the circumstances attendant on any subject. To whatever degree, in whatever manner the poet may endeavour to exceed the bounds appointed by nature, and despite all the resources to be drawn from visibility in his images, language in his actors, and motion in his personages, his action will never be more than an abridgement of action, his aggregate than a fragment of a whole, nor his picture than a necessitated reduction of the original.

In narrative poetry, notwithstanding that its scope seems to be all comprehensive, invincible obstacles arise to render the effect of its images

incomplete, when, for instance, it is employed. about material forms, the collective whole of bodies, or many properties of the visible world.

It is necessary to remark that the fictious is discoverable less in its language, in the measure or cadence of the words, than in the employment of forms of style foreign to the expression of common discourse, and the use of metaphors, the intervention of imaginary beings, the creation of certain characters, and of certain traits of moral physiognomy, whose original is everywhere, and is yet nowhere.

No art, considered with respect to its imitative power, or that of producing resemblance, affords evidence of images more incomplete, and the result of more fictious means, than music.

Where in fact does music's model exist? Whence do we derive it? Where is it permitted us to approach it so that we may compare it with its image? It may be that the model is itself but a fiction of the artist. However, be it what it may, every one is aware that music expresses sentiments or passions only by means of the inarticulate language of sounds, that is, by equivalents in every case very far short of the reality of speech. This art has never any thing determinate or definite in what it represents. It has no means of presenting to us in its images, traits so positive as to compel us to recognize them. Its secret lies in putting us in a way to see what it cannot

show us, and in influencing us to picture it to ourselves. In fact our imagination, as in the case of a text proposed for a theme, composes pictures of which music only furnishes the idea.

The magical power of music consists in its impelling us to endow the most indefinite conceptions with form, to mould its vague sketches into shape, to exchange its ideas for sensations, to translate its fugitive sounds into images, and by transpositions without number, to complete in us the effects of an imitation which owes its success as much perhaps to him who receives, as to that which produces them.

As it is inseparable from the nature of a theory, in which the ideas, though distinct, are approximate, that the same subject appear to be frequently renewed under similar points of view, I will the more willingly spare the reader, and refrain from applying the subject of this chapter to the graphic arts, since the two imitative conditions I am discussing are as easy to distinguish in what has reference to the mind, as in that which is amenable to the senses. Who can be ignorant of the bounds set to the moral properties, and physical instruments of the arts of design? Who, that the resemblances they produce are necessarily incomplete? I also deem it to be of no avail to show wherein the means of painting are fictious, an art which has only a superficial extent to represent the effect of roundness and depth, fixed

lines to express motion, and which, restricted in action to a single instant of time, must represent what, so to speak, is already past, and what has not, as yet, come to pass.

There is nothing particular, on this point, as regards sculpture, which has not been already proposed elsewhere, or that does not merge into the notions peculiar to painting.

But many persons are instinctively and not unwillingly misled as to the two theoretical points now under consideration, in the opinion they form of the imitative value of the art of dancing, or pantomime. How, say they, can it be credited that there is anything wanting to absolute truth in an art which presents to us an imitation so near identity? What can there be here either fictious or incomplete?

Happily for this art, they labour under an illusion. For if its resemblance were complete, and its truth devoid of fiction, it would cease to be an imitative art. There is no difficulty in pointing out where lies the error; it is, that either they forget, or are ignorant, that whatever is sensual or corporeal, beyond which so few look, in that art, is, as in other arts, notwithstanding the closeness of the image to the model, only an executive instrument, a means, fictious in its very reality, of expressing ideas, producing immaterial images, and portraying the sentiments and affections of the mind, failing in which, they would be

mere feats of strength and agility. But I shall not stop to prove that the art must be incomplete, which uses gesture instead of words, and which is compelled to resort to motion itself to give the idea of repose, just as music can only represent silence by means of sound.

To disfranchise every art more or less from the conditions which its fictious nature imposes on it, in order to give to its imitation what is deemed to be an increase of truth

To complete more or less what is wanting to the natural means of the imitation proper to every art, in order to render its resemblance more entire :

These two points are what ignorant innovators are continually aiming at, and endeavouring to attain. The efforts they employ, and their results, have been already made known. As it is against these their endeavours that our theory is directed, the sequel will afford many opportunities of contending against them.

It is sufficient, in this brief inquiry, to have proved to demonstration how erroneous, and indeed how utterly void, are those pretensions, to which, ignorance on the one hand, and want of talent on the other, continually lend their support.