parallel between them, meant to say that the Euclio of Plautus is more simple, that the action in which his miser plays a part, has much fewer, and less varied incidents, than that of Moliere, that the fact of a hidden treasure, the only source of the disquietudes of Euclio, predominates throughout the piece, produces the denouement and gives it the advantage of a greater unity of object, one would be greatly inclined to accede to his opinion. The very title of the piece might however have taught the above mentioned critic, that Plautus, by entitling it the treasure, or, as we should say, the casket, did not pretend to make a very extensive picture, but only a portraiture of a miser.

All that M. Schlegel has censured in Moliere proves that, notwithstanding some traits borrowed from Plautus, the French poet had conceived quite a different idea. It was not his intention to give us a single comic point of view, in one of those numerous shades of madness that render the miser ridiculous. On the contrary, by subjecting his personage to the principal traits that commonly give rise to the vice, and by displaying all the acts of his internal and domestic life tainted with this sordid passion, he proves that he wished to present to us the picture of avarice.

Here we see wherein the work of imitation may surpass that of nature, viewed individually and in particulars. For in the moral as in the

It must, therefore, be remarked, that these imaginary beings, to which the abstract sign of emblematic writing had given birth, subsequently received a new existence from the abstract fictions of poetry; but, being afterwards subordinated, in the successive developments of art, to another order of ideas, the result was that they did but exchange the abstract quality of the sign, for that equally abstract of the image; in other words, the character of ideal writing, literally speaking, for that of an imitation which was constrained to be ideal, poetically speaking.

a

This brief account may suffice to explain the causes that have given rise to the ideal taste in all the arts in Greece, and at different periods; singular phenomenon, without parallel in the history of any people, and to which familiarity with its effects alone hinders us from paying more attention. For as it is certain that we are indebted to Greece for this style of imitation, and all its consequences, so is it equally certain that no other nation of the ancient world ever suspected the existence of it, and that no modern one could ever have combined the least part of the conditions necessary to its discovery and development.

In Greece, on the contrary, as every thing contributed to give birth to it, so every thing concurred to extend, and render it common even to works which would seem to have been most alien to it. The artist obliged to form, and the people

where did the statuary Glycon find the model of
Strength? Why is not that model, which we
see to this day in his Hercules, represented in
any living individual? Why, but because it never
has been and never will be so found. Genius,
which, by the combinations of art, assembles to-
gether in one whole, what nature has promiscuously
distributed, can alone surpass it on this point, and
it is genius that creates the ideal of strength.
The same may with equal truth be said of
every
corporeal quality. Granting that the artist pro-
duce a beautiful figure, after a beautiful person;
such person, though possessed of beauty, is not
beauty itself, and the figure, that is, its por-
traiture, cannot afford us a complete image of this
quality, since it was made after a model peges-

sarily incomplete. The function of the mods

This (as already said) does not tend to exclude the study of the individual model from the labours of the artist, since it is, on the contrary, by the observation of details or particulars that we attain to generalities, that is, to the ideal

This

serves to show, that the artist must do, by the aid Lef art, what nature has not done, because, apparently, it was unnecessary that it should be done, which is explained by the difference of the end in view. (See Chap. vi.) Nature has to bestow her cares in ordering the vast, the infinite, the universal whole. Art, only on what is of all things the most limited, on a single work and a

single kind of pleasure. Herein lies its only superiority, and which it is not permitted to renounce, for if it do so, it is at once divested of the only advantage it possesses over nature, in all that concerns the outward form of bodies.

The view here taken which displays the true end of imitation, the only one worthy of the fine arts, is nothing more than (as seen in the preceding chapters) the system of the ideal.

This system, which sentiment had employed long before reason had essayed to analyse it, does not, as some would seem to believe, exclude the artist from the circle of nature. Far otherwise, it enlarges for him its horizon, by laying open to his mind, through the effect of generalized study, the mysteries of that beauty, and that truth, which all the senses could not penetrate unaided. For the ideal, far from being in opposition to the true, is, in every form of art, the very highest degree of truth, that in which objects are comprehended in their fullest extent, in order to furnish an image the most complete.

It is by virtue of this system, that the secret of that perfection which is hidden from the eyes of the vulgar amid the generalities of existent things, is revealed to the imitator. It opens to the artist the depository of the universal laws of nature, and leads him to the source of the profound impressions produced through the intervention of the

senses, by the enthusiastic perception of intellectual beauty.

By it, the art of sounds becomes the interpreter of the highest thoughts, simple relations of lines manifest the laws of the creation, the harmony of beautiful proportion raises the mind unto the Creator, and a single work of art, as limited with respect to its object and its constituent matter, as nature is unlimited, is rendered capable of producing on all men, and through all time, effects that nature herself might envy.