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be accompanied by Mars or Minerva we do not find that the poet is obliged to forewarn us, for instance, that his hero, though modern, wears the helmet and armour, or the costume of the heroic ages.

The reply to this objection has already been given more than once in what we have said concerning the difference of the imitative means belonging to each art. The poet would endeavour in vain, even by a purposed description, to offend the mind by the difference between the outward costume or appearance of these two orders of personages; it is absolutely impossible that these differences can have the same contradictory effect in poetry as in painting. Suppose the desire of rendering an incongruity of this sort perceptible to be actually entertained, which indeed is even less probable. Then on the part of the poet it can but affect the imagination; while in painting it will offend both the eye and the imagination. In pictorial metaphor all poetry is visible poetry. In painting the beings are poetical or fail to be so, through the effect of the corporeal form. So that every discrepancy of the kind in question is not only an error of taste, but is also a contradiction in matter.

The comparison instituted on this point between the poet and the painter, is just enough, were it correctly drawn. The mistake lies in the particular parallels chosen. For that which corre

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sponds to what is termed the material costume of the figures of the painter is the moral costume of the personages of the poet; in other words, the manners of those he makes speak and act. Now there can be no doubt but that the poet, in associating historical or such as are accounted real personages, with allegorical or ideal beings, is bound to make them accordant by raising their language, sentiments, and manners to a level with the proprieties enjoined by the order of things or persons to which they are transferred.

But sentiments, language, and deportment in poetry, are correlative with character, form, and costume in painting.

It must therefore be allowed that in allegorical compositions, whether those in which the whole of the subject undergoes a poetical transformation or those in which the transformation is effected by the association of allegorical with historical beings, the painter no more changes the persons and actions when he gives them other bodies and other forms than does the poet in his ideal conceptions. He changes them indeed after another manner, he changes them according to the proper means of his art and with a view to the organ to which that art must necessarily correspond.

CHAPTER XII.

OF CERTAIN PROPRIETIES TO BE OBSERVED IN THE ALLEGORICAL STYLE.

THE allegorical personages introduced into the compositions of the arts of imitation, in order to the transformation of their subjects, are either the divinities of Paganism that have as it were been naturalized into our poetry, or those imaginary beings that have at all times been created by an abuse of language, and which imitation has invested with corporeal forms, although they are in fact only personified abstractions to which no creed has ever attributed a real existence.

To these last it is that the term allegorical more particularly belongs. Although different from the former, they have for the most part, under other denominations, been identified with the Pagan deities. Prudence, knowledge, victory, strength, justice, courage, beauty, grace, mental endowments, and physical properties and effects have, in the imitation of the arts of design, very natu

rally assumed the features, forms, characters and resemblances of the ancient divinities. Under the pencil and the chisel of the modern artist, Minerva, Mercury, Hercules, Mars, Themis, Apollo, the Muses, the Graces, the Nymphs, and the Naiads have lent their forms to all the intellectual qualities that language expresses, and to the artist there is no difference between the Wisdom of allegory and the Minerva of mythology.

Thus the mythological of ancient times, and the allegorical of the present are necessarily confounded the one with the other in as far as regards their images. If, as we have seen in the foregoing chapter, the right and the power of transforming historical subjects by means of allegory belong to the art of design, and if the figures of modern allegory resemble those of mythology, we must thence infer that the artist, when he associates real with fictious personages, the model of which is derived from antiquity, is so much the more obliged to invest them with the ancient costume, character, and circumstances, lest, in neglecting to do so, one part of his composition should belie the other.

This leads us at once to discuss the strictures which some critics have passed on the employment, in modern subjects, of what they term the figures of Paganism.

Since the mythological and the modern allegorical are necessarily confounded, and taken the one for

But a want of due dis

the other in corporeal imitation, the critical remarks of the Abbe Dubos against the use of the figures of Paganism in subjects or events which, says he, have taken place since the extinction of that religion,* cannot be admitted without some restriction. Indeed the exclusion thus pronounced against the beings of the mythology, because a belief in them no longer exists, would carry with it also the exclusion from the arts of design of the allegorical beings that have assumed their forms, attributes, and whole appearance. It does not appear that the Abbe Dubos wished to push his theory so far as this. tinction on this head seems to prove that he had not taken account of the comparative force of allegorical figures, according to the circumstances under which they are employed, and the manner of employing them. Truly, the alliance by the poet of the gods of Paganism, presented as such, and under their own proper names, with the personages of a Christian subject, would be a monstrous incompatibility offensive to the imagination and repugnant to reason. The same may undoubtedly be said of the painter, who, in a picture devoted to some event pertaining to the Christian religion, should introduce and bring into play, the beings of the Pagan mythology. But there is a

* Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture, tom. i.

sect. 24.

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