personage going down some steps that terminate in a sarcophagus.* Here the poetry of the image has vanished with the idea that rendered it general. What ought to be taken in a figurative sense necessarily reverts to a simple one. The immaterial is become material, and the sculptor has unsuspectingly reconverted into prose, the image he believed he had purloined from poetry.

In order to evince how frequently such kinds of mistakes occur in the arts of design it is but necessary to call attention here to the numerous monuments in the composition of which the artist, borrowing from the poet and the orator those metaphors in which death is presented under every sort of idea from the terrible to the pathetic, those prosopopeias in which the dead are awakened and brought forth from the tomb, and a great variety of figures of speech which personify death or its destroying power, has allowed himself to set before us hideous allegories which, while shocking the senses, have by their reality dispelled the charm that attached to those images and have closed the way to the heart and the imagination.

I have already remarked, (see Part I. Chap. ix.) on the ill advised desire of being otherwise than is necessary a poet in painting, and a painter in poetry. The spirit of this criticism would how

*The monument to Marshal Saxe at Strasbourg.

ever be misunderstood if it were supposed that this meant that there is no poetry in painting, and that poetry has not its pictures. Every art undoubtedly has its means of transposition or metaphor, but in each they should be derived only from the nature of the language that belongs to it. The arts are like so many different dialects each with its own particular genius. We know that what, according to the spirit of one language is poetical, very frequently loses this virtue and becomes prosaical and oftentimes ridiculous, when transferred word for word into another. The case is the same between one art and another when the artist undertakes the literal translation of images, transferring them to a station not their own, and yet investing them with the very same garb, which only serves to render them still more alien.

CHAPTER IX.

OF THE ACT OF TRANSFORMING AND TRANSPOSING CONSIDERED AS A MEAN OF IDEAL IMITATION IN THE ARTS OF DESIGN.

WHAT has been said above does not in any wise tend to take from the arts of design their faculty of metaphor, to deprive them of the act of transforming or transposing, a privilege of poetical genius, a powerful means of ideal imitation, and a resource common alike to all the arts.

On the contrary I propose to show that the arts of design are entitled to a much more extensive range of metaphor than is usually assigned them; and we have already seen (Chap. v.) that however much the act of generalizing may equally belong to them, that yet it does not produce its full effect except when linked with that which transforms or transposes persons, facts, and things of whatever nature.

It is not against the use of metaphor in the arts of design that I have argued in the preceding chapter, but only against the employment of cer

tain metaphorical means which are not adapted to them; it is not against the propriety of changing the appearance of things, but of pretending to bring about that effect by modes of procedure which make no change, or, if so, only to a wrong purport.

I now propose to contend against the prejudices of those who, referring every thing to matter in the imitation of bodies, look upon every change of appearance wrought in the subjects or objects which the metaphorical system of art is fitted to deal with and modify, as a violation of truth.

This averseness to metaphor in the arts of design is both very common and very widely diffused. It is supposed that because the imitation belonging to them is employed about corporeal forms, that it ought therefore to be confined within the limits of material reality. Living in continual association with all that constitutes the physical models of these arts, persons become familiarized with a state of being and a manner of viewing it that is closely allied to instinctive habits, and would allow of no imitation but that directly addressed to instinctive perception. Thus the generality refuse to acknowledge as fitting or allowable, any change in the images of persons or subjects, which is due to metaphor in the ideal style of design, to the transpositions of allegory or to the conventions on which are founded the different styles of composition that are so many means of ideal imitation.

Be it also remembered that it is in a still more absolute manner maintained, that no metaphorical change should be wrought on subjects appertaining to the class of recent or modern facts, of personages either cotemporary or invested with well known pre-eminence, in short, of all things to which a knowledge of their reality is attached.

Those who, on the one hand, evince the greatest obstinacy in this view of the question, approve, on the other, or at least consent, that the same men, the same facts, the same things should change their forms in the hands of the writer, should appear under other aspects, be invested with other colouring, and be allied with supernatural and imaginary beings.

The fact is that in the art of writing every body acknowledges two very distinct degrees of style and composition which, hallowed by custom, pass under the names of plain or prosaic and figurative or poetical according as the writer by the method in which he treats his subject, designs it chiefly either to satisfy the reason or flatter the imagination.

When therefore the same freedom is refused to the arts of design, it is owing to a neglect of the twofold property they also possess of being exercised with regard to the subjects of their imitation, at one time, in a prosaic, at another in a poetical style, more or less directly in relation, the one with the senses, the other with the mind.