but Quintus Calaber and not Homer is the poet.1 'Achilles is grieved because he has killed Penthesilea. As she lies in her blood, shed so bravely, her beauty compels the respect and the compassion of the hero; and respect and compassion become love. But in the mind of the slanderous Thersites this love of his assumes the complexion of a crime. He harangues against the lust which leads even the noblest of men into folly. Achilles is enraged, and without a word in reply, deals him a blow so terrible between the cheek and ear that teeth and blood and life all come forth together from his mouth. It is horrible. The passionate, murderous Achilles becomes more hateful to me than the knavish, snarling Thersites. The cry of exultation which the Greeks raise over this deed offends me. I range myself on the side of Diomedes, who is already drawing his sword to exact vengeance for his kinsman on the murderer: at this moment I am conscious that Thersites is also my kinsman, since he is a man.' 2 The painter, owing to the character of the medium which he employs, is more restricted in the use of ugliness. 'Painting,' says Lessing, 'as a method of imitation can express ugliness; painting as a fine art declines to do so.' For the aversion which arises from ugliness of form in real objects, arises also from the representation of these objects to the eye by form and colour. It is even doubtful, 1 2 XXIII. 3 XXIV. Lessing thinks, whether painting as a fine art is justified in using ugliness of form to produce the ridiculous and the horrible, although 'both of these by imitation attain a new degree of attractiveness and pleasurableness.' Here, in representing these mixed sensations, Painting is plainly at a disadvantage as compared with Poetry. 'In poetry,' says Lessing, 'as I have already remarked, ugliness of form loses its unpleasant effect almost entirely through the change of its co-existing parts into successive parts. It thereby ceases, as thus regarded, to be ugliness at all; and, therefore, can unite itself so much the more intimately with other appearances as to produce a new and special effect. In painting, on the other hand, ugliness retains all its effects, and works scarcely less powerfully than it does when it is present in natural objects. Harmless ugliness cannot, therefore, long remain merely ludicrous. Our sense of what is unpleasant in it gains the upper hand, and what was at first comic grows to be simply detestable. The same result is found in the case of harmful ugliness; our sense of the horrible is gradually lost and deformity remains behind alone and unchangeable.' 1 In this masterly way did Lessing warn the world of art against the danger of too hastily adopting Horace's generalization—ut pictura poesis. His work, like Aristotle's treatise, is, as he himself says, rather a series of rough notes for a book than a book itself. The deficiency of arrangement natural to a work so produced makes the Laocoon 1 XXIV. difficult reading; and it is probably due to this circumstance that the mass of information which it contains is, comparatively speaking, even now unfamiliar. But what the Laocoon has lost in balance and literary finish it has gained in originality and force. CHAPTER VII DEVELOPMENT OF PHILOSOPHIC (OR PLATONIC) CRITICISM BY COUSIN HALF a century later Cousin followed Lessing with a 'regular and complete theory of Beauty and Art' : and it is significant that this complete account is not upon the philosophy of Aristotle, but on that of Plato. based The contrast presented by a comparison of Cousin's work with that of Lessing is very instructive. Lessing begins with the study of a single work of art, Cousin with the principle of beauty. The method of Lessing is that of Aristotle, and like Aristotle he depends for the support of his conclusions upon examples taken from the existing works of artists and poets. Cousin is a disciple of Plato and Descartes: his method is idealistic-that is, philosophic in the one sense in which he admits the application of the term. The results which he obtains are less exact, less practical than those of Lessing, but they have a wider application and a more permanent validity. The series of lectures entitled Du Vrai, du Beau et du Bien, were originally delivered in 1818; they were published from pupils' notes in 1836, and by the author himself in 1853. In the treatise which thus assumed its present literary form, Cousin ranges the results of a study, at once wide and exact, of ancient and modern philosophy under the three principles of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. In thus making the study of the beautiful an integral part of philosophy, he claims that he is re-writing a chapter forgotten or omitted since the time of Plato and Aristotle. Locke and Condillac, he says, have not left a single page upon beauty.' Diderot was, in the words of Voltaire, 'a head in which everything fermented without coming to maturity'; for he was ignorant of the principle of the ideal. Both the Scotch School, as represented by Hutcheson and Reid, and Kant found a place for the beautiful in their systems; but while they considered it as manifested in the soul and in nature, they did not even approach the difficult question of the reproduction of the beautiful by the genius of man.' 6 It is strange that Cousin should make no mention of the work of Addison or Lessing in this connection. It is scarcely credible, having in view the large space occupied by the imagination in Cousin's theory of art, and in particular certain passages which seem to be an adaptation of what Addison wrote on the power of the imagination, that he should have been ignorant of the nature of his work. On the other hand, Cousin's penetration was such |