C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
The Limitations of “Word-Painting”
By Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781)
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Physical beauty results from the harmony of a number of parts which can be embraced in one glance. It is therefore essential that those parts should be close together; and since things whose parts are close together are the proper subjects of painting, that art alone can represent physical beauty.
The poet, who can only set down one after another the elements of the beautiful object, should therefore abstain wholly from the description of physical beauty by itself. He ought to feel that these elements arranged in sequence cannot possibly produce the same effect as if in juxtaposition; that the comprehensive glance we try to throw back over them at the end of the enumeration produces no harmonious picture; and that it transcends the power of human imagination to realize the effect of a given pair of eyes, a given nose, and a given mouth together, unless we can call to mind a like combination in nature or art.
Here again Homer is the model of models. He says—Nireus was handsome; Achilles was very handsome; Helen was of godlike beauty. But he is nowhere enticed into giving a minuter detail of their beauties. Yet the whole poem is based on Helen’s loveliness. How a modern poet would have reveled in specifications of it!
Even Constantine Manasses tried to adorn his bare Chronicle with a portrait of Helen. I feel grateful to him for the attempt; for really I should not know where else to turn for so striking an example of the folly of venturing on what Homer’s wise judgment refrained from undertaking. When I read in his book—
Virgil, by imitating Homer’s self-restraint, has achieved a fair success. His Dido is only the very beautiful (pulcherrima) Dido. All the other details he gives refer to her rich ornaments and superb apparel…. If on this account any one turned against him what the old artist said to one of his pupils who had painted an elaborately dressed Helen,—“You have painted her rich because you could not paint her lovely,”—Virgil would answer: “I am not to blame that I could not paint her lovely. The fault is in the limitations of my art, and it is to my credit that I have kept within them.”