The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

In this respect Homer is a pattern of patterns. He says Nireus was beautiful, Achilles still more so, Helen was endowed with divine beauty. But nowhere does he enter on a detailed sketch of these beauties, and yet the whole Iliad is based on the loveliness of Helen.

In this point, in which he can imitate Homer by merely doing nothing, Virgil is also tolerably happy. His heroine Dido, too, is never anything more than pulcherrima Dido (loveliest Dido). When he wishes to be more circumstantial, he is so in the description of her rich dress and apparel.

Lucian, also, was too acute to convey any idea of the body of Panthea otherwise than by reference to the most lovely female statues of the old artists.

Yet what is this but the acknowledgment that language by itself is here without power; that poetry falters and eloquence grows speechless unless art in some measure serve them as an interpreter?

But, it will be said, does not poetry lose too much if we deprive her of all objects of typical beauty? Who would deprive her of them? Because we would debar her from wandering among the footsteps of her sister art, without ever reaching the same goal as she, do we exclude her from every other, where art in her turn must gaze after her steps with fruitless longings?

Even Homer, who so pointedly abstains from all detailed descriptions of typical beauties, from whom we but just learn that Helen had white arms and lovely hair, even he, with all this, knew how to convey to us an idea of her beauty which far exceeds anything that art is able to accomplish.

III.—Beauty and Charm

Again, another means which poetry possesses of rivalling art in the description of typical beauty is the change of beauty into charm. Charm is beauty in motion, and is for this very reason less suitable to the painter than to the poet. The painter can only leave motion to conjecture, while in fact his figures are motionless. Consequently, with him charm becomes grimace.

But in poetry it remains what it is, a transitory beauty which we would gladly see repeated. It comes and goes, and since we can generally recall to our minds a movement more easily and vividly than forms or colours, charm necessarily in the same circumstances produces a stronger effect than beauty.

Zeuxis painted a Helen, and had the courage to write below the picture those renowned lines of Homer in which the enraptured elders confess their sensations. Never had painting and poetry been engaged in such contest. The contest remained undecided, and both deserved the crown.

For just as a wise poet showed us the beauty which he felt he could not paint according to its constituent parts, but merely in its effect, so the no less wise painter showed us that beauty by nothing but those parts, deeming it unbecoming for his art to resort to any other means for aid. His picture consisted of a single figure, undraped, of Helen, probably the one painted for the people of Crotona.