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that Science is more indispensable than the Arts and that the fundamental error lies in affirming the final object of the Fine Arts to be pleasure. "Not pleasure but the sense of power and the illimitable, incarnated as it were in pleasure, is the true object of the Fine Arts; and their final purpose therefore as truly as that of Science and much more directly, the exaltation of our human nature." De Quincey's frequent references to the head of Memnon in the British Museum "that sublime head which wears upon its lips a smile co-extensive with all time and all space" show the quality that peculiarly delighted him in Fine Art. "The shows of Nature which we feel and know to be moving, unstable, and transitory, are by these arts arrested in a single moment of their passage, and frozen as it were into a motionless immortality.""

To Lessing's remark that the wound of Philoctetes was more fitted for impressive representation than the internal fire which consumes Meleager, De Quincey adds that the real cause of its impressiveness (and here he shows the tendency of his mind to the grave, the vague and religious) is that the supernatural in Meleager's case is nothing more than magic, while in Philoctetes it touches. the religious sense, the truths of reason and conscience.

De Quincey has a long note on the following remark by Lessing: "Ueberhaupt war das Uebliche bei den Alten eine sehr geringschätzige Sache. Sie fühlten dass die höchste Bestimmung ihrer Kunst sie auf die völlige

and goes on to speak of the influence of the Fine Arts upon national character. Lessing's language is here not at its clearest; but De Quincey's fault-finding is unnecessary. The real meaning is clear enough.

1 Works I, 41, note.

2 Works XI, 178, note.

Entbehrung derselben führte. Schönheit ist diese höchste Bestimmung; Noth erfand die Kleider, und was hat die Kunst mit der Noth zu thun." As well might we say, comments De Quincey, that Art has nothing to do with architecture; apart from the art in the handling of drapery itself, the real beauty of the human figure cannot be brought out except by drapery; this is due to its adaptability to the figure; but more than that, the lines of the body are repeated in more flowing material, - hence the subtlest of all pleasures, "similitude in dissimilitude". However, this is not so true of sculpture as of painting; for in sculpture owing to the sameness of material the difference is not clearly enough perceived. But a deeper reason is that the characteristic aim of sculpture is ideality and duration; "it is more abstract and imaginative than painting" and therefore would be disturbed by anything "so frail and accidental as drapery". Moreover it is not true, says De Quincey, that the sense of necessity and absolute limitation is banished from the idea of a fine art. The freedom of a fine art is found not in the absence of restraint, but in the conflict with it.

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De Quincey observes in another connection that with Lessing the poetic is too frequently "nothing more than that which is clothed in a form of sensuous apprehen- • sibility". That is certainly not the impression one would get from Lessing's own poetry, his criticism or his poetical tastes.

De Quincey's final point against Lessing is in reference to didactic poetry. "Didactic poetry", says Les

1 Works XI, 195, note.

2 Works XI, 206, note.

3 Ib. XI, 215 ff.

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sing, "is in truth no poetry"; Lessing's illustration is the description of the cow in Virgil's Georgics, the purpose of which, according to him, was purely prosaic. There is perhaps no better example anywhere of De Quincey's ability to make distinctions. Virgil, he says, may have described the cow,

1, As a difficult subject, by way of a bravura.

2, As a familiar subject.

3, As an ideal, a Pandora in her species.

4, As a beautiful object.

Each of these points is developed with intricacy and logic. Finally, "if Lessing is right in his construction of Virgil's purpose, that would prove only that, in this instance, Virgil was wrong". Lessing means obviously poetry applied to practical teaching. But the word "didactic" had caught De Quincey's attention. "Didactic in philosophic rigour it cannot be without ceasing to be poetry. But there is a didactic poetry in which a subject naturally didactic is treated in a manner, and for a purpose, not didactic... . . to win the beauty of art from a subject in itself unpromising or repulsive; and, therefore, the final object of a didactic poet is accomplished not by the didactic aspects of his poem, but directly in spite of them". Homer's "Catalogue of the Ships" is a good example. Obviously Lessing meant didactic poetry in "the strict philosophic sense" and we see therefore no necessity for the six-page discussion.

De Quincey's criticism agrees with the main purpose of the Laocoon. At the same time it will be seen that he had no grasp of Lessing's complete work, his deeper influence on German culture and scholarship, and the national attitude towards art and the church.

VI. DE QUINCEY AND HERDER.

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De Quincey's only contribution to the knowledge o Herder in England is one short article,' for the most part a translation of certain sections from Erinnerungen aus dem Leben Joh. Gottfrieds von Herder. Gesammelt und beschrieben von Maria Carolina von Herder. Herausgegeben durch Johann Georg Müller. There is the merest possible sketch of Herder's temperament and his family life, with a single attempt at a characterization. "Upon the whole, the best notion I can give of Herder to the English reader, is to say that he is the German Coleridge; having the same all-grasping erudition, the same spirit of universal research, the same disfiguring superficiality and inaccuracy, the same indeterminateness of object, the same obscure and fanciful mysticism, the

1 London Magazine, April 1823. Reprinted by De Quincey, Works IV, 380 ff.

2 The parts which De Quincey translates describe (a) The meeting of Herder and the Elector at Dresden, Herder's Werke, Band XXII, 228 f.; (b) Herder's final illness; 234–38; (c) Remarks on Herder and Jean Paul 244-45; Jean Paul's estimate of Herder, 246-50, quoted from the last lecture in Vorschule der Aesthetik. There are also translations of shorter passages in the notes.

3 Herder's sämmtliche Werke, Stuttgart und Tübingen 1830, Band XX-XXII.

same plethoric fullness of thought, the same fine sense of the beautiful, and (I think) the same incapacity for dealing with simple and austere grandeur. I must ad1, however, that in fineness and compass of understanding, our English philosopher appears to me to have greatly the advantage."

De Quincey speaks (X, 159) of the superiority of Herder's style, to that of most German writers.

For other references to Herder, Cf. Appendix II.

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