h or too little.

But in many points we moderns have imagined that we have advanced far
beyond them, because we have changed their narrow lanes into highways,
even tho the shorter and safer highways contract into footpaths as
they lead through deserts.

The dazzling antithesis of the Greek Voltaire, "Painting is dumb
poetry, and poetry is speaking painting," can never have been found in
any didactic work; it was an idea, amongst others, of Simonides, and
the truth it contains is so evident that we feel compelled to overlook
the indistinctness and error which accompany it.

And yet the ancients did not overlook them. They confined the
expression of Simonides to the effect of either art, but at the same
time forgot not to inculcate that, notwithstanding the complete
similarity of this effect, the two were different, both in the objects
which they imitated, and in their mode of imitation.

But, just as tho no such difference existed, many recent critics have
drawn from this harmony of poetry and painting the most ill-digested
conclusions. At one time they compress poetry into the narrower limits
of painting; at another they allow painting to occupy the whole wide
sphere of poetry. Everything, say they, that the one is entitled to
should be conceded to the other; everything that pleases or displeases
in the one is necessarily pleasing or displeasing in the other. Full
of this idea, they give utterance in the most confident tone to the
most shallow decisions; when, criticizing the works of a poet and
painter upon the same subject, they set down as faults any divergences
they may observe, laying the blame upon the one or the other
accordingly as they may have more taste for poetry or for painting.

Indeed, this false criticism has misled in some degree the professors
of art. It has produced the love of description in poetry, and of
allegory in painting: while the critics strove to reduce poetry to a
speaking painting, without properly knowing what it could and ought to
paint; and painting to a dumb poem, without having considered in what
degree it could express general ideas without alienating itself from
its destiny, and degenerating into an arbitrary method of writing.

II

OF SUFFERING HELD IN RESTRAINT[15]

Herr Winckelmann has pronounced a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,
displayed in the posture no less than in the expression, to be the
characteristic features common to all the Greek masterpieces of