t mechanical because it is by manual
work and that the hand represents the conception of the imagination,
you writers put down with the pen the conceptions of your mind. And if
you say that it is mechanical because it is done for money, who is more
guilty of this error--if error it can be called--than you? If you
lecture in the schools, do you not go to whomsoever rewards you most?
Do you perform any work without some pay? Although I do not say this
to blame such opinions, because all labour expects its reward; and if a
poet were to say: "I will devise with my fancy a work which shall be
pregnant with meaning," the painter can do the same, as Apelles did
when he painted The Calumny.

[Sidenote: King Matthias & the Poet]

20.

On the birthday of King Matthias, a poet brought him a work made in
praise of the royal birthday for the benefit of the world, and a
painter presented him with a portrait of his lady-love. The king
immediately shut the book of the poet and turned to the picture, and
remained gazing on it with profound admiration. Then the poet, greatly
slighted, said: "O king, read, read, and thou wilt hear something of
far greater substance than a dumb picture!" Then the king, hearing
himself blamed for contemplating a mute object, said: "O poet, be
silent, thou knowest not what thou {81} sayest; this picture gratifies
a nobler sense than thy work, which is for the blind. Give me an
object which I can see and touch and not only hear, and blame not my
choice in having placed thy work beneath my elbow, while I hold the
work of the painter with both my hands before my eyes, because my very
hands have chosen to serve a worthier sense than that of hearing.

"And as for my self I consider that the same proportion exists between
the art of the painter and that of the poet as that which exists
between the two senses on which they respectively depend.

"Knowest thou not that our soul is composed of harmony, and harmony can
only be begotten in the moments when the proportions of objects are
simultaneously visible and audible? Seest thou not that in thine art
there is no harmony created in a moment, and that, on the contrary,
each part follows from the other in succession, and the second is not
born before its predecessor dies. For this reason I consider thy
creation to be considerably inferior to that of the painter, simply
because no harmonious concord ensues from it. It does not satisfy the
mind of the s