著 CHAPTER IV. THE CORNER STONE. HOUGH foundation stones are laid CHAPTER with silver trowels and gilded plum IV. this chapter truism. mets, amid music and banner, feast- Object of ing and holiday, in the present chapter, which to prove a has to do with the basis of the Gay Science, there will be found nothing of a gala. It embodies the dull hard labour of laying down truismsheavy blocks which are not to be handled in sport, but which it is essential that we should in the outset fix in their places. If I seem to labour at trifles, I must ask for some indulgence; because, although, when fairly stated, the main doctrine of this chapter will forthwith pass for a truism, in the meantime it is not acknowledged even as a truth. What is here maintained to be the only safe foundation of the science of criticism, however obvious it may appear to be, has never yet been fully accepted as such, and has never yet been built upon. There are some Truisms require CHAPTER truisms which it may be necessary to hammer IV. out. Euclid felt the necessity of demonstrating sometimes point by point, that two sides of a triangle are demonstra- greater than the third, whereupon Zeno laughed tion. and said that every donkey knows it without proof. The donkey will not go round two sides of a field to get to his fodder if, peradventure, he can go in a straight line. The object of this chapter is to uphold the wisdom of the ass. There is a straight line for criticism to take, and criticism never has taken it, but always goes round about. A science of criticism there is something the arts. A science of criticism, embracing poetry and implies that the fine arts, is possible only on the supposition that these arts all stand on common ground; common to and that, however varied may be the methods employed in them, their inner meaning and purpose is the same. No critical canon has a wider and more undoubting acceptance than that which assumes the sisterhood of the arts. We may ignore it in practice, or we may be at a loss to explain the precise meaning of it; but the close relationship of the muses is one of the oldest traditions of literature, and one of the most On the ad- familiar lessons of our school-days. The family tionship of likeness of the arts is so marked, that language cannot choose but describe one in terms of another. Terence, in one of his prologues (Phormio), refers to the poets as musicians. mitted rela the arts. 66 Music," says Dryden," is inarticulate poetry." Thomas IV. like that been treated as identical. Fuller has at least twice in his works, once (on CHAPTER the Holy and Profane State) when speaking of artists generally, and again (in his Worthies), when writing of Dr. Christopher Tye, defined poetry as music in words, and music as poetry in sounds. Other writers dwell on the similarity of the poet and the limner. Simonides, among the Greeks, is the author of the famous saying which comes down to us through Plutarch, that poetry is a speaking picture, and painting a mute poetry. Horace, among the Latins, puts the same idea into three words-ut pictura poesis. Whether The arts so as expressed by the Greek or by the Latin poet, they have the sense of the connection between poetry and painting came to be so strong and over-mastering in modern criticism, that at length men like Darwin in England, and Marmontel in France, learned to see in the similarity of the two arts, the elements of a perfect definition of either; and Gotthold Lessing, the first great critic of Germany, had to write a work in which, taking the representations of Laocoon in poetry and in sculpture for an example, he proved elaborately that after all there is a difference between the arts, and that each has its proper limits. The underlying unity of the arts is one of the common-places of criticism, which D'Alembert concentrated in one drop of ink, when, in the preface to the French Encyclopædia, he comprised under the name of poesy all the fine arts, adding, at the same time, that they might also |