With the painter, execution appears to be more difficult than invention: with the poet on the other hand the case seems to be reversed, and his execution seems to be an easier achievement than the invention.
The word "invention" is to be taken here in the sense of plot or fable, and not as the details of design invented by the painter for the purpose of representing the action described by the poet. The premisses of Lessing's argument therefore will not stand, for the painter cannot originate a fable by means of a picture. And sequential to this of course, the painter can be of no service to the poet. Homer could not draw an original scheme from a painting. Nor may the poet take a detail from the painter, for this has already been borrowed. A poet may vary a detail in a legend because he can make the successive parts of his relation fit in with the variation, but the painter can only deal with a single moment of action, and if this does not correspond with an accepted legend, then his design appears to be untrue.
It may be said in regard to painting, that the relative difficulty of the invention (the work of gathering and arranging the signs) and the execution, varies with the character of the art. In the higher forms, as sacred and historical work, the invention is the more difficult; in ordinary scenes of life and labour the trouble involved in invention would about equal that in execution; while in the lower forms, as landscape and still-life, the execution is obviously the more difficult. In the case of the poet, the idea or fable is the hardest part of his work, but the relative difficulty of the arrangement of the parts, and the execution, would naturally depend upon the general character of the composition, and the form of the poem.
[a] Laocoon, Phillimore translation.
[NOTE 34. PAGE 82]
The works here referred to are those designed for the purpose of achieving a political or social aim, or conveying instruction or moral lessons. There are many examples of good art where advocacy of a social or administrative reform is presented by way of incident or accessory, though the art itself is never, and cannot be, assisted thereby. "Didactic Art," if such a term may be appropriately used, is practically a thing of the past, but judging from certain conventions the opinion seems to be rather widely held that art should point a moral when possible, and an opinion of Aristotle is not infrequently called in to support this view. But when Aristotle connected morals with art, he evidently did not mean to suggest that art should have a moral purpose, but that it should have a moral tendency in not being morally harmful, for art which is not morally harmful must necessarily be morally beneficial. The general connection of the good with the beautiful in ancient Greece seems to have merely implied that what is good is beautiful, and what is beautiful is good, or should be good, and not that goodness is a manifestation of beauty, or beauty of goodness. It was admitted that the two things may not coincide.
[NOTE 35. PAGE 85]
That landscape painting may be of considerable value in assisting scientific exploration is instanced by an anecdote related to the writer by a geological friend. Professor Jack, formerly Government Geologist of Queensland, while travelling in that colony, having put up one night at the house of a small squatter, noticed on the walls of the interior, a number of colour drawings which had been painted by a son of the settler from views in the neighbouring hills. One of these drawings showed a reddish-brown tint running down the slope of a grey and nearly barren hill. This caught the eye of the professor who asked the artist if the colours roughly represented the natural conditions, and receiving an affirmative reply, recommended the squatter to prospect the ground for minerals. This was done with the result that profitable copper deposits were found. It seems that in Australia many of the best mineral veins are capped with iron, and run through schistose rocks traversed by dioritic dykes. Professor Jack was well aware that the hills in the district were formed of these rocks and dykes, and as the reddish-brown streak indicated iron oxide, it occurred to him that the iron might be the cap of a lode holding valuable minerals.[a]
[a] This note is from The Position of Landscape in Art, by the present author.