[30] See, 300 Bfe. page 79.
[31] This is a difficult point to decide. The citizen class was limited by such sumptuary laws as is shown by the records, but most writers agree that the violations were open and common.
[32] The figure with the helmet is unquestionably that of Marius, the tribune. He enters from the street and is drest in street costume. Titus, who has been in the house, wears only a fillet around his hed. In the play, Marius commands the boy to stand near him for refuge, but in the picture the moment just previous is chosen, when the boy is still near his grandfather. Forster wrongly holds that the helmeted figure is Titus.
[33] Cf. A. W. v. Schlegel in Athenæum, 2, 212, "Man kennt Reynolds Ugolino aus dem Kupferstiche: es ist ein alter Mann, der hungert, aber es ist nicht Ugolino." For his criticism of Boydell, 2, 198.
[34] Marie Joachimi-Dege has given a very careful account of the erly Romantic and Storm and Stress attitude toward Shakspere. Her book needs supplementation thru a study of the Romantic Shakspere criticism, written from the English point of view.
[35] In his Academy discourses. Bohn ed., vol. I, page 460 ff. Reynolds points out that those who praise the "invention" of Timanthes in the Agamemnon picture hav not been painters but literary men. They use it as an illustration of their own art. He says, "I fear that we have but very scanty means of exciting those powers over the imagination which make so very considerable and refined a part of poetry. (Cf. Boydell's preface.) It is a doubt with me if we should even make the attempt. The chief, if not the only occasion which the painter has for this artifice, is when the subject is improper to be more fully represented, either for the sake of decency, or to avoid what would be disagreeable to be seen; and this is not to raise or increase the passions, which is the reason given for this practice, but on the contrary to diminish their effect.... We cannot ... recommend an undeterminate manner or vague ideas of any kind, in a complete or finished picture. This notion, therefore, of leaving anything to the imagination opposes a very fixed and indispensible rule in our art,—that everything shall be carefully and distinctly expresst, as if the painter knew, with correctness and precision, the exact form and character of whatever is introduced into the picture. This ... must not be sacrificed ... for uncertain and doubtful beauty which, not naturally belonging to our art, will probably be sought for without success." After praising the artifis of Timanthes, Reynolds goes on to say, "Suppose this method of leaving the expression of grief to the imagination, to be ... the invention of the painter and that it deserves all the praise that has been given to it, it is still a trick that will serve only once; whoever does it a second time, will not only want novelty, but will be justly suspected of using artifice to evade difficulties. If difficulties overcome make a great part of the merit of Art, difficulties evaded can deserve but little commendation." Among the names of those who discuss the "trick" Lessing's is, of course, wanting. Gilray's satirical plate on Boydell should be compared for this and other points. Copy in N. Y. Public Library.
[36] In this connection, the letters mention Engel's "Mimik"(1785).
[37] Some of the latter pictures by Smirke are very fine; e. g., the face of Jessica which justifies the statement of the Dict. Nat. Biog. that Smirke had "good drawing, refinement, quiet humor." Bryan has a cooler comment: "Smirke was well spoken of in the comedy vein." Tieck likes him better in tragedy (page 34). Fiorillo's comment is "Seit Hogarths Zeiten hat kein Künstler so viel Charakter oder so viel Ausdruck in seine Figuren gebracht, noch eine Scene mit so viel echter Laune bearbeitet."
[38] To me the Tieck-Schlegel translation of this scene misses all the best points of the original. To be sure, Tieck had nothing to do with its translation. (Friesen, I, 136; Sybel, III, 463 ff). It was not that Tieck was not interested in puns, altho the Dr. Cajus scene seems uninteresting to him on that account. Tieck himself made a good many puns. Cf. "Viehsiognomie," the first lines of his sonnet on the sonnet and the "gemein" from the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek in "Das jüngste Gericht." His sensing of English puns seems not to hav been so keen. So in a discussion of Mss. readings toward the end of the essay on the erly English Theater (Kr. Sch. I, 320) after calling one faulty reading "Unsinn" he continues, "In derselben Rede:
If you can construe but your doctor's bill
Parse your wife's waiting woman, etc.