For just as a wise poet showed us the beauty which he felt he could not paint according to its constituent parts, but merely in its effect, so the no less wise painter showed us that beauty by nothing but those parts, deeming it unbecoming for his art to resort to any other means for aid. His picture consisted of a single figure, undraped, of Helen, probably the one painted for the people of Crotona.
In beauty a single unbecoming part may disturb the harmonious effect of many, without the object necessarily becoming ugly. For ugliness, too, requires several unbecoming parts, all of which we must be able to comprehend at the same view before we experience sensations the opposite of those which beauty produces.
According to this, therefore, ugliness in its essence could be no subject of poetry; yet Homer has painted extreme ugliness in Thersites, and this ugliness is described according to its parts near each other. Why in the case of ugliness did he allow himself the license from which he had abstained in that of beauty? A successive enumeration of the elements of beauty will annihilate its effects. Will not a similar cause produce a similar effect in the case of ugliness?
Undoubtedly it will; but it is in this very fact that the justification of Homer lies. The poet can only take advantage of ugliness so far as it is reduced in his description into the less repugnant appearance of bodily imperfection, and ceases, as it were, in point of effect, to be ugliness. Thus, what he cannot make use of by itself he can use as the ingredient for the purpose of producing and strengthening certain mixed sensations.
These mixed feelings are the ridiculous and the horrible. Homer makes Thersites ugly in order to make him ridiculous. He is not made so, however, merely by his ugliness, for ugliness is an imperfection, and the contrast of perfection with imperfections is required to produce the ridiculous. To this I may add that the contrast must not be too sharp and glaring, and that the contrasts must blend into each other.
The wise and virtuous Æsop does not become ridiculous because of ugliness attributed to him. For his misshapen body and beautiful mind are as oil and vinegar; however much you shake them together, they always remain distinct to the taste. They will not amalgamate to produce a third quality. The body produces annoyance; the soul, pleasure; each has its own effect.
It is only when the deformed body is also fragile and, sickly, when it impedes the soul, that the annoyance and pleasure melt into each other.
For, let us suppose that the instigations of the malicious and snarling Thersites had resulted in mutiny, that the people had forsaken their leaders and departed in the ships, and that these leaders had been massacred by a revengeful foe. How would the ugliness of Thersites appear then? If ugliness, when harmless, may be ridiculous, when hurtful it is always horrible. In Shakespeare's "King Lear," Edmund, the bastard Count of Gloucester, is no less a villain than Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in "King Richard III." How is it, then, that the first excites our loathing so much less than the second? It is because when I hear the former, I listen to a devil, but see him as an angel of light; but in listening to Richard I hear a devil and see a devil.