It is ever the same with the vulgar. As soon as any art seems to have arrived at something approaching to perfection, the incessant craving for novelty forces artists to seek new ways of gratifying their patrons;--sometimes by exaggerating form, sometimes by exaggerating colour, or light and shadow. The painter by degrees loses sight of nature, and produces monsters. The sculptor attempts to make marble flow and flutter in the wind; the musician drowns expression in noise; and the poet either sickens his reader with blood and murder, or sends him to sleep over daisies and daffodils. [117] Neither the French nor the English critics appear to me to have comprehended the real motive of Timanthes, as contained in the words “_decere_, _pro dignitate_, and _digne_,” in the passages of Tully, Quintilian, and Pliny; they ascribe to impotence what was the forbearance of judgment; Timanthes felt like a father; he did not hide the face of Agamemnon because it was beyond the power of his art, not because it was beyond the _possibility_, but because it was beyond the _dignity_ of expression; because the inspiring feature of paternal affection at that moment, and the action which of necessity must have accompanied it, would either have destroyed the grandeur of the character and the solemnity of the scene, or subjected the painter, with the majority of his judges, to the imputation of insensibility. He must either have represented him in tears, or convulsed at the flash of the raised dagger, forgetting the chief in the father, or shown him absorbed by despair, and in that state of stupefaction which levels all features and deadens expression. He might indeed have chosen a fourth mode; he might have exhibited him fainting and palsied in the arms of his attendants, and by this confusion of male and female character, merited the applause of every theatre at Paris. But Timanthes had too true a sense of nature to expose a father’s feelings, or to tear a passion to rags; nor had the Greeks yet learnt of Rome to steel the face. If he made Agamemnon bear his calamity as a man, he made him also feel it as a man. It became the leader of Greece to sanction the ceremony with his presence, it did not become the father to see his daughter beneath the dagger’s point: the same nature that threw a real mantle over the face of Timoleon, when he assisted at the punishment of his brother, taught Timanthes to throw an imaginary one over the face of Agamemnon; neither height nor depth, propriety of expression was his aim.