I cannot embark in similitudes, said my guest, and from your own words, moreover, it is evident that beauty is something incomprehensible, or the effect of something incomprehensible. What cannot be comprehended is naught; what we cannot make clear by words is nonsense. _I._--Can you then clearly express in words the effect that a colored body produces on your eyes? _He._--That is again a metaphor that I will not be drawn into. It is enough that character can be indicated. You find no beauty without it, else it would be empty and insignificant. All the beauty of the Ancients is only Character, and only out of this quality is beauty developed. Our Philosopher[4] had arrived meanwhile and was conversing with my nieces, when, hearing us speak earnestly, he stepped forward; and the stranger, stimulated by the accession of a new hearer, proceeded: That is just the misfortune when good heads, when people of merit, get hold of such false principles, which have only an appearance of truth, and spread them wider and wider. None appropriate them so willingly as those who know and understand nothing of the subject. Thus has Lessing fastened upon us the principle that the ancients cultivated only the beautiful; thus has Winckelmann put us to sleep with his “noble simplicity and serene greatness”; whereas the art of the ancients appears in all imaginable forms. But these gentlemen tarry by Jupiter and Juno, Genii and Graces, and hide the ignoble forms and skulls of Barbarians, the rough hair, foul beard, gaunt bones, and wrinkled skin of deformed age, the protruding veins and hanging breasts. In the name of God, I exclaimed, are there then independent, self-existing works of the best age of Ancient Art that exhibit such frightful objects? Or are they not rather subordinate works, occasional pieces, creations of an art that must demean itself according to outward circumstances, an art on the decline? _He._--I give you the specification, you can yourself search and judge. But you will not deny that the Laocoon, that Niobe, that Dirce with her stepsons, are self-subsistent works of art. Stand before the Laocoon and contemplate nature in full revolt and desperation. The last choking pang, the desperate struggle, the maddening convulsion, the working of the corroding poison, the vehement fermenting, the stagnating circulation, suffocating pressure, and paralytic death. The Philosopher seemed to look at me with astonishment, and I answered: We shudder, we are horrified at the bare description. In sooth, if it be so with the group of Laocoon, what are we to say of the pleasure we find in this as in every other true work of art? But I will not meddle in the question. You must settle it with the authors of the _Propylæa_, who are of just the opposite mind. It must be admitted, said my guest, that all Antiquity speaks for me; for where do horror and death rage more hideously than in the representation of the Niobe?