It was well said by some one that "in every object there is an
inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of
seeing." "Each one sees what he carries in his heart," said Goethe. "You
will find poetry nowhere," said Joubert, "unless you bring some with
you." "Those who would see or feel the truth of the anatomy in the
marble must bring their knowledge with them." "Don't you think that
statue indecent?" said Boswell to Johnson. "No, sir," was the reply,
"but your remark is." Once, we are told by Hazlitt, when a pedantic
coxcomb was crying up Raphael to the skies, Northcote could not help
saying, "If there was nothing in Raphael but what you can see in him, we
should not now have been talking of him." Douglas Jerrold, it is said,
disliked the theatre behind the scenes, and seldom went there save to
witness a rehearsal. He would generally attend on the first night of the
performance of his piece, but he seldom saw the same piece twice. His
idea, as realized, generally disgusted him. He saw it with all the
delicate touches rubbed away,--a shadow, or a vulgar caricature. His
quarrels with actors were incessant, because they would take their idea
and not his idea of a part. La Rochefoucauld, in his Maxims, gives us a
picture, not of human nature, but of its selfishness. "He works," said
Sterling, "like a painter who paints the profile, and chooses the side
of the face in which the eye is blind and deformed, instead of the
other, which is unblemished. Yet the picture may be a most accurate
copy." So do we all. Those of us that see at all see but a small part of
anything at a time. Only a line upon the column is distinctly visible;
all the rest is hidden, or obscured in the glaring light or eclipsing
shadow. A man, especially, must be looked at all around, within, by a
fair light, and with a good eye, to be seen truly or judged justly. We
put a narrow and fine sight upon him naturally, and can hardly avoid
estimating him meanly. We have too much the habit of Fuseli, who
preferred beginning his sketch of the human figure at the lowest point,
and working from the foot upward. "The wisest amongst us," said the
artist and critic, Richardson, "is a fool in some things, as the lowest
amongst men has some just notions, and therein is as wise as Socrates;
so that every man resembles a statue made to stand against a wall or in
a niche; on one side it is a Plato, an Apollo, a Demosthenes; on the
other, it is a rough, unformed piece of stone." "Both," said Dr. Johnson
of the remarks of Lord Orrery and Delany on Swift, "were right,--only
Delany had seen most of the good side, Lord Orrery most of the bad."
There is a curious life of Tiberius, with two title-pages, both taken
from historical authorities; two characters--one detestable, the other
admirable--of one and the same person; made up, both, of recorded facts.
"We ought not," said La Bruyere, "to judge of men as of a picture or
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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