But I will not allow that a
professor of the fine arts has occasion to embody the idea of his scene
in language, in order to impress upon the reader its reality and its
effect. On the contrary, I will be judged by most of your readers,
Peter, should these tales ever become public, whether you have not
given us a page of talk for every single idea which two words might have
communicated, while the posture, and manner, and incident, accurately
drawn, and brougth out by appropriate colouring, would have preserved
all that was worthy of preservation, and saved these everlasting 'said
he's' and 'said she's,' with which it has been your pleasure to encumber
your pages."
I replied, "That he confounded the operations of the pencil and the pen;
that the serene and silent art, as painting has been called by one of
our first living poets, necessarily appealed to the eye, because it had
not the organs for addressing the ear; whereas poetry, or that species
of composition which approached to it, lay under the necessity of doing
absolutely the reverse, and addressed itself to the ear, for the purpose
of exciting that interest which it could not attain through the medium
of the eye.
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