Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD DISCOURSE " Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular."—Aristotle, Poetics ix. 3 (Butcher's Translation). In the Third Discourse Reynolds endeavours to lay the foundations of his principles of aesthetics, principles which he constantly appeals to in the remainder of the Discourses and which merit close inquiry. His main thesis is that in works which aim at an exalted imaginative effect, particular and inclividuarforms are out of place; that the forms in such wofTT must be general and representative; that, for instance, in a great dramatic composition the introduction of literal portraiture would lower the imaginative key, and deprive the work of its exalting and ennobling effect. In this main contention Reynolds' verdict 'is, to put it on purely empirical grounds, borne out by the practice of the greatest masters: Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo stand as witnesses to this truth. It is not, however, so easy for us to follow Reynolds in his proofs as in his conclusions, nor is it possible to acquit him altogether of confusion of thought and inconsistency in the use of words. Above all, that difficult and dangerous word "Nature" is used by him with a wilfulness which reminds one of the control over the meanings of words which Humpty Dumpty vaunted to Alice. He uses it (l)'in the ordinary , sense in which artists use the word—as the sum of visible phenomena not made by artifice. " There are excellences in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imita- . tion of Nature." f(2f It is used in an Aristotelian sense as an immanent force working in the refractory medium of matter towards the highest perfection of form...