CHAPTER XXII
VERBAL AND PLASTIC EXPRESSION COMPARED
II
The superiority of painting to literature in point of expressiveness is not, however, absolute and complete. There are regions where it does not exist, and these we must now consider.
The whole domain of the comic is much more open to literature than to plastic art. Unless it stoops to caricature, art can only express the comic in a slight degree. In art the comic tends at once to become serious again; we do not laugh on looking at Breughel, although we admire in him the same force of droll fancy which makes us laugh in reading Rabelais. Only where the comic forms but a slight accessory can pictorial expression rival the written word. We can observe it in what is called genre painting, which may be considered the most attenuated form of the comic.
The disproportionate refinement of details which we noticed above as being characteristic of the paintings of the epoch tends insensibly to change into the pleasure of relating petty curious facts. Whereas in the room of Arnolfini the minutiæ do not injure the solemn intimacy of the picture in the least, they have become mere curiosities in the master of Flémalle. His Joseph on the "Altar of Merode" is occupied with making mouse-traps. With him all the details are "genre," with an almost imperceptible flavour of the comic about them. Between his manner of painting an opened window-shutter, a sideboard, a chimney, and that of Van Eyck, there is all the difference between purely pictorial vision and "genre" painting.
Now here comes to light a clear advantage of speech over pictorial representation. As soon as something more than mere vision has to be expressed, literature, thanks to its
279
