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Who can forget his fine contrast of the howling Philoktetes in Sophokles with the gently sighing Laokoon, both in mortal agony, but the latter unable to express his pain because, being in marble, he dared not distort his countenance? To speak literally of "beautiful music" would be a contradiction in terms.
Lessing was so struck with the Inquiry that he set about a translation of it, and the correspondence between him and Moses Mendelssohn on the questions which Burke had raised contains the germs of the doctrine as to poetry and painting which Laoköon afterwards made so famous.
The chief value of Lessing's epoch-making discussion of "time-arts" and "space-arts" in his Laokoon consisted in the emphasis laid upon the specific material of the different arts, and hence upon the varying opportunities which one medium or another affords to the artist.
On the other hand, there is ever-increasing recognition of the soundness of the distinction made by Lessing in his Laokoon: or the Limits of Painting and Poetry; namely, that the fine arts differ, as media of expression, according to the nature of the material which they employ. That is to say, the "time-arts" like poetry and music deal primarily with actions that succeed one another in time.
It is a piece of hard thinking, and it has the distinction of having interested and stimulated Lessing, the author of Laoköon , by far the most definitely valuable of all the contributions to aesthetic thought in an age which was not poor in them.
She made copies of Guido, Sassoferrato and Veronese, the Laokoon group, and the Hercules of Canova, and executed a much-admired bas-relief called "Love and Innocence." Among her original paintings are an "Atala and Chactas," "Petrarch's First Meeting with Laura," a "Descent from the Cross" for the church at Tribano, a "St. Sebastian," "Melancholy," a "St. Ciro," and many Madonnas.
In the same way, Spingarn's Creative Criticism is a good preparation for Croce's monumental Aesthetics. The student should certainly make some acquaintance with Lessing's Laokoon, and he will find Babbitt's New Laokoon a brilliant and trenchant survey of the old questions.
"The pious and politically free inhabitant of New England," relates Colonel Hamilton, "is a kind of Laokoon, who does not make even the slightest effort to free himself from the serpents which are throttling him. Mammon is his god, he prays to him, not merely with his lips, but with all the force of his body and mind.
The Rector would have been the last man to deny that the author of Laoköon and the Wolfenbüttel Fragments abounded in the discerning spirit and the power of appreciation. Yet Lessing was one of the most incessantly productive minds of his age.
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