Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/354

312 poetical allegory, the conception is always the given, which it tries to make perceptible by means of a picture; it may sometimes be expressed or assisted by a painted picture. Such a picture will not be regarded as a work of art, but only as a significant symbol, and it makes no claim to pictorial, but only to poetical worth. Such is that beautiful allegorical vignette of Lavater's, which must be so heartening to every defender of truth: a hand holding a light is stung by a wasp, while gnats are burning themselves in the flame above; underneath is the motto:

To this class also belongs the gravestone with the burnt-out, smoking candle, and the inscription—

Finally, of this kind is an old German genealogical tree, in which the last representative of a very ancient family thus expresses his determination to live his life to the end in abstinence and perfect chastity, and therefore to let his race die out; he represents himself at the root of the high-branching tree cutting it over himself with shears. In general all those symbols referred to above, commonly called emblems, which might also be defined as short painted fables with obvious morals, belong to this class. Allegories of this kind are always to be regarded as belonging to poetry, not to painting, and as justified thereby; moreover, the pictorial execution is here always a matter of secondary importance, and no more is demanded of it than that it shall represent the thing so that we can recognise it But in poetry, as in plastic art, the allegory passes into the symbol if there is merely