Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVII

We returned down the Rhine through Holland. I was willing to see the contrast between flat and lofty, and between Venice and Amsterdam. We left Vevey on the 20th of September, and arrived in England on the 16th of October. It was at first exceedingly hot; we encountered several days of severe cold on the road, and it afterwards became mild and pleasant again. We hired a char-aux-bancs from Vevey to Basle, and it took us four days to reach this latter place; the expense of the conveyance was twenty-four francs a day, besides the driver. The first part of our journey, as we ascended from the Lake on the way to Moudon, was like an aërial voyage, from the elevation and the clearness of the atmosphere; yet still through the most lovely country imaginable, and with glimpses of the grand objects behind us (seen over delicious pastures, and through glittering foliage) that were truly magical. The combinations of language, however, answer but ill to the varieties of nature, and by repeating these descriptions so often, I am afraid of becoming tiresome. My excuse must be, that I have little to relate but what I saw. After mounting to a considerable height, we descended to Moudon, a small town situated in a most romantic valley. The accommodations at the inn here were by no means good, though it is a place of some pretensions. In proportion to the size of the house and the massiveness of the furniture, the provisions of the kitchen appeared to be slender, and the attendance slack. The freshness of the air the next morning, and the striking beauty and rapid changes of the scenery, soon made us forget any disappointment we had experienced in this respect. As we ascended a steep hill on this side of Moudon, and looked back, first at the green dewy valley under our feet, with the dusky town and the blue smoke rising from it, then at the road we had traversed the preceding evening, winding among thick groves of trees, and last at the Savoy Alps on the other side of the Lake of Geneva (with which we had been familiar for four months, and which seemed to have no mind to quit us) I perceived a bright speck close to the top of one of these—I was delighted, and said it was Mont Blanc. Our driver was of a different opinion, was positive it was only a cloud, and I accordingly supposed I had taken a sudden fancy for a reality. I began in secret to take myself to task, and to lecture myself for my proneness to build theories on the foundation of my conjectures and wishes. On turning round occasionally, however, I observed that this cloud remained in the same place, and I noticed the circumstance to our guide, as favouring my first suggestion; for clouds do not usually remain long in the same place. We disputed the point for half a day, and it was not till the afternoon when we had reached the other side of the lake of Neufchatel, that this same cloud rising like a canopy over the point where it had hovered, ‘in shape and station proudly eminent,’ he acknowledged it to be Mont Blanc. We were then at a distance of about forty miles from Vevey, and eighty or ninety from Chamouni. This will give the reader some idea of the scale and nature of this wonderful scenery. We dined at Iverdun (a pretty town), at the head of the lake, and passed on to Neufchatel, along its enchanting and almost unrivalled borders, having the long unaspiring range of the Jura on our left (from the top of which St. Preux, on his return from his wanderings round the world, first greeted that country, where ‘torrents of delight had poured into his heart,’ and, indeed, we could distinguish the Dent de Jamant right over Clarens almost the whole way), and on our right was the rippling lake, its low cultivated banks on the other side, then a brown rocky ridge of mountains, and the calm golden peaks of the snowy passes of the Simplon, the Great St. Bernard, and (as I was fain to believe) of Monteroso rising into the evening sky at intervals beyond. Meanwhile we rode on through a country abounding in farms and vineyards and every kind of comfort, and deserving the epithets, ‘verd et riant.’ Sometimes a tall rock rose by the road side; or a ruinous turret or a well-compacted villa attracted our attention. Neufchatel is larger and handsomer than Iverdun, and is remarkable for a number of those genteel and quiet-looking habitations, where people seem to have retired (in the midst of society) to spend the rest of their lives in ease and comfort: they are not for shew, nor are they very striking from situation; they are neither fashionable nor romantic; but the decency and sober ornaments of their exterior evidently indicate fireside enjoyments and cultivated taste within. This kind of retreat, where there is nothing to surprise, nothing to disgust, nothing to draw the attention out of itself, uniting the advantages of society and solitude, of simplicity and elegance, and where the mind can indulge in a sort of habitual and self-centred satisfaction, is the only one which I should never feel a wish to quit. The golden mean is, indeed, an exact description of the mode of life I should like to lead—of the style I should like to write; but alas! I am afraid I shall never succeed in either object of my ambition!

The next day being cloudy, we lost sight entirely of the highest range of Alpine hills, and saw them no more afterwards. The road lay for some miles through an open and somewhat dreary country, in which the only objects of curiosity were the tall peasant-girls working in the fields, with their black gauze head-dresses, sticking out from their matted hair like the wings of a dragon-fly. We, however, had the Lake of Bienne and Isle of St. Pierre in prospect before us, which are so admirably described by Rousseau, in his ‘Reveries of a Solitary Walker,’ and to which he gives the preference over the Lake of Geneva. The effect from the town of Bienne where we stopped to dine was not much; but in climbing to the top of a steep sandy hill beyond it, we saw the whole to great advantage. Evening was just closing in, and the sky was cloudy, with a few red streaks near the horizon: the first range of Alps only was discernible; the Lake was of a dull sombre lead colour, and the Isle of St. Pierre was like a dark spot in it; the hills on one side of the Lake ascended abrupt and gloomy; extensive forests swept in magnificent surges over the rich valley to our left; towns were scattered below us here and there, as in a map; rocky fragments hung over our heads, with the shattered trunks of huge pine-trees; a mountain-torrent rushed down the irregular chasm between us and the base of the mountain, that rose in misty grandeur on the opposite side; but the whole was in the greatest keeping, and viewed by the twilight of historic landscape. Yet amidst all this solemnity and grandeur, the eye constantly reverted to one little dark speck, the Isle of St. Pierre (where Rousseau had taken refuge for a few months from his sorrows and his persecutions) with a more intense interest than all the rest; for the widest prospects are trivial to the deep recesses of the human heart, and its anxious beatings are far more audible than the ‘loud torrent or the whirlwind’s roar!’ The clouds of vapours, and the ebon cloud of night prevented our having a distinct view of the road that now wound down to ——, where we stopped for the night. The inn here (the Rose and Crown), though almost a solitary house in a solitary valley, is a very good one, and the cheapest we met with abroad. Our bill for supper, lodging, and breakfast, amounted to only seven francs. Our route, the following morning, lay up a broad steep valley, with a fine gravelly road through it, and forests of pine and other trees, raised like an amphitheatre on either side. The sun had just risen, and the drops of rain still hung upon the branches. On the other side we came into a more open country, and then again were inclosed among wild and narrow passes of high rock, split either by thunder or earthquakes into ledges, like castle walls, coming down to the edge of a stream that winds through the valley, or aspiring to an airy height, with the diminished pines growing on their very tops, and patches of verdure and the foliage of other trees flourishing in the interstices between them. It was the last scene of the kind we encountered. I begin to tire of these details, and will hasten to the end of my journey, touching only on a few detached points and places.

BASLE.—This is a remarkably neat town; but it lies beyond the confines of the picturesque. We stopped at the Three Kings, and were shewn into a long, narrow room, which did not promise well at first; but the waiter threw up the window at the further end, and we all at once saw the full breadth of the Rhine, rolling rapidly beneath it, after passing through the arches of an extensive bridge. It was clear moonlight, and the effect was fine and unexpected. The broad mass of water rushed by with clamorous sound and stately impetuosity, as if it were carrying a message from the mountains to the ocean! The next morning we perceived that it was of a muddy colour. We thought of passing down it in a small boat; but the covering was so low as to make the posture uncomfortable, or, if raised higher, there was a danger of its being overset by any sudden gust of wind. We therefore went by the Diligence to Colmar and Strasburg. I regretted afterwards that we did not take the right hand road by Freybourg and the Black Forest—the woods, hills, and mouldering castles of which, as far as I could judge from a distance, are the most romantic and beautiful possible. The tower at Strasburg is red, and has a singular appearance. The fortifications here, in time of peace, have an effect like the stillness of death.

RASTADT.—We crossed the Rhine at Strasburg, and proceeded through Rastadt and Manheim to Mayence. We stopped the first night at the Golden Cross at Rastadt, which is the very best inn I was at during the whole time I was abroad. Among other things, we had chiffrons for supper, which I found on inquiry were wood-partridges, which are much more highly esteemed than the field ones. So delicately do they distinguish in Germany! Manheim is a splendid town, both from its admirable buildings and the glossy neatness of the houses. They are too fine to live in, and seem only made to be looked at. Would that one of the streets could be set down in Waterloo-place! Yet even Manheim is not equal to the towns in Italy. There the houses are palaces.

Mayence is a disagreeable town. We half missed the scenery between this and Coblentz, the only part of the Rhine worth seeing. We saw it, however, by moonlight (which hung over it like a silver veil), with its nodding towers and dismantled fortresses over our heads, the steep woody banks on the opposite side, and the broad glittering surface of the Rhine, reflecting the white clouds or dark sail gliding by. It was like a brilliant dream; nor did the mellow winding notes of the horn, calling to the warders of the drawbridges as we passed along, lessen the effect. Ehrenbreitstein overlooks Coblentz, and crowns it with magnificence and beauty. The Duke of Wellington, I understood, had been here, and being asked by a French officer, ‘If it could be taken?’ answered, ‘Yes; in two ways, by hunger and gold.’ Did the Duke of Wellington make this answer? I cry you mercy—it was the Frenchman who gave the answer: the Duke said nothing.

Cologne is the birth-place of Rubens; and at one of the churches, there is a Crucifixion by him, which we did not see, for it being the time of divine service, the back was turned to the spectator, and only a copy of it was exhibited. The road from Cologne to Neuss is the only really bad one we found on the Continent; it is a mere sand-bank, and not likely to be soon mended, from its vicinity to the Rhine.

From Neuss to Cleves we went in the Royal Prussian Diligence, and from thence to Nimeguen, the first town in Holland. From a small tower here we had an admirable view of the country. It was nearly a perfect flat all round, as far as the eye could reach; yet it was a rich and animated, as well as a novel scene. You saw a greater extent of surface than is possible in a hilly country; all within the circumference of the horizon lay exposed to the eye. It was like seeing a section of the entire globe, or like ‘striking flat its thick rotundity.’ It was a fine clear afternoon, and in the midst of this uniformity of surface, you saw every other variety—rich meadows, with flocks and herds feeding, hedge-rows, willowy banks, woods, corn-fields, roads winding along in different directions, canals, boats sailing, innumerable villages, windmills, bridges, and towns and cities in the far-off horizon; but neither rock, nor mountain, nor barren waste, nor any object that prevented your seeing the one beyond it. There were no contrasts, no masses, but the immense space stretched out beneath the eye was filled up with dotted lines, and minute, detached, countless beauties. It was as if the earth were curiously fringed and embroidered. Holland is the same everywhere, except that it is often more intersected by canals; and that as you approach the sea, the water prevails over the land. We proceeded from Nimeguen to Utrecht and Amsterdam, by the stage. The rich uninterrupted cultivation, the marks of successful industry and smiling plenty, are equally commendable and exhilarating; but the repetition of the same objects, and the extent of home view, become at last oppressive. If you see much at once, there ought to be masses and relief: if you see only detached objects, you ought to be confined to a few of them at a time. What is the use of seeing a hundred windmills, a hundred barges, a hundred willow-trees, or a hundred herds of cattle at once? Any one specimen is enough, and the others hang like a dead-weight on the traveller’s patience. Besides, there is something lumpish and heavy in the aspect of the country; the eye is clogged and impeded in its progress over it by dams and dykes, and the marshy nature of the soil damps and chills imagination. There is a like extent of country at Cassel in France; but from the greater number of woods and a more luxuriant vegetation (leaving the bare earth seldom visible,) the whole landscape seems in one glow, and the eye scours delighted over waving groves and purple distances. The towns and villas in Holland are unrivalled for neatness, and an appearance of wealth and comfort. All the way from Utrecht to Amsterdam, to the Hague, to Rotterdam, you might fancy yourself on Clapham Common. The canals are lined with farms and summer-houses, with orchards and gardens of the utmost beauty, and in excellent taste. The exterior of their buildings is as clean as the interior of ours; their public-houses look as nice and well-ordered as our private ones. If you are up betimes in a morning, you see a servant wench (the domestic Naiad,) with a leathern pipe, like that attached to a fire-engine, drenching the walls and windows with pail-fulls of water. With all this, they suffocate you with tobacco smoke in their stage-coaches and canal-boats, and you do not see a set of clean teeth from one end of Holland to the other. Amsterdam did not answer our expectations; it is a kind of paltry, rubbishly Venice. The pictures of Rembrandt here (some of which have little shade) are inferior to what we have in England. I was assured here that Rembrandt was the greatest painter in the world, and at Antwerp that Rubens was. The inn at Amsterdam (the Rousland) is one of the best I have been at; and an inn is no bad test of the civilization and diffusion of comfort in a country. We saw a play at the theatre here; and the action was exceedingly graceful and natural. The chimes at Amsterdam, which play every quarter of an hour, at first seemed gay and delightful, and in a day and a half became tedious and intolerable. It was as impertinent as if a servant could not come into the room to answer the bell without dancing and jumping over the chairs and tables every time. A row of lime-trees grew and waved their branches in the middle of the street facing the hotel. The Dutch, who are not an ideal people, bestow all their taste and fancy on practical things, and instead of creating the chimeras of poetry, devote their time and thoughts to embellishing the objects of ordinary and familiar life. Ariosto said, it was easier to build palaces with words, than common houses with stones. The Hague is Hampton-Court turned into a large town. There is an excellent collection of pictures here, with some of my old favourites brought back from the Louvre, by Rembrandt, Vandyke, Paul Potter, &c. Holland is, perhaps, the only country which you gain nothing by seeing. It is exactly the same as the Dutch landscapes of it. I was shewn the plain and village of Ryswick, close to the Hague. It struck me I had seen something very like it before. It is the back-ground of Paul Potter’s Bull. From the views and models of Chinese scenery and buildings preserved in the Museum here, it would seem that Holland is the China of Europe. Delft is a very model of comfort and polished neatness. We met with a gentleman belonging to this place in the trackschuyt, who, with other civilities, shewed us his house (a perfect picture in its kind,) and invited us in to rest and refresh ourselves, while the other boat was getting ready. These things are an extension of one’s idea of humanity. It is pleasant, and one of the uses of travel, to find large tracts of land cultivated, cities built and repaired, all the conveniences of life, men, women, and children laughing, talking, and happy, common sense and good manners on the other side of the English channel. I would not wish to lower any one’s idea of England; but let him enlarge his notions of existence and enjoyment beyond it. He will not think the worse of his own country, for thinking better of human nature! The inconveniences of travelling by canal-boats in Holland is, that you make little way, and are forced to get out and have your luggage taken into another boat at every town you come to, which happens two or three times in the course of the day. Let no one go to the Washington Arms at Rotterdam; it is only fit for American sea-captains. Rotterdam is a handsome bustling town; and on inquiring our way, we were accosted by a Dutch servant-girl, who had lived in an English family for a year, and who spoke English better, and with less of a foreign accent, than any French woman I ever heard. This convinced me that German is not so difficult to an Englishman as French; for the difficulty of acquiring any foreign language must be mutual to the natives of each country. There was a steam-boat here which set sail for London the next day; but we preferred passing through Ghent, Lille, and Antwerp. This last is a very delightful city, and the spire of the cathedral exquisitely light, beautiful, and well-proportioned. Indeed, the view of the whole city from the water-side is as singular as it is resplendent. We saw the Rubenses in the great church here. They were hung outside the choir; and seen against the huge white walls, looked like pictures dangling in a broker’s shop for sale. They did not form a part of the building. The person who shewed us the Taking Down from the Cross, said, ‘It was the finest picture in the world.’ I said, ‘One of the finest’—an answer with which he appeared by no means satisfied. We returned by way of St. Omers and Calais. I wished to see Calais once more, for it was here I first landed in France twenty years ago.

I confess, London looked to me on my return like a long, straggling, dirty country-town; nor do the names of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, or Coventry, sound like a trumpet in the ears, or invite our pilgrim steps like those of Sienna, of Cortona, Perugia, Arezzo, Pisa and Ferrara. I am not sorry, however, that I have got back. There is an old saying, Home is home, be it never so homely. However delightful or striking the objects may be abroad, they do not take the same hold of you, nor can you identify yourself with them as at home. Not only is the language an insuperable obstacle; other things as well as men speak a language new and strange to you. You live comparatively in a dream, though a brilliant and a waking one. It is in vain to urge that you learn the language; that you are familiarized with manners and scenery. No other language can ever become our mother-tongue. We may learn the words; but they do not convey the same feelings, nor is it possible they should do so, unless we could begin our lives over again, and divide our conscious being into two different selves. Not only can we not attach the same meaning to words, but we cannot see objects with the same eyes, or form new loves and friendships after a certain period of our lives. The pictures that most delighted me in Italy were those I had before seen in the Louvre ‘with eyes of youth.’ I could revive this feeling of enthusiasm, but not transfer it. Neither would I recommend the going abroad when young, to become a mongrel being, half French, half English. It is better to be something than nothing. It is well to see foreign countries to enlarge one’s speculative knowledge, and dispel false prejudices and libellous views of human nature; but our affections must settle at home. Besides though a dream, it is a splendid one. It is fine to see the white Alps rise in the horizon of fancy at the distance of a thousand miles; or the imagination may wing its thoughtful flight among the castellated Apennines, roaming from city to city over cypress and olive grove, viewing the inhabitants as they crawl about mouldering palaces or temples, which no hand has touched for the last three hundred years, and see the genius of Italy brooding over the remains of virtue, glory and liberty, with Despair at the gates, an English Minister handing the keys to a foreign Despot, and stupid Members of Parliament wondering what is the matter!

THE END.

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS ON THE FINE ARTS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Of the essays on the Fine Arts which follow, none were collected for publication in volume form by Hazlitt. Particulars as to their source will be found at the head of the Notes referring to each essay.

In 1838 the articles on Painting and The Fine Arts, ‘contributed to the seventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, by B. R. Haydon, Esq., and William Hazlitt, Esq.,’ were republished in Edinburgh by Messrs. Adam & Charles Black, in a post 8vo. volume. See the article in the present volume and notes thereto.

In 1843 appeared a fcap. 8vo. volume of ‘Criticisms on Art: and Sketches of the Picture Galleries of England. By William Hazlitt. With Catalogues of the Principal Galleries, now first collected. Edited by his Son,’ and published by John Templeman, 248, Regent Street. A Second Series appeared the year following, published by C. Templeman, 6 Great Portland Street, London. These volumes contain the essays printed in the present volume, together with others on Art which are to be found in Table Talk, The Round Table, The Plain Speaker and volume x. of the present edition, where the Edinburgh Review articles will be found. They also contain two appendixes of catalogues of pictures in the various galleries, compiled by Hazlitt’s son, and not here reprinted. In the Advertisement to these volumes Mr. W. Hazlitt (the second) states: ‘I have carefully corrected all the references to the pictures described, according to the latest arrangement of each particular gallery; and I have here and there ventured to append an illustrative or corrective note, where such seemed to be required as to a matter of fact.’ In the present edition the Essays are given as Hazlitt published them, and in the order of their first publication.

A ‘New Edition’ of ‘Essays on the Fine Arts by William Hazlitt,’ was published in one volume by Messrs. Reeves & Turner in 1873, edited by Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt.

CONTENTS

PAGE On Haydon’s Solomon 309

The Catalogue Raisonné of the British Institution 311

West’s Picture of Death on the Pale Horse 318

On Williams’s Views in Greece 324

On the Elgin Marbles 326

Fonthill Abbey 348

Judging of Pictures 356

The Vatican 359

English Students at Rome 367

Fine Arts 377

James Barry 413

Originality 423

The Ideal 429

Royal Academy 434

ESSAYS ON THE FINE ARTS

ON HAYDON’S SOLOMON

The Tenth Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours opened on Monday last. The productions of Glover, Cristall, De Wint, &c. principally fill and adorn the Water Colour Department.—Among the oil pictures in the room, the principal are, The Judgment of Solomon, by Mr. Haydon, and Don Quixote receiving Mambrino’s Helmet from Sancho, by Mr. Richter. The former is a work that evidently claims a place in the higher department of art; and we are little disposed to reject that claim. It certainly shews a bold and aspiring mind; in many parts (that which we hold above all other things to be essential to the painter) an eye for the picturesque both in form and colour; considerable variety of expression, attitude and character, and great vigour and rapidity of execution throughout. It would, at the same time, be in vain to deny, that the success is not always in proportion to the effort made; that the conception of character is sometimes erroneous; that the desire to avoid insipidity and monotony has occasionally led to extravagance and distortion; that there are great inequalities in the style, and some inconsistencies in the composition; and that, however striking and admirable many of the parts are, there is a want of union and complete harmony between them. What was said of the disjecta membra poetæ is not inapplicable to this picture. It exhibits fine studies and original fragments of a great work—it has many powerful starts of genius—without conveying that impression of uniform consistency and combined effect, which is sometimes attained by the systematic mechanism of well-disciplined dullness, and at others is the immediate emanation of genius.

That which strikes the eye most on entering the room, and on which it dwells with the greatest admiration afterwards, are the figures of the two Jewish Doctors on the left of Solomon. We do not recollect any figures in modern pictures which have a more striking effect. We say this, not only with respect to the solid mass of colour which they project on the eye, the dark draperies contrasting finely with the paleness of the countenances, but also with respect to the force, truth, and dramatic opposition of character displayed in them. The face of the one is turned in anxious expectation towards the principal actors in the scene: the other, looking downwards, appears lost in inward meditation upon it. The one is eagerly watching for the catastrophe,—the other seems endeavouring to anticipate it. Too much praise cannot be given to the conception of the figure of Solomon, which is raised above the rest of the picture, and placed in the centre—the face fronting, and looking down, the action balanced and suspended, and the face intended to combine the different characters of youth, beauty, and wisdom. Such is evidently the conception of the painter, which we think equally striking and just; but we are by no means satisfied that he has succeeded in embodying this idea, except as far as relates to the design. The expression of the countenance of the youthful judge, which ought to convey the feeling of calm penetration, we think, degenerates into supercilious indifference; the action given to the muscles is such as to destroy the beauty of the features, without giving force to the character, and instead of the majesty of conscious power and intellect, there is an appearance of languid indecision, which seems to shrink with repugnance from the difficulties which it has to encounter. The colouring of the head is unexceptionable. In the face of the good mother, the artist has, in our opinion, succeeded in overcoming that which has been always considered as the greatest difficulty of the art—the union of beauty with strong expression. The whole face exhibits the internal workings of maternal love and fear; but its death-like paleness and agony do not destroy the original character of feminine beauty and delicacy. The attitude of this figure is decidedly bad, and out of nature as well as decorum. It is one of those sprawling, extravagant, theatrical French figures, in which a common action is strained to the extremity of caricature. The action and expression of the executioner are liable to the same objection. He is turbulent and fierce, instead of being cold and obdurate. He should not bluster in the part heroically like an actor—it is his office.—On the whole, we think this picture decidedly superior to any of this Artist’s former productions, and a proof not only of genius, but of improved taste and judgment. In speaking of it with freedom, we trust we shall best serve both him and the art.

THE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ OF THE BRITISH INSTITUTION

We will lay odds that this is a fellow ‘damned in a fair face;’ with white eyes and eye-brows; of the colour of a Shrewsbury cake; a smooth tallow-skinned rascal, a white German sausage, a well-fed chitterling, from whose face Madame de —— would have turned away in disgust,—a transcendental stuffed man! We have no patience that the Arts should be catechised by a piece of whitleather, a whey-face, who thinks that pictures, like the moon, should be made of green-cheese! Shall a roll of double tripe rise up in judgment on grace; shall a piece of dough talk of feeling? ‘Tis too much. ‘Sdeath, for Rembrandt to be demanded of a cheese-curd, what replication should he make? What might Vandyke answer to a jack-pudding, whose fingers are of a thickness at both ends? What should Rubens say, who ‘lived in the rainbow, and played i’ th’ plighted clouds,’ to a swaddling-clout, a piece of stockinet, of fleecy hosiery, to a squab man, without a bend in his body? What might Raphael answer to a joint-stool? Or Nicholas Poussin, charged in the presence of his Cephalus and Aurora with being a mere pedant, without grace or feeling, to this round-about machine of formal impertinence, this lumbering go-cart of dulness and spite? We could have wished that as the fellow stood before the portrait of Rembrandt, chattering like an ape, making mocks and mows at it, the picture had lifted up its great grimy fist, and knocked him down.

The Catalogue Raisonné of the British Institution is only worth notice, as it is pretty well understood to be a declaration of the views of the Royal Academy. It is a very dull, gross, impudent attack by one of its toad-eaters on human genius, on permanent reputation, and on liberal art. What does it say? Why, in so many words, that the knowledge of Art in this country is inconsistent with the existence of the Academy, and that their success as a body of men instituted for promoting and encouraging the Fine Arts, requires the destruction or concealment of all works of Art of great and acknowledged excellence. In this they may be right; but we did not think they would have come forward to say so themselves. Or that they would get a fellow, a low buffoon, a wretched Merry Andrew, a practical St. Giles’s joker, a dirty Grub-Street critic, to vent his abominations on the chef-d’œuvres produced by the greatest painters that have gone before them, to paw them over with his bleared-eyes, to smear the filth and ordure of his tongue upon them, to spit at them, to point at them, to nickname them, to hoot at them, to make mouths at them, to shrug up his shoulders and run away from them in the presence of these divine guests, like a blackguard who affects to make a bugbear of every one he meets in the street; to play over again the nauseous tricks of one of Swift’s Yahoos—and for what? Avowedly for the purpose of diverting the public mind from the contemplation of all that genius and art can boast in the lapse of ages, and to persuade the world that there is nothing in Art that has been or ever will be produced worth looking at but the gilt frames and red curtains at the Exhibition of the Royal Academy! We knew before that they had no great genius for the Arts; but we thought they might have some love of them in their hearts. They here avow their rankling jealousy, hatred and scorn, of all Art and of all the great names in Art, and as a bold put indeed, require the keeping down of the public taste as the only means of keeping up the bubble of their reputation. They insist that their only hope of continued encouragement and support with a discerning public is in hood-winking that public, in confining their highest notions of Art to their own gross and superficial style of daubing, and in vilifying all works of standard genius.—This is right English. The English are a shop-keeping nation, and the Royal Academy are a society of hucksters in the Fine Arts, who are more tenacious of their profits as chapmen and dealers, than of the honour of the Art. The day after the Catalogue Raisonné was published, the Prince Regent, in the name and on behalf of his Father, should have directed it to be burned by the hands of the hangman of their Committee, or, upon refusal, have shut up their shop. A society for the encouragement and promotion of Art has no right to exist at all, from the moment that it professes to exist only in wrong of Art, by the suppression of the knowledge of Art, in contempt of genius in Art, in defiance of all manly and liberal sentiment in Art. But this is what the Royal Academy professes to do in the Catalogue Raisonné.

The Academy, from its commencement and up to the present hour, is in fact, a mercantile body, like any other mercantile body, consisting chiefly of manufacturers of portraits, who have got a regular monopoly of this branch of trade, with a certain rank, style, and title of their own, that is, with the King’s privilege to be thought Artists and men of genius,—and who, with the jealousy natural to such bodies, supported by authority from without, and by cabal within, think themselves bound to crush all generous views and liberal principles of Art, lest they should interfere with their monopoly and their privilege to be thought Artists and men of genius. The Academy is the Royal road to Art. The whole style of English Art, as issuing from this Academy, is founded on a principle of appeal to the personal vanity and ignorance of their sitters, and of accommodation to the lucrative pursuits of the Painter, in a sweeping attention to effect in painting, by which means he can cover so many more whole or half lengths in each season. The Artists have not time to finish their pictures, or if they had, the effect would be lost in the superficial glare of that hot room, where nothing but rouged cheeks, naked shoulders, and Ackermann’s dresses for May, can catch the eye in the crowd and bustle and rapid succession of meretricious attractions, as they do in another hot room of the same equivocal description. Yet they complain in one part of the Catalogue, that ‘they (the Academicians) are forced to come into a hasty competition every year with works that have stood the test of ages.’ It is for that very reason, among others, that it was proper to exhibit the works at the British Institution, to show to the public, and by that means to make the Academicians feel, that the securing the applause of posterity and a real rank in the Art, which that alone can give, depended on the number of pictures they finished, and not on the number they began. It is this which excites the apprehensions of the cabal; for if the eye of the public should be once spoiled by the Old Masters, the necessity of doing something like them might considerably baulk the regularity of their returns. Why should they complain of being forced into this premature competition? Who forces them to bring forward so many pictures yearly before they are fit to be seen? Would they have taken more pains, more time to finish them, to work them up to that fastidious standard of perfection, on which they have set their minds, if they had not been hurried into this unfair competition with the British Institution, ‘sent to their account with all their imperfections on their heads, unhouseled, unanointed, unanealed?’ Would they have done a single stroke more to any one picture, if the Institution had never been opened? No such thing. It is not then true, that this new and alarming competition prevents them from finishing their works, but it prevents them from imposing them on the public as finished. Pingo in eternitatem, is not their motto. There are three things which constitute the art of painting, which make it interesting to the public, which give it permanence and rank among the efforts of human genius. They are, first, gusto or expression: i.e. the conveying to the eye the impressions of the soul, or the other senses connected with the sense of sight, such as the different passions visible in the countenance, the romantic interest connected with scenes of nature, the character and feelings associated with different objects. In this, the highest and first part of art, the Italian painters, particularly Raphael, Correggio, &c., excel. The second is the picturesque; that is, the seizing on those objects, or situations and accidents of objects, as light and shade, &c. which make them most striking to the mind as objects of sight only. This is the forte of the Flemish and Venetian painters, Titian, Paul Veronese, Rubens, Vandyke, Rembrandt, and they have carried this part of the art as high as it can go, some of them with more, some of them with less of the former excellence. The third is the exact and laborious imitation of natural objects, such as they exist in their component parts, with every variety and nicety of detail, the pencil performing the part of a microscope, and there being no necessity for expression or the picturesque in the object represented, or anything but truth in the representation. In this least interesting but still curious and ingenious part of the Art, the Dutch School have been allowed to excel, though with little of the former qualities, which indeed are not very much wanted for this purpose. Now in all these three the English School are notoriously deficient and they are so for these following reasons:—

They cannot paint gusto, or high expression, for it is not in the national character. At least, it must be sought in Nature; but our Painters do not go out of their way in search of character and expression—their sitters come to them in crowds; and they come to them not to be painted in all the truth of character and expression, but to be flattered out of all meaning; or they would no longer come in crowds. To please generally, the Painter must exaggerate what is generally pleasing, obvious to all capacities, and void of offence before God and man, the shewy, the superficial, and the insipid, that which strikes the greatest number of persons with the least effort of thought; and he must suppress all the rest; all that might be ‘to the Jews a stumbling block, and to the Gentiles foolishness.’ The Exhibition is a successful experiment on the ignorance and credulity of the town. They collect ‘a quantity of barren spectators’ to judge of Art, in their corporate and public capacity, and then each makes the best market he can of them in his own. A Royal Academician must not ‘hold the mirror up to Nature,’ but make his canvass ‘the glass of fashion, and the mould of form.’ The ‘numbers without number’ who pay thirty, forty, fifty, a hundred guineas for their pictures in large, expect their faces to come out of the Painter’s hands smooth, rosy, round, smiling; just as they expect their hair to come out of the barber’s curled and powdered. It would be a breach of contract to proceed in any other way. A fashionable Artist and a fashionable hair-dresser have the same common principles of theory and practice; the one fits his customers to appear with éclat in a ball room, the other in the Great Room of the Royal Academy. A certain dexterity, and a knowledge of the prevailing fashion, are all that is necessary to either. An Exhibition-portrait is, therefore, an essence, not of character, but of commonplace. It displays not high thought and fine feeling, but physical well-being, with an outside label of health, ease, and competence. Yet the Catalogue-writer talks of the dignity of modern portrait! To enter into a general obligation to paint the passions or characters of men, must, where there are none, be difficult to the artist; where they are bad, be disagreeable to his employers. When Sir Thomas Lawrence painted Lord Castlereagh some time ago, he did not try to exhibit his character, out of complaisance to his Lordship, nor his understanding, out of regard to himself; but he painted him in a fashionable coat, with his hair dressed in the fashion, in a genteel posture like one of his footmen, and with the prim, smirking aspect of a haberdasher. There was nothing of the noble disinvoltura of his Lordship’s manner, the grand contour of his features, the profundity of design hid under an appearance of indifference, the traces of the Irish patriot or the English statesman. It would have puzzled Lavater or Spurzheim to have discovered there the author of the Letter to Mon Prince. Tacitus had drawn him before in a different style, and perhaps Sir Thomas despaired of rivalling this great master in his own way. Yet the picture pleased, and Mr. Perry of the Chronicle swore to the likeness, though he had been warned to the contrary. Now, if this picture had erred on the side of the characteristic expression as much as it did on that of mannered insignificance, how it must have shocked all parties in the State! An insipid misrepresentation was safer than a disagreeable reality. In the glosses of modern art, as in the modern refinement of law, it is the truth that makes the libel.—Again, the picturesque is necessarily banished from the painting rooms of the Academicians, and from the Great Room of the Academy. People of fashion go to be painted because other people do, and they wish to look like other people. We never remember to have seen a memorable head in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy. Any thing that had any thing singular or striking in it would look quite monstrous there, and would be stared out of countenance. Any thing extraordinary or original in nature is inadmissible in modern art; any thing that would strike the eye, or that you would ever think of again, would be a violation of decorum, an infringement of professional etiquette, and would disturb the uniform and well-arranged monotony of the walls of the Exhibition ‘with most admired disorder.’ A man of any originality of mind, if he has also the least common sense, soon finds his error, and reforms. At Rome one must do as the people at Rome do. The Academy is not the place for the eccentricities of genius. The persons of rank and opulence, who wish to have their pictures exhibited, do not wish to be exhibited as objects of natural history, as extraordinary phenomena in art or nature, in the moral or intellectual world; and in this they are right. Neither do they wish to volunteer their own persons, which they hold in due reverence, though there is nothing at all in them, as subjects for the painter to exercise his skill upon, as studies of light and shade, as merely objects of sight, as something curious and worth seeing from the outward accidents of nature. They do not like to share their triumph with nature; to sink their persons in ‘her glorious light.’ They owe no allegiance to the elements. They wish to be painted as Mr. and Mrs. Such-a-one, not as studies of light and shade; they wish to be represented as complete abstractions of persons and property, to have one side of the face seen as much as the other; to have their coat, waistcoat and breeches, their muslin dresses, silks, sophas, and settees, their dogs and horses, their house furniture, painted, to have themselves and all that belongs to them, and nothing else painted. The picture is made for them, and not they for the picture. Hence there can be nothing but the vapid, trite, and mechanical, in professional Art. Professional Art is a contradiction in terms. Art is genius, and genius cannot belong to a profession. Our Painters’ galleries are not studies, but lounging shew-rooms. Would a booby with a star wish to be painted (think you) with a view to its effect in the picture, or would he not have it seen at all events and as much as possible? The Catalogue Writer wishes the gentlemen-sitters of the Royal Academy to go and look at Rembrandt’s portraits, and to ask themselves, their wives, and daughters, whether they would like to be painted in the same way? No, truly. This, we confess, is hard upon our Artists, to have to look upon splendour and on obscurity still more splendid, which they dare not even attempt to imitate; to see themselves condemned, by the refinements of taste and progress of civilization, to smear rouge and white paste on the faces and necks of their portraits, for ever; and still ‘to let I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor cat in the adage.’ But why then complain of the injury they would sustain by the restoration of Art (if it were possible) into the original wardship of nature and genius, when ‘service sweat for duty, not for meed.’ Sir Joshua made a shift to combine some of Rembrandt’s art with his portraits, only by getting the start of public affectation, and by having the lead in his profession, so that like the early painters he could assert the independence of his own taste and judgment. The modern makers of catalogues would have driven him and his chiaro scuro into the shade presently. The critic professes to admire Sir Joshua, though all his excellencies are Gothic, palpably borrowed from the Old Masters. But he is wrong or inconsistent in everything.—The imitation of the details of nature is not compatible with the professional avarice of the painter, as the two former essentials of the art are inconsistent with the vanity and ignorance of his employers. ‘This, this is the unkindest blow of all.’ It is that in which the understanding of the multitude is most likely to conspire with the painter’s ‘own gained knowledge’ to make him dissatisfied with his disproportioned profits or under the loss of them. The Dutch masters are instructive enough in this way, and shew the value of detail by shewing the value of Art where there is nothing else but this. But this is not all. It might be pretended by our wholesale manufacturers of chef-d’œuvres in the Fine Arts, that so much nicety of execution is useless or improper in works of high gusto and grand effect. It happens unfortunately, however, that the works of the greatest gusto and most picturesque effect have this fidelity of imitation often in the highest degree (as in Raphael, Titian, and Rembrandt), generally in a very high degree (as in Rubens and Paul Veronese), so that the moderns gain nothing by this pretext. This is a serious loss of time or reputation to them. To paint a hand like Vandyke would cost them as much time as a dozen half-lengths; and they could not do it after all. To paint an eye like Titian would cost them their whole year’s labour, and they would lose their time and their labour into the bargain. Or to take Claude’s landscapes as an example in this respect, as they are in almost all others. If Turner, whom, with the Catalogue-writer, we allow, most heartily allow, to be the greatest landscape-painter of the age, were to finish his trees or his plants in the foreground, or his distances, or his middle distances, or his sky, or his water, or his buildings, or any thing in his pictures, in like manner, he could only paint and sell one landscape where he now paints and sells twenty. This is a clear loss to the artist of pounds, shillings, and pence, and ‘that’s a feeling disputation.’ He would have to put twenty times as much of every thing into a picture as he now has, and that is what (if he is like other persons who have got into bad habits) he would be neither able nor willing to do. It was a common cant a short time ago to pretend of him as it formerly was of Wilson, that he had other things which Claude had not, and that what Claude had besides, only impaired the grandeur of his pictures. The public have seen to the contrary. They see the quackery of painting trees blue and yellow, to produce the effect of green at a distance. They see the affectation of despising the mechanism of the Art, and never thinking about any thing but the mechanism. They see that it is not true in Art, that a part is greater than the whole, or that the means are destructive of the end. They see that a daub, however masterly, cannot vie with the perfect landscapes of the all-accomplished Claude. ‘To some men their graces serve them but as enemies’; and it was so till the other day with Claude. If it had been only for opening the eyes of the public on this subject, the Institution would have deserved well of the art and their country.

WEST’S PICTURE OF DEATH ON THE PALE HORSE

Mr. West’s name stands deservedly high in the annals of art in this country—too high for him to condescend to be his own puffer, even at second-hand. He comes forward, in the present instance, as the painter and the showman of the piece; as the candidate for public applause, and the judge who awards himself the prize; as the idol on the altar, and the priest who offers up the grateful incense of praise. He places himself, as it were, before his own performance, with a Catalogue Raisonné in his hand, and, before the spectator can form a judgment on the work itself, dazzles him with an account of the prodigies of art which are there conceived and executed. This is not quite fair. It is a proceeding which, though ‘it sets on a quantity of barren spectators to admire, cannot but make the judicious grieve.’ Mr. West, by thus taking to himself unlimited credit for the ‘high endeavour and the glad success,’ by proclaiming aloud that he has aimed at the highest sublimities of his art, and as loudly, with a singular mixture of pomposity and phlegm, that he has fully accomplished all that his most ardent hopes had anticipated,—must, we should think, obtain a great deal of spurious, catchpenny reputation, and lose a great deal of that genuine tribute of approbation to which he is otherwise entitled, by turning the attention of the well-informed and unprejudiced part of the community from his real and undoubted merits to his groundless and exaggerated pretensions. Self-praise, it is said, is no praise; but it is worse than this. It either shows great weakness and vanity for an artist to talk (or to get another to talk) of his own work, which was produced yesterday, and may be forgotten to-morrow, with the same lofty, emphatic, solemn tone, as if it were already stamped with the voice of ages, and had become sacred to the imagination of the beholder; or else the doing so is a deliberate attempt to encroach on the right of private judgment and public opinion, which those who are not its dupes will resent accordingly, and endeavour to repel by acts of precaution or hostility. An unsuccessful effort to extort admiration is sure to involve its own punishment.

We should not have made these remarks, if the ‘Description of the Picture of Death’ had been a solitary instance of the kind; but it is one of a series of descriptions of the same sort—it is a part of a system of self-adulation which cannot be too much discouraged. Perhaps Mr. West may say, that the Descriptive Catalogue is not his; that he has nothing to do with its composition or absurdities. But it must be written with his consent and approbation; and this is a sanction which it ought not to receive. We presume the artist would have it in his option to put a negative on any undue censure or flagrant abuse of his picture; it must be equally in his power, and it is equally incumbent upon him, to reject, with dignified modesty, the gross and palpable flatteries which it contains, direct or by implication.

The first notice we received of this picture was by an advertisement in a morning paper, (the editor of which is not apt to hazard extravagant opinions without a prompter,) purporting that, ‘in consequence of the President’s having devoted a year and a half to its completion, and of its having for its subject the Terrible Sublime, it would place Great Britain in the same conspicuous relation to the rest of Europe in arts, that the battle of Waterloo had done in arms!’ We shall not stay to decide between the battle and the picture; but the writer follows up the same idea of the Terrible Sublime in the Catalogue, the first paragraph of which is conceived in the following terms:—

‘The general effect proposed to be excited by this picture is the terrible sublime, and its various modifications, until lost in the opposite extremes of pity and horror, a sentiment which painting has so seldom attempted to awaken, that a particular description of the subject will probably be acceptable to the public.’

‘So shall my anticipation prevent your discovery.’ Mr. West here, like Bayes in the ‘Rehearsal,’ insinuates the plot very profoundly. He has, it seems, opened a new walk in art with its alternate ramifications into the opposite regions of horror and pity, and kindly takes the reader by the hand, to show him how triumphantly he has arrived at the end of his journey.

‘In poetry,’ continues the writer, ‘the same effect is produced by a few abrupt and rapid gleams of description, touching, as it were, with fire, the features and edges of a general mass of awful obscurity; but in painting, such indistinctness would be a defect, and imply, that the artist wanted the power to pourtray the conceptions of his fancy. Mr. West was of opinion that to delineate a physical form, which in its moral impression would approximate to that of the visionary Death of Milton, it was necessary to endow it, if possible, with the appearance of superhuman strength and energy. He has, therefore, exerted the utmost force and perspicuity of his pencil on the central figure.’ This is ‘spoken with authority, and not as the scribes.’ Poetry, according to the definition here introduced of it, resembles a candlelight picture, which gives merely the rim and outlines of things in a vivid and dazzling, but confused and imperfect manner. We cannot tell whether this account will be considered as satisfactory. But Mr. West, or his commentator, should tread cautiously on this ground. He may otherwise commit himself, not only in a comparison with the epic poet, but with the inspired writer, who only uses words. It will hardly be contended, for instance, that the account of Death on the Pale Horse in the book of Revelations, never produced its due effect of the terrible sublime, till the deficiencies of the pen were supplied by the pencil. Neither do we see how the endowing a physical form with superhuman strength, has any necessary connection with the moral impression of the visionary Death of Milton. There seems to be here some radical mistake in Mr. West’s theory. The moral attributes of death are powers and effects of an infinitely wide and general description, which no individual or physical form can possibly represent, but by courtesy of speech or by a distant analogy. The moral impression of Death is essentially visionary; its reality is in the mind’s eye. Words are here the only things; and things, physical forms, the mere mockeries of the understanding. The less definite the conception, the less bodily, the more vast, unformed, and unsubstantial, the nearer does it approach to some resemblance of that omnipresent, lasting, universal, irresistible principle, which everywhere, and at some time or other, exerts its power over all things. Death is a mighty abstraction, like Night, or Space, or Time. He is an ugly customer, who will not be invited to supper, or to sit for his picture. He is with us and about us, but we do not see him. He stalks on before us, and we do not mind him; he follows us behind, and we do not look back at him. We do not see him making faces at us in our lifetime! we do not feel him tickling our bare ribs afterwards, nor look at him through the empty grating of our hollow eyes! Does Mr. West really suppose that he has put the very image of Death upon his canvas; that he has taken the fear of him out of our hearts; that he has circumscribed his power with a pair of compasses; that he has measured the length of his arm with a two-foot rule; that he has suspended the stroke of his dart with a stroke of his pencil; that he has laid his hands on the universal principle of destruction, and hemmed him in with lines and lineaments, and made a gazing-stock and a show of him, ‘under the patronage of the Prince Regent’ (as that illustrious person has taken, and confined, and made a show of another enemy of the human race)—so that the work of decay and dissolution is no longer going on in nature; that all we have heard or felt of death is but a fable compared with this distinct, living, and warranted likeness of him? Oh no! There is no power in the pencil actually to embody an abstraction, to impound the imagination, to circumvent the powers of the soul, which hold communion with the universe. The painter cannot make the general particular, the infinite and imaginary defined and palpable, that which is only believed and dreaded, an object of sight.

As Mr. West appears to have wrong notions of the powers of his art, so he seems not to put in practice all that it is capable of. The only way in which the painter of genius can represent the force of moral truth, is by translating it into an artificial language of his own,—by substituting hieroglyphics for words, and presenting the closest and most striking affinities his fancy and observation can suggest between the general idea and the visible illustration of it. Here we think Mr. West has failed. The artist has represented Death riding over his prostrate victims in all the rage of impotent despair. He is in a great splutter, and seems making a last effort to frighten his foes by an explosion of red-hot thunderbolts, and a pompous display of his allegorical paraphernalia. He has not the calm, still, majestic form of Death, killing by a look,—withering by a touch. His presence does not make the still air cold. His flesh is not stony or cadaverous, but is crusted over with a yellow glutinous paste, as if it had been baked in a pye. Milton makes Death ‘grin horrible a ghastly smile,’ with an evident allusion to the common Death’s head; but in the picture he seems grinning for a wager, with a full row of loose rotten teeth; and his terrible form is covered with a long black drapery, which would cut a figure in an undertaker’s shop, and which cuts a figure where it is (for it is finely painted), but which serves only as a disguise for the King of Terrors. We have no idea of such a swaggering and blustering Death as this of Mr. West’s. He has not invoked a ghastly spectre from the tomb, but has called up an old squalid ruffian from a night cellar, and crowned him ‘monarch of the universal world.’ The horse on which he rides is not ‘pale,’ but white. There is no gusto, no imagination in Mr. West’s colouring. As to his figure, the description gives an accurate idea of it enough. ‘His horse rushes forward with the universal wildness of a tempestuous element, breathing livid pestilence, and rearing and trampling with the vehemence of unbridled fury.’ The style of the figure corresponds to the style of the description. It is overloaded and top-heavy. The chest of the animal is a great deal too long for the legs.

The painter has made amends for this splashing figure of the Pale Horse, by those of the White and Red Horse. They are like a couple of rocking-horses, and go as easy. Mr. West’s vicarious egotism obtrudes itself again offensively in speaking of the Rider on the White Horse. ‘As he is supposed,’ says the Catalogue, ‘to represent the Gospel, it was requisite that he should be invested with those exterior indications of purity, excellence, and dignity, which are associated in our minds with the name and offices of the Messiah. But it was not THE SAVIOUR healing and comforting the afflicted, or the meek and lowly JESUS, bearing with resignation the scorn and hatred of the scoffing multitude, that was to be represented;—it was the King of Kings going forth, conquering and to conquer. He is therefore painted with a solemn countenance, expressive of a mind filled with the thoughts of a great enterprise; and he advances onward in his sublime career with that serene Majesty,’ &c. Now this is surely an unwarrantable assumption of public opinion in a matter of taste. Christ is not represented in this picture as he was in Mr. West’s two former pictures; but in all three he gives you to understand that he has reflected the true countenance and divine character of the Messiah. Multum abludit imago. The Christs in each picture have a different character indeed, but they only present a variety of meanness and insipidity. But the unwary spectator, who looks at the catalogue to know what he is to think of the picture, and reads all these therefores of sublimity, serenity, purity, &c. considers them as so many infallible inferences and demonstrations of the painter’s skill.

Mr. West has been tolerably successful in the delineation of the neutral character of the ‘Man on the Black Horse;’ but ‘the two wretched emaciated figures’ of a man and woman before him, ‘absorbed in the feelings of their own particular misery,’ are not likely to excite any sympathy in the beholders. They exhibit the lowest stage of mental and physical imbecility, that could never by any possibility come to any good. In the domestic groupe in the foreground, ‘the painter has attempted to excite the strongest degree of pity which his subject admitted, and to contrast the surrounding objects with images of tenderness and beauty;’ and it is here that he has principally failed. The Dying Mother appears to have been in her lifetime a plaster-cast from the antique, stained with a little purple and yellow, to imitate the life. The ‘Lovely Infant’ that is falling from her breast, is a hideous little creature, with glazed eyes, and livid aspect, borrowed from the infant who is falling out of his mother’s lap over the bridge, in Hogarth’s Print of Gin-Lane. The Husband’s features, who is placed in so pathetic an attitude, are cut out of the hardest wood, and of the deepest dye; and the surviving Daughter, who is stated ‘to be sensible only to the loss she has sustained by the death of so kind a parent,’ is neither better nor worse than the figures we meet with in the elegant frontispieces to history-books, or family stories, intended as Christmas presents to good little boys and girls. The foreshortening of the lower extremities, both of the Mother and Child, is wretchedly defective, either in drawing and colouring.

In describing ‘the anarchy of the combats of men with beasts,’ Mr. West has attained that sort of excellence which always arises from a knowledge of the rules of composition. His lion, however, looks as if his face and velvet paws were covered with calf’s skin, or leather gloves pulled carefully over them. So little is the appearance of hair given! The youth in this group, whom Mr. West celebrates for his muscular manly courage, has a fine rustic look of health and strength about him; but we think the other figure, with scowling swarthy face, striking at an animal, is superior in force of character and expression. In the back figure of the man holding his hand to his head, (with no very dignified action), the artist has well imitated the bad colouring, and stiff inanimate drawing of Poussin. The remaining figures are not of much importance, or are striking only from their defects. Mr. West, however, omits no opportunity of discreetly sounding his own praise. ‘The story of this group,’ it is said, ‘would have been incomplete, had the lions not been shown conquerors to a certain extent, by the two wounded men,’ &c. As it is, it is perfect! Admirable critic! Again we are told, ‘The pyramidal form of this large division is perfected by a furious bull,’ &c. Nay, indeed, the form of the pyramid is even preserved in the title-page of the catalogue. The prettiest incident in the picture is the dove lamenting over its mate, just killed by the serpent. We do not deny Mr. West the praise of invention. Upon the whole, we think this the best coloured and most picturesque of all Mr. West’s productions; and in all that relates to composition, and the introduction of the adjuncts of historical design, it shows, like his other works, the hand of a master. In the same room is the picture of Christ Rejected. Alas! how changed, and in how short a time! The colours are scarcely dry, and it already looks dingy, flat, and faded.

ON WILLIAMS’S VIEWS IN GREECE

There has been lately exhibited at the Calton Convening Room, Edinburgh, a collection of views in Greece, Italy, Sicily, and the Ionian Isles, painted in water colours by Mr. Hugh Williams, a native of Scotland, which themselves do honour to the talents of the artist, as the attention they have excited does to the taste of the northern capital. It is well; for the exhibition in that town of the works of living artists (to answer to our Somerset-House exhibition) required some set-off. Mr. Williams has made the amende honorable, for his country, to the offended genius of art, and has stretched out under the far-famed Calton Hill, and in the eye of Arthur’s Seat, fairy visions of the fair land of Greece, that Edinburgh belles and beaux repair to see with cautious wonder and well-regulated delight. It is really a most agreeable novelty to the passing visitant to see the beauty of the North, the radiant beauty of the North, enveloped in such an atmosphere, and set off by such a back-ground. Oriental skies pour their molten lustre on Caledonian charms. The slender, lovely, taper waist (made more taper, more lovely, more slender by the stay-maker), instead of being cut in two by the keen blasts that rage in Prince’s street, is here supported by warm languid airs, and a thousand sighs, that breathe from the vale of Tempe. Do not those fair tresses look brighter as they are seen hanging over a hill in Arcadia, than when they come in contact with the hard grey rock of the castle? Do not those fair blue eyes look more translucent as they glance over some classic stream? What can vie with that alabaster skin but marble temples, dedicated to the Queen of Love? What can match those golden freckles but glittering sun-sets behind Mount Olympus? Here, in one corner of the room, stands the Hill of the Muses, and there is a group of Graces under it! There played the NINE on immortal lyres, and here sit the critical but admiring Scottish fair, with the catalogue in their hands, reading the quotations from Lord Byron’s verses with liquid eyes and lovely vermilion lips—would that they spoke English, or any thing but Scotch!—Poor is this irony! Vain the attempt to reconcile Scottish figures with Attic scenery! What land can rival Greece? What earthly flowers can compare with the colours in the sky? What living beauty can recall the dead? For in that word, GREECE, there breathe three thousand years of fame that has no date to come! Over that land hovers a light, brighter than that of suns, softer than that which vernal skies shed on halcyon seas, the light that rises from the tomb of virtue, genius, liberty! Oh! thou Uranian Venus, thou that never art, but wast and art to be; thou that the eye sees not, but that livest for ever in the heart; thou whom men believe and know to be, for thou dwellest in the desires and longings, and hunger of the mind; thou that art a Goddess, and we thy worshippers, say dost thou not smile for ever on this land of Greece, and shed thy purple light over it, and blend thy choicest blandishments with its magic name? But here (in the Calton Convening Room, in Waterloo place, close under the Melville monument—strange contradiction!) another Greece grows on the walls—other skies are to be seen, ancient temples rise, and modern Grecian ladies walk. Here towers Mount Olympus, where Gods once sat—that is the top of a hill in Arcadia—(who would think that the eyes would ever behold a form so visionary, that they would ever see an image of that, which seems only a delicious vanished sound?) this is Corinth—that is the Parthenon—there stands Thebes in Bœotia—that is the Plain of Platæa,—yonder is the city of Syracuse, and the Temple of Minerva Sunias, and there the site of the gardens of Alcinous.

‘Close to the gate a spacious garden lies, From storms defended, and inclement skies; Tall thriving trees confess the fruitful mould, The reddening apple ripens here to gold. Here the blue fig with luscious juice o’erflows, With deeper red the full pomegranate glows; The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear, And verdant olives flourish round the year. The balmy spirit of the western gale Eternal breathes on fruits, untaught to fail; The same mild season gives the blooms to blow, The buds to harden, and the fruit to grow.’

This is Pope’s description of them in the Odyssey, which (we must say) is very bad, and if Mr. Williams had not given us a more distinct idea of the places he professes to describe, we should not have gone out of our way to notice them. As works of art, these water-colour drawings deserve very high praise. The drawing is correct and characteristic: the colouring chaste, rich, and peculiar; the finishing generally careful; and the selection of points of view striking and picturesque. We have at once an impressive and satisfactory idea of the country of which we have heard so much; and wish to visit places which, it seems from this representation of them, would not bely all that we have heard. Some splenetic travellers have pretended that Attica was dry, flat, and barren. But it is not so in Mr. Williams’s authentic draughts; and we thank him for restoring to us our old, and, as it appears, true illusion—for crowning that Elysium of our school-boy fancies with majestic hills, and scooping it into lovely winding valleys once more. Lord Byron is, we believe, among those who have spoken ill of Greece, calling it a ‘sand-bank,’ or something of that sort. Every ill-natured traveller ought to hold a pencil as well as a pen in his hand, and be forced to produce a sketch of his own lie. As to the subjects of Mr. Williams’s pencil, nothing can exceed the local interest that belongs to them, and which he has done nothing, either through injudicious selection, or negligent execution, to diminish. Quere. Is not this interest as great in London as it is in Edinburgh? In other words, we mean to ask, whether this exhibition would not answer well in London.

There are a number of other very interesting sketches interspersed, and some very pleasing home views, which seem to show that nature is everywhere herself.

ON THE ELGIN MARBLES

‘Who to the life an exact piece would make Must not from others’ work a copy take; No, not from Rubens or Vandyke: Much less content himself to make it like Th’ ideas and the images which lie In his own Fancy or his Memory. No: he before his sight must place The natural and living face; The real object must command Each judgment of his eye and motion of his hand.’

The true lesson to be learnt by our students and professors from the Elgin marbles, is the one which the ingenious and honest Cowley has expressed in the above spirited lines. The great secret is to recur at every step to nature—

‘To learn Her manner, and with rapture taste her style.’

It is evident to any one who views these admirable remains of Antiquity (nay, it is acknowledged by our artists themselves, in despite of all the melancholy sophistry which they have been taught or have been teaching others for half a century) that the chief excellence of the figures depends on their having been copied from nature, and not from imagination. The communication of art with nature is here everywhere immediate, entire, palpable. The artist gives himself no fastidious airs of superiority over what he sees. He has not arrived, at that stage of his progress described at much length in Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, in which having served out his apprenticeship to nature, he can set up for himself in opposition to her. According to the old Greek form of drawing up the indentures in this case, we apprehend they were to last for life. At least, we can compare these Marbles to nothing but human figures petrified: they have every appearance of absolute fac-similes or casts taken from nature. The details are those of nature; the masses are those of nature; the forms are from nature; the action is from nature; the whole is from nature. Let any one, for instance, look at the leg of the Ilissus or River-God, which is bent under him—let him observe the swell and undulation of the calf, the inter-texture of the muscles, the distinction and union of all the parts, and the effect of action every where impressed on the external form, as if the very marble were a flexible substance, and contained the various springs of life and motion within itself, and he will own that art and nature are here the same thing. It is the same in the back of the Theseus, in the thighs and knees, and in all that remains unimpaired of these two noble figures. It is not the same in the cast (which was shown at Lord Elgin’s) of the famous Torso by Michael Angelo, the style of which that artist appears to have imitated too well. There every muscle has obviously the greatest prominence and force given to it of which it is capable in itself, not of which it is capable in connexion with others. This fragment is an accumulation of mighty parts, without that play and re-action of each part upon the rest, without that ‘alternate action and repose’ which Sir Thomas Lawrence speaks of as characteristic of the Theseus and the Ilissus, and which are as inseparable from nature as waves from the sea. The learned, however, here make a distinction, and suppose that the truth of nature is, in the Elgin Marbles, combined with ideal forms. If by ideal forms they mean fine natural forms, we have nothing to object; but if they mean that the sculptors of the Theseus and Ilissus got the forms out of their own heads, and then tacked the truth of nature to them, we can only say, ‘Let them look again, let them look again.’ We consider the Elgin Marbles as a demonstration of the impossibility of separating art from nature without a proportionable loss at every remove. The utter absence of all setness of appearance proves that they were done as studies from actual models. The separate parts of the human body may be given from scientific knowledge:—their modifications or inflections can only be learnt by seeing them in action; and the truth of nature is incompatible with ideal form, if the latter is meant to exclude actually existing form. The mutual action of the parts cannot be determined where the object itself is not seen. That the forms of these statues are not common nature, such as we see it every day, we readily allow: that they were not select Greek nature, we see no convincing reason to suppose. That truth of nature, and ideal or fine form, are not always or generally united, we know; but how they can ever be united in art, without being first united in nature, is to us a mystery, and one that we as little believe as understand!

Suppose, for illustration’s sake, that these Marbles were originally done as casts from actual nature, and then let us inquire whether they would not have possessed all the same qualities that they now display, granting only, that the forms were in the first instance selected with the eye of taste, and disposed with knowledge of the art and of the subject.

First, the larger masses and proportions of entire limbs and divisions of the body would have been found in the casts, for they would have been found in nature. The back and trunk, and arms, and legs, and thighs would have been there, for these are parts of the natural man or actual living body, and not inventions of the artist, or ideal creations borrowed from the skies. There would have been the same sweep in the back of the Theseus; the same swell in the muscles of the arm on which he leans; the same division of the leg into calf and small, i.e. the same general results, or aggregation of parts, in the principal and most striking divisions of the body. The upper part of the arm would have been thicker than the lower, the thighs larger than the legs, the body larger than the thighs, in a cast taken from common nature; and in casts taken from the finest nature they would have been so in the same proportion, form, and manner, as in the statue of the Theseus, if the Theseus answers to the idea of the finest nature; for the idea and the reality must be the same; only, we contend that the idea is taken from the reality, instead of existing by itself, or being the creature of fancy. That is, there would be the same grandeur of proportions and parts in a cast taken from finely developed nature, such as the Greek sculptors had constantly before them, naked and in action, that we find in the limbs and masses of bone, flesh, and muscle, in these much and justly admired remains.

Again, and incontestibly, there would have been, besides the grandeur of form, all the minutiæ and individual details in the cast that subsist in nature, and that find no place in the theory of ideal art—in the omission of which, indeed, its very grandeur is made to consist. The Elgin Marbles give a flat contradiction to this gratuitous separation of grandeur of design and exactness of detail, as incompatible in works of art, and we conceive that, with their whole ponderous weight to crush it, it will be difficult to set this theory on its legs again. In these majestic colossal figures, nothing is omitted, nothing is made out by negation. The veins, the wrinkles in the skin, the indications of the muscles under the skin (which appear as plainly to the anatomist as the expert angler knows from an undulation on the surface of the water what fish is playing with his bait beneath it), the finger-joints, the nails, every the smallest part cognizable to the naked eye, is given here with the same ease and exactness, with the same prominence, and the same subordination, that it would be in a cast from nature, i.e., in nature itself. Therefore, so far these things, viz., nature, a cast from it, and the Elgin Marbles, are the same; and all three are opposed to the fashionable and fastidious theory of the ideal. Look at Sir Joshua’s picture of Puck, one of his finest-coloured, and most spirited performances. The fingers are mere spuds, and we doubt whether any one can make out whether there are four toes or five allowed to each of the feet. If there had been a young Silenus among the Elgin Marbles, we don’t know that in some particulars it would have surpassed Sir Joshua’s masterly sketch, but we are sure that the extremities, the nails, &c. would have been studies of natural history. The life, the spirit, the character of the grotesque and imaginary little being would not have made an abortion of any part of his natural growth or form.

Farther, in a cast from nature there would be, as a matter of course, the same play and flexibility of limb and muscle, or, as Sir Thomas Lawrence expresses it, the same ‘alternate action and repose,’ that we find so admirably displayed in the Elgin Marbles. It seems here as if stone could move: where one muscle is strained, another is relaxed, where one part is raised, another sinks in, just as in the ocean, where the waves are lifted up in one place, they sink proportionally low in the next: and all this modulation and affection of the different parts of the form by others arise from an attentive and co-instantaneous observation of the parts of a flexible body, where the muscles and bones act upon, and communicate with, one another like the ropes and pullies in a machine, and where the action or position given to a particular limb or membrane naturally extends to the whole body. This harmony, this combination of motion, this unity of spirit diffused through the wondrous mass and every part of it, is the glory of the Elgin Marbles:—put a well-formed human body in the same position, and it will display the same character throughout; make a cast from it while in that position and action, and we shall still see the same bold, free, and comprehensive truth of design. There is no alliteration or antithesis in the style of the Elgin Marbles, no setness, squareness, affectation, or formality of appearance. The different muscles do not present a succession of tumuli, each heaving with big throes to rival the other. If one is raised, the other falls quietly into its place. Neither do the different parts of the body answer to one another, like shoulder-knots on a lacquey’s coat or the different ornaments of a building. The sculptor does not proceed on architectural principles. His work has the freedom, the variety, and stamp of nature. The form of corresponding parts is indeed the same, but it is subject to inflection from different circumstances. There is no primness or petit maître-ship, as in some of the later antiques, where the artist seemed to think that flesh was glass or some other brittle substance; and that if it were put out of its exact shape it would break in pieces. Here, on the contrary, if the foot of one leg is bent under the body, the leg itself undergoes an entire alteration. If one side of the body is raised above the other, the original, or abstract, or ideal form of the two sides is not preserved strict and inviolable, but varies as it necessarily must do in conformity to the law of gravitation, to which all bodies are subject. In this respect, a cast from nature would be the same. Mr. Chantrey once made a cast from Wilson the Black. He put him into an attitude at first, and made the cast, but not liking the effect when done, got him to sit again and made use of the plaister of Paris once more. He was satisfied with the result; but Wilson, who was tired with going through the operation, as soon as it was over, went and leaned upon a block of marble with his hands covering his face. The sagacious sculptor was so struck with the superiority of this natural attitude over those into which he had been arbitrarily put that he begged him (if possible) to continue in it for another quarter of an hour, and another impression was taken off. All three casts remain, and the last is a proof of the superiority of nature over art. The effect of lassitude is visible in every part of the frame, and the strong feeling of this affection, impressed on every limb and muscle, and venting itself naturally in an involuntary attitude which gave immediate relief, is that which strikes every one who has seen this fine study from the life. The casts from this man’s figure have been much admired:—it is from no superiority of form: it is merely that, being taken from nature, they bear her ‘image and superscription.’

As to expression, the Elgin Marbles (at least the Ilissus and Theseus) afford no examples, the heads being gone.

Lastly, as to the ideal form, we contend it is nothing but a selection of fine nature, such as it was seen by the ancient Greek sculptors; and we say that a sufficient approximation to this form may be found in our own country, and still more in other countries, at this day, to warrant the clear conclusion that, under more favourable circumstances of climate, manners, &c. no vain imagination of the human mind could come up to entire natural forms; and that actual casts from Greek models would rival the common Greek statues, or surpass them in the same proportion and manner as the Elgin Marbles do. Or if this conclusion should be doubted, we are ready at any time to produce at least one cast from living nature, which if it does not furnish practical proof of all that we have here advanced, we are willing to forfeit the last thing we can afford to part with—a theory!

If then the Elgin Marbles are to be considered as authority in subjects of art, we conceive the following principles, which have not hitherto been generally received or acted upon in Great Britain, will be found to result from them:—

1. That art is (first and last) the imitation of nature.

2. That the highest art is the imitation of the finest nature, that is to say, of that which conveys the strongest sense of pleasure or power, of the sublime or beautiful.

3. That the ideal is only the selecting a particular form which expresses most completely the idea of a given character or quality, as of beauty, strength, activity, voluptuousness, &c. and which preserves that character with the greatest consistency throughout.

4. That the historical is nature in action. With regard to the face, it is expression.

5. That grandeur consists in connecting a number of parts into a whole, and not in leaving out the parts.

6. That as grandeur is the principle of connexion between different parts, beauty is the principle of affinity between different forms, or rather gradual conversion into each other. The one harmonizes, the other aggrandizes our impressions of things.

7. That grace is the beautiful or harmonious in what relates to position or motion.

8. That grandeur of motion is unity of motion.

9. That strength is the giving the extremes, softness, the uniting them.

10. That truth is to a certain degree beauty and grandeur, since all things are connected, and all things modify one another in nature. Simplicity is also grand and beautiful for the same reason. Elegance is ease and lightness, with precision.

All this we have, we believe, said before; we shall proceed to such proofs or explanations as we are able to give of it in another article.

* * * * *

At the conclusion of a former article on this subject, we ventured to lay down some general principles, which we shall here proceed to elucidate in such manner as we are able.

1. The first was, that art is (first and last) the imitation of nature.

By nature, we mean actually existing nature, or some one object to be found in rerum naturâ, not an idea of nature existing solely in the mind, got from an infinite number of different objects, but which was never yet embodied in an individual instance. Sir Joshua Reynolds may be ranked at the head of those who have maintained the supposition that nature (or the universe of things) was indeed the groundwork or foundation on which art rested; but that the superstructure rose above it, that it towered by degrees above the world of realities, and was suspended in the regions of thought alone—that a middle form, a more refined idea, borrowed from the observation of a number of particulars, but unlike any of them, was the standard of truth and beauty, and the glittering phantom that hovered round the head of the genuine artist:

‘So from the ground Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves More airy, last the bright consummate flower!’

We have no notion of this vague, equivocal theory of art, and contend, on the other hand, that each image in art should have a tally or corresponding prototype in some object in nature. Otherwise, we do not see the use of art at all: it is a mere superfluity, an incumbrance to the mind, a piece of ‘laborious foolery’—for the word, the mere name of any object or class of objects will convey the general idea, more free from particular details or defects than any the most neutral and indefinite representation that can be produced by forms and colours. The word Man, for instance, conveys a more filmy, impalpable, abstracted, and (according to this hypothesis) sublime idea of the species, than Michael Angelo’s Adam, or any real image can possibly do. If this then is the true object of art, the language of painting, sculpture, &c. becomes quite supererogatory. Sir Joshua and the rest contend, that nature (properly speaking) does not express any single individual, nor the whole mass of things as they exist, but a general principle, a something common to all these, retaining the perfections, that is, all in which they are alike, and abstracting the defects, namely, all in which they differ: so that, out of actual nature, we compound an artificial nature, never answering to the former in any one part of its mock-existence, and which last is the true object of imitation to the aspiring artist. Let us adopt this principle of abstraction as the rule of perfection, and see what havoc it will make in all our notions and feelings in such matters. If the perfect is the intermediate, why not confound all objects, all forms, all colours at once? Instead of painting a landscape with blue sky, or white clouds, or green earth, or grey rocks and towers; what should we say if the artist (so named) were to treat all these ‘fair varieties’ as so many imperfections and mistakes in the creation, and mass them altogether, by mixing up the colours on his palette in the same dull, leaden tone, and call this the true principle of epic landscape-painting? Would not the thing be abominable, an abortion, and worse than the worst Dutch picture? Variety then is one principle, one beauty in external nature, and not an everlasting source of pettiness and deformity, which must be got rid of at all events, before taste can set its seal upon the work, or fancy own it. But it may be said, it is different in things of the same species, and particularly in man, who is cast in a regular mould, which mould is one. What then, are we, on this pretext, to confound the difference of sex in a sort of hermaphrodite softness, as Mr. Westall, Angelica Kauffman, and others, have done in their effeminate performances? Are we to leave out of the scale of legitimate art, the extremes of infancy and old age, as not middle terms in man’s life? Are we to strike off from the list of available topics and sources of interest, the varieties of character, of passion, of strength, activity, &c.? Is everything to wear the same form, the same colour, the same unmeaning face? Are we only to repeat the same average idea of perfection, that is, our own want of observation and imagination, for ever, and to melt down the inequalities and excrescences of individual nature in the monotony of abstraction? Oh no! As well might we prefer the cloud to the rainbow; the dead corpse to the living moving body! So Sir Joshua debated upon Rubens’s landscapes, and has a whole chapter to inquire whether accidents in nature, that is, rainbows, moonlight, sun-sets, clouds and storms, are the proper thing in the classical style of art. Again, it is urged that this is not what is meant, viz. to exclude different classes or characters of things, but that there is in each class or character a middle point, which is the point of perfection. What middle point? Or how is it ascertained? What is the middle age of childhood? Or are all children to be alike, dark or fair? Some of Titian’s children have black hair, and others yellow or auburn: who can tell which is the most beautiful? May not a St. John be older than an infant Christ? Must not a Magdalen be different from a Madonna, a Diana from a Venus? Or may not a Venus have more or less gravity, a Diana more or less sweetness? What then becomes of the abstract idea in any of these cases? It varies as it does in nature; that is, there is indeed a general principle or character to be adhered to, but modified everlastingly by various other given or nameless circumstances. The highest art, like nature, is a living spring of unconstrained excellence, and does not produce a continued repetition of itself, like plaster-casts from the same figure. But once more it may be insisted, that in what relates to mere form or organic structure, there is necessarily a middle line or central point, anything short of which is deficiency, and anything beyond it excess, being the average form to which all the other forms included in the same species tend, and approximate more or less. Then this average form as it exists in nature should be taken as the model for art. What occasion to do it out of your own head, when you can bring it under the cognizance of your senses? Suppose a foot of a certain size and shape to be the standard of perfection, or if you will, the mean proportion between all other feet. How can you tell this so well as by seeing it? How can you copy it so well as by having it actually before you? But, you will say, there are particular minute defects in the best-shaped actual foot which ought not to be transferred to the imitation. Be it so. But are there not also particular minute beauties in the best, or even the worst shaped actual foot, which you will only discover by ocular inspection, which are reducible to no measurement or precepts, and which in finely-developed nature outweigh the imperfections a thousandfold, the proper general form being contained there also, and these being only the distinctly articulated parts of it, with their inflections which no artist can carry in his head alone? For instance, in the bronze monument of Henry VII. and his wife, in Westminster Abbey, by the famous Torregiano, the fingers and fingernails of the woman in particular are made out as minutely, and, at the same time, as beautifully as it is possible to conceive; yet they have exactly the effect that a cast taken from a fine female hand would have, with every natural joint, muscle, and nerve in complete preservation. Does this take from the beauty or magnificence of the whole? No: it aggrandises it. What then does it take from? Nothing but the conceit of the artist that he can paint a hand out of his own head (that is, out of nothing, and by reducing it again as near as can be to nothing, to a mere vague image) that shall be better than any thing in nature. A hand or foot is not one thing, because it is one word or name; and the painter of mere abstractions had better lay down his pencil at once, and be contented to write the descriptions or titles under works of art. Lastly, it may be objected that a whole figure can never be found perfect or equal; that the most beautiful arm will not belong to the same figure as the most beautiful leg, and so on. How is this to be remedied? By taking the arm from one, and the leg from the other, and clapping them both on the same body? That will never do; for however admirable in themselves, they will hardly agree together. One will have a different character from the other; and they will form a sort of natural patchwork. Or, to avoid this, will you take neither from actual models, but derive them from the neutralising medium of your own imagination. Worse and worse. Copy them from the same model, the best in all its parts you can get; so that, if you have to alter, you may alter as little as possible, and retain nearly the whole substance of nature.[50] You may depend upon it that what is so retained, will alone be of any specific value. The rest may have a negative merit, but will be positively good for nothing. It will be to the vital truth and beauty of what is taken from the best nature, like the piecing of an antique statue. It fills a gap, but nothing more. It is, in fact, a mental blank.

2. This leads us to the second point laid down before, which was, that the highest art is the imitation of the finest nature, or in other words, of that which conveys the strongest sense of pleasure or power, of the sublime or beautiful.

The artist does not pretend to invent an absolutely new class of objects, without any foundation in nature. He does not spread his palette on the canvas, for the mere finery of the thing, and tell us that it makes a brighter show than the rainbow, or even than a bed of tulips. He does not draw airy forms, moving above the earth, ‘gay creatures of the element, that play i’ th’ plighted clouds,’ and scorn the mere material existences, the concrete descendants of those that came out of Noah’s Ark, and that walk, run, or creep upon it. No, he does not paint only what he has seen in his mind’s eye, but the common objects that both he and others daily meet—rocks, clouds, trees, men, women, beasts, fishes, birds, or what he calls such. He is then an imitator by profession. He gives the appearances of things that exist outwardly by themselves, and have a distinct and independent nature of their own. But these know their own nature best; and it is by consulting them that he can alone trace it truly, either in the immediate details, or characteristic essences. Nature is consistent, unaffected, powerful, subtle: art is forgetful, apish, feeble, coarse. Nature is the original, and therefore right: art is the copy, and can but tread lamely in the same steps. Nature penetrates into the parts, and moves the whole mass: it acts with diversity, and in necessary connexion; for real causes never forget to operate, and to contribute their portion. Where, therefore, these causes are called into play to the utmost extent that they ever go to, there we shall have a strength and a refinement, that art may imitate but cannot surpass. But it is said that art can surpass this most perfect image in nature by combining others with it. What! by joining to the most perfect in its kind something less perfect? Go to,—this argument will not pass. Suppose you have a goblet of the finest wine that ever was tasted: you will not mend it by pouring into it all sorts of samples of an inferior quality. So the best in nature is the stint and limit of what is best in art: for art can only borrow from nature still; and, moreover, must borrow entire objects, for bits only make patches. We defy any landscape-painter to invent out of his own head, and by jumbling together all the different forms of hills he ever saw, by adding a bit to one, and taking a bit from another, anything equal to Arthur’s seat, with the appendage of Salisbury Crags, that overlook Edinburgh. Why so? Because there are no levers in the mind of man equal to those with which nature works at her utmost need. No imagination can toss and tumble about huge heaps of earth as the ocean in its fury can. A volcano is more potent to rend rocks asunder than the most splashing pencil. The convulsions of nature can make a precipice more frightfully, or heave the backs of mountains more proudly, or throw their sides into waving lines more gracefully than all the beau idéal of art. For there is in nature not only greater power and scope, but (so to speak) greater knowledge and unity of purpose. Art is comparatively weak and incongruous, being at once a miniature and caricature of nature. We grant that a tolerable sketch of Arthur’s seat, and the adjoining view, is better than Primrose Hill itself, (dear Primrose Hill! ha! faithless pen, canst thou forget its winding slopes, and valleys green, to which all Scotland can bring no parallel?) but no pencil can transform or dandle Primrose Hill (our favourite Primrose Hill!) into a thing of equal character and sublimity with Arthur’s seat. It gives us some pain to make this concession; but in doing it, we flatter ourselves that no Scotchman will have the liberality in any way to return us the compliment. We do not recollect a more striking illustration of the difference between art and nature in this respect, than Mr. Martin’s very singular and, in some things, very meritorious pictures. But he strives to outdo nature. He wants to give more than she does, or than his subject requires or admits. He sub-divides his groups into infinite littleness, and exaggerates his scenery into absolute immensity. His figures are like rows of shiny pins; his mountains are piled up one upon the back of the other, like the stories of houses. He has no notion of the moral principle in all art, that a part may be greater than the whole. He reckons that if one range of lofty square hills is good, another range above that with clouds between must be better. He thus wearies the imagination, instead of exciting it. We see no end of the journey, and turn back in disgust. We are tired of the effort, we are tired of the monotony of this sort of reduplication of the same object. We were satisfied before; but it seems the painter was not, and we naturally sympathise with him. This craving after quantity is a morbid affection. A landscape is not an architectural elevation. You may build a house as high as you can lift up stones with pulleys and levers, but you cannot raise mountains into the sky merely with the pencil. They lose probability and effect by striving at too much; and, with their ceaseless throes, oppress the imagination of the spectator, and bury the artist’s fame under them. The only error of these pictures is, however, that art here puts on her seven-league boots, and thinks it possible to steal a march upon nature. Mr. Martin might make Arthur’s Seat sublime, if he chose to take the thing as it is; but he would be for squaring it according to the mould in his own imagination, and for clapping another Arthur’s Seat on the top of it, to make the Calton Hill stare! Again, with respect to the human figure. This has an internal structure, muscles, bones, blood-vessels, &c. by means of which the external surface is operated upon according to certain laws. Does the artist, with all his generalizations, understand these, as well as nature does? Can he predict, with all his learning, that if a certain muscle is drawn up in a particular manner, it will present a particular appearance in a different part of the arm or leg, or bring out other muscles, which were before hid, with certain modifications? But in nature all this is brought about by necessary laws, and the effect is visible to those, and those only, who look for it in actual objects. This is the great and master-excellence of the ELGIN MARBLES, that they do not seem to be the outer surface of a hard and immovable block of marble, but to be actuated by an internal machinery, and composed of the same soft and flexible materials as the human body. The skin (or the outside) seems to be protruded or tightened by the natural action of a muscle beneath it. This result is miraculous in art: in nature it is easy and unavoidable. That is to say, art has to imitate or produce certain effects or appearances without the natural causes: but the human understanding can hardly be so true to those causes as the causes to themselves; and hence the necessity (in this sort of simulated creation) of recurring at every step to the actual objects and appearances of nature. Having shown so far how indispensable it is for art to identify itself with nature, in order to preserve the truth of imitation, without which it is destitute of value or meaning, it may be said to follow as a necessary consequence, that the only way in which art can rise to greater dignity or excellence is by finding out models of greater dignity and excellence in nature. Will any one, looking at the Theseus, for example, say that it could spring merely from the artist’s brain, or that it could be done from a common, ill-made, or stunted body! The fact is, that its superiority consists in this, that it is a perfect combination of art and nature, or an identical, and as it were spontaneous copy of an individual picked out of a finer race of men than generally tread this ball of earth. Could it be made of a Dutchman’s trunk-hose? No. Could it be made out of one of Sir Joshua’s Discourses on the middle form? No. How then? Out of an eye, a head, and a hand, with sense, spirit, and energy to follow the finest nature, as it appeared exemplified in sweeping masses, and in subtle details, without pedantry, conceit, cowardice, or affectation! Some one was asking at Mr. H—yd—n’s one day, as a few persons were looking at the cast from this figure, why the original might not have been done as a cast from nature. Such a supposition would account at least for what seems otherwise unaccountable—the incredible labour and finishing bestowed on the back and the other parts of this figure, placed at a prodigious height against the walls of a temple, where they could never be seen after they were once put up there. If they were done by means of a cast in the first instance, the thing appears intelligible, otherwise not. Our host stoutly resisted this imputation, which tended to deprive art of one of its greatest triumphs, and to make it as mechanical as a shaded profile. So far, so good. But the reason he gave was bad, viz., that the limbs could not remain in those actions long enough to be cast. Yet surely this would take a shorter time than if the model sat to the sculptor; and we all agreed that nothing but actual, continued, and intense observation of living nature could give the solidity, complexity, and refinement of imitation which we saw in the half animated, almost moving figure before us.[51] Be this as it may, the principle here stated does not reduce art to the imitation of what is understood by common or low life. It rises to any point of beauty or sublimity you please, but it rises only as nature rises exalted with it too. To hear these critics talk, one would suppose there was nothing in the world really worth looking at. The Dutch pictures were the best that they could paint: they had no other landscapes or faces before them. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Yet who is not alarmed at a Venus by Rembrandt? The Greek statues were (cum grano salis) Grecian youths and nymphs; and the women in the streets of Rome (it has been remarked[52]) look to this hour as if they had walked out of Raphael’s pictures. Nature is always truth: at its best, it is beauty and sublimity as well; though Sir Joshua tells us in one of the papers in the IDLER, that in itself, or with reference to individuals, it is a mere tissue of meanness and deformity. Luckily, the Elgin Marbles say NO to that conclusion: for they are decidedly part and parcel thereof. What constitutes fine nature, we shall inquire under another head. But we would remark here, that it can hardly be the middle form, since this principle, however it might determine certain general proportions and outlines, could never be intelligible in the details of nature, or applicable to those of art. Who will say that the form of a finger nail is just midway between a thousand others that he has not remarked: we are only struck with it when it is more than ordinarily beautiful, from symmetry, an oblong shape, &c. The staunch partisans of this theory, however, get over the difficulty here spoken of, in practice, by omitting the details altogether, and making their works sketches, or rather what the French call ébauches and the English daubs.

3. The IDEAL is only the selecting a particular form which expresses most completely the idea of a given character or quality, as of beauty, strength, activity, voluptuousness, &c. and which preserves that character with the greatest consistency throughout.

Instead of its being true in general that the ideal is the middle point, it is to be found in the extremes; or, it is carrying any idea as far as it will go. Thus, for instance, a Silenus is as much an ideal thing as an Apollo, as to the principle on which it is done, viz., giving to every feature, and to the whole form, the utmost degree of grossness and sensuality that can be imagined, with this exception (which has nothing to do with the understanding of the question), that the ideal means by custom this extreme on the side of the good and beautiful. With this reserve, the ideal means always the something more of anything which may be anticipated by the fancy, and which must be found in nature (by looking long enough for it) to be expressed as it ought. Suppose a good heavy Dutch face (we speak by the proverb)—this, you will say, is gross; but it is not gross enough. You have an idea of something grosser, that is, you have seen something grosser and must seek for it again. When you meet with it, and have stamped it on the canvas, or carved it out of the block, this is the true ideal, namely, that which answers to and satisfies a preconceived idea; not that which is made out of an abstract idea, and answers to nothing. In the Silenus, also, according to the notion we have of the properties and character of that figure, there must be vivacity, slyness, wantonness, &c. Not only the image in the mind, but a real face may express all these combined together; another may express them more, and another most, which last is the ideal; and when the image in nature coalesces with, and gives a body, force, and reality to the idea in the mind, then it is that we see the true perfection of art. The forehead should be ‘villainous low;’ the eye-brows bent in; the eyes small and gloating; the nose pugged, and pointed at the end, with distended nostrils; the mouth large and shut; the cheeks swollen; the neck thick, &c. There is, in all this process, nothing of softening down, of compromising qualities, of finding out a mean proportion between different forms and characters; the sole object is to intensify each as much as possible. The only fear is ‘to o’erstep the modesty of nature,’ and run into caricature. This must be avoided; but the artist is only to stop short of this. He must not outrage probability. We must have seen a class of such faces, or something so nearly approaching, as to prevent the imagination from revolting against them. The forehead must be low, but not so low as to lose the character of humanity in the brute. It would thus lose all its force and meaning. For that which is extreme and ideal in one species is nothing, if, by being pushed too far, it is merged in another. Above all, there should be keeping in the whole and every part. In the Pan, the horns and goat’s feet, perhaps, warrant the approach to a more animal expression than would otherwise be allowable in the human features; but yet this tendency to excess must be restrained within certain limits. If Pan is made into a beast, he will cease to be a God! Let Momus distend his jaws with laughter, as far as laughter can stretch them, but no farther; or the expression will be that of pain and not of pleasure. Besides, the overcharging the expression or action of any one feature will suspend the action of others. The whole face will no longer laugh. But this universal suffusion of broad mirth and humour over the countenance is very different from a placid smile, midway between grief and joy. Yet a classical Momus, by modern theories of the ideal, ought to be such a nonentity in expression. The ancients knew better. They pushed art in such subjects to the verge of ‘all we hate,’ while they felt the point beyond which it could not be urged with propriety, i.e. with truth, consistency, and consequent effect. There is no difference, in philosophical reasoning, between the mode of art here insisted on, and the ideal regularity of such figures as the Apollo, the Hercules, the Mercury, the Venus, &c. All these are, as it were, personifications, essences, abstractions of certain qualities of virtue in human nature, not of human nature in general, which would make nonsense. Instead of being abstractions of all sorts of qualities jumbled together in a neutral character, they are in the opposite sense abstractions of some single quality or customary combination of qualities, leaving out all others as much as possible, and imbuing every part with that one predominant character to the utmost. The Apollo is a representation of graceful dignity and mental power; the Hercules of bodily strength; the Mercury of swiftness; the Venus of female loveliness, and so on. In these, in the Apollo is surely implied and found more grace than usual; in the Hercules more strength than usual; in the Mercury more lightness than usual; in the Venus more softness than usual. Is it not so? What then becomes of the pretended middle form? One would think it would be sufficient to prove this, to ask, ‘Do not these statues differ from one another? And is this difference a defect?’ It would be ridiculous to call them by different names, if they were not supposed to represent different and peculiar characters: sculptors should, in that case, never carve anything but the statue of a man, the statue of a woman, &c. and this would be the name of perfection. This theory of art is not at any rate justified by the history of art. An extraordinary quantity of bone and muscle is as proper to the Hercules as his club, and it would be strange if the Goddess of Love had not a more delicately rounded form, and a more languishing look withal, than the Goddess of Hunting. That a form combining and blending the properties of both, the downy softness of the one, with the elastic buoyancy of the other, would be more perfect than either, we no more see than that grey is the most perfect of colours. At any rate, this is the march neither of nature nor of art. It is not denied that these antique sculptures are models of the ideal; nay, it is on them that this theory boasts of being founded. Yet they give a flat contradiction to its insipid mediocrity. Perhaps some of them have a slight bias to the false ideal, to the smooth and uniform, or the negation of nature: any error on this side is, however, happily set right by the ELGIN MARBLES, which are the paragons of sculpture and the mould of form.—As the ideal then requires a difference of character in each figure as a whole, so it expects the same character (or a corresponding one) to be stamped on each part of every figure. As the legs of a Diana should be more muscular and adapted for running, than those of a Venus or a Minerva, so the skin of her face ought to be more tense, bent on her prey, and hardened by being exposed to the winds of heaven. The respective characters of lightness, softness, strength, &c. should pervade each part of the surface of each figure, but still varying according to the texture and functions of the individual part. This can only be learned or practised from the attentive observation of nature in those forms in which any given character or excellence is most strikingly displayed, and which has been selected for imitation and study on that account.—Suppose a dimple in the chin to be a mark of voluptuousness; then the Venus should have a dimple in the chin; and she has one. But this will imply certain correspondent indications in other parts of the features, about the corners of the mouth, a gentle undulation and sinking in of the cheek, as if it had just been pinched, and so on: yet so as to be consistent with the other qualities of roundness, smoothness, &c. which belong to the idea of the character. Who will get all this and embody it out of the idea of a middle form, I cannot say: it may be, and has been, got out of the idea of a number of distinct enchanting graces in the mind, and from some heavenly object unfolded to the sight!

4. That the historical is nature in action. With regard to the face, it is expression.

Hogarth’s pictures are true history. Every feature, limb, figure, group, is instinct with life and motion. He does not take a subject and place it in a position, like a lay figure, in which it stirs neither limb nor joint. The scene moves before you: the face is like a frame-work of flexible machinery. If the mouth is distorted with laughter, the eyes swim in laughter. If the forehead is knit together, the cheeks are puckered up. If a fellow squints most horribly, the rest of his face is awry. The muscles pull different ways, or the same way, at the same time, on the surface of the picture, as they do in the human body. What you see is the reverse of still life. There is a continual and complete action and re-action of one variable part upon another, as there is in the ELGIN MARBLES. If you pull the string of a bow, the bow itself is bent. So is it in the strings and wires that move the human frame. The action of any one part, the contraction or relaxation of any one muscle, extends more or less perceptibly to every other:

‘Thrills in each nerve, and lives along the line.’

Thus the celebrated Iö of Correggio is imbued, steeped, in a manner in the same voluptuous feeling all over—the same passion languishes in her whole frame, and communicates the infection to the feet, the back, and the reclined position of the head. This is history, not carpenter’s work. Some painters fancy that they paint history, if they get the measurement from the foot to the knee and put four bones where there are four bones. This is not our idea of it; but we think it is to show how one part of the body sways another in action and in passion. The last relates chiefly to the expression of the face, though not altogether. Passion may be shown in a clenched fist as well as in clenched teeth. The face, however, is the throne of expression. Character implies the feeling, which is fixed and permanent; expression that which it occasional and momentary, at least, technically speaking. Portrait treats of objects as they are; history of the events and changes to which they are liable. And so far history has a double superiority; or a double difficulty to overcome, viz. in the rapid glance over a number of parts subject to the simultaneous action of the same law, and in the scope of feeling required to sympathise with the critical and powerful movements of passion. It requires greater capacity of muscular motion to follow the progress of a carriage in violent motion, than to lean upon it standing still. If, to describe passion, it were merely necessary to observe its outward effects, these, perhaps, in the prominent points, become more visible and more tangible as the passion is more intense. But it is not only necessary to see the effects, but to discern the cause, in order to make the one true to the other. No painter gives more of intellectual or impassioned appearances than he understands or feels. It is an axiom in painting that sympathy is indispensable to truth of expression. Without it, you get only caricatures, which are not the thing. But to sympathise with passion, a greater fund of sensibility is demanded in proportion to the strength or tenderness of the passion. And as he feels most of this whose face expresses most passion, so he also feels most by sympathy whose hand can describe most passion. This amounts nearly, we take it, to a demonstration of an old and very disputed point. The same reasoning might be applied to poetry, but this is not the place.—Again, it is easier to paint a portrait than an historical face, because the head sits for the first, but the expression will hardly sit for the last. Perhaps those passions are the best subjects for painting, the expression of which may be retained for some time, so as to be better caught, which throw out a sort of lambent fire, and leave a reflected glory behind them, as we see in Madonnas, Christ’s heads, and what is understood by sacred subjects in general. The violences of human passion are too soon over to be copied by the hand, and the mere conception of the internal workings is not here sufficient, as it is in poetry. A portrait is to history what still-life is to portraiture: that is, the whole remains the same while you are doing it; or while you are occupied about each part, the rest wait for you. Yet, what a difference is there between taking an original portrait and making a copy of one! This shows that the face in its most ordinary state is continually varying and in action. So much of history is there in portrait!—No one should pronounce definitively on the superiority of history over portrait, without recollecting Titian’s heads. The finest of them are very nearly (say quite) equal to the finest of Raphael’s. They have almost the look of still-life, yet each part is decidedly influenced by the rest. Everything is relative in them. You cannot put any other eye, nose, lip in the same face. As is one part, so is the rest. You cannot fix on any particular beauty; the charm is in the whole. They have least action, and the most expression of any portraits. They are doing nothing, and yet all other business seems insipid in comparison of their thoughts. They are silent, retired, and do not court observation; yet you cannot keep your eyes from them. Some one said, that you would be as cautious of your behaviour in a room where a picture of Titian’s was hung, as if there was somebody by—so entirely do they look you through. They are the least tiresome furniture-company in the world!

5. Grandeur consists in connecting a number of parts into a whole, and not leaving out the parts.

Sir Joshua lays it down that the great style in art consists in the omission of the details. A greater error never man committed. The great style consists in preserving the masses and general proportions; not in omitting the details. Thus, suppose, for illustration’s sake, the general form of an eye-brow to be commanding and grand. It is of a certain size, and arched in a particular curve. Now, surely, this general form or outline will be equally preserved, whether the painter daubs it in, in a bold, rough way, as Reynolds or perhaps Rembrandt would, or produces the effect by a number of hair-lines arranged in the same form as Titian sometimes did; and in his best pictures. It will not be denied (for it cannot) that the characteristic form of the eye-brow would be the same, or that the effect of the picture at a small distance would be nearly the same in either case; only in the latter, it would be rather more perfect, as being more like nature. Suppose a strong light to fall on one side of a face, and a deep shadow to involve the whole of the other. This would produce two distinct and large masses in the picture; which answers to the conditions of what is called the grand style of composition. Well, would it destroy these masses to give the smallest veins or variation of colour or surface in the light side, or to shade the other with the most delicate and elaborate chiaro-scuro? It is evident not; from common sense, from the practice of the best masters, and, lastly, from the example of nature, which contains both the larger masses, the strongest contrasts, and the highest finishing, within itself. The integrity of the whole, then, is not impaired by the indefinite subdivision and smallness of the parts. The grandeur of the ultimate effects depends entirely on the arrangement of these in a certain form or under certain masses. The Ilissus, or River-god, is floating in his proper element, and is, in appearance, as firm as a rock, as pliable as a wave of the sea. The artist’s breath might be said to mould and play upon the undulating surface. The whole is expanded into noble proportions, and heaves with general effect. What then? Are the parts unfinished; or are they not there? No; they are there with the nicest exactness, but in due subordination; that is, they are there as they are found in fine nature; and float upon the general form, like straw or weeds upon the tide of ocean. Once more: in Titian’s portraits we perceive a certain character stamped upon the different features. In the Hippolito de Medici the eye-brows are angular, the nose is peaked, the mouth has sharp corners, the face is (so to speak) a pointed oval. The drawing in each of these is as careful and distinct as can be. But the unity of intention in nature, and in the artist, does not the less tend to produce a general grandeur and impressiveness of effect; which at first sight it is not easy to account for. To combine a number of particulars to one end is not to omit them altogether; and is the best way of producing the grand style, because it does this without either affectation or slovenliness.

6. The sixth rule we proposed to lay down was, that as grandeur is the principle of connexion between different parts; beauty is the principle of affinity between different forms, or their gradual conversion into each other. The one harmonizes, the other aggrandizes, our impressions of things.

There is a harmony of colours and a harmony of sounds, unquestionably: why then there should be all this squeamishness about admitting an original harmony of forms as the principle of beauty and source of pleasure there we cannot understand. It is true, that there is in organized bodies a certain standard of form to which they approximate more or less, and from which they cannot very widely deviate without shocking the sense of custom, or our settled expectations of what they ought to be. And hence it has been pretended that there is in all such cases a middle central form, obtained by leaving out the peculiarities of all the others, which alone is the pure standard of truth and beauty. A conformity to custom is, we grant, one condition of beauty or source of satisfaction to the eye, because an abrupt transition shocks; but there is a conformity (or correspondence) of colours, sounds, lines, among themselves, which is soft and pleasing for the same reason. The average or customary form merely determines what is natural. A thing cannot please, unless it is to be found in nature; but that which is natural is most pleasing, according as it has other properties which in themselves please. Thus the colour of a cheek must be the natural complexion of a human face;—it would not do to make it the colour of a flower or a precious stone;—but among complexions ordinarily to be found in nature, that is most beautiful which would be thought so abstractedly, or in itself. Yellow hair is not the most common, nor is it a mean proportion between the different colours of women’s hair. Yet, who will say that it is not the most beautiful? Blue or green hair would be a defect and an anomaly, not because it is not the medium of nature, but because it is not in nature at all. To say that there is no difference in the sense of form except from custom, is like saying that there is no difference in the sensation of smooth or rough. Judging by analogy, a gradation or symmetry of form must affect the mind in the same manner as a gradation of recurrence at given intervals of tones or sounds; and if it does so in fact, we need not inquire further for the principle. Sir Joshua (who is the arch-heretic on this subject) makes grandeur or sublimity consist in the middle form, or abstraction of all peculiarities; which is evidently false, for grandeur and sublimity arise from extraordinary strength, magnitude, &c. or in a word, from an excess of power, so as to startle and overawe the mind. But as sublimity is an excess of power, beauty is, we conceive, the blending and harmonizing different powers or qualities together, so as to produce a soft and pleasurable sensation. That it is not the middle form of the species seems proved in various ways. First, because one species is more beautiful than another, according to common sense. A rose is the queen of flowers, in poetry at least; but in this philosophy any other flower is as good. A swan is more beautiful than a goose; a stag than a goat. Yet if custom were the test of beauty, either we should give no preference, or our preference would be reversed. Again, let us go back to the human face and figure. A straight nose is allowed to be handsome, that is, one that presents nearly a continuation of the line of the forehead, and the sides of which are nearly parallel. Now this cannot be the mean proportion of the form of noses. For, first, most noses are broader at the bottom than at the top, inclining to the negro head, but none are broader at top than at the bottom, to produce the Greek form as a balance between both. Almost all noses sink in immediately under the forehead bone, none ever project there; so that the nearly straight line continued from the forehead cannot be a mean proportion struck between the two extremes of convex and concave form in this feature of the face. There must, therefore, be some other principle of symmetry, continuity, &c. to account for the variation from the prescribed rule. Once more (not to multiply instances tediously), a double calf is undoubtedly the perfection of beauty in the form of the leg. But this is a rare thing. Nor is it the medium between two common extremes. For the muscles seldom swell enough to produce this excrescence, if it may be so called, and never run to an excess there, so as, by diminishing the quantity, to subside into proportion and beauty. But this second or lower calf is a connecting link between the upper calf and the small of the leg, and is just like a second chord or half-note in music. We conceive that any one who does not perceive the beauty of the Venus de Medicis, for instance, in this respect, has not the proper perception of form in his mind. As this is the most disputable, or at least the most disputed part of our theory, we may, perhaps, have to recur to it again, and shall leave an opening for that purpose.

7. That grace is the beautiful or harmonious in what relates to position or motion.

There needs not much be said on this point; as we apprehend it will be granted that, whatever beauty is as to the form, grace is the same thing in relation to the use that is made of it. Grace, in writing, relates to the transitions that are made from one subject to another, or to the movement that is given to a passage. If one thing leads to another, or an idea or illustration is brought in without effect, or without making a boggle in the mind, we call this a graceful style. Transitions must in general be gradual and pieced together. But sometimes the most violent are the most graceful, when the mind is fairly tired out and exhausted with a subject, and is glad to leap to another as a repose and relief from the first. Of these there are frequent instances in Mr. Burke’s writings, which have something Pindaric in them. That which is not beautiful in itself, or in the mere form, may be made so by position or motion. A figure by no means elegant may be put in an elegant position. Mr. Kean’s figure is not good; yet we have seen him throw himself into attitudes of infinite spirit, dignity, and grace. John Kemble’s figure, on the contrary, is fine in itself; and he has only to show himself to be admired. The direction in which anything is moved has evidently nothing to do with the shape of the thing moved. The one may be a circle and the other a square. Little and deformed people seem to be well aware of this distinction, who, in spite of their unpromising appearance, usually assume the most imposing attitudes, and give themselves the most extraordinary airs imaginable.

8. Grandeur of motion is unity of motion.

This principle hardly needs illustration. Awkwardness is contradictory or disjointed motion.

9. Strength in art is giving the extremes, softness the uniting them.

There is no incompatibility between strength and softness, as is sometimes supposed by frivolous people. Weakness is not refinement. A shadow may be twice as deep in a finely coloured picture as in another, and yet almost imperceptible, from the gradations that lead to it, and blend it with the light. Correggio had prodigious strength, and greater softness. Nature is strong and soft, beyond the reach of art to imitate. Softness then does not imply the absence of considerable extremes, but it is the interposing a third thing between them, to break the force of the contrast. Guido is more soft than strong. Rembrandt is more strong than soft.

10. And lastly. That truth is, to a certain degree, beauty and grandeur, since all things are connected, and all things modify one another in nature. Simplicity is also grand and beautiful for the same reason. Elegance is ease and lightness, with precision.

This last head appears to contain a number of gratis dicta, got together for the sake of completing a decade of propositions. They have, however, some show of truth, and we should add little clearness to them by any reasoning upon the matter. So we will conclude here for the present.

FONTHILL ABBEY

London Magazine. November 1822.

The old sarcasm—Omne ignotum pro magnifico est—cannot be justly applied here. FONTHILL ABBEY, after being enveloped in impenetrable mystery for a length of years, has been unexpectedly thrown open to the vulgar gaze, and has lost none of its reputation for magnificence—though, perhaps, its visionary glory, its classic renown, have vanished from the public mind for ever. It is, in a word, a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy-shop, an immense Museum of all that is most curious and costly, and, at the same time, most worthless, in the productions of art and nature. Ships of pearl and seas of amber are scarce a fable here—a nautilus’s shell surmounted with a gilt triumph of Neptune—tables of agate, cabinets of ebony and precious stones, painted windows ‘shedding a gaudy, crimson light,’ satin borders, marble floors, and lamps of solid gold—Chinese pagodas and Persian tapestry—all the miniature splendour of Solomon’s Temple is displayed to the view—whatever is far-fetched and dear-bought, rich in the materials, or rare and difficult in the workmanship—but scarce one genuine work of art, one solid proof of taste, one lofty relic of sentiment or imagination!

The difficult, the unattainable, the exclusive, are to be found here in profusion, in perfection; all else is wanting, or is brought in merely as a foil or as a stop-gap. In this respect the collection is as satisfactory as it is unique. The specimens exhibited are the best, the most highly finished, the most costly and curious, of that kind of ostentatious magnificence which is calculated to gratify the sense of property in the owner, and to excite the wondering curiosity of the stranger, who is permitted to see or (as a choice privilege and favour) even to touch baubles so dazzling and of such exquisite nicety of execution; and which, if broken or defaced, it would be next to impossible to replace. The same character extends to the pictures, which are mere furniture-pictures, remarkable chiefly for their antiquity or painful finishing, without beauty, without interest, and with about the same pretensions to attract the eye or delight the fancy as a well-polished mahogany table or a waxed oak-floor. Not one great work by one great name, scarce one or two of the worst specimens of the first masters, Leonardo’s Laughing Boy, or a copy from Raphael or Correggio, as if to make the thing remote and finical—but heaps of the most elaborate pieces of the worst of the Dutch masters, Breughel’s Sea-horses with coats of mother-of-pearl, and Rottenhammer’s Elements turned into a Flower-piece. The Catalogue, in short, is guiltless of the names of any of those works of art

‘Which like a trumpet make the spirits dance;’

and is sacred to those which rank no higher than veneering, and where the painter is on a precise par with the carver and gilder. Such is not our taste in art; and we confess we should have been a little disappointed in viewing Fonthill, had not our expectations been disabused beforehand. Oh! for a glimpse of the Escurial! where the piles of Titians lie; where nymphs, fairer than lilies, repose in green, airy, pastoral landscapes, and Cupids with curled locks pluck the wanton vine; at whose beauty, whose splendour, whose truth and freshness, Mengs could not contain his astonishment, nor Cumberland his raptures;

‘While groves of Eden, vanish’d now so long, Live in description, and look green in song;’

the very thought of which, in that monastic seclusion and low dell, surrounded by craggy precipices, gives the mind a calenture, a longing desire to plunge through wastes and wilds, to visit at the shrine of such beauty, and be buried in the bosom of such verdant sweetness.—Get thee behind us, temptation; or not all China and Japan will detain us, and this article will be left unfinished, or found (as a volume of Keats’s poems was carried out by Mr. Ritchie to be dropped in the Great Desart) in the sorriest inn in the farthest part of Spain, or in the marble baths of the Moorish Alhambra, or amidst the ruins of Tadmor, or in barbaric palaces, where Bruce encountered Abyssinian queens! Any thing to get all this frippery, and finery, and tinsel, and glitter, and embossing, and system of tantalization, and fret-work of the imagination out of our heads, and take one deep, long, oblivious draught of the romantic and marvellous, the thirst of which the fame of Fonthill Abbey has raised in us, but not satisfied!—

Mr. Beckford has undoubtedly shown himself an industrious bijoutier, a prodigious virtuoso, an accomplished patron of unproductive labour, an enthusiastic collector of expensive trifles—the only proof of taste (to our thinking) he has shown in this collection is his getting rid of it. What splendour, what grace, what grandeur might he substitute in lieu of it! What a handwriting might he spread out upon the walls! What a spirit of poetry and philosophy might breathe there! What a solemn gloom, what gay vistas of fancy, like chequered light and shade, might genius, guided by art, shed around! The author of Vathek is a scholar; the proprietor of Fonthill has travelled abroad, and has seen all the finest remains of antiquity and boasted specimens of modern art. Why not lay his hands on some of these? He had power to carry them away. One might have expected to see, at least, a few fine old pictures, marble copies of the celebrated statues, the Apollo, the Venus, the Dying Gladiator, the Antinous, antique vases with their elegant sculptures, or casts from them, coins, medals, bas-reliefs, something connected with the beautiful forms of external nature, or with what is great in the mind or memorable in the history of man,—Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Chaldee manuscripts, or paper made of the reeds of the Nile, or mummies from the Pyramids! Not so; not a trace (or scarcely so) of any of these;—as little as may be of what is classical or imposing to the imagination from association or well-founded prejudice; hardly an article of any consequence that does not seem to be labelled to the following effect—‘This is mine, and there is no one else in the whole world in whom it can inspire the least interest, or any feeling beyond a momentary surprise!’ To show another your property is an act in itself ungracious, or null and void. It excites no pleasure from sympathy. Every one must have remarked the difference in his feelings on entering a venerable old cathedral, for instance, and a modern-built private mansion. The one seems to fill the mind and expand the form, while the other only produces a sense of listless vacuity, and disposes us to shrink into our own littleness. Whence is this, but that in the first case our associations of power, of interest, are general, and tend to aggrandize the species; and that in the latter (viz. the case of private property) they are exclusive, and tend to aggrandize none but the individual? This must be the effect, unless there is something grand or beautiful in the objects themselves that makes us forget the distinction of mere property, as from the noble architecture or great antiquity of a building; or unless they remind us of common and universal nature, as pictures, statues do, like so many mirrors, reflecting the external landscape, and carrying us out of the magic circle of self-love. But all works of art come under the head of property or showy furniture, which are neither distinguished by sublimity nor beauty, and are estimated only by the labour required to produce what is trifling or worthless, and are consequently nothing more than obtrusive proofs of the wealth of the immediate possessor. The motive for the production of such toys is mercenary, and the admiration of them childish or servile. That which pleases merely from its novelty, or because it was never seen before, cannot be expected to please twice: that which is remarkable for the difficulty or costliness of the execution can be interesting to no one but the maker or owner. A shell, however rarely to be met with, however highly wrought or quaintly embellished, can only flatter the sense of curiosity for a moment in a number of persons, or the feeling of vanity for a greater length of time in a single person. There are better things than this (we will be bold to say) in the world both of nature and art—things of universal and lasting interest, things that appeal to the imagination and the affections. The village-bell that rings out its sad or merry tidings to old men and maidens, to children and matrons, goes to the heart, because it is a sound significant of weal or woe to all, and has borne no uninteresting intelligence to you, to me, and to thousands more who have heard it perhaps for centuries. There is a sentiment in it. The face of a Madonna (if equal to the subject) has also a sentiment in it, ‘whose price is above rubies.’ It is a shrine, a consecrated source of high and pure feeling, a well-head of lovely expression, at which the soul drinks and is refreshed, age after age. The mind converses with the mind, or with that nature which, from long and daily intimacy, has become a sort of second self to it: but what sentiment lies hid in a piece of porcelain? What soul can you look for in a gilded cabinet or a marble slab? Is it possible there can be any thing like a feeling of littleness or jealousy in this proneness to a merely ornamental taste, that, from not sympathising with the higher and more expansive emanations of thought, shrinks from their display with conscious weakness and inferiority? If it were an apprehension of an invidious comparison between the proprietor and the author of any signal work of genius, which the former did not covet, one would think he must be at least equally mortified at sinking to a level in taste and pursuits with the maker of a Dutch toy. Mr. Beckford, however, has always had the credit of the highest taste in works of art as well as in virtù. As the showman in Goldsmith’s comedy declares that ‘his bear dances to none but the genteelest of tunes—Water parted from the Sea, or The Minuet in Ariadne;’—so it was supposed that this celebrated collector’s money went for none but the finest Claudes and the choicest specimens of some rare Italian master. The two Claudes are gone. It is as well—they must have felt a little out of their place here—they are kept in countenance, where they are, by the very best company!

We once happened to have the pleasure of seeing Mr. Beckford in the Great Gallery of the Louvre—he was very plainly dressed in a loose great coat, and looked somewhat pale and thin—but what brought the circumstance to our minds, was that we were told on this occasion one of those thumping matter-of-fact lies, which are pretty common to other Frenchmen besides Gascons—viz. That he had offered the First Consul no less a sum than two hundred thousand guineas for the purchase of the St. Peter Martyr. Would that he had! and that Napoleon had taken him at his word!—which we think not unlikely. With two hundred thousand guineas he might have taken some almost impregnable fortress. ‘Magdeburg,’ said Buonaparte, ‘is worth a hundred queens:’ and he would have thought such another stronghold worth at least one Saint. As it is, what an opportunity have we lost of giving the public an account of this picture! Yet why not describe it, as we see it still ‘in our mind’s eye,’ standing on the floor of the Thuilleries, with none of its brightness impaired, through the long perspective of waning years? There it stands, and will for ever stand in our imagination, with the dark, scowling, terrific face of the murdered monk looking up to his assassin, the horror-struck features of the flying priest, and the skirts of his vest waving in the wind, the shattered branches of the autumnal trees that feel the coming gale, with that cold convent spire rising in the distance amidst the sapphire hills and golden sky—and over-head are seen the cherubim bringing the crown of martyrdom with rosy fingers; and (such is the feeling of truth, the soul of faith in the picture) you hear floating near, in dim harmonies, the pealing anthem, and the heavenly choir! Surely, the St. Peter Martyr surpasses all Titian’s other works, as he himself did all other painters. Had this picture been transferred to the present collection (or any picture like it) what a trail of glory would it have left behind it! for what a length of way would it have haunted the imagination! how often should we have wished to revisit it, and how fondly would the eye have turned back to the stately tower of Fonthill Abbey, that from the western horizon gives the setting sun to other climes, as the beacon and guide to the knowledge and the love of high Art!

The Duke of Wellington, it is said, has declared Fonthill to be ‘the finest thing in Europe.’ If so, it is since the dispersion of the Louvre. It is also said, that the King is to visit it. We do not mean to say it is not a fit place for the King to visit, or for the Duke to praise: but we know this, that it is a very bad one for us to describe. The father of Mr. Christie was supposed to be ‘equally great on a ribbon or a Raphael.’ This is unfortunately not our case. We are not ‘great’ at all, but least of all in little things. We have tried in various ways: we can make nothing of it. Look here—this is the Catalogue. Now what can we say (who are not auctioneers, but critics) to

Six Japan heron-pattern embossed dishes; or,

Twelve burnt-in dishes in compartments; or,

Sixteen ditto, enamelled with insects and birds; or,

Seven embossed soup-plates, with plants and rich borders; or,

Nine chocolate cups and saucers of egg-shell China, blue lotus pattern; or,

Two butter pots on feet, and a bason, cover, and stand, of Japan; or,

Two basons and covers, sea-green mandarin; or,

A very rare specimen of the basket-work Japan, ornamented with flowers in relief, of the finest kind, the inside gilt, from the Ragland Museum; or,

Two fine enamelled dishes scalloped; or,

Two blue bottles and two red and gold cups—extra fine; or,

A very curious egg-shell lantern; or,

Two very rare Japan cups mounted as milk buckets, with silver rims, gilt and chased; or,

Two matchless Japan dishes; or,

A very singular tray, the ground of a curious wood artificially waved, with storks in various attitudes on the shore, mosaic border, and avanturine back; or,

Two extremely rare bottles with chimæras and plants, mounted in silver gilt; or,

Twenty-four fine OLD SÈVE dessert plates; or,

Two precious enamelled bowl dishes, with silver handles;—

Or, to stick to the capital letters in this Paradise of Dainty Devices, lest we should be suspected of singling out the meanest articles, we will just transcribe a few of them, for the satisfaction of the curious reader:—

A RICH and HIGHLY ORNAMENTED CASKET of the very rare gold JAPAN, completely covered with figures.

An ORIENTAL SCULPTURED TASSA OF LAPIS LAZULI, mounted in silver gilt, and set with lapis lazuli intaglios. From the Garde Meuble of the late King of France.

A PERSIAN JAD VASE and COVER, inlaid with flowers and ornaments, composed of oriental rubies, and emeralds on stems of fine gold.

A LARGE OVAL ENGRAVED ROCK CRYSTAL CUP, with the figure of a Syren, carved from the block, and embracing a part of the vessel with her wings, so as to form a handle; from the ROYAL COLLECTION OF FRANCE.

An OVAL CUP and COVER OF ORIENTAL MAMILLATED AGATE, richly marked in arborescent mocoa, elaborately chased and engraved in a very superior manner. An unique article.

Shall we go on with this fooling? We cannot. The reader must be tired of such an uninteresting account of empty jars and caskets—it reads so like Della Cruscan poetry. They are not even Nugæ Canoræ. The pictures are much in the same mimminèe-pimminèe taste. For instance, in the first and second days’ sale we meet with the following:—

A high-finished miniature drawing of a Holy Family, and a portrait: one of those with which the patents of the Venetian nobility were usually embellished.

A small landscape, by Breughel.

A small miniature painting after Titian, by Stella.

A curious painting, by Peter Peters Breughel, the conflagration of Troy—a choice specimen of this scarce master.

A picture by Franks, representing the temptation of St. Anthony.

A picture by old Breughel, representing a fête—a singular specimen of his first manner.

Lucas Cranach—The Madonna and Child—highly finished.

A crucifixion, painted upon a gold ground, by Andrea Orcagna, a rare and early specimen of Italian art. From the Campo Santo di Pisa.

A lady’s portrait, by Cosway.

Netecher—a lady seated, playing on the harpsichord, &c.

Who cares any thing about such frippery, time out of mind the stale ornaments of a pawnbroker’s shop; or about old Breughel, or Stella, or Franks, or Lucas Cranach, or Netecher, or Cosway?—But at that last name we pause, and must be excused if we consecrate to him a petit souvenir in our best manner: for he was Fancy’s child. All other collectors are fools to him: they go about with painful anxiety to find out the realities:—he said he had them—and in a moment made them of the breath of his nostrils and the fumes of a lively imagination. His was the crucifix that Abelard prayed to—the original manuscript of the Rape of the Lock—the dagger with which Felton stabbed the Duke of Buckingham—the first finished sketch of the Jocunda—Titian’s large colossal portrait of Peter Aretine—a mummy of an Egyptian king—an alligator stuffed. Were the articles authentic?—no matter—his faith in them was true. What a fairy palace was his of specimens of art, antiquarianism, and virtù, jumbled all together in the richest disorder, dusty, shadowy, obscure, with much left to the imagination (how different from the finical, polished, petty, perfect, modernised air of Fonthill!) and with copies of the old masters, cracked and damaged, which he touched and retouched with his own hand, and yet swore they were the genuine, the pure originals! He was gifted with a second-sight in such matters: he believed whatever was incredible. Happy mortal! Fancy bore sway in him, and so vivid were his impressions that they included the reality in them. The agreeable and the true with him were one. He believed in Swedenborgianism—he believed in animal magnetism—he had conversed with more than one person of the Trinity—he could talk with his lady at Mantua through some fine vehicle of sense, as we speak to a servant down stairs through an ear-pipe.—Richard Cosway was not the man to flinch from an ideal proposition. Once, at an Academy dinner, when some question was made, whether the story of Lambert’s leap was true, he started up, and said it was, for he was the man that performed it;—he once assured us, that the knee-pan of King James I. at Whitehall was nine feet across (he had measured it in concert with Mr. Cipriani); he could read in the book of Revelations without spectacles, and foretold the return of Buonaparte from Elba and from St. Helena. His wife, the most lady-like of Englishwomen, being asked, in Paris, what sort of a man her husband was, answered, Toujours riant, toujours gai. This was true. He must have been of French extraction. His soul had the life of a bird; and such was the jauntiness of his air and manner that, to see him sit to have his half-boots laced on, you would fancy (with the help of a figure) that, instead of a little withered elderly gentleman, it was Venus attired by the Graces. His miniatures were not fashionable—they were fashion itself. When more than ninety, he retired from his profession, and used to hold up the palsied right hand that had painted lords and ladies for upwards of sixty years, and smiled, with unabated good humour, at the vanity of human wishes. Take him with all his faults or follies, ‘we scarce shall look upon his like again!’

After speaking of him, we are ashamed to go back to Fonthill, lest one drop of gall should fall from our pen. No, for the rest of our way, we will dip it in the milk of human kindness, and deliver all with charity. There are four or five very curious cabinets—a triple jewel cabinet of opaque, with panels of transparent amber, dazzles the eye like a temple of the New Jerusalem—the Nautilus’s shell, with the triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite, is elegant, and the table on which it stands superb—the cups, vases, and sculptures, by Cellini, Berg, and John of Bologna, are as admirable as they are rare—the Berghem (a sea-port) is a fair specimen of that master—the Poulterer’s Shop, by G. Douw, is passable—there are some middling Bassans—the Sibylla Libyca, of L. Caracci, is in the grand style of composition—there is a good copy of a head by Parmegiano—the painted windows in the centre of the Abbey have a surprising effect—the form of the building (which was raised by torch-light) is fantastical, to say the least—and the grounds, which are extensive and fine from situation, are laid out with the hand of a master. A quantity of coot, teal, and wild fowl sport in a crystal stream that winds along the park; and their dark brown coats, seen in the green shadows of the water, have a most picturesque effect. Upon the whole, if we were not much pleased by our excursion to Fonthill, we were very little disappointed; and the place altogether is consistent and characteristic.

JUDGING OF PICTURES

Painters assume that none can judge of pictures but themselves. Many do this avowedly, some by implication, and all in practice. They exclaim against any one writing about art who has not served his apprenticeship to the craft, who is not versed in the detail of its mechanism. This has often put me a little out of patience—but I will take patience, and say why.

In the first place, with regard to the productions of living artists, painters have no right to speak at all. The way in which they are devoured and consumed by envy would be ludicrous if it were not lamentable. It is folly to talk of the divisions and backbitings of authors and poets while there are such people as painters in the world. I never in the whole course of my life heard one speak in hearty praise of another. Generally they blame downrightly—but at all events their utmost applause is with a damning reservation. Authors—even poets, the genus irritabile—do taste and acknowledge the beauties of the productions of their competitors; but painters either cannot see them through the green spectacles of envy, or seeing, they hate and deny them the more. In conformity with this, painters are more greedy of praise than any other order of men. ‘They gorge the little fame they get all raw’—they are gluttonous of it in their own persons in the proportion in which they would starve others.

I once knew a very remarkable instance of this. A friend of mine had written a criticism of an exhibition. In this were mentioned in terms of the highest praise the works of two brothers—sufficiently so, indeed, to have satisfied, one would have thought, the most insatiate. I was going down into the country to the place where these brothers lived, and I was asked to be the bearer of the work in which the critique appeared. I was so, and sent a copy to each of them. Some days afterwards I called on one of them, who began to speak of the review of his pictures. He expressed some thanks for what was said of them, but complained that the writer of it had fallen into a very common error under which he had often suffered—the confounding, namely, his pictures with his brother’s. ‘Now, my dear sir,’ continued he, ‘what is said of me is all very well, but here,’ turning to the high-wrought panegyric on his brother, ‘this is all in allusion to my style—this is all with reference to my pictures—this is all meant for me.’ I could hardly help exclaiming before the man’s face. The praise which was given to himself was such as would have called a blush to any but a painter’s face to speak of; but, not content with this, he insisted on appropriating his brother’s also: How insatiate is the pictorial man!

But to come to the more general subject—I deny in toto and at once the exclusive right and power of painters to judge of pictures. What is a picture meant for? To convey certain ideas to the mind of painters? that is, of one man in ten thousand?—No, but to make them apparent to the eye and mind of all. If a picture be admired by none but painters, I think it is strong presumption that the picture is bad. A painter is no more a judge, I suppose, than another man of how people feel and look under certain passions and events. Every body sees as well as him whether certain figures on the canvas are like such a man, or like a cow, a tree, a bridge, or a windmill. All that the painter can do more than the lay spectator, is to tell why and how the merits and defects of a picture are produced. I see that such a figure is ungraceful and out of nature—he shows me that the drawing is faulty, or the foreshortening incorrect. He then points out to me whence the blemish arises; but he is not a bit more aware of the existence of the blemish than I am. In Hogarth’s ‘Frontispiece’ I see that the whole business is absurd, for a man on a hill two miles off could not light his pipe at a candle held out of a window close to me—he tells me that it is from a want of perspective, that is, of certain rules by which certain effects are obtained. He shows me why the picture is bad, but I am just as well capable of saying ‘The picture is bad’ as he is. To take a coarse illustration, but one most exactly apposite, I can tell whether a made dish be good or bad,—whether its taste be pleasant or disagreeable.—It is dressed for the palate of uninitiated people, and not alone for the disciples of Dr. Kitchener and Mr. Ude. But it needs a cook to tell one why it is bad; that there is a grain too much of this, or a drop too much of t’other—that it has been boiled rather too much, or stewed rather too little—these things, the wherefores, as ‘Squire Western would say, I require an artist to tell me,—but the point in debate—the worth or the bad quality of the painting or potage, I am as well able to decide upon as any he who ever brandished a pallet or a pan, a brush or a skimming-ladle.

To go into the higher branches of the art—the poetry of painting—I deny still more peremptorily the exclusiveness of the initiated. It might be as well said, that none but those who could write a play have any right to sit on the third row in the pit, on the first night of a new tragedy. Nay, there is more plausibility in the one than the other. No man can judge of poetry without possessing in some measure a poetical mind. It need not be of that degree necessary to create, but it must be equal to taste and to analyze. Now in painting there is a directly mechanical power required to render those imaginations, to the judging of which the mind may be perfectly competent. I may know what is a just or a beautiful representation of love, anger, madness, despair, without being able to draw a straight line—and I do not see how that faculty adds to the capability of so judging. A very great proportion of painting is mechanical. The higher kinds of painting need first a poet’s mind to conceive:—Very well, but then they need a draughtsman’s hand to execute. Now he who possesses the mind alone is fully able to judge of what is produced, even though he is by no means endowed with the mechanical power of producing it himself. I am far from saying that any one is capable of duly judging pictures of the higher class. It requires a mind capable of estimating the noble, or touching, or terrible, or sublime subjects which they present—but there is no sort of necessity that we should be able to put them upon the canvas ourselves.

There is one point, even, on which painters usually judge worse of pictures than the general spectator; I say usually, for there are some painters who are too thoroughly intellectual to run into the error of which I am about to speak. I mean that they are apt to overlook the higher and more mental parts of a picture, in their haste to criticise its mechanical properties. They forget the expression, in being too mindful of what is more strictly manual. They talk of such a colour being skilfully or unskillfully put in opposition to another, rather than of the moral contrast of the countenances of a group. They say that the flesh-tints are well brought out, before they speak of the face which the flesh forms. To use a French term of much condensation, they think of the physique before they bestow any attention on the morale.

I am the farthest in the world from falling into the absurdity of upholding that painters should neglect the mechanical parts of their profession; for without a mastery in them it would be impossible to body forth any imaginations, however strong or beautiful. I only wish that they should not overlook the end to which these are the means—and give them an undue preference over that end itself. Still more I object to their arrogating to the possessors of these qualities of hand and eye all power of judging that which is conveyed through the physical vision into the inward soul.

On looking over what I have written, I find that I have used some expressions with regard to painters as a body which may make it appear that I hold them in light esteem; whereas no one can admire their art, or appreciate their pursuit of it, more highly than I do. Of what I have said, however, with regard to their paltry denial of each other’s merits, I cannot bate them an ace. I appeal to all those who are in the habit of associating with painters to say whether my assertion be not correct. And why should they do this?—surely the field is wide enough. Haydon and Wilkie can travel to fame together without ever jostling each other by the way. Surely there are parallel roads which may be followed, each leading to the same point—but neither crossing or trenching upon one another.

The Art of Painting is one equally delightful to the eye and to the mind. It has very nearly the reality of dramatic exhibition, and has permanence, which that is wholly without. We may gaze at a picture, and pause to think, and turn and gaze again. The art is inferior to poetry in magnitude of extent and succession of detail—but its power over any one point is far superior: it seizes it, and figures it forth in corporeal existence if not in bodily life. It gives to the eye the physical semblance of those figures which have floated in vagueness in the mind. It condenses indistinct and gauzy visions into palpable forms—as, in the story, the morning mist gathered into the embodying a spirit. But shall it be said that the enchanter alone can judge of the enchantment—that none shall have an eye to see, and a heart to feel, unless he have also a hand to execute? Alas, our inherent perceptions give the lie to this. As I used to go to the Louvre, day after day, to glut myself and revel in the congregated genius of pictorial ages, would any one convince me that it was necessary to be able to paint that I might duly appreciate a picture?

THE VATICAN

L. The Vatican did not quite answer your expectation?

H. To say the truth, it was not such a blow as the Louvre; but then it came after it, and what is more, at the distance of twenty years. To have made the same impression, it should have been twenty times as fine; though that was scarcely possible, since all that there is fine in the Vatican, in Italy, or in the world, was in the Louvre when I first saw it, except the frescoes of Raphael and Michael Angelo, which could not be transported, without taking the walls of the building, across the Alps.

L. And what, may I ask (for I am curious to hear,) did you think of these same frescoes?

H. Much the same as before I saw them. As far as I could judge, they are very like the prints. I do not think the spectator’s idea of them is enhanced beyond this. The Raphaels, of which you have a distinct and admirable view, are somewhat faded—I do not mean in colour, but the outline is injured—and the Sibyls and Prophets in the Sistine Chapel are painted on the ceiling at too great a height for the eye to distinguish the faces as accurately as one would wish. The features and expressions of the figures near the bottom of the ‘Last Judgment’ are sufficiently plain, and horrible enough they are.

L. What was your opinion of the ‘Last Judgment’ itself?

H. It is literally too big to be seen. It is like an immense field of battle, or charnel-house, strewed with carcases and naked bodies: or it is a shambles of Art. You have huge limbs apparently torn from their bodies and stuck against the wall: anatomical dissections, backs and diaphragms, tumbling ‘with hideous ruin and combustion down,’ neither intelligible groups, nor perspective, nor colour; you distinguish the principal figure, that of Christ, only from its standing in the centre of the picture, on a sort of island of earth, separated from the rest of the subject by an inlet of sky. The whole is a scene of enormous, ghastly confusion, in which you can only make out quantity and number, and vast, uncouth masses of bones and muscles. It has the incoherence and distortion of a troubled dream, without the shadowiness; everything is here corporeal and of solid dimensions.

L. But surely there must be something fine in the Sibyls and Prophets, from the copies we have of them; justifying the high encomiums of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of so many others.

H. It appears to me that nothing can be finer as to form, attitude, and outline. The whole conception is so far inimitably noble and just; and all that is felt as wanting, is a proportionable degree of expression in the countenances, though of this I am not sure, for the height (as I said before) baffles a nice scrutiny. They look to me unfinished, vague, and general. Like some fabulous figure from the antique, the heads were brutal, the bodies divine. Or at most, the faces were only continuations of and on a par with the physical form, large and bold, and with great breadth of drawing, but no more the seat of a vivifying spirit, or with a more powerful and marked intelligence emanating from them, than from the rest of the limbs, the hands, or even drapery. The filling up of the mind is, I suspect, wanting, the divinæ particula auræ: there is prodigious and mighty prominence and grandeur and simplicity in the features, but they are not surcharged with meaning, with thought or passion, like Raphael’s, ‘the rapt soul sitting in the eyes.’ On the contrary, they seem only to be half-informed, and might be almost thought asleep. They are fine moulds, and contain a capacity of expression, but are not bursting, teeming with it. The outward material shrine, or tabernacle, is unexceptionable; but there is not superadded to it a revelation of the workings of the mind within. The forms in Michael Angelo are objects to admire in themselves: those of Raphael are merely a language pointing to something beyond, and full of this ultimate import.

L. But does not the difference arise from the nature of the subjects?

H. I should think, not. Surely, a Sibyl in the height of her phrensy, or an inspired Prophet—‘seer blest’—in the act of receiving or of announcing the will of the Almighty, is not a less fit subject for the most exalted and impassioned expression than an Apostle, a Pope, a Saint, or a common man. If you say that these persons are not represented in the act of inspired communication, but in their ordinary quiescent state,—granted; but such preternatural workings, as well as the character and frame of mind proper for them, must leave their shadowings and lofty traces behind them. The face that has once held communion with the Most High, or been wrought to madness by deep thought and passion, or that inly broods over its sacred or its magic lore, must be ‘as a book where one may read strange matters,’ that cannot be opened without a correspondent awe and reverence. But here is ‘neither the cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night:’ neither the blaze of immediate inspiration nor the hallowed radiance, the mystic gloomy light that follows it, so far as I was able to perceive. I think it idle to say that Michael Angelo painted man in the abstract, and so left the expression indeterminate, when he painted prophets and other given characters in particular. He has painted them on a larger scale, and cast their limbs in a gigantic mould to give a dignity and command answering to their situations and high calling, but I do not see the same high character and intensity of thought or purpose impressed upon their countenances. Thus, nothing can be nobler or more characteristic than the figure of the prophet Jeremiah. It is not abstracted, but symbolical of the history and functions of the individual. The whole figure bends and droops under a weight of woe, like a large willow tree surcharged with showers. Yet there is no peculiar expression of grief in one part more than another; the head hangs down despondingly indeed, but so do the hands, the clothes, and every part seems to labour under and be involved in a complication of distress. Again, the prophet Ezra is represented reading in a striking attitude of attention, and with the book held close to him as if to lose no part of its contents in empty space:—all this is finely imagined and designed, but then the book reflects back none of its pregnant, hieroglyphic meaning on the face, which, though large and stately, is an ordinary, unimpassioned, and even unideal one. Daniel, again, is meant for a face of inward thought and musing, but it might seem as if the compression of the features were produced by external force as much as by involuntary perplexity. I might extend these remarks to this artist’s other works; for instance, to the Moses, of which the form and attitude express the utmost dignity and energy of purpose, but the face wants a something of the intelligence and expansive views of the Hebrew legislator. It is cut from the same block, and by the same bold sweeping hand, as the sandals or the drapery.

L. Do you think there is any truth or value in the distinction which assigns to Raphael the dramatic, and to Michael Angelo the epic department of the art?

H. Very little, I confess. It is so far true, that Michael Angelo painted single figures, and Raphael chiefly groups; but Michael Angelo gave life and action to his figures, though not the same expression to the face. I think this arose from two circumstances. First, from his habits as a sculptor, in which form predominates, and in which the fixed lineaments are more attended to than the passing inflections, which are neither so easily caught nor so well given in sculpture as in painting. Secondly, it strikes me that Michael Angelo, who was a strong, iron-built man, sympathised more with the organic structure, with bones and muscles, than with the more subtle and sensitive workings of that fine medullary substance called the brain. He compounded man admirably of brass or clay, but did not succeed equally in breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, of thought or feeling. He has less humanity than Raphael, and I think that he is also less divine, unless it be asserted that the body is less allied to earth than the mind. Expression is, after all, the principal thing. If Michael Angelo’s forms have, as I allow, an intellectual character about them and a greatness of gusto, so that you would almost say ‘his bodies thought;’ his faces, on the other hand, have a drossy and material one. For example, in the figure of Adam coming from the hand of his Creator, the composition, which goes on the idea of a being starting into life at the touch of Omnipotence, is sublime:—the figure of Adam, reclined at ease with manly freedom and independence, is worthy of the original founder of our race; and the expression of the face, implying passive resignation and the first consciousness of existence, is in thorough keeping—but I see nothing in the countenance of the Deity denoting supreme might and majesty. The Eve, too, lying extended at the foot of the Forbidden Tree, has an elasticity and buoyancy about it, that seems as if it could bound up from the earth of its own accord, like a bow that has been bent. It is all life and grace. The action of the head thrown back, and the upward look, correspond to the rest. The artist was here at home. In like manner, in the allegorical figures of Night and Morn at Florence, the faces are ugly or distorted, but the contour and actions of the limbs express dignity and power, in the very highest degree. The legs of the figure of Night, in particular, are twisted into the involutions of a serpent’s folds; the neck is curved like the horse’s, and is clothed with thunder.

L. What, then, is the precise difference between him and Raphael, according to your conception?

H. As far as I can explain the matter, it seems to me that Michael Angelo’s forms are finer, but that Raphael’s are more fraught with meaning; that the rigid outline and disposable masses in the first are more grand and imposing, but that Raphael puts a greater proportion of sentiment into his, and calls into play every faculty of mind and body of which his characters are susceptible, with greater subtilty and intensity of feeling. Dryden’s lines—

‘A fiery soul that working out its way Fretted the pigmy body to decay, And o’er-inform’d the tenement of clay’—

do not exactly answer to Raphael’s character, which is mild and thoughtful rather than fiery; nor is there any want either of grace or grandeur in his figures; but the passage describes the ‘o’er-informing’ spirit that breathes through them, and the unequal struggle of the expression to vent itself by more than ordinary physical means. Raphael lived a much shorter time than Michael Angelo, who also lived long after him; and there is no comparison between the number, the variety, or the finished elegance of their works.[53] Michael Angelo possibly lost himself in the material and instrumental part of art, in embodying a technical theory, or in acquiring the grammar of different branches of study, excelling in knowledge and in gravity of pretension; whereas Raphael gave himself up to the diviner or lovelier impulse that breathes its soul over the face of things, being governed by a sense of reality and of general truth. There is nothing exclusive or repulsive in Raphael; he is open to all impressions alike, and seems to identify himself with whatever he saw that arrested his attention or could interest others. Michael Angelo studied for himself, and raised objects to the standards of his conception, by a formula or system: Raphael invented for others, and was guided only by sympathy with them. Michael Angelo was painter, sculptor, architect; but he might be said to make of each art a shrine in which to build up the stately and gigantic stature of his own mind:—Raphael was only a painter, but in that one art he seemed to pour out all the treasures and various excellence of nature, grandeur and scope of design, exquisite finishing, force, grace, delicacy, the strength of man, the softness of woman, the playfulness of infancy, thought, feeling, invention, imitation, labour, ease, and every quality that can distinguish a picture, except colour. Michael Angelo, in a word, stamped his own character on his works, or recast Nature in a mould of his own, leaving out much that was excellent: Raphael received his inspiration from without, and his genius caught the lambent flame of grace, of truth, and grandeur, which are reflected in his works with a light clear, transparent and unfading.

L. Will you mention one or two things that particularly struck you?

H. There is a figure of a man leading a horse in the Attila, which I think peculiarly characteristic. It is an ordinary face and figure, in a somewhat awkward dress: but he seems as if he had literally walked into the picture at that instant; he is looking forward with a mixture of earnestness and curiosity, as if the scene were passing before him, and every part of his figure and dress is flexible and in motion, pliant to the painter’s plastic touch. This figure, so unconstrained and free, animated, salient, put me in mind, compared with the usual stiffness and shackles of the art, of chain-armour used by the knights of old instead of coat-of-mail. Raphael’s fresco figures seem the least of all others taken from plaster-casts; this is more than can be said of Michael Angelo’s, which might be taken from, or would serve for very noble ones. The horses in the same picture also delight me. Though dumb, they appear as though they could speak, and were privy to the import of the scene. Their inflated nostrils and speckled skins are like a kind of proud flesh; or they are animals spiritualised. In the Miracle of Bolsano is that group of children, round-faced, smiling, with large-orbed eyes, like infancy nestling in the arms of affection; the studied elegance of the choir of tender novices, with all their sense of the godliness of their function and the beauty of holiness; and the hard, liny, individual portraits of priests and cardinals on the right-hand, which have the same life, spirit, boldness, and marked character, as if you could have looked in upon the assembled conclave. Neither painting nor popery ever produced anything finer. There is the utmost hardness and materiality of outline, with a spirit of fire. The School of Athens is full of striking parts and ingenious contrasts; but I prefer to it the Convocation of Saints, with that noble circle of Prophets and Apostles in the sky, on whose bent foreheads and downcast eyes you see written the City of the Blest, the beatific presence of the Most High and the Glory hereafter to be revealed, a solemn brightness and a fearful dream, and that scarce less inspired circle of sages canonised here on earth, poets, heroes, and philosophers, with the painter himself, entering on one side like the recording angel, smiling in youthful beauty, and scarce conscious of the scene he has embodied. If there is a failure in any of these frescoes, it is, I think, in the Parnassus, in which there is something quaint and affected. In the St. Peter delivered from prison, he has burst with Rembrandt into the dark chambers of night, and thrown a glory round them. In the story of Cupid and Psyche, at the Little Farnese, he has, I think, even surpassed himself in a certain swelling and voluptuous grace, as if beauty grew and ripened under his touch, and the very genius of ancient fable hovered over his enamoured pencil.

L. I believe you when you praise, not always when you condemn. Was there anything else that you saw to give you a higher idea of him than the specimens we have in this country?

H. Nothing superior to the Cartoons for boldness of design and execution; but I think his best oil pictures are abroad, though I had seen most of them before in the Louvre. I had not, however, seen the Crowning of the Virgin, which is in the Picture-gallery of the Vatican, and appears to me one of his very highest-wrought pictures. The Virgin in the clouds is of an admirable sedateness and dignity, and over the throng of breathing faces below there is poured a stream of joy and fervid devotion that can be compared to nothing but the golden light that evening skies pour on the edges of the surging waves. ‘Hope elevates, and joy brightens their every feature.’ The Foligno Virgin was at Paris, in which I cannot say I am quite satisfied with the Madonna; it has rather a précieuse expression; but I know not enough how to admire the innumerable heads of cherubs surrounding her, touched in with such care and delicacy, yet so as scarcely to be perceptible except on close inspection, nor that figure of the winged cherub below, offering the casket, and with his round, chubby face and limbs as full of rosy health and joy, as the cup is full of the juice of the purple vine. There is another picture of his I will mention, the Leo X. in the Palace Pitti, ‘on his front engraven thought and public care; ‘and again, that little portrait in a cup in the Louvre, muffled in thought and buried in a kind of mental chiaro scuro. When I think of these and so many other of his inimitable works, ‘scattered like stray-gifts o’er the earth,’ meeting our thoughts half-way, and yet carrying them farther than we should have been able of ourselves, enriching, refining, exalting all around, I am at a loss to find motives for equal admiration or gratitude in what Michael Angelo has left, though his Prophets and Sibyls on the walls of the Sistine Chapel are thumping make-weights thrown into the opposite scale. It is nearly impossible to weigh or measure their different merits. Perhaps Michael Angelo’s works, in their vastness and unity, may give a greater blow to some imaginations and lift the mind more out of itself, though accompanied with less delight or food for reflection, resembling the rocky precipice, whose ‘stately height though bare’ overlooks the various excellence and beauty of subjected art.

L. I do not think your premises warrant your conclusion. If what you have said of each is true, I should give the undoubted preference to Raphael as at least the greater painter, if not the greater man. I must prefer the finest face to the largest mask.

H. I wish you could see and judge for yourself.

L. I prythee do not mock me. Proceed with your account. Was there nothing else worth mentioning after Raphael and Michael Angelo?

H. So much, that it has slipped from my memory. There are the finest statues in the world there, and they are scattered and put into niches or separate little rooms for effect, and not congregated together like a meeting of the marble gods of mythology, as was the case in the Louvre. There are some of Canova’s, worked up to a high pitch of perfection, which might just as well have been left alone—and there are none, I think, equal to the Elgin marbles. A bath of one of the Antonines, of solid porphyry and as large as a good-sized room, struck me as the strongest proof of ancient magnificence. The busts are innumerable, inimitable, have a breathing clearness and transparency, revive ancient history, and are very like actual English heads and characters. The inscriptions alone on fragments of antique marble would furnish years of study to the curious or learned in that way. The vases are most elegant—of proportions and materials unrivalled in taste and in value. There are some tapestry copies of the Cartoons, very glaring and unpleasant to look at. The room containing the coloured maps of Italy, done about three hundred years ago, is one of the longest and most striking; and the passing through it with the green hillocks, rivers, and mountains on its spotty sides, is like going a delightful and various journey. You recall or anticipate the most interesting scenes and objects. Out of the windows of these long straggling galleries, you look down into a labyrinth of inner and of outer courts, or catch the Dome of St Peter’s adjoining (like a huge shadow), or gaze at the distant amphitheatre of hills surrounding the Sacred City, which excite a pleasing awe, whether considered as the haunts of banditti or from a recollection of the wondrous scene, the hallowed spot, on which they have overlooked for ages, Imperial or Papal Rome, or her commonwealth, more august than either. Here also in one chamber of the Vatican is a room stuffed full of artists, copying the Transfiguration, or the St. Jerome of Domenichino, spitting, shrugging, and taking snuff, admiring their own performances and sneering at those of their neighbours; and on certain days of the week the whole range of the rooms is thrown open without reserve to the entire population of Rome and its environs, priests and peasants, with heads not unlike those that gleam from the walls, perfect in expression and in costume, and young peasant girls in clouted shoes with looks of pleasure, timidity and wonder, such as those with which Raphael himself, from the portraits of him, might be supposed to have hailed the dawn of heaven-born art. There is also (to mention small works with great) a portrait of George the Fourth in his robes (a present to his Holiness) turned into an outer room; and a tablet erected by him in St. Peter’s, to the memory of James III. Would you believe it? Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, when he saw the averted looks of the good people of England as they proclaimed his Majesty James III. in any of the towns through which they passed, would not have believed it. Fergus Maclvor, when in answer to the crier of the court, who repeated ‘Long live King George!’ he retorted, ‘Long live King James!’ would not have believed it possible!

L. Hang your politics.

H. Never mind, if they do not hang me.

ENGLISH STUDENTS AT ROME

‘No wher so besy a man as he ther n’as, And yet he semed besier than he was.’ Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

Rome is of all places the worst to study in, for the same reason that it is the best to lounge in. There is no end of objects to divert and distract the mind. If a person has no other view than to pass away his time, to fill his portfolio or common-place book, or to improve his general taste and knowledge, he may find employment and amusement here for ever: if ever he wishes to do any thing, he should fly from it as he would from the plague. There is a species of malaria hanging over it, which infects both the mind and the body. It has been the seat of too much activity and luxury formerly, not to have produced a correspondent torpor and stagnation (both in the physical and moral world) as the natural consequence at present. If Necessity is the mother of Invention it must be stifled in the birth here, where every thing is already done and provided to your hand that you could possibly wish for or think of. You have no stimulus to exertion, for you have but to open your eyes and see, in order to live in a continued round of delight and admiration. The doors of a splendid banquet of all that is rare and rich in art stand ready open to you, you are invited to enter in and feast your senses and your imagination gratis; and it is not likely that, under these circumstances, you will try to earn a scanty meal by hard labour, or even to gain an appetite by wholesome exercise. The same thing occurs here that is objected to the inhabitants of great cities in general. They have too many objects always passing before them, that engage their attention and fill up their time, to allow them either much leisure or inclination for thought or study. Rome is the great metropolis of Art; and it is somewhat to be feared that those who take up their abode there will become, like other cockneys, ignorant, conceited, and superficial.

The queen and mistress of the ancient and the modern world claims such a transcendent superiority over the mind, that you look down as it were from this eminence on the rest of mankind; and from the contempt you feel for others, come to have a mighty good opinion of yourself. The being at Rome (both from the sound of the name and the monuments of genius and magnificence she has to show) is of itself a sufficient distinction without doing anything there. After viewing some splendid relic of antiquity, the efforts of contemporary art sink into insignificance and nothingness: but we are disposed to occupy the vacant space, the clear ground thus created, with our own puny pretensions and aspiring fancies. As this indulgence of alternate enthusiasm and reflected self-complacency is a never-failing source of gratification, and a much less laborious one than the embodying our vain imaginations in practice, we easily rest in the means as the end; and without making any farther progress, are perfectly satisfied with what others have done, and what we are to do. We indeed wear the livery, and follow in the train of greatness; and, like other livery-servants, despise the rabble, growing more lazy, affected, luxurious, insolent, trifling, and incapable of gaining an honest livelihood every hour. We are the dupes of flattering appearances and of false comparisons between ourselves and others. We think that a familiarity with great names and great works is an approach to an equality with them; or fondly proceed to establish our own pretensions on the ruins of others, not considering that if it were not what we do, but what we see, that is the standard of proficiency, thousands of spectators might give themselves the same airs of self-importance on the same idle score, and treat us as barbarians and poor creatures, if they had our impertinence and presumption. We stand before a picture of some great master, and fancy there is nothing between him and us: we walk under the Dome of St. Peter’s, and it seems to grow larger with a consciousness of our presence and with the amplitude of our conceptions. All this is fine as well as easy work; nor can it be supposed that we shall be in any haste to exchange this waking dream for the drudgery of mechanical exertion, or for the mortifying evidence of the disparity between our theory and our practice. All the great names and schools of art stand proxy for us, till we choose to take the responsibility on our own shoulders; and as it happens in other cases, we have no objection to make our faith in the merits of others a convenient substitute for good works and zealous exertions in the cause. Yet a common stone-mason or sign-painter, who understands the use of his tools and sticks close to his business, has more resemblance to Raphael or Michael Angelo, and stands a better chance of achieving something great, than those who visit the Corridors of the Vatican or St. Peter’s once a day, return home, spend the evening in extolling what they have witnessed, begin a sketch or a plan and lay it aside, and saunter out again the next day in search of fresh objects to dissipate ennui and kill the time without being obliged to draw for one instant on their own resources or resolution.

Numberless are the instances of those who go on thus, while vanity and indolence together are confirmed into an incurable disease, the sleek, pampered tone of which they mistake for the marks of taste and genius. What other result can be expected? If they do any thing, it is all over with them. They not only strip off the mask from their own self-love, but expose themselves to the pity and derision of their competitors, whom they before affected to despise. Within ‘the vast, the unbounded’ circle of pretension, of vapouring, and inuendo, they are safe: the future would-be Raphaels, Correggios, &c. have nothing to dread from criticism while they hatch their embryo conquests and prepare a distant triumph: no one can apply Ithuriel’s spear to detect what is confessedly a shadow. But they must waive this privilege when they descend into the common lists; and in proportion as they have committed themselves in conversation or in idle fancy, they are ashamed to commit themselves in reality, because any thing they could do at first must unavoidably fall short of that high standard of excellence, which (if at all) can only be attained by the labour and experience of a whole life. Their real incapacity shrinks from the pomp of their professions. The magnificence of the air-drawn edifice of their reputation prevents them from laying the first stone in downright earnest; and they have no other mode of excusing the delay, and the indecision it betokens, than by assuming still greater delicacy of taste and loftiness of ambition, and by thus aggrandising their unfounded schemes, rendering their execution more hopeless and impossible. Should they begin something, a new thought strikes them, and they throw aside a very promising sketch to enlarge their canvass and proceed upon a scale more worthy of them: to this enlarged design some object is indispensably necessary, which is unluckily wanting:—thus time is gained, a new lease of credit is granted, and instead of putting the last hand to the original sketch, they take merit to themselves for the enlargement of their views and the determined pursuit of the higher walk of art. Meantime, the smaller picture stands unfinished on the easel, and nominal commissions pour in for new and more extended projects. Then comes a new secret of colouring, a new principle of grouping, a new theory, a new book—always something to draw off the attention from its proper object, and to substitute laborious idleness for true pains and profitable study. Then a picture is to be copied as a preparation for undertaking a given subject, or a library to be ransacked to ascertain the precise truth of the historical facts or the exact conception of the characters; and after a year thus lost in desultory and scrupulous researches, the whole plan is given up, either because no one comes forward effectually to patronise it, or because some more tempting prospect is opened into the realms of art and high renown. Then again friends are to be consulted; some admire one thing, some another; some recommend the study of nature, others are all for the antique; some insist on the utmost finishing, others explode all attention to minutiæ; artists find one fault, the uninstructed spectator another; and in going backwards and forwards from one to another, listening to new reasons and new objections, in reconciling all parties and pleasing none, life is passed in endless doubts and difficulties, and we discover that our most valuable years have fled in busy preparations to do—nothing. It is then too late, and we consume the remainder in vain regrets and querulous repinings, as we did the flower and marrow of our time in fanciful speculation and egregious trifling. The student should of all things steer clear of the character of the dilettanti—it is the rock on which he is most likely to split. Pleasure, or extravagance, or positive idleness, are less dangerous; for these he knows to be fatal to his success, and he indulges in them with his eyes open. But in the other case, he is thrown off his guard by the most plausible appearances. Vanity here puts on the garb of humility, indecision of long-sighted perseverance, and habitual sloth of constant industry. Few will reproach us, while we are accumulating the means of ultimate success, with neglecting the end; or remind us that though art is long, life is short. It is true, that art is a long and steep ascent, but we must learn to scale it by regular, practical stages, and not by a hasty wish or still more futile calculations and measurements of the height. We can only indeed be sensible of its real height by the actual progress we have made, and by the glorious views that gradually dawn upon us, the cheerers of our way, and the harbingers of our success. It is only by attempting something that we feel where our strength lies, and if we have what travellers call a forte journée to perform, it is the more indispensable that we should set out betimes and not loiter on the road. What is well done is the consequence of doing much—perfection is the reward of numberless attempts and failures. The chief requisites are a practised hand and eye, and an active imagination. Indolent taste and passive acquirements are not enough. They will neither supply our wants while living, nor enable us to leave a name behind us after we are dead. Farther, the brooding over excellence with a feverish importunity, and stimulating ourselves to great things by an abstract love of fame, can do little good, and may do much harm. It is, no doubt, a very delightful and enviable state of mind to be in, but neither a very arduous nor a very profitable one. Nothing remarkable was ever done, except by following up the impulse of our own minds, by grappling with difficulties and improving our advantages, not by dreaming over our own premature triumphs or doating on the achievements of others.

If it were nothing else, the having the works of the great masters of former times always before us is enough to discourage and defeat all ordinary attempts. How many elegant designs and meritorious conceptions must lie buried under the high arched porticoes of the Vatican! The walls of the Sistine Chapel must fall upon the head of inferior pretensions and crush them. What minor pencil can stand in competition with the ‘petrific mace’ that painted the Last Judgment? What fancy can expand into blooming grace and beauty by the side of the Heliodorus? What is it we could add, or what occasion, what need, what pretence is there to add anything to the art after this? Who in the presence of such glorious works does not wish to shrink into himself, or to live only for them? Is it not a profanation to think he can hope to do any thing like them? And who, having once seen, can think with common patience or with zealous enthusiasm of doing aught but treading in their footsteps? If the artist has a genius and turn of mind at all similar, they baulk and damp him by their imposing stately height: if his talent lies in a different and humbler walk, they divert and unsettle his mind. If he is contented to look on and admire, a vague and unattainable idea of excellence floats before his imagination, and tantalises him with equally vain hopes and wishes. If he copies, he becomes a mechanic; and besides, runs another risk. He finds he can with ease produce in three days an incomparably finer effect than he could do with all his efforts, and after any length of time, in working without assistance. He is therefore disheartened and put out of countenance, and returns with reluctance to original composition: for where is the sense of taking ten times the pains and undergoing ten times the anxiety to produce not one hundredth part of the effect? When I was young, I made one or two studies of strong contrasts of light and shade in the manner of Rembrandt with great care and (as it was thought) with some success. But after I had once copied some of Titian’s portraits in the Louvre, my ambition took a higher flight. Nothing would serve my turn but heads like Titian—Titian expressions, Titian complexions, Titian dresses; and as I could not find these where I was, after one or two abortive attempts to engraft Italian art on English nature, I flung away my pencil in disgust and despair. Otherwise I might have done as well as others, I dare say, but from a desire to do too well. I did not consider that Nature is always the great thing, or that ‘Pan is a god, Apollo is no more!’—Nor is the student repelled and staggered in his progress only by the degree of excellence, but distracted and puzzled by the variety of incompatible claims upon his ingenuous and sincere enthusiasm. While any one attends to what circumstances bring in his way, or keeps in the path that is prompted by his own genius (such as it may be), he stands a fair chance, by directing all his efforts to one point, to compass the utmost object of his ambition. But what likelihood is there of this from the moment that all the great schools, and all the most precious chef-d’œuvres of art, at once unveil their diversified attractions to his astonished sight? What Protestant, for instance, can be properly and permanently imbued with the fervent devotion or saint-like purity of the Catholic religion, or hope to transfer the pride, pomp, and pageantry of that detested superstition to his own canvass, with real feeling and con amore? What modern can enter fully into the spirit of the ancient Greek mythology, or rival the symmetry of its naked forms? What single individual will presume to unite ‘the colouring of Titian, the drawing of Raphael, the airs of Guido, the learning of Poussin, the purity of Domenichino, the correggiescity of Correggio, and the grand contour of Michael Angelo,’ in the same composition? Yet those who are familiar with all these different styles and their excellences, require them all. Mere originality will not suffice, it is quaint and Gothic—common-place perfection is still more intolerable, it is insipid and mechanical. Modern Art is indeed like the fabled Sphinx, that imposes impossible tasks on her votaries, and as she clasps them to her bosom pierces them to the heart. Let a man have a turn and taste for landscape, she whispers him that nothing is truly interesting but the human face: if he makes a successful debut in portrait, he soon (under the same auspices) aspires to history; but if painting in its highest walks seems within his reach, she then plays off the solid forms and shining surfaces of sculpture before his eyes, urging him to combine the simple grandeur of the Antique with Canova’s polished elegance; or he is haunted with the majestic effects and scientific rules of architecture, and ruined temples and broken fragments nod in his bewildered imagination! What is to be done in this case? What generally is done—Nothing. Amidst so many pretensions, how is choice possible? Or where all are equally objects of taste and knowledge, how rest satisfied without giving some proofs of our practical proficiency in all? To mould a clay-figure that if finished might surpass the Venus; to make a pen-and-ink drawing after a splendid piece of colouring by Titian; to give the picturesque effect of the arch of some ancient aqueduct as seen by moonlight; some such meagre abstractions and flimsy refinements in art are among the spolia opima and patchwork trophies offered to the presiding Goddess of spleen, idleness, and affectation!—

Nothing can be conceived more unpropitious to ‘the high endeavour and the glad success,’ than the whole aspect and character of ancient Rome, both what remains as well as what is lost of it. Is this the Eternal City? Is this she that (amazon or votaress) was twice mistress of the world? Is this the country of the Scipios, the Cincinnati and the Gracchi, of Cato and of Brutus, of Pompey and of Sylla, is this the Capitol where Julius Cæsar fell, where Cicero thundered against Catiline, the scene of combats and of triumphs, and through whose gates kings and nations were led captive by the side of their conquerors’ chariot-wheels? All is vanished. The names alone remain to haunt the memory: the spirits of the mighty dead mock us, as we pass. The genius of Antiquity bestrides the place like a Colossus. Ruin here sits on her pedestal of pride, and reads a mortifying lecture to human vanity. We see all that ages, nations, a subjected world conspired to build up to magnificence, overthrown or hastening fast into decay; empire, religion, freedom, Gods and men trampled in the dust or consigned to the regions of lasting oblivion or of shadowy renown; and what are we that in this mighty wreck we should think of cultivating our petty talents and advancing our individual pretensions? Rome is the very tomb of ancient greatness, the grave of modern presumption. The mere consciousness of the presence in which we stand ought to abash and overawe our pragmatical self-conceit. Men here seem no better than insects crawling about: everything has a Lilliputian and insignificant appearance. Our big projects, our bloated egotism, shrink up within the enormous shadow of transitory power and splendour: the sinews of desire relax and moulder away, and the fever of youthful ambition is turned into a cold ague-fit. There is a languor in the air; and the contagion of listless apathy infects the hopes that are yet unborn.—As to what remains of actual power and spiritual authority, Hobbes said well, that ‘Popery was the ghost of the Roman Empire, sitting upon the ruins of Rome.’ The only flourishing thing in Rome (and that is only half flourishing) is an old woman; and who would wish to be an old woman? Greatness here is greatness in masquerade—one knows not whether to pity or laugh at it—and the Cardinals’ red legs peeping out like the legs of some outlandish stuffed bird in a Museum, excite much the same curiosity and surprise. No one (no Englishman at least) can be much edified by the array of distinctions, that denote a consummation of art or weakness. Still, perhaps, to the idle and frivolous there may be something alluring in this meretricious mummery and splendour, as moths are attracted to the taper’s blaze, and perish in it!

There is a great deal of gossiping and stuff going on at Rome. There are Conversationes, where the Cardinals go and admire the fair complexions and innocent smiles of the young Englishwomen; and where the English students who have the entrée look at the former with astonishment as a sort of nondescripts, and are not the less taken with their pretty countrywomen for being the objects of attention to Popish Cardinals. Then come the tittle-tattle of who and who’s together, the quaint and piquant inter-national gallantries, and the story of the greatest beauty in Rome said to be married to an English gentleman—how odd and at the same time how encouraging! Then the manners and customs of Rome excite a buzz of curiosity, and the English imagination is always recurring to and teazed with that luckless question of cicisbeism. Some affect to be candid, while others persist in their original blindness, and would set on foot a reform of the Roman metropolis—on the model of the British one! In short, there is a great deal too much tampering and dalliance with subjects, with which we have little acquaintance and less business. All this passes the time, and relieves the mind either after the fatigue or in the absence of more serious study. Then there is to be an Academy Meeting at night, and a debate is to take place whether the Academy ought not to have a President, and if so, whether the President of the Academy at Rome ought not (out of respect) to be a Royal Academician, thus extending the links in the chain of professional intrigue and cabal from one side of the Continent to the other. A speech is accordingly to be made, a motion seconded, which requires time and preparation—or a sudden thought strikes the more raw and heedless adventurer, but is lost for want of words to express it—Vox faucibus hæsit, and the cast of the Theseus looks dull and lumpish as the disappointed candidate for popular applause surveys it by the light of his lamp in retiring to his chamber, Sedet infelix Theseus, &c. So the next day Gibbon is bought and studied with great avidity to give him a command of tropes and figures at their next meeting. The arrival of some new lord or squire of high degree or clerical virtuoso is announced, and a cabal immediately commences, who is to share his patronage, who is to guide his taste, who is to show him the lions, who is to pasquinade, epigrammatise or caricature him, and fix his pretensions to taste and liberality as culminating from the zenith or sunk below zero. Everything here is transparent and matter of instant notoriety: nothing can be done in a corner. The English are comparatively few in number, and from their being in a foreign country are objects of importance to one another as well as of curiosity to the natives. All ranks and classes are blended together for mutual attack or defence. The patron sinks into the companion; the protegé plays off the great man upon occasion. Indeed the grand airs and haughty reserve of English manners are a little ridiculous and out of place at Rome. You are glad to meet with any one who will bestow his compassion and ‘his tediousness’ upon you. You want some shelter from the insolence and indifference of the inhabitants, which are very much calculated to repel the feelings, and throw you back on your resources in common humanity or the partiality of your fellow-countrymen. Nor is this the least inconvenience of a stranger’s residence at Rome. You have to squabble with every one about you to prevent being cheated, to drive a hard bargain in order to live, to keep your hands and your tongue within strict bounds, for fear of being stilettoed, or thrown into the Tower of St. Angelo, or remanded home. You have much to do to avoid the contempt of the inhabitants; if you fancy you can ingratiate yourself with them and play off the amiable, you have a still more charming pursuit and bait for vanity and idleness. You must run the gauntlet of sarcastic words or looks for a whole street, of laughter or want of comprehension in reply to all the questions you ask; or if a pretty black-browed girl puts on a gracious aspect, and seems to interest herself in your perplexity, you think yourself in high luck, and well repaid for a thousand affronts. A smile from a Roman beauty must be well nigh fatal to many an English student at Rome. In short, while abroad, and while our self-love is continually coming into collision with that of others, and neither knows what to make of the other, we are necessarily thinking of ourselves and of them, and in no pleasant or profitable way. Every thing is strange and new; we seem beginning life over again, and feel like children or rustics. We have not learned the alphabet of civilization and humanity: how, then, should we aspire to the height of Art? We are taken up with ourselves as English travellers and English students, when we should be thinking of something else. All the petty intrigue, vexation, and tracasserie of ordinary dealings, should be banished as much as possible from the mind of the student, who requires to have his whole time and faculties to himself; all ordinary matters should go on mechanically of themselves, without giving him a moment’s uneasiness or interruption; but here they are forced upon him with tenfold sharpness and frequency, hurting his temper and hindering his time. Instead of ‘tearing from his memory all trivial, fond records,’ that he may devote himself to the service of Art, and that ‘her commandment all alone may live within the book and volume of his brain, unmixed with baser matter,’ he is never free from the most pitiful annoyances—they follow him into the country, sit down with him at home, meet him in the street, take him by the button, whisper in his ear, prevent his sleeping, waken him before the dawn, and plague him out of his very life, making it resemble a restless dream or an ill-written romance. Under such disadvantages, should an artist do anything, the Academy which has sent him out should lose no time in sending for him back again; for there is nothing that may not be expected from an English student at Rome who has not become an idler, a petit-maitre, and a busy-body! Or if he is still unwilling to quit classic ground, is chained by the soft fetters of the climate or of a fair face, or likes to see the morning mist rise from the Marshes of the Campagna and circle round the Dome of St. Peter’s, and that to sever him from these would be to sever soul from body, let him go to Gensano, stop there for five years, visiting Rome only at intervals, wander by Albano’s gleaming lake and wizard grottoes, make studies of the heads and dresses of the peasant-girls in the neighbourhood, those Goddesses of health and good-temper, embody them to the life, and show (as the result) what the world never saw before!

FINE ARTS

OBJECTS OF THE ARTICLE.—In the Encyclopædia there is some account, under the head ARTS, of the general theory and history of the Fine Arts, including Poetry, Eloquence, Painting, Statuary, and Architecture. The term, in its widest application, would also embrace Music, Dancing, Theatrical Exhibition; and in general, all those arts, in which the powers of imitation or invention are exerted, chiefly with a view to the production of pleasure, by the immediate impression which they make on the mind. The phrase has of late, we think, been restricted to a narrower and more technical signification; namely, to Painting, Sculpture, Engraving, and Architecture, which appeal to the eye as the medium of pleasure; and by way of eminence, to the two first of these arts. In the present article, we shall adopt this limited sense of the term; and shall endeavour to develope the principles upon which the great Masters have proceeded, and also to inquire, in a more particular manner, into the state and probable advancement of these arts in this Country.

RULING PRINCIPLE OF THE FINE ARTS.—The great works of art, at present extant, and which may be regarded as models of perfection in their several kinds, are the Greek statues—the pictures of the celebrated Italian Masters—those of the Dutch and Flemish schools—to which we may add the comic productions of our own countryman, Hogarth. These all stand unrivalled in the history of art; and they owe their pre-eminence and perfection to one and the same principle,—the immediate imitation of nature. This principle predominated equally in the classical forms of the antique, and in the grotesque figures of Hogarth; the perfection of art in each arose from the truth and identity of the imitation with the reality; the difference was in the subjects; there was none in the mode of imitation. Yet the advocates for the ideal system of art would persuade their disciples, that the difference between Hogarth and the antique does not consist in the different forms of nature which they imitated, but in this, that the one is like, and the other unlike nature. This is an error, the most detrimental, perhaps, of all others, both to the theory and practice of art. As, however, the prejudice is very strong and general, and supported by the highest authority, it will be necessary to go somewhat elaborately into the question in order to produce an impression on the other side.

What has given rise to the common notion of the ideal, as something quite distinct from actual nature, is probably the perfection of the Greek statues. Not seeing among ourselves any thing to correspond in beauty and grandeur, either with the features or form of the limbs in these exquisite remains of antiquity, it was an obvious, but a superficial conclusion, that they must have been created from the idea existing in the artist’s mind, and could not have been copied from anything existing in nature. The contrary, however, is the fact. The general form, both of the face and figure, which we observe in the old statues, is not an ideal abstraction, is not a fanciful invention of the sculptor, but is as completely local and national (though it happens to be more beautiful) as the figures on a Chinese screen, or a copperplate engraving of a negro chieftain in a book of travels. It will not be denied that there is a difference of physiognomy as well as of complexion in different races of men. The Greek form appears to have been naturally beautiful, and they had, besides, every advantage of climate, of dress, of exercise, and modes of life to improve it. The artist had also every facility afforded him in the study and knowledge of the human form, and their religious and public institutions gave him every encouragement in the prosecution of his art. All these causes contributed to the perfection of these noble productions; but we should be inclined principally to attribute the superior symmetry of form common to the Greek statues, in the first place, to the superior symmetry of the models in nature, and in the second, to the more constant opportunities for studying them. If we allow, also, for the superior genius of the people, we shall not be wrong; but this superiority consisted in their peculiar susceptibility to the impressions of what is beautiful and grand in nature. It may be thought an objection to what has just been said, that the antique figures of animals, &c., are as fine, and proceed on the same principles as their statues of gods or men. But all that follows from this seems to be, that their art had been perfected in the study of the human form, the test and proof of power and skill; and was then transferred easily to the general imitation of all other objects, according to their true characters, proportions, and appearances. As a confirmation of these remarks, the antique portraits of individuals were often superior even to the personifications of their gods. We think that no unprejudiced spectator of real taste can hesitate for a moment in preferring the head of the Antinous, for example, to that of the Apollo. And in general, it may be laid down as a rule, that the most perfect of the antiques are the most simple;—those which affect the least action, or violence of passion;—which repose the most on natural beauty of form, and a certain expression of sweetness and dignity, that is, which remain most nearly in that state in which they could be copied from nature without straining the limbs or features of the individual, or racking the invention of the artist. This tendency of Greek art to repose has indeed been reproached with insipidity by those who had not a true feeling of beauty and sentiment. We, however, prefer these models of habitual grace or internal grandeur to the violent distortions of suffering in the Laocoon, or even to the supercilious air of the Apollo. The Niobe, more than any other antique head, combines truth and beauty with deep passion. But here the passion is fixed, intense, habitual;—it is not a sudden or violent gesticulation, but a settled mould of features; the grief it expresses is such as might almost turn the human countenance itself into marble!

In general, then, we would be understood to maintain, that the beauty and grandeur so much admired in the Greek statues were not a voluntary fiction of the brain of the artist, but existed substantially in the forms from which they were copied, and by which the artist was surrounded. A striking authority in support of these observations, which has in some measure been lately discovered, is to be found in the Elgin marbles, taken from the Acropolis at Athens, and supposed to be the works of the celebrated Phidias. The process of fastidious refinement and indefinite abstraction is certainly not visible there. The figures have all the ease, the simplicity, and variety, of individual nature. Even the details of the subordinate parts, the loose hanging folds in the skin, the veins under the belly or on the sides of the horses, more or less swelled as the animal is more or less in action, are given with scrupulous exactness. This is true nature and true art. In a word, these invaluable remains of antiquity are precisely like casts taken from life. The ideal is not the preference of that which exists only in the mind, to that which exists in nature; but the preference of that which is fine in nature to that which is less so. There is nothing fine in art but what is taken almost immediately, and, as it were, in the mass, from what is finer in nature. Where there have been the finest models in nature, there have been the finest works of art.

As the Greek statues were copied from Greek forms, so Raphael’s expressions were taken from Italian faces; and we have heard it remarked, that the women in the streets at Rome seem to have walked out of his pictures in the Vatican.

Sir Joshua Reynolds constantly refers to Raphael as the highest example in modern times (at least with one exception) of the grand or ideal style; and yet he makes the essence of that style to consist in the embodying of an abstract or general idea, formed in the mind of the artist by rejecting the peculiarities of individuals, and retaining only what is common to the species. Nothing can be more inconsistent than the style of Raphael with this definition. In his Cartoons and in his groupes in the Vatican, there is hardly a face or figure which is any thing more than fine individual nature finely disposed and copied. The late Mr. Barry, who could not be suspected of a prejudice on this side of the question, speaks thus of them: “In Raphael’s pictures (at the Vatican) of the Dispute of the Sacrament, and the School of Athens, one sees all the heads to be entirely copied from particular characters in nature, nearly proper for the persons and situations which he adapts them to; and he seems to me only to add and take away what may answer his purpose in little parts, features, &c.; conceiving, while he had the head before him, ideal characters and expressions, which he adapts these features and peculiarities of face to. This attention to the particulars which distinguish all the different faces, persons, and characters, the one from the other, gives his pictures quite the verity and unaffected dignity of nature, which stamp the distinguishing differences betwixt one man’s face and body and another’s.”

If any thing is wanting to the conclusiveness of this testimony, it is only to look at the pictures themselves; particularly the Miracle of the Conversion, and the Assembly of Saints, which are little else than a collection of divine portraits, in natural and expressive attitudes, full of the loftiest thought and feeling, and as varied as they are fine. It is this reliance on the power of nature which has produced those masterpieces by the prince of painters, in which expression is all in all;—where one spirit,—that of truth,—pervades every part, brings down Heaven to Earth, mingles Cardinals and Popes with Angels and Apostles,—and yet blends and harmonizes the whole by the true touches and intense feeling of what is beautiful and grand in nature. It is no wonder that Sir Joshua, when he first saw Raphael’s pictures in the Vatican, was at a loss to discover any great excellence in them, if he was looking out for his theory of the ideal,—of neutral character and middle forms.

There is more an appearance of abstract grandeur of form in Michael Angelo. He has followed up, has enforced, and expanded, as it were, a preconceived idea, till he sometimes seems to tread on the verge of caricature. His forms, however, are not middle, but extreme forms, massy, gigantic, supernatural. They convey the idea of the greatest size and strength in the figure, and in all the parts of the figure. Every muscle is swollen and turgid. This tendency to exaggeration would have been avoided, if Michael Angelo had recurred more constantly to nature, and had proceeded less on a scientific knowledge of the structure of the human body; for science gives only the positive form of the different parts, which the imagination may afterwards magnify, as it pleases, but it is nature alone which combines them with perfect truth and delicacy, in all the varieties of motion and expression. It is fortunate that we can refer, in illustration of our doctrine, to the admirable fragment of the Theseus at Lord Elgin’s, which shows the possibility of uniting the grand and natural style in the highest degree. The form of the limbs, as affected by pressure or action, and the general sway of the body, are preserved with the most consummate mastery. We should prefer this statue as a model for forming the style of the student to the Apollo, which strikes us as having something of a theatrical appearance, or to the Hercules, in which there is an ostentatious and over-laboured display of anatomy. This last figure is so overloaded with sinews, that it has been suggested as a doubt, whether, if life could be put into it, it would be able to move. Grandeur of conception, truth of nature, and purity of taste, seem to have been at their height when the masterpieces which adorned the temple of Minerva at Athens, of which we have only these imperfect fragments, were produced. Compared with these, the later Greek statues display a more elaborate workmanship, more of the artifices of style. The several parts are more uniformly balanced, made more to tally like modern periods: each muscle is more equally brought out, and more highly finished as a part, but not with the same subordination of each part to the whole. If some of these wonderful productions have a fault, it is the want of that entire and naked simplicity which pervades the whole of the Elgin marbles.

WORKS OF THE GRECIAN AND ITALIAN ARTISTS.—Having spoken here of the Greek statues, and of the works of Raphael and Michael Angelo, as far as relates to the imitation of nature, we shall attempt to point out, to the best of our ability, and as concisely as possible, what we conceive to be their general and characteristic excellences. The ancients excelled in beauty of form; Michael Angelo in grandeur of conception; Raphael in expression. In Raphael’s faces, particularly his women, the expression is very superior to the form; in the ancient statues the form is the principal thing. The interest which the latter excite, is in a manner external; it depends on a certain grace and lightness of appearance, joined with exquisite symmetry and refined susceptibility to voluptuous emotions; but there is in general a want of pathos. In their looks, we do not read the workings of the heart; by their beauty they seem raised above the sufferings of humanity, by their beauty they are deified. The pathos which they exhibit is rather that of present and physical distress, than of deep internal sentiment. What has been remarked of Leonardo da Vinci, is also true of Raphael, that there is an angelic sweetness and tenderness in his faces, in which human frailty and passion are purified by the sanctity of religion. The ancient statues are finer objects for the eye to contemplate; they represent a more perfect race of physical beings, but we have little sympathy with them. In Raphael, all our natural sensibilities are heightened and refined by the sentiments of faith and hope, pointing mysteriously to the interests of another world. The same intensity of passion appears also to distinguish Raphael from Michael Angelo. Michael Angelo’s forms are grander, but they are not so informed with expression. Raphael’s, however ordinary in themselves, are full of expression, ‘even to o’erflowing;’ every nerve and muscle is impregnated with feeling,—bursting with meaning. In Michael Angelo, on the contrary, the powers of body and mind appear superior to any events that can happen to them; the capacity of thought and feeling is never full, never strained or tasked to the extremity of what it will bear. All is in a lofty repose and solitary grandeur, which no human interest can shake or disturb. It has been said that Michael Angelo painted man, and Raphael men; that the one was an epic, the other a dramatic painter. But the distinction we have stated is, perhaps, truer and more intelligible, viz. that the one gave greater dignity of form, and the other greater force and refinement of expression. Michael Angelo, in fact, borrowed his style from sculpture. He represented, in general, only single figures (with subordinate accompaniments), and had not to express the conflicting actions and passions of a multitude of persons. It is therefore a mere truism to say that his compositions are not dramatic. He is much more picturesque than Raphael. The whole figure of his Jeremiah droops and hangs down like a majestic tree surcharged with showers. His drawing of the human form has the characteristic freedom and boldness of Titian’s landscapes.

After Michael Angelo and Raphael, there is no doubt that Leonardo da Vinci, and Correggio, are the two painters, in modern times, who have carried historical expression to the highest ideal perfection; and yet it is equally certain that their heads are carefully copied from faces and expressions in nature. Leonardo excelled principally in his women and children. We find, in his female heads, a peculiar charm of expression; a character of natural sweetness and tender playfulness, mixed up with the pride of conscious intellect, and the graceful reserve of personal dignity. He blends purity with voluptuousness; and the expression of his women is equally characteristic of ‘the mistress or the saint.’ His pictures are worked up to the height of the idea he had conceived, with an elaborate, felicity; but this idea was evidently first suggested, and afterwards religiously compared with nature. This was his excellence. His fault is, that his style of execution is too mathematical; that is, his pencil does not follow the graceful variety of the details of objects, but substitutes certain refined gradations, both of form and colour, producing equal changes in equal distances, with a mechanical uniformity. Leonardo was a man of profound learning as well as genius, and perhaps transferred too much of the formality of science to his favourite art.

The masterpieces of Correggio have the same identity with nature, the same stamp of truth. He has indeed given to his pictures the utmost softness and refinement of outline and expression; but this idea, at which he constantly aimed, is filled up with all the details and varieties which such heads would have in nature. So far from any thing like a naked abstract idea, or middle form, the individuality of his faces has something peculiar in it, even approaching the grotesque. He has endeavoured to impress habitually on the countenance, those undulating outlines which rapture or tenderness leave there, and has chosen for this purpose those forms and proportions which most obviously assisted his design.

As to the colouring of Correggio, it is nature itself. Not only the general tone is perfectly true, but every speck and particle is varied in colour, in relief, in texture, with a care, a felicity, and an effect, which is almost magical. His light and shade are equally admirable. No one else, perhaps, ever gave the same harmony and roundness to his compositions. So true are his shadows,—equally free from coldness, opacity, or false glare;—so clear, so broken, so airy, and yet so deep, that if you hold your hand so as to cast a shadow on any part of the flesh which is in the light, this part, so shaded, will present exactly the same appearance which the painter has given to the shadowed part of the picture. Correggio, indeed, possessed a greater variety of excellences in the different departments of his art, than any other painter; and yet it is remarkable, that the impression which his pictures leave upon the mind of the common spectator, is monotonous and comparatively feeble. His style is in some degree mannered and confined. For instance, he is without the force, passion, and grandeur of Raphael, who, however, possessed his softness of expression, but of expression only; and in colour, in light and shade, and other qualities, was quite inferior to Correggio. We may, perhaps, solve this apparent contradiction by saying, that he applied the power of his mind to a greater variety of objects than others; but that this power was still of the same character; consisting in a certain exquisite sense of the harmonious, the soft and graceful in form, colour, and sentiment, but with a deficiency of strength, and a tendency to effeminacy in all these.

After the names of Raphael and Correggio, we shall mention that of Guido, whose female faces are exceedingly beautiful and ideal, but altogether commonplace and vapid, compared with those of Raphael or Correggio; and they are so, for no other reason but that the general idea they convey is not enriched and strengthened by an intense contemplation of nature. For the same reason, we can conceive nothing more unlike the antique than the figures of Nicholas Poussin, except as to the preservation of the costume; and it is perhaps chiefly owing to the habit of studying his art at second-hand, or by means of scientific rules, that the great merits of that able painter, whose understanding and genius are unquestionable, are confined to his choice of subjects for his pictures, and his manner of telling the story. His landscapes, which he probably took from nature, are superior as paintings to his historical pieces. The faces of Poussin want natural expression, as his figures want grace; but the back grounds of his historical compositions can scarcely be surpassed. In his plague of Athens, the very buildings seem stiff with horror. His giants, seated on the top of their fabled mountains, and playing on their Pan’s pipes, are as familiar and natural as if they were the ordinary inhabitants of the scene. The finest of his landscapes is his picture of the Deluge. The sun is just seen, wan and drooping in his course. The sky is bowed down with a weight of waters, and Heaven and earth seem mingling together.

Titian is at the head of the Venetian school. He is the first of all colourists. In delicacy and purity Correggio is equal to him, but his colouring has not the same warmth and gusto in it. Titian’s flesh-colour partakes of the glowing nature of the climate, and of the luxuriousness of the manners of his country. He represents objects not through a merely lucid medium, but as if tinged with a golden light. Yet it is wonderful in how low a tone of local colouring his pictures are painted,—how rigidly his means are husbanded. His most gorgeous effects are produced, not less by keeping down, than by heightening his colours; the fineness of his gradations adds to their variety and force; and, with him, truth is the same thing as splendour. Every thing is done by the severity of his eye, by the patience of his touch. He is enabled to keep pace with nature, by never hurrying on before her; and as he forms the broadest masses out of innumerable varying parts and minute strokes of the pencil, so he unites and harmonises the strongest contrasts by the most imperceptible transitions. Every distinction is relieved and broken by some other intermediate distinction, like half notes in music; and yet all this accumulation of endless variety is so managed, as only to produce the majestic simplicity of nature; so that to a common eye there is nothing extraordinary in his pictures, any more than in nature itself. It is, we believe, owing to what has been here stated, that Titian is, of all painters, at once the easiest and the most difficult to copy. He is the most difficult to copy perfectly, for the artifice of his colouring and execution is hid in its apparent simplicity; and yet the knowledge of nature, and the arrangement of the forms and masses in his pictures, is so masterly, that any copy made from them, even the rudest outline or sketch, can hardly fail to have a look of high art. Because he was the greatest colourist in the world, this, which was his most prominent, has, for shortness, been considered as his only excellence; and he has been said to have been ignorant of drawing. What he was, generally speaking, deficient in, was invention or composition, though even this appears to have been more from habit than want of power; but his drawing of actual forms, where they were not to be put into momentary action, or adapted to a particular expression, was as fine as possible. His drawing of the forms of inanimate objects is unrivalled. His trees have a marked character and physiognomy of their own, and exhibit an appearance of strength or flexibility, solidity or lightness, as if they were endued with conscious power and purpose. Character was another excellence which Titian possessed in the highest degree. It is scarcely speaking too highly of his portraits to say, that they have as much expression, that is, convey as fine an idea of intellect and feeling, as the historical heads of Raphael. The chief difference appears to be, that the expression in Raphael is more imaginary and contemplative, and in Titian more personal and constitutional. The heads of the one seem thinking more of some event or subject, those of the other to be thinking more of themselves. In the portraits of Titian, as might be expected, the Italian character always predominates; there is a look of piercing sagacity, of commanding intellect, of acute sensibility, which it would be in vain to seek for in any other portraits. The daring spirit and irritable passions of the age and country, are distinctly stamped upon their countenances, and can be as little mistaken as the costume which they wear. The portraits of Raphael, though full of profound thought and feeling, have more of common humanity about them. Titian’s portraits are the most historical that ever were painted; and they are so, for this reason, that they have most consistency of form and expression. His portraits of Hippolito de Medici, and of a young Neapolitan nobleman, lately in the gallery of the Louvre, are a striking contrast in this respect. All the lines of the face in the one, the eye-brows, the nose, the corners of the mouth, the contour of the face, present the same sharp angles, the same acute, edgy, contracted, violent expression. The other portrait has the finest expansion of feature and outline, and conveys the most exquisite idea possible, of mild, thoughtful sentiment. The consistency of the expression constitutes as great a charm in Titian’s portraits, as the harmony of the colouring. The similarity sometimes objected to his heads, is partly national, and partly arises from the class of persons whom he painted. He painted only Italians; and in his time it rarely happened, that any but persons of the highest rank, Senators or Cardinals, sat for their pictures. The similarity of costume of the dress, the beard, &c. also adds to the similarity of their appearance. It adds, at the same time, to their picturesque effect; and the alteration in this respect, is one circumstance among others that has been injurious, not to say fatal, to modern art. This observation is not confined to portrait; for the hired dresses with which our historical painters clothe their figures sit no more easily on the imagination of the artist, than they do gracefully on the lay-figures over which they are thrown.

Giorgioni, Paul Veronese, Tintoret, and the Bassans, are the remaining great names of the Venetian school. The excellence of all of them consisted in the bold, masterly, and striking imitation of nature. Their want of ideal form and elevated character is, indeed, a constant subject of reproach against them. Giorgioni takes the first place among them; for he was in some measure the master of Titian, whereas the others were only his disciples. The Carraccis, Domenichino, and the rest of the Bolognese school, formed themselves on a principle of combining the excellences of the Roman and Venetian painters, in which they for a while succeeded to a considerable degree; but they degenerated and dwindled away into absolute insignificance, in proportion as they departed from nature, or the great masters who had copied her, to mould their works on academic rules, and the phantoms of abstract perfection.

FLEMISH AND DUTCH PAINTERS.—Rubens is the prince of the Flemish painters. Of all the great painters, he is perhaps the most artificial,—the one who painted most from his own imagination,—and, what was almost the inevitable consequence, the most of a mannerist. He had neither the Greek forms to study from, nor the Roman expression, nor the high character, picturesque costume, and sun-burnt hues which the Venetian painters had immediately before them. He took, however, what circumstances presented to him,—a fresher and more blooming tone of complexion, arising from moister air, and a colder climate. To this he added the congenial splendour of reflected lights and shadows cast from rich drapery; and he made what amends he could for the want of expression, by the richness of his compositions, and the fantastic variety of his allegorical groups. Both his colouring and his drawing were, however, ideal exaggerations. But both had particular qualities of the highest value. He has given to his flesh greater transparency and freshness than any other painter; and this excellence he had from nature. One of the finest instances will be found in his Peasant Family going to Market, in which the figures have all the bloom of health upon their countenances; and the very air of the surrounding landscape strikes sharp and wholesome on the sense. Rubens had another excellence; he has given all that relates to the expression of motion in his allegorical figures, in his children, his animals, even in his trees, to a degree which no one else has equalled, or indeed approached. His drawing is often deficient in proportion, in knowledge, and in elegance, but it is always picturesque. The drawing of N. Poussin, on the contrary, which has been much cried up, is merely learned and anatomical: he has a knowledge of the structure and measurements of the human body, but very little feeling of the grand, or beautiful, or striking, in form. All Rubens’s forms have ease, freedom, and excessive elasticity. In the grotesque style of history,—as in the groups of satyrs, nymphs, bacchanals, and animals, where striking contrasts of form are combined with every kind of rapid and irregular movement, he has not a rival. Witness his Silenus at Blenheim, where the lines seem drunk and staggering; and his procession of Cupids riding on animals at Whitehall, with that adventurous leader of the infantine crew, who, with a spear, is urging a lion, on which he is mounted, over the edge of the world; for beyond we only see a precipice of clouds and sky. Rubens’s power of expressing motion perhaps arose from the facility of his pencil, and his habitually trusting a good deal to memory and imagination in his compositions; for this quality can be given in no other way. His portraits are the least valuable productions of his pencil. His landscapes are often delightful, and appear like the work of fairy hands.

It remains to speak of Vandyke and Rembrandt, the one the disciple of Rubens, the other the entire founder of his own school. It is not possible for two painters to be more opposite. The characteristic merits of the former are very happily summed up in a single line of a poetical critic, where he speaks of

‘The soft precision of the clear Vandyke.’

The general object of this analysis of the works of the great masters, has been to show, that their pre-eminence has constantly depended, not on the creation of a fantastic, abstract excellence, existing nowhere but in their own minds, but in their selecting and embodying some one view of nature, which came immediately under their habitual observation, and which their particular genius led them to study and imitate with success. This is certainly the case with Vandyke. His portraits, mostly of English women, in the collection in the Louvre, have a cool refreshing air about them, a look of simplicity and modesty even in the very tone, which forms a fine contrast to the voluptuous glow and mellow golden lustre of Titian’s Italian women. There is a quality of flesh-colour in Vandyke which is to be found in no other painter, and which exactly conveys the idea of the soft, smooth, sliding, continuous, delicately varied surface of the skin. The objects in his pictures have the least possible difference of light and shade, and are presented to the eye without passing through any indirect medium. It is this extreme purity and silvery clearness of tone, together with the facility and precision of his particular forms, and a certain air of fashionable elegance, characteristic of the age in which he flourished, that places Vandyke in the first rank of portrait painters.

If ever there was a man of genius in the art, it was Rembrandt. He might be said to have created a medium of his own, through which he saw all objects. He was the grossest and the least vulgar, that is to say, the least common-place in his grossness, of all men. He was the most downright, the least fastidious of the imitators of nature. He took any object, he cared not what, how mean soever in form, colour, and expression, and from the light and shade which he threw upon it, it came out gorgeous from his hands. As Vandyke made use of the smallest contrasts of light and shade, and painted as if in the open air, Rembrandt used the most violent and abrupt contrasts in this respect, and painted his objects as if in a dungeon. His pictures may be said to be ‘bright with excessive darkness.’ His vision had acquired a lynx-eyed sharpness from the artificial obscurity to which he had accustomed himself. ‘Mystery and silence hung upon his pencil.’ Yet he could pass rapidly from one extreme to another, and dip his colours with equal success in the gloom of night, or in the blaze of the noon-day sun. In surrounding different objects with a medium of imagination, solemn or dazzling, he was a true poet; in all the rest, he was a mere painter, but a painter of no common stamp. The powers of his hand were equal to those of his eye; and indeed he could not have attempted the subjects he did, without an execution as masterly as his knowledge was profound. His colours are sometimes dropped in lumps on the canvas; at other times they are laid on as smooth as glass; and he not unfrequently painted with the handle of his brush. He had an eye for all objects as far as he had seen them. His history and landscapes are equally fine in their way. His landscapes we could look at for ever, though there is nothing in them. But ‘they are of the earth, earthy.’ It seems as if he had dug them out of nature. Every thing is so true, so real, so full of all the feelings and associations which the eye can suggest to the other senses, that we immediately take as strong an affection to them as if they were our home—the very place where we were brought up. No length of time could add to the intensity of the impression they convey. Rembrandt is the least classical and the most romantic of all painters. His Jacob’s Ladder is more like a dream than any other picture that ever was painted. The figure of Jacob himself is thrown in one corner of the picture like a bundle of clothes, while the angels hover above the darkness, in the shape of airy wings.

It would be needless to prove that the generality of the Dutch painters copied from actual objects. They have become almost a bye-word for carrying this principle into its abuse, by copying every thing they saw, and having no choice or preference of one thing to another, unless that they preferred that which was most obvious and common. We forgive them. They perhaps did better in faithfully and skilfully imitating what they had seen, than in imagining what they had not seen. Their pictures at least show, that there is nothing in nature, however mean or trivial, that has not its beauty and some interest belonging to it, if truly represented. We prefer Vangoyen’s views on the borders of a canal, the yellow-tufted bank, and passing sail, or Ruysdael’s woods and sparkling waterfalls, to the most classical or epic compositions which they could have invented out of nothing; and we think that Teniers’s boors, old women, and children, are very superior to the little carved ivory Venuses in the pictures of Vanderneer; just as we think Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode is better than his Sigismunda, or as Mr. Wilkie’s Card-Players is better than his Alfred. We should not assuredly prefer a Dutch Fair by Teniers to a Cartoon by Raphael; but we suspect we should prefer a Dutch Fair by Teniers to a Cartoon by the same master; or we should prefer truth and nature in the simplest dress, to affectation and inanity in the most pompous disguise. Whatever is genuine in art must proceed from the impulse of nature and individual genius.

FRENCH AND SPANISH PAINTERS.—In the French school there are but two names of high and established reputation, N. Poussin and Claude Lorraine. Of the former we have already spoken; of the latter we shall give our opinion when we come to speak of our own Wilson. We ought not to pass over the names of Murillo and Velasquez, those admirable Spanish painters. It is difficult to characterize their peculiar excellences as distinct from those of the Italian and Dutch schools. They may be said to hold a middle rank between the painters of mind and body. They express not so much thought and sentiment, nor yet the mere exterior, as the life and spirit of the man. Murillo is probably at the head of that class of painters who have treated subjects of common life. After making the colours on the canvass feel and think, the next best thing is to make them breathe and live. But there is in Murillo’s pictures of this kind a look of real life, a cordial flow of native animal spirits, which we find nowhere else. We might here refer particularly to his picture of the Two Spanish Beggar Boys, in the collection at Dulwich College, which cannot easily be forgotten by those who have ever seen it.

PROGRESS OF ART IN BRITAIN.—We come now to speak of the progress of art in our own Country,—of its present state,—and the means proposed for advancing it to still higher perfection.

HOGARTH.—We shall speak first of Hogarth, both as he is the first name in the order of time that we have to boast of, and as he is the greatest comic painter of any age or country. His pictures are not imitations of still life, or mere transcripts of incidental scenes or customs; but powerful moral satires, exposing vice and folly in their most ludicrous points of view, and with a profound insight into the weak sides of character and manners, in all their tendencies, combinations, and contrasts. There is not a single picture of his, containing a representation of merely natural or domestic scenery. His object is not so much ‘to hold the mirror up to nature,’ as ‘to show vice her own feature, scorn her own image.’ Folly is there seen at the height—the moon is at the full—it is the very error of the time. There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities, a tilt and tournament of absurdities, pampered into all sorts of affectation, airy, extravagant, and ostentatious! Yet he is as little a caricaturist as he is a painter of still life. Criticism has not done him justice, though public opinion has. His works have received a sanction which it would be vain to dispute, in the universal delight and admiration with which they have been regarded, from their first appearance, to the present moment. If the quantity of amusement, or of matter for reflection which they have afforded, is that by which we are to judge of precedence among the intellectual benefactors of mankind, there are perhaps few persons who can put in a stronger claim to our gratitude than Hogarth. The wonderful knowledge which he possessed of human life and manners, is only to be surpassed (if it can be) by the powers of invention with which he has arranged his materials, and by the mastery of execution with which he has embodied and made tangible the very thoughts and passing movements of the mind. Some persons object to the style of Hogarth’s pictures, or the class to which they belong. First, Hogarth belongs to no class, or, if he belongs to any, it is to the same class as Fielding, Smollett, Vanbrugh, and Molière. Besides, the merit of his pictures does not depend on the nature of his subjects, but on the knowledge displayed of them, on the number of ideas, on the fund of observation and amusement contained in them. Make what deductions you please for the vulgarity of the subjects—yet in the research, the profundity, the absolute truth and precision of the delineation of character,—in the invention of incident, in wit and humour, in life and motion, in everlasting variety and originality,—they never have, and probably never will be, surpassed. They stimulate the faculties, as well as amuse them. ‘Other pictures we see, Hogarth’s we read.’[54]

There is one error which has been frequently entertained on this subject, and which we wish to correct, namely, that Hogarth’s genius was confined to the imitation of the coarse humours and broad farce of the lowest life. But he excelled quite as much in exhibiting the vices, the folly, and frivolity of the fashionable manners of his time. His fine ladies do not yield the palm of ridicule to his waiting-maids, and his lords and his porters are on a very respectable footing of equality. He is quite at home, either in St. Giles’s or St. James’s. There is no want, for example, in his Marriage à la Mode, or his Taste in High Life, of affectation verging into idiotcy, or of languid sensibility that might

‘Die of a rose in aromatic pain.’

Many of Hogarth’s characters would form admirable illustrations of Pope’s Satires, who was contemporary with him. In short, Hogarth was a painter of real, not of low life. He was, as we have said, a satirist, and consequently his pencil did not dwell on the grand and beautiful, but it glanced, with equal success at the absurdities and peculiarities of high or low life, ‘of the great vulgar and the small.’

To this it must be added, that he was as great a master of passion as of humour. He succeeded in low tragedy, as much as in low or genteel comedy, and had an absolute power in moving the affections and rending the hearts of the spectators, by depicting the effects of the most dreadful calamities of human life, on common minds and common countenances. Of this, the Rake’s Progress, particularly the Bedlam scene, and many others, are unanswerable proofs. Hogarth’s merits, as a mere artist, are not confined to his prints. In general, indeed, this is the case. But when he chose to take pains, he could add the delicacies of execution and colouring in the highest degree to those of character and composition; as is evident in his series of pictures, all equally well painted, of the Marriage à la Mode, exhibited lately at the British Institution.

WILSON.—We shall next speak of Wilson, whose pictures may be divided into three classes:—his Italian landscapes, or imitations of the manner of Claude,—his copies of English scenery,—and his historical compositions. The first of these are, in our opinion, by much the best; and we appeal, in support of this opinion, to the Apollo and the Seasons, and to the Phaeton. The figures are of course out of the question (these being as uncouth and slovenly as Claude’s are insipid and finical); but the landscape, in both pictures, is delightful. In looking at them, we breathe the air which the scene inspires, and feel the genius of the place present to us. In the first, there is the cool freshness of a misty spring morning; the sky, the water, the dim horizon, all convey the same feeling. The fine grey tone, and varying outline of the hills; the graceful form of the retiring lake, broken still more by the hazy shadows of the objects that repose on its bosom; the light trees that expand their branches in the air; and the dark stone figure and mouldering temple, that contrast strongly with the broad clear light of the rising day,—give a charm, a truth, a force and harmony to this composition, which produce the greater pleasure the longer it is dwelt on. The distribution of light and shade resembles the effect of light on a globe. The Phaeton has the dazzling fervid appearance of an autumnal evening; the golden radiance streams in solid masses from behind the flickering clouds; every object is baked in the sun;—the brown fore-ground, the thick foliage of the trees, the streams, shrunk and stealing along behind the dark high banks,—combine to produce that richness, and characteristic unity of effect, which is to be found only in nature, or in art derived from the study and imitation of nature. These two pictures, as they have the greatest general effect, are also more carefully finished than any other pictures we have seen of his.

In general, Wilson’s views of English scenery want almost every thing that ought to recommend them. The subjects he has chosen are not well fitted for the landscape-painter, and there is nothing in the execution to redeem them. Ill-shaped mountains, or great heaps of earth, trees that grow against them without character or elegance, motionless waterfalls, a want of relief, of transparency and distance, without the imposing grandeur of real magnitude (which it is scarcely within the province of art to give),—are the chief features and defects of this class of his pictures. In more confined scenes, the effect must depend almost entirely on the difference in the execution and the details; for the difference of colour alone is not sufficient to give relief to objects placed at a small distance from the eye. But, in Wilson, there are commonly no details,—all is loose and general; and this very circumstance, which might assist him in giving the massy contrasts of light and shade, deprived his pencil of all force and precision within a limited space. In general, air is necessary to the landscape painter; and, for this reason, the lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland afford few subjects for landscape-painting. However stupendous the scenery of that country is, and however powerful and lasting the impression which it must always make on the imagination, yet the effect is not produced merely through the medium of the eye, but arises chiefly from collateral and associated feelings. There is the knowledge of the physical magnitude of the objects in the midst of which we are placed,—the slow, improgressive motion which we make in traversing them;—there is the abrupt precipice, the torrent’s roar, the boundless expanse of the prospect from the highest mountains,—the difficulty of their ascent, their loneliness and silence; in short, there is a constant sense and superstitious awe of the collective power of matter, of the gigantic and eternal forms of nature, on which, from the beginning of time, the hand of man has made no impression, and which, by the lofty reflections they excite in us, give a sort of intellectual sublimity even to our sense of physical weakness. But there is little in all these circumstances that can be translated into the picturesque, which makes its appeal immediately to the eye.

Wilson’s historical landscapes, his Niobe, Celadon and Amelia, &c. do not, in our estimation, display either true taste or fine imagination, but are affected and violent exaggerations of clumsy common nature. They are made up mechanically of the same stock of materials,—an over-hanging rock, bare shattered trees, black rolling clouds, and forked lightning. The figures, in the most celebrated of these, are not like the children of Niobe, punished by the Gods, but like a group of rustics, crouching from a hail-storm. We agree with Sir Joshua Reynolds, that Wilson’s mind was not, like N. Poussin’s, sufficiently imbued with the knowledge of antiquity to transport the imagination three thousand years back, to give natural objects a sympathy with preternatural events, and to inform rocks, and trees, and mountains with the presence of a God. To sum up his general character, we may observe, that, besides his excellence in aërial perspective, Wilson had great truth, harmony, and depth of local colouring. He had a fine feeling of the proportions and conduct of light and shade, and also an eye for graceful form, as far as regards the bold and varying outlines of indefinite objects; as may be seen in his foregrounds, &c., where the artist is not tied down to an imitation of characteristic and articulate forms. In his figures, trees, cattle, and in everything having a determinate and regular form, his pencil was not only deficient in accuracy of outline, but even in perspective and actual relief. His trees, in particular, frequently seem pasted on the canvass, like botanical specimens. In fine, we cannot subscribe to the opinion of those who assert, that Wilson was superior to Claude as a man of genius; nor can we discern any other grounds for this opinion, than what would lead to the general conclusion,—that the more slovenly the performance the finer the picture, and that that which is imperfect is superior to that which is perfect. It might be said, on the same principle, that the coarsest sign-painting is better than the reflection of a landscape in a mirror; and the objection that is sometimes made to the mere imitation of nature, cannot be made to the landscapes of Claude, for in them the Graces themselves have, with their own hands, assisted in selecting and disposing every object. Is the general effect in his pictures injured by the details? Is the truth inconsistent with the beauty of the imitation? Does the perpetual profusion of objects and scenery, all perfect in themselves, interfere with the simple grandeur and comprehensive magnificence of the whole? Does the precision with which a plant is marked in the fore-ground, take away from the air-drawn distinctions of the blue glimmering horizon? Is there any want of that endless airy space, where the eye wanders at liberty under the open sky, explores distant objects, and returns back as from a delightful journey? There is no comparison between Claude and Wilson. Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say, that there would be another Raphael before there would be another Claude. His landscapes have all that is exquisite and refined in art and nature. Every thing is moulded into grace and harmony; and, at the touch of his pencil, shepherds with their flocks, temples and groves, and winding glades, and scattered hamlets, rise up in never-ending succession, under the azure sky and the resplendent sun, while

‘Universal Pan, Knit with the Graces, and the hours in dance, Leads on the eternal spring.——’

Michael Angelo has left, in one of his sonnets, a fine apostrophe to the earliest poet of Italy:

‘Fain would I, to be what our Dante was, Forego the happiest fortunes of mankind.’

What landscape-painter does not feel this of Claude.[55]

GAINSBOROUGH.—We have heard an anecdote connected with the reputation of Gainsborough’s pictures, which rests on pretty good authority. Sir Joshua Reynolds, at one of the Academy dinners, speaking of Gainsborough, said to a friend,—‘He is undoubtedly the best English landscape-painter.’ ‘No,’ said Wilson, who overheard the conversation, ‘he is not the best landscape-painter, but he is the best portrait-painter in England.’ They were both wrong; but the story is creditable to the versatility of Gainsborough’s talents.

Those of his portraits which we have seen are not in the first rank. They are in a good measure imitations of Vandyke; and have more an air of gentility, than of nature. His landscapes are of two classes or periods; his early and his later pictures. The former are minute imitations of nature, or of painters who imitated nature, such as Ruysdael, &c. some of which have great truth and clearness. His later pictures are flimsy caricatures of Rubens, who himself carried inattention to the details to the utmost limit that it would bear. Many of Gainsborough’s latter landscapes may be compared to bad water-colour drawings, washed in by mechanical movements of the hand, without any communication with the eye. The truth seems to be, that Gainsborough found there was something wanting in his early manner, that is, something beyond the literal imitation of the details of natural objects; and he appears to have concluded rather hastily, that the way to arrive at that something more, was to discard truth and nature altogether. His fame rests principally, at present, on his fancy-pieces, cottage-children, shepherd-boys, &c. These have often great truth, great sweetness, and the subjects are often chosen with great felicity. We too often find, however, even in his happiest efforts, a consciousness in the turn of the limbs, and a pensive languor in the expression, which is not taken from nature. We think the gloss of art is never so ill bestowed as on such subjects, the essence of which is simplicity. It is perhaps the general fault of Gainsborough, that he presents us with an ideal common life, of which we have had a surfeit in poetry and romance. His subjects are softened, and sentimentalised too much; it is not simple unaffected nature that we see, but nature sitting for her picture. Our artist, we suspect, led the way to that masquerade style, which piques itself on giving the air of an Adonis to the driver of a hay-cart, and models the features of a milk-maid on the principles of the antique. His Woodman’s Head is admirable. Nor can too much praise be given to his Shepherd Boy in a Storm; in which the unconscious simplicity of the boy’s expression, looking up with his hands folded and with timid wonder,—the noisy chattering of a magpie perched above,—and the rustling of the coming storm in the branches of the trees, produce a most delightful and romantic impression on the mind.

Gainsborough was to be considered, perhaps, rather as a man of delicate taste, and of an elegant and feeling mind, than as a man of genius; as a lover of the art, rather than an artist. He devoted himself to it, with a view to amuse and soothe his mind, with the ease of a gentleman, not with the severity of a professional student. He wished to make his pictures, like himself, amiable; but a too constant desire to please almost unavoidably leads to affectation and effeminacy. He wanted that vigour of intellect, which perceives the beauty of truth; and thought that painting was to be gained, like other mistresses, by flattery and smiles. It was an error which we are disposed to forgive in one, around whose memory, both as an artist and a man, many fond recollections, many vain regrets, must always linger.[56]

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.—The authority of Sir Joshua Reynolds, both from his example and instructions, has had, and still continues to have, a considerable influence on the state of art in this country. That influence has been on the whole unquestionably beneficial in itself, as well as highly creditable to the rare talents and elegant mind of Sir Joshua; for it has raised the art of painting from the lowest state of degradation,—of dry, meagre, lifeless inanity, to something at least respectable, and bearing an affinity to the rough strength and bold spirit of the national character. Whether the same implicit deference to his authority, which has helped to advance the art thus far, may not, among other causes, limit and retard its future progress? Whether there are not certain original errors, both in his principles and practice, which, the farther they are proceeded in, the farther they will lead us from the truth? Whether there is not a systematic bias from the right line by which alone we can arrive at the goal of the highest perfection?—are questions well worth considering.

We shall begin with Sir Joshua’s merits as an artist. There is one error which we wish to correct at setting out, because we think it important. There is not a greater or more unaccountable mistake than the supposition that Sir Joshua Reynolds owed his success or excellence in his profession, to his having been the first who introduced into this country more general principles of the art, and who raised portrait to the dignity of history from the low drudgery of copying the peculiarities, meannesses, and details of individual nature, which was all that had been attempted by his immediate predecessors. This is so far from being true, that the very reverse is the fact. If Sir Joshua did not give these details and peculiarities so much as might be wished, those who went before him did not give them at all. Those pretended general principles of the art, which, it is said, ‘alone give value and dignity to it,’ had been pushed to their extremest absurdity before his time; and it was in getting rid of the mechanical systematic monotony and middle forms, by the help of which Lely, Kneller, Hudson, the French painters, and others, carried on their manufactories of history and face painting, and in returning (as far as he did return) to the truth and force of individual nature, that the secret both of his fame and fortune lay. The pedantic, servile race of artists, whom Reynolds superseded, had carried the abstract principle of improving on nature to such a degree of refinement, that they left it out altogether; and confounded all the varieties and irregularities of form, feature, character, expression or attitude, in the same artificial mould of fancied grace and fashionable insipidity. The portraits of Kneller, for example, seem all to have been turned in a machine; the eye-brows are arched as if by a compass; the mouth curled, and the chin dimpled, the head turned on one side, and the hands placed in the same affected position. The portraits of this mannerist, therefore, are as like one another as the dresses which were then in fashion; and have the same ‘dignity and value’ as the full bottomed wigs which graced their originals. The superiority of Reynolds consisted in his being varied and natural, instead of being artificial and uniform. The spirit, grace, or dignity which he added to his portraits, he borrowed from nature, and not from the ambiguous quackery of rules. His feeling of truth and nature was too strong to permit him to adopt the unmeaning style of Kneller and Hudson; but his logical acuteness was not such as to enable him to detect the verbal fallacies and speculative absurdities which he had learned from Richardson and Coypel; and, from some defects in his own practice, he was led to confound negligence with grandeur. But of this hereafter.

Sir Joseph Reynolds owed his vast superiority over his contemporaries to incessant practice, and habitual attention to nature, to quick organic sensibility, to considerable power of observation, and still greater taste in perceiving and availing himself of those excellences of others, which lay within his own walk of art. We can by no means look upon Sir Joshua as having a claim to the first rank of genius. He would hardly have been a great painter, if other greater painters had not lived before him. He would not have given a first impulse to the art, nor did he advance any part of it beyond the point where he found it. He did not present any new view of nature, nor is he to be placed in the same class with those who did. Even in colour, his pallet was spread for him by the old Masters, and his eye imbibed its full perception of depth and harmony of tone, from the Dutch and Venetian schools, rather than from nature. His early pictures are poor and flimsy. He indeed learned to see the finer qualities of nature through the works of art, which he, perhaps, might never have discovered in nature itself. He became rich by the accumulation of borrowed wealth, and his genius was the offspring of taste. He combined and applied the materials of others to his own purpose, with admirable success; he was an industrious compiler, or skilful translator, not an original inventor in art. The art would remain, in all its essential elements, just where it is, if Sir Joshua had never lived. He has supplied the industry of future plagiarists with no new materials. But it has been well observed, that the value of every work of art, as well as the genius of the artist, depends, not more on the degree of excellence, than on the degree of originality displayed in it. Sir Joshua, however, was perhaps the most original imitator that ever appeared in the world; and the reason of this, in a great measure, was, that he was compelled to combine what he saw in art, with what he saw in nature, which was constantly before him. The portrait-painter is, in this respect, much less liable than the historical painter, to deviate into the extremes of manner and affectation; for he cannot discard nature altogether, under the excuse that she only puts him out. He must meet her, face to face; and if he is not incorrigible, he will see something there that cannot fail to be of service to him. Another circumstance which must have been favourable to Sir Joshua was, that though not the originator in point of time, he was the first Englishman who transplanted the higher excellences of his profession into his own country, and had the merit, if not of an inventor, of a reformer of the art. His mode of painting had the graces of novelty in the age and country in which he lived; and he had, therefore, all the stimulus to exertion, which arose from the enthusiastic applause of his contemporaries, and from a desire to expand and refine the taste of the public.

To an eye for colour and for effects of light and shade, Sir Joshua united a strong perception of individual character,—a lively feeling of the quaint and grotesque in expression, and great mastery of execution. He had comparatively little knowledge of drawing, either as it regarded proportion or form. The beauty of some of his female faces and figures arises almost entirely from their softness and fleshiness. His pencil wanted firmness and precision. The expression, even of his best portraits, seldom implies either lofty or impassioned intellect or delicate sensibility. He also wanted grace, if grace requires simplicity. The mere negation of stiffness and formality is not grace; for looseness and distortion are not grace. His favourite attitudes are not easy and natural, but the affectation of ease and nature. They are violent deviations from a right line. Many of the figures in his fancy-pieces are placed in postures in which they could not remain for an instant without extreme difficulty and awkwardness. We might instance the Girl drawing with a Pencil, and some others. His portraits are his best pictures, and of these his portraits of men are the best; his pictures of children are the next in value. He had fine subjects for the former, from the masculine sense and originality of character of many of the persons whom he painted; and he had also a great advantage (as far as practice went) in painting a number of persons of every rank and description. Some of the finest and most interesting are those of Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith (which is, however, too much a mere sketch), Baretti, Dr. Burney, John Hunter, and the inimitable portrait of Bishop Newton. The elegant simplicity of character, expression, and drawing, preserved throughout the last picture, even to the attitude and mode of handling, discover the true genius of a painter. We also remember to have seen a print of Thomas Warton, than which nothing could be more characteristic or more natural. These were all Reynolds’s intimate acquaintances, and it could not be said of them that they were men of ‘no mark or likelihood.’ Their traits had probably sunk deep into the artist’s mind; he painted them as pure studies from nature, copying the real image existing before him, with all its known characteristic peculiarities; and, with as much wisdom as good-nature, sacrificing the graces on the altar of friendship. They are downright portraits, and nothing more, and they are valuable in proportion. In his portraits of women, on the contrary (with very few exceptions), Sir Joshua appears to have consulted either the vanity of his employers or his own fanciful theory. They have not the look of individual nature, nor have they, to compensate the want of this, either peculiar elegance of form, refinement of expression, delicacy of complexion, or gracefulness of manner. Vandyke’s attitudes have been complained of as stiff and confined. Reynolds, to avoid this defect, has fallen into the contrary extreme of negligence and contortion. His female figures which aim at gentility, are twisted into that serpentine line, the idea of which he ridiculed so much in Hogarth. Indeed, Sir Joshua, in his Discourses (see his account of Correggio), speaks of grace as if it were nearly allied to affectation. Grace signifies that which is pleasing and natural in the posture and motions of the human form, as Beauty is more properly applied to the form itself. That which is stiff, inanimate, and without motion, cannot, therefore, be graceful; but, to suppose that a figure, to be graceful, need only be put into some languishing or extravagant posture, is to mistake flutter and affectation for ease and elegance.

Sir Joshua’s children, as we have said above, are among his chef d’œuvres. The faces of children have in general that want of precision of outline, that prominence of relief, and strong contrast of colour, which were peculiarly adapted to his style of painting. The arch simplicity of expression, and the grotesque character which he has given to the heads of his children, were, however, borrowed from Correggio. His Puck is the most masterly of all these; and the colouring, execution, and character, alike exquisite. The single figure of the Infant Hercules is also admirable. Many of those to which his friends have suggested historical titles are mere common portraits or casual studies. Thus the Infant Samuel is an innocent little child saying its prayers at the bed’s feet: it has nothing to do with the story of the Hebrew prophet. The same objection will apply to many of his fancy-pieces and historical compositions. There is often no connection between the picture and the subject but the name. Even his celebrated Iphigenia (beautiful as she is, and prodigal of her charms) does not answer to the idea of the story. In drawing the naked figure, Sir Joshua’s want of truth and firmness of outline, became more apparent; and his mode of laying on his colours, which, in the face and extremities, was relieved and broken by the abrupt inequalities of surface and variety of tints in each part, produced a degree of heaviness and opacity in the larger masses of flesh-colour, which can indeed only be avoided by extreme delicacy, or extreme lightness of execution.

Shall we speak the truth at once? In our opinion, Sir Joshua did not possess either that high imagination, or those strong feelings, without which no painter can become a poet in his art. His larger historical compositions have been generally allowed to be most liable to objection, in a critical point of view. We shall not attempt to judge them by scientific or technical rules, but make one or two observations on the character and feeling displayed in them. The highest subject which Sir Joshua has attempted was the Count Ugolino, and it was, as might be expected from the circumstances, a total failure. He had, it seems, painted a study of an old beggar-man’s head; and some person, who must have known as little of painting as of poetry, persuaded the unsuspecting artist, that it was the exact expression of Dante’s Count Ugolino, one of the most grand, terrific, and appalling characters in modern fiction. Reynolds, who knew nothing of the matter but what he was told, took his good fortune for granted, and only extended his canvass to admit the rest of the figures. The attitude and expression of Count Ugolino himself, are what the artist intended them to be, till they were pampered into something else by the officious vanity of friends—those of a common mendicant at the corner of a street, waiting patiently for some charitable donation. The imagination of the painter took refuge in a parish work-house, instead of ascending the steps of the Tower of Famine. The hero of Dante is a lofty, high-minded, and unprincipled Italian nobleman, who had betrayed his country to the enemy, and who, as a punishment for his crime, is shut up with his four sons in the dungeon of the citadel, where he shortly finds the doors barred against him, and food withheld. He in vain watches with eager feverish eye the opening of the door at the accustomed hour, and his looks turn to stone; his children one by one drop down dead at his feet; he is seized with blindness, and, in the agony of his despair, he gropes on his knees after them,

——‘Calling each by name For three days after they were dead.’

Even in the other world, he is represented with the same fierce, dauntless, unrelenting character, ‘gnawing the skull of his adversary, his fell repast.’ The subject of the Laocoon is scarcely equal to that described by Dante. The horror there is physical and momentary; in the other, the imagination fills up the long, obscure, dreary void of despair, and joins its unutterable pangs to the loud cries of nature. What is there in the picture to convey the ghastly horrors of the scene, or the mighty energy of soul with which they are borne?[57] His picture of Macbeth is full of wild and grotesque images; and the apparatus of the witches contains a very elaborate and well arranged inventory of dreadful objects. His Cardinal Beaufort is a fine display of rich mellow colouring; and there is something gentlemanly and Shakespearian in the King and the attendant Nobleman. At the same time, we think the expression of the Cardinal himself is too much one of physical horror, a canine gnashing of the teeth, like a man strangled. This is not the best style of history. Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, is neither the tragic muse nor Mrs. Siddons; and we have still stronger objections to Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy.

There is a striking similarity between Sir Joshua Reynolds’s theory and his practice; and as each of these has been appealed to in support of the other, it is necessary that we should examine both. Sir Joshua’s practice was generally confined to the illustration of that part of his theory, which relates to the more immediate imitation of nature, and it is to what he says on this subject, that we shall chiefly direct our observations at present.

He lays it down as a general and invariable rule, that ‘the great style in art, and the most PERFECT IMITATION OF NATURE, consists in avoiding the details and peculiarities of particular objects.’ This sweeping principle he applies almost indiscriminately to Portrait, History, and Landscape; and he appears to have been led to the conclusion itself, from supposing the imitation of particulars to be inconsistent with general truth and effect. It appears to us, that the highest perfection of the art depends, not on separating but on uniting general truth and effect with individual distinctness and accuracy.

First, it is said, that the great style in painting, as it relates to the immediate imitation of external nature, consists in avoiding the details of particular objects. It consists neither in giving nor avoiding them, but in something quite different from both. Any one may avoid the details. So far, there is no difference between the Cartoons, and a common sign-painting. Greatness consists in giving the larger masses and proportions with truth;—this does not prevent giving the smaller ones too. The utmost grandeur of outline, and the broadest masses of light and shade, are perfectly compatible with the utmost minuteness and delicacy of detail, as may be seen in nature. It is not, indeed, common to see both qualities combined in the imitations of nature, any more than the combination of other excellences; nor are we here saying to which the principal attention of the artist should be directed; but we deny, that, considered in themselves, the absence of the one quality is necessary or sufficient to the production of the other.

If, for example, the form of the eye-brow is correctly given, it will be perfectly indifferent to the truth or grandeur of the design, whether it consists of one broad mark, or is composed of a number of hair-lines, arranged in the same order. So, if the lights and shades are disposed in fine and large masses, the breadth of the picture, as it is called, cannot possibly be affected by the filling up of those masses with the details, that is, with the subordinate distinctions which appear in nature. The anatomical details in Michael Angelo, the ever-varying outline of Raphael, the perfect execution of the Greek statues, do not destroy their symmetry or dignity of form; and, in the finest specimens of the composition of colour, we may observe the largest masses combined with the greatest variety in the parts of which those masses are composed.

The gross style consists in giving no details; the finical in giving nothing else. Nature contains both large and small parts, both masses and details; and the same may be said of the most perfect works of art. The union of both kinds of excellence, of strength with delicacy, as far as the limits of human capacity, and the shortness of human life would permit, is that which has established the reputation of the most successful imitators of nature. Farther, their most finished works are their best. The predominance, indeed, of either excellence in the best Masters, has varied according to their opinion of the relative value of these qualities,—the labour they had the time or the patience to bestow on their works,—the skill of the artist,—or the nature and extent of his subject. But, if the rule here objected to (that the careful imitation of the parts injures the effect of the whole), be once admitted, slovenliness would become another name for genius, and the most unfinished performance be the best. That such has been the confused impression left on the mind by the perusal of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, is evident from the practice, as well as conversation, of many (even eminent) artists. The late Mr. Opie proceeded entirely on this principle. He left many admirable studies of portraits, particularly in what relates to the disposition and effect of light and shade; but he never finished any of the parts, thinking them beneath the attention of a great artist. He went over the whole head the second day as he had done the first, and therefore made no progress. The picture at last, having neither the lightness of a sketch, nor the accuracy of a finished work, looked coarse, laboured, and heavy. Titian is the most perfect example of high finishing. In him the details are engrafted on the most profound knowledge of effect, and attention to the character of what he represented. His pictures have the exact look of nature, the very tone and texture of flesh. The variety of his tints is blended into the greatest simplicity. There is a proper degree both of solidity and transparency. All the parts hang together; every stroke tells, and adds to the effect of the rest. Sir Joshua seems to deny that Titian finished much; and says that he produced, by two or three strokes of his pencil, effects which the most laborious copyist would in vain attempt to equal. It is true, he availed himself in some degree of what is called execution, to facilitate his imitation of the details and peculiarities of nature; but it was to facilitate, not to supersede it. There can be nothing more distinct than execution and daubing. Titian, however, made a very moderate, though a very admirable, use of this power; and those who copy his pictures will find that the simplicity is in the results, not in the details. To conclude our observations on this head, we will only add, that, while the artist thinks there is any thing to be done, either to the whole or to the parts of his picture, which can give it still more the look of nature, if he is willing to proceed, we would not advise him to desist. This rule is the more necessary to the young student, for he will relax in his attention as he grows older. And again, with respect to the subordinate parts of a picture, there is no danger that he will bestow a disproportionate degree of labour upon them, because he will not feel the same interest in copying them, and because a much less degree of accuracy will serve every purpose of deception.

Secondly, with regard to the imitation of expression, we can hardly agree with Sir Joshua, that ‘the perfection of portrait-painting consists in giving the general idea or character without the individual peculiarities.’ No doubt, if we were to choose between the general character, and the peculiarities of feature, we ought to prefer the former. But, they are so far from being incompatible with, that they are not without some difficulty distinguishable from, each other. There is a general look of the face, a predominant expression arising from the correspondence and connection of the different parts, which it is of the first and last importance to give; and without which, no elaboration of detached parts, or marking of the peculiarities of single features, is worth any thing; but which, at the same time, is not destroyed, but assisted by the careful finishing, and still more by giving the exact outline of each part.

It is on this point that the modern French and English schools differ, and (in our opinion) are both wrong. The English seem generally to suppose, that if they only leave out the subordinate parts, they are sure of the general result. The French, on the contrary, as erroneously imagine, that, by attending successively to each separate part, they must infallibly arrive at a correct whole; not considering that, besides the parts, there is their relation to each other, and the general expression stamped upon them by the character of the individual, which to be seen must be felt; for it is demonstrable, that all character and expression, to be adequately represented, must be perceived by the mind, and not by the eye only. The French painters give only lines and precise differences; the English only general masses, and strong effects. Hence the two nations reproach one another with the difference of their styles of art,—the one as dry, hard, and minute,—the other as gross, gothic, and unfinished; and they will probably remain for ever satisfied with each other’s defects, as they afford a very tolerable fund of consolation on either side.

Much has been said of historical portrait; and we have no objection to this phrase, if properly understood. The giving historical truth to a portrait, means, then, the representing the individual under one consistent, probable, and striking view; or showing the different features, muscles, &c. in one action, and modified by one principle. A portrait thus painted may be said to be historical; that is, it carries internal evidence of truth and propriety with it; and the number of individual peculiarities, as long as they are true to nature, cannot lessen, but must add to the strength of the general impression.

It might be shown (if there were room in this place) that Sir Joshua has constructed his theory of the ideal in art, upon the same mistaken principle of the negation or abstraction of particular nature. The ideal is not a negative but a positive thing. The leaving out the details or peculiarities of an individual face does not make it one jot more ideal. To paint history, is to paint nature as answering to a general, predominant, or preconceived idea in the mind, of strength, beauty, action, passion, thought, &c.; but the way to do this is not to leave out the details, but to incorporate the general idea with the details;—that is, to show the same expression actuating and modifying every movement of the muscles, and the same character preserved consistently through every part of the body. Grandeur does not consist in omitting the parts, but in connecting all the parts into a whole, and in giving their combined and varied action: abstract truth or ideal perfection does not consist in rejecting the peculiarities of form, but in rejecting all those which are not consistent with the character intended to be given; and in following up the same general idea of softness, voluptuousness, strength, activity, or any combination of these through every ramification of the frame. But these modifications of form or expression can only be learnt from nature, and therefore the perfection of art must always be sought in nature. The ideal properly applies as much to the idea of ugliness, weakness, folly, meanness, vice, as of beauty, strength, wisdom, magnanimity, or virtue. The antique heads of fauns and satyrs, of Pan or Silenus, are quite as ideal as those of the Apollo or Bacchus; and Hogarth adhered to an idea of humour in his faces, as Raphael did to an idea of sentiment. But Raphael found the character of sentiment in nature as much as Hogarth did that of humour; otherwise neither of them would have given one or the other with such perfect truth, purity, force, and keeping. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ideal, as consisting in a mere negation of individuality, bears just the same relation to real beauty or grandeur as caricature does to true comic character.[58]

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PRESENT STATE OF BRITISH ART.—It is owing either to a mistaken theory of elevated art, or to the want of models in nature, that the English are hitherto without any painter of serious historical subjects, who can be placed in the first rank of genius. Many of the pictures of modern artists have shown a capacity for correct and happy delineation of actual objects and domestic incidents, only inferior to the masterpieces of the Dutch School. We might here mention the names of Wilkie, Collins, Heaphy, and many others. We have portrait-painters, who have attained to a very high degree of excellence in all the branches of their art. In landscape, Turner has shown a knowledge of the effects of air, and of powerful relief in objects, which was never surpassed. But in the highest walk of art—in giving the movements of the finer or loftier passions of the mind, this country has not produced a single painter, who has made even a faint approach to the excellence of the great Italian painters. We have, indeed, a good number of specimens of the clay-figure, the anatomical mechanism, the regular proportions measured by a two-foot rule;—large canvasses, covered with stiff figures, arranged in deliberate order, with the characters and story correctly expressed by uplifted eyes or hands, according to old receipt-books for the passions;—and with all the hardness and inflexibility of figures carved in wood, and painted over in good strong body colours, that look ‘as if some of nature’s journeymen had made them, and not made them well.’ But we still want a Prometheus to give life to the cumbrous mass, to throw an intellectual light over the opaque image,—to embody the inmost refinements of thought to the outward eye,—to lay bare the very soul of passion. That picture is of little comparative value which can be completely translated into another language,—of which the description in a common catalogue conveys all that is expressed by the picture itself; for it is the excellence of every art to give what can be given by no other, in the same degree. Much less is that picture to be esteemed, which only injures and defaces the idea already existing in the mind’s eye,—which does not come up to the conception which the imagination forms of the subject, and substitutes a dull reality for high sentiment; for the art is in this case an incumbrance, not an assistance, and interferes with, instead of adding to, the stock of our pleasurable sensations. But we should be at a loss to point out (we will not say any English picture, but certainly) any English painter, who, in heroic and classical composition, has risen to the height of his subject, and answered the expectation of the well-informed spectator, or excited the same impression by visible means, as had been excited by words, or by reflection.[59] That this inferiority in English art is not owing to a deficiency of genius, imagination, or passion, is proved sufficiently by the works of our poets and dramatic writers, which, in loftiness and force, are not surpassed by those of any other nation. But whatever may be the depth of internal thought and feeling in the English character, it seems to be more internal; and (whether this is owing to habit, or physical constitution) to have, comparatively, a less immediate and powerful communication with the organic expression of passion,—which exhibits the thoughts and feelings in the countenance, and furnishes matter for the historic muse of painting. The English artist is instantly sensible that the flutter, grimace, and extravagance of the French physiognomy, are incompatible with high history; and we are at no loss to explain in this way, that is, from the defect of living models, how it is that the productions of the French school are marked with all the affectation of national caricature, or sink into tame and lifeless imitations of the antique. May we not account satisfactorily for the general defects of our own historic productions, in a similar way,—from a certain inertness and constitutional phlegm, which does not habitually impress the workings of the mind in correspondent traces on the countenance, and which may also render us less sensible of these outward and visible signs of passion, even when they are so impressed there? The irregularity of proportion, and want of symmetry, in the structure of the national features, though it certainly enhances the difficulty of infusing natural grace and grandeur into the works of art, rather accounts for our not having been able to attain the exquisite refinements of Grecian sculpture, than for our not having rivalled the Italian painters in expression.

Mr. West does not form an exception to, but a confirmation of, these general observations. His pictures have all that can be required in what relates to the composition of the subject; to the regular arrangement of the groups; the anatomical proportions of the human body; and the technical knowledge of expression,—as far as expression is reducible to abstract rules, and is merely a vehicle for the telling of a story; so that anger, wonder, sorrow, pity, &c. have each their appropriate and well-known designations. These, however, are but the instrumental parts of the art, the means, not the end; but beyond these, Mr. West’s pictures do not go. They never ‘snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.’ They exhibit the mask, not the soul of expression. We doubt, whether, in the entire range of Mr. West’s productions, meritorious and admirable as the design and composition often are, there is to be found one truly fine head. They display a total want of gusto. In Raphael, the same divine spirit breathes through every part; it either agitates the inmost frame, or plays in gentle undulations on the trembling surface. Whether we see his figures bending with all the blandishments of maternal love, or standing in the motionless silence of thought, or hurried into the tumult of action, the whole is under the impulse of deep passion. But Mr. West sees hardly any thing in the human face but bones and cartilages; or, if he avails himself of the more flexible machinery of nerves and muscles, it is only by rule and method. The effect is not that which the soul of passion impresses on the countenance, and which the soul of genius alone can seize; but such as might, in a good measure, be given to wooden puppets or pasteboard figures, pulled by wires, and taught to open the mouth, or knit the forehead, or raise the eyes in a very scientific manner. In fact, there is no want of art or learning in his pictures, but of nature and feeling.

MEANS OF PROMOTING THE FINE ARTS.—It is not long ago that an opinion was very general, that all that was wanting to the highest splendour and perfection of the arts in this country might be supplied by Academies and public institutions. We believe the most sanguine promoters of this scheme have at present relaxed in their zeal. There are three ways in which Academies and public institutions may be supposed to promote the fine arts; either by furnishing the best models to the student; or by holding out immediate emolument and patronage; or by improving the public taste. We shall bestow a short consideration on the influence of each.

First, a constant reference to the best models of art necessarily tends to enervate the mind, to intercept our view of nature, and to distract the attention by a variety of unattainable excellence. An intimate acquaintance with the works of the celebrated masters may indeed add to the indolent refinements of taste, but will never produce one work of original genius, one great artist. In proof of the general truth of this observation, we might cite the history of the progress and decay of art in all countries where it has flourished. It is a little extraordinary, that if the real sources of perfection are to be sought in Schools, in Models, and Public Institutions, that whereever schools, models, and public institutions have existed, there the arts should regularly disappear,—that the effect should never follow from the cause.

The Greek statues remain to this day unrivalled,—the undisputed standard of the most perfect symmetry of form. In Italy the art of painting has had the same fate. After its long and painful struggles in the time of the earlier artists, Cimabue, Ghirlandaio, Massacio, and others, it burst out with a light almost too dazzling to behold, in the works of Titian, Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Correggio; which was reflected, with diminished lustre, in the productions of their immediate disciples; lingered for a while with the school of the Carraccis, and expired with Guido Reni. From that period, painting sunk to so low a state in Italy as to excite only pity or contempt. There is not a single name to redeem its faded glory from utter oblivion. Yet this has not been owing to any want of Dilettanti and Della Cruscan societies,—of academies of Florence, of Bologna, of Parma, and Pisa,—of honorary members and Foreign Correspondents—of pupils and teachers, professors and patrons, and the whole busy tribe of critics and connoisseurs.

What is become of the successors of Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyke? What have the French Academicians done for the arts; or what will they ever do, but add intolerable affectation and grimace to centos of heads from the antique, and caricature Greek forms by putting them into opera attitudes? Nicholas Poussin is the only example on record in favour of the contrary theory, and we have already sufficiently noticed his defects. What extraordinary advances have we made in our own country in consequence of the establishment of the Royal Academy? What greater names has the English school to boast than those of Hogarth, Reynolds, and Wilson, who created it? Even the venerable President of the Royal Academy was one of its founders.

Again, we might cite, in support of our assertion, the works of Carlo Maratti, of Raphael Mengs, or of any of the effeminate school of critics and copyists, who have attempted to blend the borrowed beauties of others in a perfect whole. What do they contain, but a negation of every excellence which they pretend to combine? The assiduous imitator, in his attempts to grasp all, loses his hold of that which was placed within his reach, and, from aspiring at universal excellence, sinks into uniform mediocrity. The student who has models of every kind of excellence constantly before him, is not only diverted from that particular walk of art, in which, by patient exertion, he might have obtained ultimate success, but, from having his imagination habitually raised to an overstrained standard of refinement, by the sight of the most exquisite examples in art, he becomes impatient and dissatisfied with his own attempts, determines to reach the same perfection all at once, or throws down his pencil in despair. Thus the young enthusiast, whose genius and energy were to rival the great Masters of antiquity, or create a new æra in the art itself, baffled in his first sanguine expectations, reposes in indolence on what others have done; wonders how such perfection could have been achieved,—grows familiar with the minutest peculiarities of the different schools,—flutters between the splendour of Rubens, and the grace of Raphael, and ends in nothing. Such was not Correggio. He saw and felt for himself; he was of no school, but had his own world of art to create. That image of truth and beauty, which existed in his mind, he was forced to construct for himself, without rules or models. As it had arisen in his mind from the contemplation of nature, so he could only hope to embody it to others, by the imitation of nature. We can conceive the work growing under his hands by slow and patient touches, approaching nearer to perfection, softened into finer grace, gaining strength from delicacy, and at last reflecting the pure image of nature on the canvass. Such is always the true progress of art; such are the necessary means by which the greatest works of every kind have been produced. They have been the effect of power gathering strength from exercise, and warmth from its own impulse—stimulated to fresh efforts by conscious success, and by the surprise and strangeness of a new world of beauty, opening to the delighted imagination. The triumphs of art were victories over the difficulties of art; the prodigies of genius, the result of that strength which had grappled with nature. Titian copied even a plant or a piece of common drapery from the objects themselves; and Raphael is known to have made elaborate studies of the principal heads in his pictures. All the great painters of this period were thoroughly grounded in the first principles of their art; had learned to copy a face, a hand, or an eye, and had acquired patience to finish a single figure, before they undertook to paint extensive compositions. They knew that though Fame is represented with her head above the clouds, her feet rest upon the earth. Genius can only have its full scope, where, though much may have been done, more remains to do; where models exist chiefly to show the deficiencies of art, and where the perfect idea is left to be filled up in the painter’s imagination. When once the stimulus of novelty and of original exertion is wanting, generations repose on what has been done for them by their predecessors, as individuals, after a certain period, rest satisfied with the knowledge they have already acquired.

With regard to the pecuniary advantages arising from the public patronage of the arts;—the plan unfortunately defeats itself; for it multiplies its objects faster than it can satisfy their claims; and raises up a swarm of competitors for the prize of genius from the dregs of idleness and dulness. The real patron is anxious to reward merit, not to encourage gratuitous pretensions to it; to see that the man of genius takes no detriment, that another Wilson is not left to perish for want;—not to propagate the breed of embryo candidates for fame. Offers of public and promiscuous patronage can in general be little better than a species of intellectual seduction, administering provocatives to vanity and avarice, and leading astray the youth of the nation by fallacious hopes, which can scarcely ever be realized. At the same time, the good that might be done by private taste and benevolence, is in a great measure defeated. The moment that a few individuals of discernment and liberal spirit become members of a public body, they are no longer anything more than parts of a machine, which is usually wielded at will by some officious, overweening pretender; their good-sense and good-nature are lost in a mass of ignorance and presumption; their names only serve to reflect credit on proceedings in which they have no share, and which are determined on by a majority of persons who have no interest in the arts but what arises from the importance attached to them by regular organization, and no opinions but what are dictated to them by some self-constituted judge. As far as we have had an opportunity of observing the conduct of such bodies of men, instead of taking the lead of public opinion, of giving a firm, manly, and independent tone to that opinion, they make it their business to watch all its caprices, and follow it in every casual turning. They dare not give their sanction to sterling merit, struggling with difficulties, but take advantage of its success, to reflect credit on their own reputation for sagacity. Their taste is a servile dependant on their vanity, and their patronage has an air of pauperism about it. Perhaps the only public patronage which was ever really useful to the arts, or worthy of them, was that which they received first in Greece, and afterwards in Italy, from the religious institutions of the country; when the artist felt himself, as it were, a servant at the altar; when his hand gave a visible form to Gods or Heroes, Angels or Apostles; and when the enthusiasm of genius was exalted by mingling with the flame of national devotion. The artist was not here degraded, by being made the dependant on the caprice of wealth or fashion, but felt himself at once the servant and the benefactor of the public. He had to embody, by the highest efforts of his art, subjects which were sacred to the imagination and feelings of the spectators; there was a common link, a mutual sympathy between them in their common faith. Every other mode of patronage, but that which arises, either from the general institutions and manners of a people, or from the real unaffected taste of individuals, must, we conceive, be illegitimate, corrupted in its source, and either ineffectual or injurious to its professed object.

Lastly, Academies and Institutions may be supposed to assist the progress of the fine arts, by promoting a wider taste for them.

In general, it must happen in the first stages of the arts, that as none but those who had a natural genius for them would attempt to practise them,—so none but those who had a natural taste for them, would pretend to judge of or criticise them. This must be an incalculable advantage to the man of true genius; for it is no other than the privilege of being tried by his peers. In an age when connoisseurship had not become a fashion; when religion, war, and intrigue, occupied the time and thoughts of the great, only those minds of superior refinement would be led to notice the works of art, who had a real sense of their excellence; and, in giving way to the powerful bent of his own genius, the painter was most likely to consult the taste of his judges. He had not to deal with pretenders to taste, through vanity, affectation, and idleness. He had to appeal to the higher faculties of the soul,—to that deep and innate sensibility to truth and beauty, which required only fit objects to have its enthusiasm excited,—and to that independent strength of mind, which, in the midst of ignorance and barbarism, hailed and fostered genius whereever it met with it. Titian was patronised by Charles V. Count Castiglione was the friend of Raphael. These were true patrons and true critics; and, as there were no others (for the world, in general, merely looked on and wondered), there can be little doubt that such a period of dearth of factitious patronage would be most favourable to the full developement of the greatest talents, and to the attainment of the highest excellence.

By means of public institutions, the number of candidates for fame, and pretenders to criticism, is increased beyond all calculation, while the quantity of genius and feeling remain much the same as before; with these disadvantages, that the man of original genius is often lost among the crowd of competitors who would never have become such, but from encouragement and example, and that the voice of the few whom nature intended for judges, is apt to be drowned in the noisy and forward suffrages of shallow smatterers in Taste.

JAMES BARRY

Barry (James) an eminent painter, was born in Cork, in Ireland, October 11, 1741. His father had been a builder, and at one time of his life, a coasting trader between the two countries of England and Ireland. To this business of a trader was James destined, and he actually made, when a boy, several voyages; but these voyages being forced upon him, he on one occasion ran away from the ship, and on others discovered such an aversion to the life and habits of a sailor, as to induce his father to quit all hopes of him in this line, and to suffer him to pursue his inclinations, which led him to drawing and study. When on board his father’s vessel, instead of handling sails and ropes, and climbing the mast, he was generally occupied with a piece of black chalk, sketching the coast, or drawing figures, as his fancy directed him. When his father found that the idea of making a sailor of him must be given up, he permitted him to acquire as much instruction as the schools of Cork afforded; but long retained his aversion to the chalk drawings, with which the floors and walls of the house were covered; the boy being always engaged in some attempt at large figures, and early catching at the means of representing action, attitude, and passion. It was at a very early period of his life that some bookseller in Ireland, undertaking to reprint a set of fables or emblems, young Barry offered to furnish the drawings, and, as it is believed, helped to etch the engravings, such as they were. At the schools in Cork, which he was sent to, he was distinguished by his parts and industry above his school-fellows; his habits differed from those of ordinary boys, as he seldom mixed in their games or amusements, but at those times stole off to his own room, where he worked at his pencil, or was studying some book that he had borrowed or bought. He would spend whole nights in this manner at his studies, to the alarm of his mother, who dreaded his injuring his health or setting fire to the house, and who often kept up his sister or the servant to watch him. His allowance of money he spent in buying books or candles to read by; he sometimes locked himself up in his room for days, and seldom slept upon his bed, or else made it so hard as to take away the temptation or luxury of lying long in it. Perhaps the unsocial and ascetic turn of his temper, which thus early manifested itself, might be remarked as the source both of the misfortunes of his life, and the defects of his genius. Common humanity, a sense of pleasure, and a sympathy with the feelings of those around us, is not more necessary to success in life, than it probably is to success in the fine arts. Few things can be more fatal to the artist than this sort of indifference to the common pleasures and pursuits of life. If affected, it is bad; if real and constitutional, it is even worse. It stuck to poor Barry to the last. It is not to be understood that, at this period of his life, he led the life of an absolute recluse, for he could and did occasionally join in any feats going on in the neighbourhood, and was not behind other boys in such pastimes and mischief as boys are usually fond of. An adventure which happened to him about this time, and which left a strong impression on his mind, is worth mentioning here. In one of his rambles in the neighbourhood, he entered, one winter’s evening, an old, and, as he thought, an uninhabited house, situate in a narrow bye-lane in the city of Cork. The house was without doors or windows; but curiosity impelled him to enter, and, after mounting a rotten staircase, which conducted to empty rooms on different floors, he arrived at the garret, where he could just discern, by the glimmering light of a few embers, two old and emaciated figures, broken by age, disease, and want, sitting beside each other, in the act, as far as their palsied efforts would permit, of tearing each other’s faces; not a word being uttered by either, but with the most horrible grimaces that malice could invent. They took no notice of his entrance, but went on with their deeds of mutual hate, which made such an impression on the boy that he ran down stairs, making his own reflections, which he afterwards found verified through life, that man and all animals are malicious and cruel in proportion as they are impotent; and that age and poverty, two of the worst evils in human life, almost always add to the calamities inherent in them by arts of their own creating. In general, his great desire to improve his mind led him to seek the society of educated men; who were not averse to receive him, seeing his active and inquisitive disposition, and his seriousness of manner, couched under a garb the plainest and coarsest; for he adopted this kind of attire from his childhood, not from affectation, but from an indifference to all dress. Having a retentive memory, he profited by his own reading, and by the conversation of others, who directed him also in the choice of books. As his finances were too low to make many purchases, he borrowed books from his friends, and was in the practice of making large extracts from such as he particularly liked, and sometimes even of copying out the whole book, of which several specimens were found among his papers, written in a stiff school-boy’s hand. As his industry was excessive, his advances in the acquisition of knowledge were rapid, and he was regarded as a prodigy by his school-fellows. His mother being a zealous Catholic, the son could not avoid mixing at times in the company of priests resident at Cork, who pointed out to him books of polemical divinity, of which he became a great reader, and for which he retained a strong bias during his lifetime. He was said at one time to have been destined for the priesthood, but for this report there is no authority. He, however, always continued a Catholic, and in the decline of life manifested rather a bigoted attachment to the religion of his early choice. For a short interval he had a little wavering in his belief of revealed religion in general; but a conversation with Mr. Edmund Burke put an end to this levity. A book which Mr. Burke lent him, and which settled his mind on this subject, was Bishop Butler’s Analogy; and, as a suitable reward, he has placed this Prelate in the group of divines, in his picture of Elysium.

About the age of seventeen he first attempted oil paintings; and between that and the age of twenty-two, when he first went to Dublin, he produced several large ones, which decorated his father’s house, and represented subjects not often handled by young men; such as Æneas escaping with his family from the flames of Troy; Susanna and the Elders; Daniel in the Lion’s Den, &c. At this period, he also produced the picture which first drew him into public notice, launched him on an ampler theatre than his native town of Cork afforded, and, above all, gained him the acquaintance and patronage of Mr. Burke. This picture was founded on an old tradition of the landing of St. Patrick on the sea-coast of Cashel, and of the conversion and baptism of the king of that district by the patron saint of Ireland. The priest, in the act of baptizing his new convert, inadvertently strikes the spear of the crosier in the foot of the monarch. The holy father, absorbed in the duties of his office, does not perceive what he has done, and the king, without interrupting the ceremony, bears the pain with immoveable fortitude. This incident, together with the gestures and expressions of the attendants, certainly formed a good subject for an historical picture; and Mr. Barry’s manner of treating it was such as to insure him the applause and admiration of the connoisseurs of the metropolis of the sister kingdom, where it was exhibited in 1762 or 1763. Mr. Barry took this picture with him to Dublin; and afterwards going to the exhibition room, being delighted with the encomiums it received from the spectators, he could not refrain from making himself known as the painter. His pretensions were treated with great contempt by the company, and Barry burst into tears of anger and vexation. But the incredulity of his hearers was a compliment paid to the real or supposed excellence of his painting. It appears that a Dr. Sleigh, a physician of Cork, and a sensible and amiable man, was first instrumental in introducing young Barry to the notice of Mr. Burke. During their early acquaintance, having fallen into a dispute on the subject of taste, Barry quoted a passage in support of his opinion from the Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, which had been just then published anonymously, and which Barry, in his youthful admiration of it, had, it seems, transcribed entire. Burke affected to treat this work as a theoretical romance, of no authority whatever, which threw Barry into such a rage in its defence, that Mr. Burke thought it necessary to appease him by owning himself to be the author. The scene ended in Barry’s running to embrace him, and showing him the copy of the work which he had been at the pains to transcribe. He passed his time in Dublin in reading, drawing, and society. While he resided here, an anecdote is preserved of him, which marks the character of the man. He had been enticed by his companions several times to carousings at a tavern, and one night, as he wandered home by himself, a thought struck him of the frivolity and viciousness of thus mis-spending his time: the fault, he imagined, lay in his money, and, therefore, without more ado, in order to avoid the morrow’s temptation, he threw the whole of his wealth, which perhaps amounted to no great sum, into the Liffey, and locked himself up at his favourite pursuits. After a residence of seven or eight months in Dublin, an opportunity offered of accompanying some part of Mr. Burke’s family to London, which he eagerly embraced. This took place some time in the year 1764, when he was twenty-three years of age, and with one of those advantages which do not always fall to the lot of young artists on their arrival in the British capital, that of being recommended to the acquaintance of the most eminent men in the profession by the persuasive eloquence of a man who, to genius in himself, added the rare and noble quality of encouraging it in others; this was Mr. Burke, who lost no time, not merely in making Barry known, but in procuring for him the first of all objects to an inexperienced and destitute young artist, employment. This employment was chiefly that of copying in oil drawings by Mr. Stewart, better known by the name of Athenian Stewart; and whether it suited the ambition of Barry or not, to be at this kind of labour, yet there can be no doubt that he profited by his connection with such a man as Stewart, and had full leisure to cast his eye about, and to improve by the general aspect of art and artists that occupied the period.

Mr. Burke and his other friends thinking it important that he should be introduced to a wider and nobler school of art than this country afforded, now came forward with the means necessary to accomplish this object; and in the latter end of 1765 Mr. Barry proceeded to the Continent, where he remained till the beginning of 1771, studying his art with an enthusiasm which seemed to augur the highest success, and making observations on the different chef d’œuvres of Italy with equal independence of judgment and nicety of discrimination. He was supported during this period by the friendly liberality of the Burke family (Edmund, William, and Richard), who allowed him forty pounds a-year for his necessary expenditure, besides occasional remittances for particular purposes. He proceeded first to Paris, then to Rome, where he remained upwards of three years, from thence to Florence and Bologna, and home through Venice. His letters to the Burkes, giving an account of Michael Angelo, Raphael, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci, show a complete insight into the characteristic merits of their works, and would make us wonder (if the case were at all singular) how he could enter with such force, delicacy, and feeling, into excellencies of which he never transplanted an atom into his own works. He saw, felt, and wrote; his impressions were profound and refined, but the expression of them must be instantaneous, such as gave the results of them with a stroke of the pen, as they were received by a glance of the eye, and he could not wait for the slow process of the pencil for embodying his conceptions in the necessary details of his own art. It was his desire to make the ideas and language of painting co-instantaneous,—to express abstract results by abstract mechanical means (a thing impossible),—to stamp the idea in his mind at once upon the canvass, without knowledge of its parts, without labour, without patience, without a moment’s time or thought intervening between what he wished to do and its being done, that was perhaps the principal obstacle to his ever attaining a degree of excellence in his profession at all proportioned either to his ambition or his genius. It is probable, that, as his hand had not the patience to give the details of objects, his eye, from the same habit of mind, had not the power to analyze them. It is possible, however, to see the results without the same laborious process that is necessary to convey them; for the eye sees faster than the hand can move.

We suspect Mr. Barry did not succeed very well in copying the pictures he so well describes; because he appears to have copied but few, only one of Raphael, as far as we can find, and three from Titian, whom he justly considered as the model of colouring, and as more perfect in that department of the art than either Raphael or Michael Angelo were in theirs, expression and form, the highest excellence in which he conceives to have been possessed only by the ancients. In copying from the antique, however, he manifested the same aversion to labour, or to that kind of labour which, by showing us our defects, compels us to make exertions to remedy them. He made all his drawings from the antique, by means of a delineator, that is, a mechanical instrument, to save the trouble of acquiring a knowledge both of form and proportion. In this manner, equally gratifying to his indolence and his self-love, he is stated to have made numberless sketches of the antique statues, of all sizes, and in all directions, carefully noting down on his sketch-paper their several measurements and proportions.

The consequences are before us in his pictures; namely, that all those of his figures which he took from these memorandums are deficient in every thing but form, and that all the others are equally deficient in form and every thing else. If he did not employ his pencil properly, or enough, in copying from the models he saw, he employed his thoughts and his pen about them with indefatigable zeal and spirit. He talked well about them; he wrote well about them; he made researches into all the collateral branches of art and knowledge, sculpture, architecture, cameos, seals, and intaglios. There is a long letter of his, addressed to Mr. Burke, on the origin of the Gothic style of architecture, written, as it should seem, to convince his friend and patron of his industry in neglecting his proper business. Soon after his arrival at Rome, he became embroiled with the whole tribe of connoisseurs, painters, and patrons there, whether native or foreign, on subjects of virtù; and he continued in this state of hostility with those around him while he staid there, and, indeed, to the end of his life. One might be tempted to suppose that Barry chiefly studied his art as a subject to employ his dialectics upon. On this unfortunate disposition of his to wrangling and controversy, as it was likely to affect his progress in his art and his progress in life, he received some most judicious advice from Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mr. Burke, his answers to which show an admirable self-ignorance. On his irritable denunciations of the practices and tricks of the Italian picture-dealers, Mr. Burke makes a reflection well deserving of attention. ‘In particular, you may be assured that the traffic in antiquity, and all the enthusiasm, folly, and fraud, which may be in it, never did, nor never can, hurt the merit of living artists. Quite the contrary, in my opinion: for I have ever observed, that, whatever it be that turns the minds of men to anything relative to the arts, even the most remotely so, brings artists more and more into credit and repute; and though, now and then, the mere broker and dealer in such things runs away with a great deal of profit, yet, in the end, ingenious men will find themselves gainers by the dispositions which are nourished and diffused in the world by such pursuits.’ Mr. Barry painted two pictures while abroad, his Adam and Eve and his Philoctetes. The first of these he sent home as a specimen of his progress in the art. It does not appear to have given much satisfaction. His Philoctetes he brought home with him. It is a most wretched, coarse, unclassical performance, the direct opposite of all that he thought it to be. During his stay at Rome, he made an excursion to Naples, and was highly delighted with the collections of art there. All the time he was abroad, Mr. Burke and his brothers not only were punctual in their remittances to him, but kept up a most friendly and cordial correspondence. On one occasion, owing to the delay of a letter, a bill which Barry had presented to a banker was dishonoured. This detained Barry for some time at the place where he was in very awkward circumstances, and he had thoughts of getting rid of his chagrin and of his prospects in life at once, by running away and turning friar. For some time previous to his return to England, Mr. Hamilton (afterwards Sir William) appears to have been almost the only person with whom he kept up any intimacy. It was on his return home through Milan that he witnessed, and has recorded with due reprobation, the destruction of Leonardo’s Last Supper, which two bungling artists were employed to paint over by order of one Count de Firmian, the secretary of state.

In the spring of 1771, Mr. Barry arrived in England, after an absence of five years. He soon after produced his picture of Venus, which has been compared to the Galatea of Raphael, the Venus of Titian, and the Venus of Medicis, without reason. Mr. Barry flattered himself that he had surpassed the famous statue of that name, by avoiding the appearance of maternity in it. There is an engraving of it by Mr. Valentine Green. In 1773, he exhibited his Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida, which was much praised by some critics of that day. His Death of General Wolfe was considered as a falling off from his great style of art, which consisted in painting Greek subjects, and it accordingly is said to ‘have obtained no praise.’ His fondness for Greek costume was assigned by his admirers as the cause of his reluctance to paint portraits; as if the coat was of more importance than the face. His fastidiousness, in this respect, and his frequent excuses, or blunt refusals, to go on with a portrait of Mr. Burke, which he had begun, caused a misunderstanding with that gentleman, which does not appear to have been ever entirely made up. The difference between them is said to have been widened by Burke’s growing intimacy with Sir Joshua, and by Barry’s feeling some little jealousy of the fame and fortune of his rival in an humbler walk of the art. He, about the same time, painted a pair of classical subjects, Mercury inventing the Lyre, and Narcissus looking at himself in the water, the last suggested to him by Mr. Burke. He also painted an historical picture of Chiron and Achilles, and another of the story of Stratonice, for which last the Duke of Richmond gave him a hundred guineas. In 1773, there was a plan in contemplation for our artists to decorate the inside of St. Paul’s with historical and sacred subjects; but this plan fell to the ground, from its not meeting with the concurrence of the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the no small mortification of Barry, who had fixed upon the subject he was to paint,—the rejection of Christ by the Jews when Pilate proposes his release. In 1775, he published An Inquiry into the real and imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England, vindicating the capacity of the English for the fine arts, and tracing their slow progress hitherto to the Reformation; to political and civil dissensions; and, lastly, to the general turn of the public mind to mechanics, manufactures, and commerce. In the year 1774, shortly after the failure of the scheme of decorating St. Paul’s, a proposal was made, through Mr. Valentine Green, to the same artists, Reynolds, West, Cipriani, Barry, &c. for ornamenting the great room of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, in the Adelphi, with historical and allegorical paintings. This proposal was at the time rejected by the artists themselves; but, in 1777, Mr. Barry made an offer to paint the whole himself, on condition of being allowed the choice of his subjects, and being paid the expense of canvass, paints, and models, by the Society. This offer was accepted, and he finished the series of pictures at the end of seven years, instead of two, which he had proposed to himself, but with entire satisfaction to the members of the Society, for whom it was intended, and who conducted themselves to him with liberality throughout. They granted him two exhibitions, and at different periods voted him 50 guineas, their gold medal, and again 200 guineas, and a seat among them. Dr. Johnson remarked, when he saw the pictures, that, ‘whatever the hand had done, the head had done its part.’ There was an excellent anonymous criticism, supposed to be by Mr. Burke, published on them, in answer to some remarks put forth by Barry, in his descriptive catalogue, on the ideal style of art, and the necessity of size to grandeur. His notions on both these subjects are very ably controverted, and, indeed, they are the rock on which Barry’s genius split. It would be curious if Mr. Burke were the author of these strictures; for it is not improbable that Barry was led into the last error, here deprecated, by that author’s Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. The series consists of six pictures, showing the progress of human culture. The first represents Orpheus taming the savages by his lyre. The figure of Orpheus himself is more like a drunken bacchanal than an inspired poet or lawgiver. The only part of this picture which is valuable is the background, in one part of which a lion is seen ready to dart upon a family group milking near a cave, and, in another, a tyger is pursuing a horse. There is certainly a scope of thought and picturesque invention, in thus showing indirectly the protection which civilization extends, as it were, over both man and animals. The second picture is a Grecian harvest, which has nothing Grecian in it. But we cannot apply this censure to the third picture of the Olympic Games, some of the figures in which, and the principal group, are exceedingly graceful, classical, and finely conceived. This picture is the only proof Mr. Barry has left upon canvass that he was not utterly insensible to the beauties of the art. The figure of the young man on horseback really reminds the spectator of some of the Elgin marbles; and the outlines of the two youthful victors at the games, supporting their father on their shoulders, are excellent. The colouring is, however, as bald and wretched in this picture as the rest, and there is a great want of expression. The fourth picture is the triumph of commerce, with Dr. Burney swimming in the Thames, with his hair powdered, among naked sea-nymphs. The fifth, the Society of Arts, distributing their annual prizes. And the sixth represents Elysium. This last picture is a collection of caricatured portraits of celebrated individuals of all ages and nations, strangely jumbled together, with a huge allegorical figure of Retribution driving Heresy, Vice, and Atheism, into the infernal regions. The moral design of all these pictures is much better explained in the catalogue than on the canvass; and the artist has added none of the graces of the pencil to it in any of them, with the exception above made. Mr. Barry appears, however, to have rested his pretensions to fame as an artist on this work, for he did little afterwards but paltry engravings from himself, and the enormous and totally worthless picture of Pandora in the assembly of the gods. His self-denial, frugality, and fortitude, in the prosecution of his work at the Adelphi, cannot be too much applauded. He has been heard to say, that at the time of his undertaking it, he had only 16s. in his pocket; and that he had often been obliged, after painting all day, to sit up at night to sketch or engrave some design for the printsellers, which was to supply him with his next day’s subsistence. In this manner he did his prints of Job, dedicated to Mr. Burke, of the birth of Venus, Polemon, Head of Chatham, King Lear, from the picture painted for the Shakespear gallery, &c. His prints are caricatures even of his pictures: they seem engraved on rotten wood.

Soon after Mr. Barry’s return from the Continent, he was chosen a member of the Royal Academy; and in 1782, was appointed professor of painting, in the room of Mr. Penny, with a salary of £30 a-year. The lectures which he delivered from the chair were full of strong sense, and strong advice, both to the students and academicians. Among other things, he insisted much on the necessity of purchasing a collection of pictures by the best masters as models for the students, and proposed several of those in the Orleans collection. This recommendation was not relished by the academicians, who, perhaps, thought their own pictures the best models for their several pupils. Bickerings, jealousies, and quarrels arose, and at length reached such a height, that, in 1799, Mr. Barry was expelled from the academy, soon after the appearance of his Letter to the Dilettanti Society; a very amusing, but eccentric publication, full of the highest enthusiasm for his art, and the lowest contempt for the living professors of it. In 1800, he undertook a design or drawing to celebrate the union of the two kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland. The profits of the two exhibitions of the Adelphi pictures are said to have amounted to above £500. Lord Romney presented him with 100 guineas for his portrait, which had been copied into one of the pictures, and he had twenty guineas for a head of Mr. Hooper. He probably received other sums for portraits introduced into the work. By extreme frugality he contrived, not only to live, but to save money. His house was twice robbed of sums which he kept by him; one of the times (in 1794) of upwards of £100; a loss which was made up by the munificence of Lord Radnor, and by that of his friends, the Hollis’s. After the loss of his salary, a subscription was set on foot by the Earl of Buchan to relieve him from his difficulties, and to settle him in a larger house to finish his picture of Pandora. The subscription amounted to £1000, with which an annuity was bought; but of this he was prevented from enjoying the benefit; for, on the 6th of February 1806, he was seized with a pleuritic fever, and as he neglected medical assistance at first, it was afterwards of no use. After lingering on for a fortnight in considerable pain, but without losing his fortitude of mind, he died on the 22d of the same month. On the 13th of March, the body was taken to the great room of the Society of Arts, and was thence attended, the following day, by a numerous and respectable train of his friends to the cathedral of St. Paul’s, where it was deposited.

Mr. Barry, as an artist, a writer, and a man, was distinguished by great inequality of powers and extreme contradictions in character. He was gross and refined at the same time; violent and urbane; sociable and sullen; inflammable and inert; ardent and phlegmatic; relapsing from enthusiasm into indolence; irritable, headstrong, impatient of restraint; captious in his intercourse with his friends, wavering and desultory in his profession. In his personal habits he was careless of appearances or decency, penurious, slovenly, and squalid. He regarded nothing but his immediate impulses, confirmed into incorrigible habits. His pencil was under no control. His eye and his hand seemed to receive a first rude impulse, to which it gave itself up, and paid no regard to any thing else. The strength of the original impetus only drove him farther from his object. His genius constantly flew off in tangents, and came in contact with nature only at salient points. There are two drawings of his from statues of a lion and a lioness at Rome; the nose of the lioness is two straight lines; the ears of the lion two curves, which might be mistaken for horns; as if, after it had taken its first direction, he lost the use of his hand, and his tools worked mechanically and monotonously without his will. His enthusiasm and vigour were exhausted in the conception; the execution was crude and abortive. His writings are a greater acquisition to the art than his paintings. The powers of conversation were what he most excelled in; and the influence which he exercised in this way over all companies where he came, in spite of the coarseness of his dress, and the frequent rudeness of his manner, was great. Take him for all in all, he was a man of whose memory it is impossible to think without admiration as well as regret.

ORIGINALITY

Originality is any conception of things, taken immediately from nature, and neither borrowed from, nor common to, others. To deserve this appellation, the copy must be both true and new. But herein lies the difficulty of reconciling a seeming contradiction in the terms of the explanation. For as any thing to be natural must be referable to a consistent principle, and as the face of things is open and familiar to all, how can any imitation be new and striking, without being liable to the charge of extravagance, distortion, and singularity? And, on the other hand, if it has no such peculiar and distinguishing characteristic to set it off, it cannot possibly rise above the level of the trite and common-place. This objection would indeed hold good and be unanswerable, if nature were one thing, or if the eye or mind comprehended the whole of it at a single glance; in which case, if an object had been once seen and copied in the most cursory and mechanical way, there could be no farther addition to, or variation from, this idea, without obliquity and affectation; but nature presents an endless variety of aspects, of which the mind seldom takes in more than a part or than one view at a time; and it is in seizing on this unexplored variety, and giving some one of these new but easily recognised features, in its characteristic essence, and according to the peculiar bent and force of the artist’s genius, that true originality consists. ROMNEY, when he was first introduced into Sir JOSHUA’S gallery, said, ‘there was something in his portraits which had been never seen in the art before, but which every one must be struck with as true and natural the moment he saw it.’ This could not happen if the human face did not admit of being contemplated in several points of view, or if the hand were necessarily faithful to the suggestions of sense. Two things serve to perplex this question; first, the construction of language, from which, as one object is represented by one word, we imagine that it is one thing, and that we can no more conceive differently of the same object than we can pronounce the same word in different ways, without being wrong in all but one of them; secondly, the very nature of our individual impressions puts a deception upon us; for, as we know no more of any given object than we see, we very pardonably conclude that we see the whole of it, and have exhausted inquiry at the first view, since we can never suspect the existence of that which, from our ignorance and incapacity, gives us no intimation of itself. Thus, if we are shown an exact likeness of a face, we give the artist credit chiefly for dexterity of hand; we think that any one who has eyes can see a face; that one person sees it just like another, that there can be no mistake about it (as the object and the image are in our notion the same)—and that if there is any departure from our version of it, it must be purely fantastical and arbitrary. Multum abludit imago. We do not look beyond the surface; or rather we do not see into the surface, which contains a labyrinth of difficulties and distinctions, that not all the effects of art, of time, patience, and study, can master and unfold. But let us take this self-evident proposition, the human face, and examine it a little; and we shall soon be convinced what a Proteus, what an inexplicable riddle it is! Ask any one who thinks he has a perfect idea of the face of his friend, what the shape of his nose or any other feature is, and he will presently find his mistake;—ask a lover to draw his ‘mistress’ eyebrow,’ it is not merely that his hand will fail him, but his memory is at fault both for the form and colour; he may, indeed, dream, and tell you with the poet, that

‘Grace is in all her steps, heaven in her eye, In every gesture, dignity and love’:—

but if he wishes to embody his favourite conceit, and to convince any one else of all this by proof positive, he must borrow the painter’s aid. When a young artist first begins to make a study from a head, it is well known that he has soon done, because after he has got in a certain general outline and rude masses, as the forehead, the nose, the mouth, the eyes in a general way, he sees no farther, and is obliged to stop; he feels in truth that he has made a very indifferent copy, but is quite at a loss how to supply the defect—after a few months’ or a year or two’s practice, if he has a real eye for nature and a turn for his art, he can spend whole days in working up the smallest details, in correcting the proportions, in softening the gradations; and does not know when to leave off, till night closes in upon him, and then he sits musing and gazing in the twilight at what remains for his next day’s work. Sir JOSHUA REYNOLDS used to say, that if he did not finish any one of his pictures till he saw nothing more to be done to it, he should never leave off. TITIAN wrote on his pictures, faciebat—as much as to say that he was about them, but that it was an endless task. As the mind advances in the knowledge of nature, the horizon of art enlarges and the air refines. Then, in addition to an infinity of details, even in the most common object, there is the variety of form and colour, of light and shade, of character and expression, of the voluptuous, the thoughtful, the grand, the graceful, the grave, the gay, the I know not what; which are all to be found (separate or combined) in nature, which sufficiently account for the diversity of art, and to detect and carry off the spolia opima of any one of which is the highest praise of human genius and skill—

‘Whate’er Lorrain light-touch’d with softening hue, Or savage Rosa dash’d, or learned Poussin drew.’

All that we meet with in the master-pieces of taste and genius is to be found in the previous capacity of nature; and man, instead of adding to the store, or creating any thing either as to matter or manner, can only draw out a feeble and imperfect transcript, bit by bit, and one appearance after another, according to the peculiar aptitude and affinity that subsists between his mind and some one part. The mind resembles a prism, which untwists the various rays of truth, and displays them by different modes and in several parcels. Enough has been said to vindicate both conditions of originality, which distinguish it from singularity on the one hand and from vulgarity on the other; or to show how a thing may at the same time be both true and new. This novel truth is brought out when it meets with a strong congenial mind—that is, with a mind in the highest degree susceptible of a certain class of impressions, or of a certain kind of beauty or power; and this peculiar strength, congeniality, truth of imagination, or command over a certain part of nature, is, in other words, what is meant by genius. This will serve to show why original inventors have in general (and except in what is mechanical), left so little for their followers to improve upon; for as the original invention implies the utmost stretch and felicity of thought, or the greatest strength and sagacity to discover and dig the ore from the mine of truth, so it is hardly to be expected that a greater degree of capacity should ever arise (than the highest), that a greater mastery should be afterwards obtained in shaping and fashioning the precious materials, than in the first heat and eagerness of discovery; or that, if the capacity were equal, the same scope and opportunity would be left for its exercise in the same field. If the genius were different, it would then seek different objects and a different vent, and open new paths to fame and excellence, instead of treading in old ones. Hence the well-known observation, that in each particular style or class of art, the greatest works of genius are the earliest. Hence, also, the first productions of men of genius are often their best. What was that something that ROMNEY spoke of in REYNOLDS’S pictures that the world had never seen before, but with which they were enchanted the moment they beheld it, and which both HOPPNER and JACKSON, with all their merit, have but faintly imitated since? It was a reflection of the artist’s mind—an emanation from his character, transferred to the canvass. It was an ease, an amenity, an indolent but anxious satisfaction, a graceful playfulness, belonging to his disposition, and spreading its charm on all around it, attracting what harmonized with, and softening and moulding what repelled it, avoiding every thing hard, stiff, and formal, shrinking from details, reposing on effect, imparting motion to still life, viewing all things in their ‘gayest, happiest attitudes,’ and infusing his own spirit into nature as the leaven is kneaded into the dough; but, though the original bias existed in himself, and was thence stamped upon his works, yet the character could neither have been formed without the constant recurrence and pursuit of proper nourishment, nor could it have expressed itself without a reference to those objects, looks, and attitudes in nature, which soothed and assimilated with it. What made HOGARTH original and inimitable, but the wonderful redundance, and, as it were, supererogation of his genius, which poured the oil of humanity into the wounds and bruises of human nature, redeemed, while it exposed, vice and folly, made deformity pleasing, and turned misfortune into a jest? But could he have done so if there were no enjoyment or wit in a night-cellar, or if the cripple could not dance and sing? No, the moral was in nature; but let no one dare to insist upon it after him, in the same language and with the same pretensions! There was REMBRANDT—did he invent the extremes of light and shade, or was he only the first that embodied them? He was so only because his eye drank in light and shade more deeply than any one before or since; and, therefore, the sunshine hung in liquid drops from his pencil, and the dungeon’s gloom hovered over his canvass. Who can think of CORREGGIO without a swimming of the head—the undulating line, the melting grace, the objects advancing and retiring as in a measured dance or solemn harmony! But all this fulness, roundness, and delicacy, existed before in nature, and only found a fit sanctuary in his mind. The breadth and masses of MICHAEL ANGELO were studies from nature, which he selected and cast in the mould of his own manly and comprehensive genius. The landscapes of CLAUDE are in a fixed repose, as if nothing could be moved from its place without a violence to harmony and just proportion: in those of RUBENS every thing is fluttering and in motion, light and indifferent, as the winds blow where they list. All this is characteristic, original, a different mode of nature, which the artist had the happiness to find out and carry to the utmost point of perfection. It has been laid down that no one paints any thing but his own character, and almost features; and the workman is always to be traced in the work. Mr. FUSELI’S figures, if they were like nothing else, were like himself, or resembled the contortions of a dream; WILKIE’S have a parochial air; HAYDON’S are heroical; Sir THOMAS’S genteel. What Englishman could bear to sit to a French artist? What English artist could hope to succeed in a French coquet? There is not only an individual but a national bias, which is observable in the different schools and productions of art. Mannerism is the bane (though it is the occasional vice) of genius, and is the worst kind of imitation, for it is a man’s imitating himself. Many artists go on repeating and caricaturing themselves, till they complain that nature puts them out. Gross plagiarism may consist with great originality. STERNE was a notorious plagiarist, but a true genius. His Corporal Trim, his Uncle Toby, and Mr. Shandy, are to be found no where else. If RAPHAEL had done nothing but borrow the two figures from MASACCIO, it would have been impossible to say a word in his defence: no one has a right to steal, who is not rich enough to be robbed by others. So MILTON has borrowed more than almost any other writer; but he has uniformly stamped a character of his own upon it. In what relates to the immediate imitation of nature, people find it difficult to conceive of an opening for originality, inasmuch as they think that they themselves see the whole of nature, and that every other view of it is wrong:—in what relates to the productions of imagination or the discoveries of science, as they themselves are totally in the dark, they fancy the whole to be a fabrication, and give the inventor credit for a sort of dealing with the Devil, or some preternatural kind of talent. Poets lay a popular and prescriptive claim to inspiration: the astronomer of old was thought able to conjure with the stars; and the skilful leech, who performed unexpected cures was condemned for a sorcerer. This is as great an error the other way. The vulgar think there is nothing in what lies on the surface; though the learned only see beyond it by stripping off incumbrances and coming to another surface beneath the first. The difference between art and science is only the difference between the clothed and naked figure: but the veil of truth must be drawn aside before we can distinctly see the face. The physician is qualified to prescribe remedies because he is acquainted with the internal structure of the body, and has studied the symptoms of disorders: the mathematician arrives at his most surprising conclusions by slow and sure steps; and where he can add discovery to discovery by the very certainty of the hold he has of all the previous links. There is no witchcraft in either case. The invention of the poet is little more than the fertility of a teeming brain—that is, than the number and quantity of associations present to his mind, and the various shapes in which he can turn them without being distracted or losing a ‘semblable coherence’ of the parts; as the man of observation and reflection strikes out just and unforeseen remarks by taking off the mask of custom and appearances; or by judging for himself of men and things, without taking it for granted that they are what he has hitherto supposed them, or waiting to be told by others what they are. If there were no foundation for an unusual remark in our own consciousness or experience, it would not strike us as a discovery: it would sound like a jeu-d’esprit, a whim or oddity, or as flat nonsense. The mere mob, ‘the great vulgar and the small,’ are not therefore capable of distinguishing between originality and singularity, for they have no idea beyond the commonplace of fashion or custom. Prejudice has no ears either for or against itself; it is alike averse to objections and proofs, for both equally disturb its blind implicit notions of things. Originality is, then, ‘the strong conception’ of truth and nature ‘that the mind groans withal,’ and of which it cannot stay to be delivered by authority or example. It is feeling the ground sufficiently firm under one’s feet to be able to go alone. Truth is its essence; it is the strongest possible feeling of truth; for it is a secret and instinctive yearning after, and approximation towards it, before it is acknowledged by others, and almost before the mind itself knows what it is. Paradox and eccentricity, on the other hand, show a dearth of originality, as bombast and hyperbole show a dearth of imagination; they are the desperate resources of affectation and want of power. Originality is necessary to genius; for when that which, in the first instance, conferred the character, is afterwards done by rule and routine, it ceases to be genius. To conclude, the value of any work of art or science depends chiefly on the quantity of originality contained in it, and which constitutes either the charm of works of fiction or the improvement to be derived from those of progressive information. But it is not so in matters of opinion, where every individual thinks he can judge for himself, and does not wish to be set right. There is, consequently, nothing that the world like better than originality of invention, and nothing that they hate worse than originality of thought. Advances in science were formerly regarded with like jealousy, and stigmatised as dangerous by the friends of religion and the state: GALILEO was imprisoned in the same town of Florence, where they now preserve his finger pointing to the skies!

THE IDEAL

The ideal is the abstraction of any thing from all the circumstances that weaken its effect, or lessen our admiration of it. Or it is filling up the outline of truth or beauty existing in the mind, so as to leave nothing wanting or to desire farther. The principle of the ideal is the satisfaction we have in the contemplation of any quality or object, which makes us seek to heighten, to prolong, or extend that satisfaction to the utmost; and beyond this we cannot go, for we cannot get beyond the highest conceivable degree of any quality or excellence diffused over the whole of an object. Any notion of perfection beyond is is a word without meaning—a thing in the clouds. Another name for the ideal is the divine; for, what we imagine of the Gods is pleasure without pain—power without effort. The ideal is the impassive and immortal: it is that which exists in and for itself; or is begot by the intense idea and innate love of it. Hence it has been argued by some, as if it were brought from another sphere, as RAPHAEL was said to have fetched his Galatea from the skies; but it was the Gods, ‘the children of HOMER,’ who peopled ‘the cloud-capt Olympus.’ The statue of Venus was not beautiful because it represented a goddess; but it was supposed to represent a goddess, because it was in the highest degree (that the art or wit of man could make it so) and in every part beautiful. Goddesses also walk the earth in the shape of women; the height of nature surpasses the utmost stretch of the imagination; the human form is alone the image of the divinity. It has been usual to represent the ideal as an abstraction of general nature, or as a mean or average proportion between different qualities and faculties, which, instead of carrying any one to the highest point of perfection or satisfaction, would only neutralise and damp the impression. We take our notions on this subject chiefly from the antique; but what higher conception do we form of the Jupiter of PHIDIAS than that of power frowning in awful majesty? or of the Minerva of the same hand, than that of wisdom, ‘severe in youthful beauty?’ We shall do well not to refine in our theories beyond these examples, that have been left us—

‘Inimitable on earth by model, Or by shading pencil shown.’

What is the Venus, the Apollo, the Hercules, but the personification of beauty, grace, and strength, or the displaying these several properties in every part of the attitude, face, and figure, and in the utmost conceivable degree, but without confounding the particular kinds of form or expression in an intermediate something, pretended to be more perfect than either? A thing is not more perfect by becoming something else, but by being more itself. If the face of the Venus had been soft and feminine, but the figure had not corresponded, then this would have been a defect of the ideal, which subdues the discordances of Nature in the mould of passion, and so far from destroying character, imparts the same character to all, according to a certain established idea or preconception in the mind. The following up the contrary principle would lead to the inevitable result, that the most perfect, that is, the most abstract, representation of the human form could contain neither age nor sex, neither character nor expression, neither the attributes of motion nor rest, but a mere unmeaning negation or doubtful balance of all positive qualities—in fact, to propose to embody an abstraction is a contradiction in terms. The attempt to carry such a scheme into execution would not merely supersede all the varieties and accidents of nature, but would effectually put a stop to the productions of art, or reduce them to one vague and undefined abstraction, answering to the word man. That amalgamation, then, of a number of different impressions into one, which in some sense is felt to constitute the ideal, is not to be sought in the dry and desert spaces or the endless void of metaphysical abstraction, or by taking a number of things and muddling them all together, but by singling out some one thing or leading quality of an object, and making it the pervading and regulating principle of all the rest, so as to produce the greatest strength and harmony of effect. This is the natural progress of things, and accords with the ceaseless tendency of the human mind from the Finite to the Infinite. If I see beauty, I do not want to change it for power; if I am struck with power, I am no longer in love with beauty; but I wish to make beauty still more beautiful, power still more powerful, and to pamper and exalt the prevailing impression, whatever it be, till it ends in a dream and a vision of glory. This view of the subject has been often dwelt upon: I shall endeavour to supply some inferences from it. The ideal, it appears then by this account of it, is the enhancing and expanding an idea from the satisfaction we take in it; or it is taking away whatever divides, and adding whatever increases our sympathy with pleasure and power ‘till our content is absolute,’ or at the height. Hence that repose which has been remarked as one striking condition of the ideal; for as it is nothing but the continued approximation of the mind to the great and the good, so in the attainment of this object it rejects as much as possible not only the petty, the mean, and disagreeable, but also the agony and violence of passion, the force of contrast, and the extravagance of imagination. It is a law to itself. It relies on its own aspirations after pure enjoyment and lofty contemplation alone, self-moved and self-sustained, without the grosser stimulus of the irritation of the will, privation, or suffering—unless when it is inured and reconciled to the last (as an element of its being) by heroic fortitude, and when ‘strong patience conquers deep despair.’ In this sense, MILTON’s Satan is ideal, though tragic: for it is permanent tragedy, or one fixed idea without vicissitude or frailty, and where all the pride of intellect and power is brought to bear in confronting and enduring pain. Mr. WORDSWORTH has expressed this feeling of stoical indifference (proof against outward impressions) admirably in the poem of Laodamia:—

‘Know, virtue were not virtue, if the joys Of sense were able to return as fast And surely as they vanish. Earth destroys Those raptures duly: _Erebus disdains— Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains_.’

These lines are a noble description and example of the ideal in poetry. But the ideal is not in general the stronghold of poetry. For description in words (to produce any vivid impression) requires a translation of the object into some other form, which is the language of metaphor and imagination; as narrative can only interest by a succession of events and a conflict of hopes and fears. Therefore, the sphere of the ideal is in a manner limited to Sculpture and Painting, where the object itself is given entire without any possible change of circumstances, and where, though the impression is momentary, it lasts for ever. Hence we may see the failure in Sir Charles Grandison, which is an attempt to embody this perfect or ideal character in a succession of actions without passion, and in a variety of situations where he is still the same everlasting coxcomb, and where we are tired to death of the monotony, affectation, and self-conceit. The story of ‘Patient Grizzle,’ however fine the sentiment, is far from dramatic: for the ideal character, which is the self-sufficient, the immovable, and the one, precludes change, or at least all motive for, or interest in, the alternation of events, to which it constantly rises superior. SHAKSPEARE’S characters are interesting and dramatic, in proportion as they are not above passion and outward circumstances, that is, as they are men and not angels. The Greek tragedies may serve to explain how far the ideal and the dramatic are consistent; for the characters there are almost as ideal as their statues, and almost as impassive; and perhaps their extreme decorum and self-possession is only rendered palatable to us by the story which nearly always represents a conflict between Gods and men. The ideal part is, however, necessary at all times to the grandeur of tragedy, since it is the superiority of character to fortune and circumstances, or the larger scope of thought and feeling thrown into it, that redeems it from the charge of vulgar grossness or physical horrors. Mrs. SIDDONS’S acting had this character; that is to say, she kept her state in the midst of the tempest of passion, and her eye surveyed, not merely the present suffering, but the causes and consequences; there was inherent power and dignity of manner. In a word, as there is a sanguine temperament, and a health of body and mind which floats us over daily annoyances and hindrances (instead of fastening upon petty and disagreeable details), and turns every thing to advantage, so it is in art and works of the imagination, the principle of the ideal being neither more nor less than that fulness of satisfaction and enlargement of comprehension in the mind itself that assists and expands all that accords with it, and throws aside and triumphs over whatever is adverse. Grace in movement is either that which is continuous and consistent, from having no obstacles opposed to it, or that which perseveres in this continuous and equable movement from a delight in it, in spite of interruption or uneven ground; this last is the ideal, or a persisting in, and giving effect to, our choice of the good, notwithstanding the unfavourableness of the actual or outward circumstances. We may in like manner trace the origin of dancing, music, and poetry, which is the march of words. Self-possession is the ideal in ordinary behaviour. A low or vulgar character seizes on every trifling or painful circumstance that occurs, from irritability and want of imagination to look beyond the moment; while a person of more refinement and capacity, or with a stronger predisposition of the mind to good, and a greater fund of good sense and pleasurable feeling to second it, despises these idle provocations, and preserves an unruffled composure and serenity of temper. This internal character, being permanent, communicates itself to the outward expression in proportionable sweetness, delicacy, and unity of effect, which it requires all the same characteristics of the mind to feel and convey to others; and hence the superiority of RAPHAEL’S Madonnas over HOGARTH’S faces. Keeping is not the ideal, for there may be keeping in the little, the mean, and the disjointed, without strength, softness or expansion. The Fauns and Satyrs of antiquity belong (like other fabulous creations) rather to the grotesque than the ideal. They may be considered, however, as a bastard species of the ideal, for they stamp one prominent character of vice and deformity on the whole face, instead of going into the minute, uncertain, and shuffling details. As to the rest, the ideal abhors monsters and incongruity. If the horses in the Elgin marbles, or the boar of MELEAGER, are ranked with the human figures, it is from their being perfect representations of the forms and actions of the animals designed, not caricatures half-way between the human and the brute.

The ideal, then, is the highest point of purity and perfection to which we can carry the idea of any object or quality. The natural differs from the ideal style, inasmuch as what anything is differs from what we wish and can conceive it to be. Many people would substitute the phrase, from what it ought to be, to express the latter part of the alternative, and would explain what a thing ought to be by that which is best. But for myself, I do not understand, or at least it does not appear to me, a self-evident proposition, either what a thing ought to be, or what it is best that it should be; it is only shifting the difficulty a remove farther, and begging the question a second time. I may know what is good; I can tell what is better: but that which is best is beyond me—it is a thing in the clouds. There is perhaps also a species of cant—the making up for a want of clearness of ideas by insinuating a pleasing moral inference—in the words purity and perfection used above; but I would be understood as meaning by purity nothing more than a freedom from alloy or any incongruous mixture in a given quality or character of an object, and by perfection completeness, or the extending that quality to all the parts and circumstances of an object, so that it shall be as nearly as possible of a piece. The imagination does not ordinarily bestow any pains on that which is mean and indifferent in itself, but having conceived an interest in any thing, and the passions being once excited, we endeavour to give them food and scope by making that which is beautiful still more beautiful, that which is striking still more grand, that which is hateful still more deformed, through the positive, comparative, and superlative degrees, till the mind can go no farther in this progression of fancy and passion without losing the original idea, or quitting its hold of nature, which is the ground on which it still rests with fluttering pinions. The ideal does not transform any object into something else, or neutralize its character, but, by removing what is irrelevant and supplying what was defective, makes it more itself than it was before. I have included above the Fauns and Satyrs, as well as the Heroes and Deities of antique art, or the perfection of deformity as well as of beauty and strength, but any one who pleases may draw the line, and leave out the exceptionable part; it will make no difference in the principle.

Venus is painted fair, with golden locks, but she must not be fair beyond the fairness of woman—for the beauty we desire is that of woman—nor must the hair be actually of the colour of gold, but only approaching to it, for then it would no longer look like hair, but like something else, and in striving to enhance the effect we should weaken it. Habit, as well as passion, knowledge as well as desire, is one part of the human mind; nor, in aiming at imaginary perfection, are we to confound the understood boundaries and distinct classes of things, or ‘to o’erstep the modesty of nature.’ We may rise the superstructure of fancy as high as we please; the basis is custom. We talk in words of an ivory skin, of golden tresses; but these are but figures of speech, and a poetical licence. Richardson acknowledges that Clarissa’s neck was not so white as the lace on it, whatever the poets might say if they had been called upon to describe it.

ROYAL ACADEMY

The choice of a President for this Society is one of some nicety. Where there is not any individual taking a decided and indisputable lead in art, it requires a combination and balance of qualities not always easily to be met with. The President of the great body of art in this country ought not merely to be eminent in his profession, but a man of gentlemanly manners, of good person, of respectable character, and standing well in the opinion of his brother artists. He should be a person free from peculiarity of temper, from party spirit, and able to represent the elegant arts (of which he stands at the head) as the last ostensible link connecting scientific pursuit with the enlightened taste and aristocratic refinements of their immediate patrons. The choice has fallen upon Mr. SHEE, and his honours will sit well upon him. This artist has been long a favourite with the public in the most popular branch of his art, and is scarcely less distinguished by his occasional brilliant effusions as a poet and his accomplishments as a man. The characteristics of Mr. SHEE’S style of portrait painting are vivacity of expression, facility of execution, and clearness of colouring. He has attempted history with some success. Perhaps if he had done more in this way, it might have been to his own detriment; and the habits and studies of the historical painter, immersed in a world of retirement and abstraction, are such as hardly serve for an introduction to situations of ornament and distinction in social life. Mr. WILKIE’S merits as a painter of familiar subjects have procured him the deserved honour of being appointed ‘historical painter to the King’—the admirable busts of Mr. CHANTREY might also have been thrown into the opposite scale; but, upon the whole, the judgment of the public will not take the laurel from the head where the hands of the Academy have placed it. If we might hint a fault where so much praise is due, it would be by expressing a wish that Mr. SHEE could more boldly say with Rembrandt, ‘Je suis peintre, non pas teinturier.’ His tones are too pure, approaching too nearly to virgin tints. For one department of his office the new President is happily qualified—we mean the delivery of lectures from the Chair of the Royal Academy. The art of painting is dumb but Mr. SHEE can borrow the aid of a sister muse.

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Footnote 12:

One would think that a people so devoted to perfumes, who deal in essences and scents, and have fifty different sorts of snuffs, would be equally nice, and offended at the approach of every disagreeable odour. Not so. They seem to have no sense of the disagreeable in smells or tastes, as if their heads were stuffed with a cold, and hang over a dunghill, as if it were a bed of roses, or swallow the most detestable dishes with the greatest relish. The nerve of their sensibility is bound up at the point of pain. A Frenchman (as far as I can find) has no idea answering to the word nasty; or if he has, feels a predilection for, instead of an aversion to, it. So in morals they bid fair to be the Sybarites of the modern world. They make the best of every thing (which is a virtue)—and treat the worst with levity or complaisance (which is a vice). They harbour no antipathies. They would swallow Gil Blas’s supper as a luxury, and boast of it afterwards as a feat. Their moral system is not sustained by the two opposite principles of attraction and repulsion, for they are shocked at nothing: what excites horror or disgust in other minds, they consider as a bagatelle; it is resolved into an abstraction of agreeable sensations, a source of amusement. There is an oil of self-complacency in their constitutions, which takes the sting out of evil, and neutralizes the poison of corruption. They, therefore, can commit atrocities with impunity, and wallow in disgrace without a blush, as no other people can. There is Monsieur Chateaubriand, for instance. Who would not suppose that the very echo of his own name would hoot him out of the world? So far from it, his pamphlet On the Censorship has just come to a third edition, and is stuck all over Paris!

Footnote 13:

This is not correct; there is no foot-path in France, but there is a side-path, claiming, I presume, the same privileges.

Footnote 14:

‘There is nothing which an Englishman enjoys so much as the pleasure of sulkiness.’—Edinburgh Review, No. 80.

Footnote 15:

We may trace something of their national origin in both their minds. In Claude there is the French finicalness, and love of minute details; but there is a fusion of all these into the most perfect harmony from the influence of a southern sky, and he has none of the flimsiness or littleness of effect, to which his countrymen are prone. Again, it cannot be denied that there is a certain setness and formality, a didactic or prosing vein in Nicolas Poussin’s compositions. He proceeds on system, has a deliberate purpose to make out, and is often laboured, monotonous, and extravagant. His pictures are the finest subjects in the world for French criticism—to point the moral, or detach an episode. He is somewhat pedantic and over-significant, in the manner of French orators and poets. He had, like his countrymen, no great eye for nature or truth of expression; but he had what they chiefly want—imagination, or the power of placing himself in the circumstances of others. Poussin, in fact, held a middle place between Raphael and other painters of the Italian school, who have embodied the highest poetry of expression, and the common run of French artists, whose utmost stretch of invention reaches no farther than correctness in the costume and chronology of their subject.

Footnote 16:

It is at Florence.

Footnote 17:

Is not a monkey grave when it is doing nothing, or when it is not employed in mischief?

Footnote 18:

The French phrase for being present at a play is, to assist at it. It must be owned that there is some appearance of truth in the expression.

Footnote 19:

Inventor of the Diorama.

Footnote 20:

It is the same idle, inveterate self-complacency, the same limited comprehension, that has been their ruin in every thing. Parisian exquisites could not conceive that it snowed in Russia, nor how it was possible for barbarians to bivouac in the Champs Elysées. But they have forgotten the circumstance altogether. Why should I remind them of it?

Footnote 21:

French pictures, to be thoroughly and unexceptionably good, ought to be translated back again into sculpture, from which they are originally taken.

Footnote 22:

Yet they tax Shakspeare with grossness and barbarity. There is nothing like this scene in all his plays, except Titus Andronicus, which is full of the same tragic exaggeration and tautology. I was walking out (this 1st of October—a clear grey autumnal morning) in the gardens of the Tuileries, and seeing the long, tall avenue of trees before me that leads up to the barrier of Neuilly, it put me in mind of former times, of prints and pictures of the scenery and roads in foreign countries which I had been used to from a child, with the old-fashioned look of every thing around Paris, as if it were the year 1724, instead of 1824, till the view before me seemed to become part of a dream, or to transport me into past time, or to raise itself up in my imagination, like a picture in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ I wondered whether Buonaparte sometimes thought of this view when he was at St. Helena. I checked myself in this strain of speculation as overcharged and disproportioned to the occasion, according to the correct and elegant taste of the people where I was, when on a post opposite, I saw stuck up in large letters, ‘Pension de l’Univers,’ meaning a tenpenny ordinary. These are the people that are continually crying out against the extravagance and bombast of their neighbours. Their imagination runs to the ends of the universe, when it has nothing but words to carry—no people so magnificent, so prodigal of professions, so hyperbolical as they—add but meaning or a weight of feeling to them, and they complain bitterly of the load, and throw it off as barbarous, intolerable, Gothic, and uncouth. It is not the extravagance of the style, then, with which they quarrel, but the palpableness of the imagery which gives a blow to their slender intellectual stamina, or the accumulation of feeling about it with which they have not firmness or comprehension to grapple. ‘Dip it in the ocean, and it will stand’—says Sterne’s barber of the buckle of his wig. They magnify trifles, con amore; it is only when a poor struggling attempt is to be made to gain relief from the ‘perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart,’ or to embody the swelling conceptions of the soul in remote and lofty images, that they shrink back with the timidity of women and the formality of pedants.

Footnote 23:

The Orpheus and Eurydice of Drölling is a performance of great merit. The females, floating in the air before Orpheus, are pale as lilies, and beautiful in death. But he need hardly despair, or run wild as he does. He may easily overtake them; and as to vanishing, they have no appearance of it. Their figures are quite solid and determined in their outline.

Footnote 24:

See the admirably-drawn, but painful scene in Evelina between Captain Mervin and Monsieur Dubois.

Footnote 25:

A French dwarf, exhibited in London some years ago, and who had the misfortune to be born a mere trunk, grew enraged at the mention of another dwarf as a rival in bodily imperfection, and after insisting that the other had both hands and feet, exclaimed emphatically, ‘Mais moi, je suis unique.’ My old acquaintance (Dr. Stoddart) used formerly to recount this trait of French character very triumphantly, but then it was in war-time. He may think it indecent to have here hinted any such thing of an individual of a nation with whom we are at peace. At present, he seems to have become a sort of portent and by-word himself among English politicians; and without head or heart may exclaim—‘Mais moi, je suis unique!‘—See his late articles on the Spanish Refugees, &c. Would such a man have been any better, had he never turned renegade, or had he become (his first ambition) a revolutionary leader? Would he not have been as blood-thirsty, as bigoted, as perverse and ridiculous on the side of the question he left, as on the one he has come over to? It imports little what men are, so long as they are themselves. The great misfortune of a certain class of persons (both for their own sake and that of others) is ever to have been born or heard of!

Footnote 26:

I remember being once much amused with meeting, in a hot dusty day, between Blenheim and Oxford, some strolling Italians with a troop of dancing dogs, and a monkey in costume mounted on the back of one of them. He rode en cavalier, and kept his countenance with great gravity and decorum, and turned round with a certain look of surprise and resentment, that I, a foot-passenger, should seem to question his right to go on horseback. This seemed to me a fine piece of practical satire in the manner of Swift.

Footnote 27:

Mr. Wordsworth, in some fine lines, reproaches the French with having ‘no single volume paramount, no master-spirit’—

‘But equally a want of books and men.’

I wish he would shew any single author that exercises such a ‘paramount’ influence over the minds of the English, as four or five ‘master-spirits’ do on those of the French. The merit is not here the question, but the effect produced. He himself is not a very striking example of the sanguine enthusiasm with which his countrymen identify themselves with works of great and original genius!

Footnote 28:

The same circumstance literally happened to Gibbon, though from a different cause. He fell on his knees before a Swiss lady (I think a Mademoiselle d’Ivernois,) and was so fat he could not rise. She left him in this posture, and sent in a servant to help him up.

Footnote 29:

The fronts of the houses and of many of the finest buildings seem (so to speak) to have been composed in mud, and translated into stone—so little projection, relief, or airiness have they. They have a look of being stuck together.

Footnote 30:

They are as different as Mr. Moore’s verses and an epic poem.

Footnote 31:

The French physiognomy is like a telegraphic machine, ready to shift and form new combinations every moment. It is commonly too light and variable for repose; it is careless, indifferent, but not sunk in indolence, nor wedded to ease: as on the other hand, it is restless, rapid, extravagant, without depth or force. Is it not the same with their feelings, which are alike incapable of a habit of quiescence, or of persevering action or passion? It seems so to me. Their freedom from any tendency to drunkenness, to indulge in its dreamy stupor, or give way to its incorrigible excesses, confirms by analogy the general view of their character. I do not bring this as an accusation against them, I ask if it is not the fact; and if it will not account for many things observable in them, good, bad, and indifferent? In a word, mobility without momentum solves the whole riddle of the French character.

Footnote 32:

Lord Byron has merely taken up the common cant of connoisseurship, inflating it with hyperbolical and far-fetched eulogies of his own—not perceiving that the Apollo was somewhat of a coxcomb, the Venus somewhat insipid, and that the expression in the Laocoon is more of physical than of mental agony. The faces of the boys are, however, superlatively fine. They are convulsed with pain, yet fraught with feeling. He has made a better hit in interpreting the downcast look of the Dying Gladiator, as denoting his insensibility to the noise and bustle around him:—

‘He heard it, but he heeded not—his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away; He reck’d not of the life he lost, nor prize, But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, There were his young barbarians all at play, There was their Dacian mother—he, their sire, Butcher’d to make a Roman holyday— All this rush’d with his blood—shall he expire And unaveng’d?—Arise! ye Goths and glut your ire!’

Footnote 33:

Why do the French confound the words exhibition and exposure? One of which expresses what is creditable, and the other what is disgraceful. Is it that the sense of vanity absorbs every other consideration, turning the sense of shame, in case of exposure, into a source of triumph, and the conscious tingling feeling of ostentation in a display of talent into a flagrant impropriety? I do not lay much stress on this word-catching, which is a favourite mode of German criticism. We say, for instance, indiscriminately, that ‘a thing redounds to our credit or our disgrace.’

Footnote 34:

It were to be wished that the French sculptors would come over and look at the Elgin Marbles, as they are arranged with great care and some pomp in the British Museum. They may smile to see that we are willing to remove works of art from their original places of abode, though we will not allow others to do so. These noble fragments of antiquity might startle our fastidious neighbours a little at first from their rude state and their simplicity, but I think they would gain upon them by degrees, and convince their understandings, if they did not subdue their affections. They are indeed an equally instructive lesson and unanswerable rebuke to them and to us—to them for thinking that finishing every part alike is perfection, and to us who imagine that to leave every part alike unfinished is grandeur. They are as remote from finicalness as grossness, and combine the parts with the whole in the manner that nature does. Every part is given, but not ostentatiously, and only as it would appear in the circumstances. There is an alternate action and repose. If one muscle is strained, another is proportionably relaxed. If one limb is in action and another at rest, they come under a different law, and the muscles are not brought out nor the skin tightened in the one as in the other. There is a flexibility and sway of the limbs and of the whole body. The flesh has the softness and texture of flesh, not the smoothness or stiffness of stone. There is an undulation and a liquid flow on the surface, as the breath of genius moved the mighty mass: they are the finest forms in the most striking attitudes, and with every thing in its place, proportion, and degree, uniting the ease, truth, force, and delicacy of Nature. They shew nothing but the artist’s thorough comprehension of, and entire docility to that great teacher. There is no petit-maitreship, no pedantry, no attempt at a display of science, or at forcing the parts into an artificial symmetry, but it is like cutting a human body out of a block of marble, and leaving it to act for itself with all the same springs, levers, and internal machinery. It was said of Shakspeare’s dramas, that they were the logic of passion; and it may be affirmed of the Elgin Marbles, that they are the logic of form.—One part being given, another cannot be otherwise than it is. There is a mutual understanding and re-action throughout the whole frame. The Apollo and other antiques are not equally simple and severe. The limbs have too much an appearance of being cased in marble, of making a display of every recondite beauty, and of balancing and answering to one another, like the rhymes in verse. The Elgin Marbles are harmonious, flowing, varied prose. In a word, they are like casts after the finest nature. Any cast from nature, however inferior, is in the same style. Let the French and English sculptors make casts continually. The one will see in them the parts everywhere given—the other will see them everywhere given in subordination to, and as forming materials for a whole.

Footnote 35:

For some account of Madame Pasta’s acting in Nina, I take the liberty to refer to a volume of TABLE-TALK, just published.

Footnote 36:

At Milan, a short time ago, a gentleman had a Homer, in Greek and Latin, among his books. He was surlily asked to explain what it meant. Upon doing so, the Inspector shook his head doubtingly, and said, ‘it might pass this time,’ but advised him to beware of a second. ‘Here, now, is a work,’ he continued, pointing to ——’s Lives of the Popes, containing all the abominations (public and private) of their history, ‘You should bring such books as this with you!’ This is one specimen of that learned conspiracy for the suppression of light and letters, of which we are sleeping partners and honorary associates. The Allies complain at present of Mr. Canning’s ‘faithlessness.’ Oh! that he would indeed play them false and earn his title of ‘slippery George!’ Faithful to anything he cannot be—faithless to them would be something. The Austrians, it is said, have lately attempted to strike the name of Italy out of the maps, that that country may neither have a name, a body, or a soul left to it, and even to suppress the publication of its finest historians, that it may forget it ever had one. Go on, obliging creatures! Blot the light out of heaven, tarnish the blue sky with the blight and fog of despotism, deface and trample on the green earth; for while one trace of what is fair or lovely is left in the earth under our feet, or the sky over our heads, or in the mind of man that is within us, it will remain to mock your impotence and deformity, and to reflect back lasting hatred and contempt upon you. Why does not our Eton scholar, our classic Statesman, suggest to the Allies an intelligible hint of the propriety of inscribing the name of Italy once more on the map,

‘Like that ensanguined flower inscribed with woe’—

of taking off the prohibition on the Histories of Guicciardini and Davila? Or why do not the English people—the English House of Commons, suggest it to him? Is there such a thing as the English people—as an English House of Commons? Their influence is not felt at present in Europe, as erst it was, to its short-lived hope, bought with flat despair. The reason is, the cause of the people of Europe has no echo in the breasts of the British public. The cause of Kings had an echo in the breast of a British Monarch—that of Foreign Governments in the breasts of British Ministers! There are at present no fewer than fifteen hundred of the Italian nobility of the first families proscribed from their country, or pining in dungeons. For what? For trying to give to their country independence and a Constitutional Government, like England! What says the English House of Lords to that? What if the Russians were to come and apply to us and to them the benefits and the principles of the Holy Alliance—the bayonet and the thumbscrew? Lord Bathurst says, ‘Let them come;’—and they will come when we have a servile people, dead to liberty, and an arbitrary government, hating and ready to betray it!

Footnote 37:

Why have they such quantities of looking-glasses in Italy, and none in Scotland? The dirt in each country is equal; the finery not. Neither in Scotland do they call in the aid of the Fine Arts, of the upholsterer and tapissier, to multiply the images of the former in squalid decorations, and thus shew that the debasement is moral as well as physical. They write up on certain parts of Rome ‘Immondizia.’ A Florentine asked why it was not written on the gates of Rome? An Englishman might be tempted to ask, why it is not written on the gates of Calais, to serve for the rest of the Continent? If the people and houses in Italy are as dirty or dirtier than in France, the streets and towns are kept in infinitely better order.

Footnote 38:

See Westminster Review.

Footnote 39:

They tell a story in Paris of a monkey at the Jardin des Plantes, that was noted for its mischievous tricks and desire to fly at every one. Dr. Gall observed the organ of philanthropy particularly strong in the beast, and desired the keeper to let him loose, when he sprung upon the Doctor, and hugged him round the neck with the greatest bon-hommie and cordiality, to the astonishment of the keeper and the triumph of craniology! Some men are as troublesome as some animals with their demonstrations of benevolence.

Footnote 40:

He was confined in the Inquisition about six weeks, where it is supposed he was put to the torture; for he had strange pains in his limbs, and bodily disabilities afterwards. In the Museum here is at present preserved, in a glass-case, a finger of Galileo, pointing to the skies! Such is the history of philosophy and superstition.

Footnote 41:

The jewellers’ shops on the bridge, in one of which he was brought up, still remain. The Rape of the Sabines, by John of Bologna, near Benvenuto’s Perseus, is an admirable group: nothing can exceed the fleshiness and softened contours of the female figure, seen in every direction.

Footnote 42:

See his Memoirs of himself, lately re-translated by Thomas Roscoe, Esq.

Footnote 43:

Excellent tea is to be had at Rome at an Italian shop at the corner of the Via Condotti, in the Piazza di Spagna.

Footnote 44:

We have five names unrivalled in modern times and in their different ways:—Newton, Locke, Bacon, Shakspeare, and Milton—and if to these we were to add a sixth that could not be questioned in his line, perhaps it would be Hogarth. Our wit is the effect not of gaiety, but spleen—the last result of a pertinacious reductio ad absurdum. Our greatest wits have been our gravest men. Fielding seems to have produced his History of a Foundling with the same deliberation and forethought that Arkwright did his spinning-jenny. The French have no poetry; that is, no combination of internal feeling with external imagery. Their dramatic dialogue is frothy verbiage or a mucilage of sentiment without natural bones or substance: ours constantly clings to the concrete, and has a purchase upon matter. Outward objects interfere with and extinguish the flame of their imagination: with us they are the fuel that kindle it into a brighter and stronger blaze.

Footnote 45:

A Mr. Law lately came over from America to horsewhip the writer of an article in the Quarterly, reflecting on his mother (Mrs. Law) as a woman of bad character, for the Tory reason that she was the wife of a Mr. Law, who differed with his brother (Lord Ellenborough) in politics. He called on Mr. Barrow, who knew nothing of the writer; he called on Mr. Gifford, who knew nothing of the writer; he called on Mr. Murray, who looked oddly, but he could get no redress except a public disavowal of the falsehood; and they took that opportunity to retract some other American calumny. Mr. L. called on one Secretary of the Admiralty, but there are two Secretaries of the Admiralty!

Footnote 46:

Chief Justice Holt used to say, ‘there were more robberies committed in England than in Scotland, because we had better hearts.’ The English are at all times disposed to interpret this literally.

Footnote 47:

See even the Ananias, Elymas, and others, which might be thought exceptions.

Footnote 48:

The girls who work in the vineyards, are paid three batz a day.

Footnote 49:

Since my return I have put myself on a regimen of brown bread, beef, and tea, and have thus defeated the systematic conspiracy carried on against weak digestions. To those accustomed to, and who can indulge in foreign luxuries, this list will seem far from satisfactory.

Footnote 50:

I believe this rule will apply to all except grotesques, which are evidently taken from opposite natures.

Footnote 51:

Some one finely applied to the repose of this figure the words:

‘——Sedet, in æternumque sedebit, Infelix Theseus.’

Footnote 52:

By Mr. Coleridge.

Footnote 53:

The oil-pictures attributed to Michael Angelo are meagre and pitiful; such as that of the Fates at Florence. Another of Witches, at Cardinal Fesch’s at Rome, is like what the late Mr. Barry would have admired and imitated—dingy, coarse, and vacant.

Footnote 54:

See an admirable Essay on the genius of Hogarth, by Charles Lamb, in a periodical work, called The Reflector.

Footnote 55:

This painter’s book of studies from nature, commonly called Liber Veritatis, disproves the truth of the general opinion that his landscapes are mere artificial compositions for the finished pictures are nearly fac-similes of the original sketches.

Footnote 56:

The idea of the necessity of improving upon nature, and giving what was called a flattering likeness, was universal in this country fifty years ago; so that Gainsborough is not to be so much blamed for tampering with his subjects.

Footnote 57:

Why does not the British Institution, instead of patronising pictures of the battle of Waterloo, of red coats, foolish faces, and labels of victory, offer a prize for a picture of the subject of Ugolino that shall be equal to the group of the Laocoon? That would be the way to do something, if there is anything to be done by such patronage.

Footnote 58:

This subject of the Ideal will be resumed, and more particularly enlarged upon, under that head.

Footnote 59:

If we were to make any qualification of this censure, it would be in favour of some of Mr. Northcote’s compositions from early English history.

NOTES

PICTURE-GALLERIES IN ENGLAND

In 1824 a volume was published, entitled British Galleries of Art, ‘printed for G. & W. B. Whittaker, Ave-Maria-Lane,’ by Thomas Davison, Whitefriars, which is sometimes put forward by second-hand booksellers as by William Hazlitt. The articles composing the volume appeared in the New Monthly Magazine in 1823 (see vols. VII. and VIII.), and their subjects are in most cases identical with those in Hazlitt’s Picture-Galleries in England (Angerstein, Dulwich, the Marquis of Stafford’s Gallery, Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, Blenheim); apart from the internal evidence, however, which is overwhelming, the anonymous author says in his preface that ‘any merit that may attach to the mere plan of “British Galleries of Art” belongs entirely to the author of [the Picture-Galleries in England], the separate Papers of which appeared, (also in a periodical work) about the same time with those of the following which are on the same subjects.’

Hazlitt included his criticism on the pictures of Titian at the Marquis of Stafford’s and at Windsor Castle in the Appendix to ‘The Life of Titian: with anecdotes of the distinguished persons of his time. By James Northcote, Esq., R.A. In two volumes. London. Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 8, New Burlington Street, 1830.’ See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, vol. II. pp. 212–13, and also the Biographical Sketch by Hazlitt’s son, contributed to The Literary Remains of William Hazlitt, 1836, for particulars of Hazlitt’s share in Northcote’s work. This Appendix to Northcote’s Titian also contains ‘Character of Titian’s Portraits’ from The Plain Speaker and ‘An Enquiry whether the Fine Arts are promoted by Academies and Public Institutions.’

MR. ANGERSTEIN’S COLLECTION

From The London Magazine, December 1822.

PAGE

7. Balm of hurt minds. Macbeth, Act II. Sc. 2.

Mr. Angerstein. John Julius Angerstein (1735–1823), merchant and art connoisseur. His collection of pictures formed a basis for the present National Gallery.

8. Colnaghi’s. Paul Colnaghi (1751–1833), of the famous print-selling house. He was of Milanese birth, but a naturalised Englishman.

9. Ludovico Caracci. Lodovico Carracci (1555–1619), of Bologna, the founder of the Eclectic School of Painting, known better as a teacher than as a painter. His nephew, Annibale (1560–1609), was the decorator of the Farnese Palace.

Piping as though he should never be old. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Book I. chap. 2.

10. A letter to his uncle Ludovico. Hazlitt gives this letter in the Appendix to Northcote’s Life of Titian.

Sebastian del Piombo. Sebastiano Luciani (1485–1547) of Venice, a disciple

PAGE

of Giorgione. After the death of Raphael he was thought the greatest painter in Rome.

10. And still walking under. Ben Jonson, Underwoods, XXX., ‘An Epistle to Sir Edward Sackvile.’

11. Parmegiano. Francesco Mazzuola (1504–1540), of Parma. Vasari relates that at Rome it was held ‘that the soul of Raphael had passed into the person of Parmigiano.’ He was a follower of Correggio.

Which pale passion loves. Beaumont and Fletcher, The Nice Valour, III. 3.

All ear. Comus, l. 560.

Mask or midnight serenade.

‘ball Or serenate, which the starved lover sings To his proud fair.’ Paradise Lost, IV. 768.

12. Carlo Dolce. Carlo Dolci (1616–1686), of Florence, a painter of tender and placid expressions, highly finished.

Somerset-house. The rooms of the Royal Academy of Arts were here, 1780–1838. See vol. VI. Mr. Northcote’s Conversations, where, by a misprint, these dates are given in the note to p. 435 as 1870–1838.

13. Where universal Pan. Paradise Lost, IV. 266.

Lord Egremont. Sir George O’Brien Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont (1751–1837), stock-breeder and art patron. He first promoted the recognition of Turner.

N. Poussin. Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), of Villers, in Normandy. See vol. VI. Table Talk, pp. 168 et seq.

The British Institution. In Pall Mall (No. 52), built by Boydell to contain his Shakespeare Gallery. The Institution was dissolved in 1866 and the building pulled down in 1868.

Of outward show. Paradise Lost, VIII. 539.

14. Pious orgies. Hazlitt may have been thinking of a passage by Burke. See Select Works, ed. Payne, II. p. 85.

Vice, by losing all its grossness. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 89).

Gaspar Poussin. Gaspard Dughet (1613–1675), born in Rome of French parents, Nicolas’s brother-in-law and pupil.

The air is delicate. Macbeth, Act I. Sc. 6.

Sear and [the] yellow leaf. Macbeth, Act V. Sc. 3.

Mr. Wilkie. David Wilkie (1785–1841). He was knighted in 1836.

15. Mr. Liston. John Liston (1776?-1846).

Flock of drunkards. Othello, Act II. Sc. 3.

Mr. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery. Johann Heinrich Fuessly, or Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), of Zurich, who came to England in 1763, writer and painter, opened his Milton Gallery in 1799.

A Catalogue. This list was added to later issues of the Picture-Galleries, with the title-page still dated 1824. The pages so occupied are numbered 19*-22*. The list was not given in The London Magazine.

THE DULWICH GALLERY

From The London Magazine, Jan. 1823.

17. When yellow leaves. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, LXXIII [those boughs].

Allen. John Allen, M.D. (1771–1843), one of the staff of The Edinburgh Review, was warden of Dulwich College, 1811–1820, and master,

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1820–1843. He is chiefly now remembered as the friend and factotum of Lord Holland.

17. Constrained by mastery. Cf. ‘That Love will not submit to be controlled by mastery,’ Wordsworth, The Excursion, VI. 163, 164.

Green and yellow melancholy. Twelfth Night, Act II. Sc. 4.

18. Julio Romano. Giulio Dei Giannuzzi, of Rome (1492–1546), Raphael’s apprentice and best pupil.

Sir Francis Bourgeois. Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois (1756–1811), landscape painter to George III. and painter to the King of Poland. He acquired the collection of Desenfans (see note to p. 19) and bequeathed 371 pictures to Dulwich College, endowing the Gallery also.

19. Mr. Desenfans. Noel Joseph Desenfans (1745–1807), of French birth, whose collection of pictures, bought for a Polish National Gallery, had to be sold when Poland was dismembered.

Shed [casting] a dim ... religious light. Milton, Il Penseroso, 160.

Cuyp. Aelbert Cuyp (1605–1691), the Dutch Claude.

Carlo Maratti. Of Camurano, in Ancona (1625–1713), etcher and painter.

What a delicious breath painting [marriage] sends forth. Middleton’s Women Beware Women, Act III. Sc. 1.

Berkeley. George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (1685–1753), whose Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, wherein he sets forth his philosophical speculations on Matter and Spirit, was published in 1710.

Palpable [sensible] to feeling as to sight. Macbeth, Act II. Sc. 1.

The eye is made the fool. Macbeth, Act II. Sc. 1.

So potent art. Tempest, Act V. Sc. 1.

20. Teniers. David Teniers (1610–1694), of Antwerp, painter of scenes of peasant life.

Adrian Brouwer. Of Haarlem or Oudenaerde (c. 1605–1638), painter of Dutch interiors.

Potations pottle deep. Othello, Act II. Sc. 3.

Ostade. Adriaen Janzoon van Ostade (1610–1685), of Haarlem, painter of peasant scenes. His brother, Isack van Ostade (1621–1649), was also a painter.

Polemberg. Cornells van Poelenburgh, of Utrecht (1586–1667), landscape and portrait painter.

Crespi. Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665–1747), of Bologna.

Sanadram. Probably Pieter Saenredam (1597–1665), of Assendelft, who is known for his large church interiors.

Backhuysen. Ludolf Bakhuisen (1631–1708), of Emden, the celebrated painter of sea-storms.

Vandervelde. Willem Van de Velde (1633–1707), the younger, the greatest Dutch marine painter. He lies buried in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly.

Both. Jan Both (c. 1610–c. 1662), of Utrecht. The cattle and figures in his landscapes were usually added by his brother Andries (c. 1609–c. 1644).

21. Jordaens. ?Jakob Jordaens (1593–1678), of Antwerp.

Sacchi. Andrea Sacchi (d. 1661), of Nettuno, near Rome; Carlo Maratti (see note to p. 19) was one of his pupils.

Beechey. Sir William Beechey (1753–1839), portrait painter to Queen Charlotte.

Wouvermans. Philips Wouverman (?1614–1668), of Haarlem, celebrated for his paintings of horses.

22. Ruysdael. Jakob van Ruysdael (c. 1630–1682), of Haarlem, landscape painter.

Hobbima. Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709), Dutch landscape painter.

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23. Entire affection scorneth [hateth] nicer hands. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I. VIII. 40.

Berchem. Nicolaas Pietersz, commonly called Berchem (1620–1683), of Haarlem, landscape painter, whose work is characterised by much delicacy of composition.

Watteau. Antoine Watteau (1684–1721).

24. Body and limbs ... add what flourishes. Cf. Hamlet, Act II. Sc. 2.

Grand caterers and wet-nurses of the state [dry nurse of the church]. Cowper, The Task, II. 371.

Under the shade. As You Like It, Act II. Sc. 7.

Salvator Rosa. Of Renella, near Naples (1615–1673).

25. He has had his reward. S. Matthew, VI. 2.

Andrea del Sarto. Andrea d’Agnolo (his father was a tailor, whence his better-known name), of Florence (1487–1531), the ‘faultless painter.’

What lacks it then? Cf. S. Matthew XIX. 20.

Le Brun. Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), French historical painter. He was one of the principal founders of the Academy, the first director of the Gobelins manufactory, and did much of the decoration of Versailles.

Wilson. Richard Wilson (1714–1782), one of the greatest of English landscape painters.

Guercino. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, the squint-eyed (1591–1666), of Cento, in the Ferrarese country.

Francesco Mola. Pietro Francesco Mola (1612–1668), a follower of the Venetian School.

26. Giorgione. Giorgio Barbarelli (c. 1476–1511), of Castelfranco, a fellow-student of Titian, and one of the greatest of the Venetian painters.

Guido. Guido Reni (1575–1642), of Calvenzo, near Bologna.

Vanderwerf. Adriaan van der Werff (1659–1722), of Rotterdam.

P. Veronese. Paolo Caliari (1528–1588), of Verona.

Morales. Luis de Morales (d. 1586), of Badajoz, ‘the divine,’ a follower of Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci.

THE MARQUIS OF STAFFORD’S GALLERY

From The London Magazine, February 1823.

27. Forked mountain. Antony and Cleopatra, Act IV. Sc. 12.

Volume of the brain. Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 5.

Life is as a [lasting] storm. Pericles, Act IV. Sc. 1.

28. Lord Bacon exclaims ... poems of Homer. In the Advancement of Learning, Book I. VIII. 6.

29. A book sealed. Cf. Revelation, V. i.

Hoole’s Version. John Hoole’s (1727–1803) translations of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, and Arioto’s Orlando Furioso were published in 1763 and 1783 respectively.

30. David. Jacques Louis David (1748–1825). During the Revolution he supported Robespierre, but later he became first painter to the first Napoleon.

The foremost man in all this world. Julius Caesar, Act IV. Sc. 3.

Monsieur Talleyrand. Charles Maurice Talleyrand de Périgord, Prince de Bénévent (1754–1838), De Quincey’s ‘rather middling bishop, but very eminent knave.’

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30. The late Lord Castlereagh. Lord Castlereagh had committed suicide in a fit of insanity in 1822. See vol. III. Political Essays, pp. 102–3, and note to p. 36 etc.

31. Barry. James Barry (1741–1806). See Hazlitt’s article on him, p. 413 et seq.

Collins. Probably Richard Collins (1755–1831), who was chief miniature and enamel painter to George III.

And o’er-informed the tenement of clay. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, I. 158.

32. Like an exhalation [a steam]. Milton, Comus, 556.

33. Which of you copied the other? Said of Menander by Aristophanes of Byzantium.

Note. Cleveland-House. Near Stable Yard, St. James’s, now called Bridgewater House. It was bought by the Duke of Bridgewater in 1730.

34. Albano. Francesco Albani (1578–1660), of Bologna, the friend of Guido Reni, and his fellow-student under the Carracci.

Moroni. Giovanni Battista Moroni (1520–1578), of Bondio, in the province of Bergamo, one of the greatest of portrait painters.

Milk of human kindness. Macbeth, Act I. Sc. 5.

Pordenone. Giovanni Antonio Licinio (1483–1539), of Pordenone, near Udine.

Tintoretto. Jacopo Robusti, or Tintoretto, from his father’s trade, dyeing (1519–1594), the head of Venetian sixteenth century painting.

Note. The late Mr. Curran. John Philpot Curran, the famous orator, had died in 1817.

35. Palma Vecchio. Jacopo Palma (1480–1528), of Serinalta, in the province of Bergamo. He is associated with Giorgione and Titian in the reform of the Venetian school.

Bassan. Jacopo da Ponte, Il Bassano (1519–1592), a follower of Titian, and a member of a family of north Italian painters.

Luca Cambiasi. Luca Cambiaso (1527–1585), of Moneglia, near Genoa, whose greatest work, The Rape of the Sabines, is in the Imperial Palace, at Terralba, near Genoa.

Alessandro Veronese. Alessandro Turchi (1582–c. 1648), of Verona.

Domenichino. Domenico Zampieri (1581–1641), of Bologna, a pupil of the Carracci.

Le Nain. Antoine and Louis Le Nain (b. 1588 and 1593 respectively), of Laon. They painted pictures of rustic life together.

Metzu. Gabriel Metsu (1630–1667), a genre painter, of Leyden. He was a pupil of Dou.

Douw. Gerard Dou (1613–1675), of Leyden, one of the greatest of Dutch painters of humble life.

36. Vangoyen. Jan van Goyen (1596–1666), of Leyden, one of the earliest of Dutch landscape painters.

With yellow tufted banks.

‘The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale, The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sale.’ Goldsmith, The Traveller, 293–4.

THE PICTURES AT WINDSOR CASTLE

From The London Magazine, March 1823

36. A line of Kings. Macbeth, Act III. Sc. 1.

The oak of Herne the hunter. Merry Wives of Windsor, Act V. Sc. 5.

37. The proud Keep of Windsor. A Letter to a Noble Lord, (Works, Bohn, V. 137).

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37. Verrio. Antonio Verrio (1639–1707), of Lecce, near Otranto. He was employed at Windsor under Charles II. and James II., and at Hampton Court under Anne.

West. Benjamin West (1738–1820), of Pennsylvania. He succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1792 as President of the Royal Academy.

Zuccarelli. Francesco Zuccarelli (c. 1702–1788), of Tuscany. He was one of the founders of the Royal Academy.

38. Clear-spirited thought.

Cf. ‘Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise.’ Milton, Lycidas, 70.

Mrs. Hutchinson’s admirable Memoirs. Lucy Hutchinson’s memoirs of her husband, the Puritan Colonel, were first published in 1806.

Lely. Pieter van der Faes (1618–1680). His father changed the name to Lely. He was made a baronet by Charles II.

39. Kneller. He was born at Lübeck in 1646, made a fortune in England as a portrait painter, was knighted in 1692, made a baronet in 1715, and died in 1723. Pope wrote an epitaph for his monument in Westminster Abbey.

Ramsay. Allan Ramsay, portrait painter (1713–1784), son of ‘the Gentle Shepherd.’

40. The Misers. See vol. II. Characteristics, p. 417.

Quintin Matsys. Quentin Massys (1466–1531), of Louvain, the painter of The Entombment, in the Museum at Antwerp.

The still, small voice of reason. Cf. Cowper, The Task, v. 687, and 1 Kings xix. 12.

41. Denner. Balthasar Denner (1685–1749), of Hamburg.

THE PICTURES AT HAMPTON COURT

From The London Magazine, June 1823.

The previous article in the series ended with the words:—‘We shall break off here, and give some account of the Cartoons at Hampton Court in our next, as we do not like them to come in at the fag-end of an article.’

42. Fine by degrees. Prior, Henry and Emma, 432.

44. Calm contemplation and majestic pains.

Cf. ‘Calm pleasures there abide—majestic pains.’ Wordsworth’s Laodamia, 72.

and ‘Calm contemplation and poetic ease.’ Thomson’s Autumn, 1275.

46. The seasons’ difference. As You Like It, Act II. Sc. 1.

Through their looped and tattered ‘wretchedness. Cf. ‘Your loop’d and windowed raggedness.’ King Lear, Act III. Sc. 4.

Sir James Thornhill. He copied the cartoons at Hampton Court, decorated Greenwich, and was much employed by Queen Anne. He was knighted in 1720 by George I. (1675–1734).

47. Like to those hanging locks. Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, I. 2.

48. Dwelleth not in temples. Acts vii. 48.

In act to speak. Pope, The Temple of Fame, 241.

LORD GROSVENOR’S COLLECTION OF PICTURES

From The London Magazine, July 1823.

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49. In our mind’s eye, Horatio. Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 2.

Warton. Thomas Warton (1728–1790). See vol. V. Lectures on the English Poets, p. 120 and note.

50. At every fall. Milton, Comus, 251.

51. Nod to him, elves. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III. Sc. 1.

The breezy call. Gray’s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard.

52. Air [shape] and gesture proudly eminent. Paradise Lost, Book I. 590.

53. It is place which lessens. Cymbeline, Act III. Sc. 3.

54. Sigh our souls. Merchant of Venice, Act V. Sc. 1.

Snyders. Franz Snyders (1579–1657), of Antwerp, painter of hunting scenes.

55. Of the earth, earthy. 1 Cor. xv. 47.

We think it had better not be seen. The Magazine article adds:—‘We never very much liked this picture; but that may probably be our fault.’

PICTURES AT WILTON, STOURHEAD, ETC.

From The London Magazine, October 1823.

The article ends with the words:—‘Blenheim in our next, which will conclude this series of articles.’

Note. The author of Vathek. William Beckford (1759–1844), whose romance was written in French in 1781–1782, translated anonymously into English in 1784, and published in French in 1787.

57. Ranged in a row. ‘Ranged o’er the chimney, glistened in a row,’ Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, 236.

58. Keep their state. Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act V. Sc. 2.

Burke’s description of the age of chivalry. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 89.

The mood of lutes [flutes]. Paradise Lost, Book I. 551.

Mount on barbed steeds, etc. Cf. ‘Mounting barbed steeds.’ King Richard III., Act I. Sc. 1. and,

‘Witch the world with noble horsemanship.’ 1 King Henry IV., Act IV. Sc. 1.

The Goose Gibbie. See Old Mortality.

59. Of all men the most miserable. 1 Cor. xv. 19.

Above all pain. Pope’s Epistle to Robert, Earl of Oxford.

Berchem. See ante, note to p. 22.

Hath a devil. S. Luke vii. 33.

60. Mieris. A family of Delft and Leyden painters, the best known of whom are Frans van Mieris, one of twenty-three children (1635–1681), the ‘prince of Dou’s pupils,’ and William van Mieris, his son (1662–1747).

The porcelain of Franguestan. ‘Vathek voluptuously reposed in his capacious litter upon cushions of silk, with two little pages beside him of complexions more fair than the enamel of Franguistan.’ The description is commented on in a note which explains that they were Circassian boy-slaves.

Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Historian of Wiltshire (1758–1838).

61. Tempt but to betray.

Cf. ‘Whose fruit though fair, tempts only to destroy.’ Cowper, The Progress of Error, 238.

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61. Trace his footsteps.

Cf. ‘Where shall I seek His bright appearances, or footstep trace? For, though I fled him angry, yet, recalled To life prolonged and promised race, I now Gladly behold though but his utmost skirts Of glory, and far-off his steps adore.’ Paradise Lost, XI. 328.

Though in ruins. Paradise Lost, II. 300.

Of the court, courtly. Cf. ‘Of the earth, earthy.’ 1 Cor. xv. 47.

PICTURES AT BURLEIGH HOUSE

From the New Monthly Magazine, vol. IV., 1822, Table Talk, No. IV.

62. And dull [dead] cold winter. The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act II. Sc. 1.

Faded to the light. Wordsworth, Ode, Intimations of Immortality.

Ways were mire. Milton, Sonnet XX.

63. And still walking under. See ante, note to p. 10.

I was brutish [beastly] like, warlike as the wolf. Cymbeline, Act III. Sc. 3.

Paul Potter. Of Enkhuizen (1625–1654), animal painter.

64. To see the sun to bed. Lamb, John Woodvil, Act II.

Hunt half a day. Wordsworth’s Hart-Leap Well, Part II.

65. Humbled by such rebuke. Paradise Lost, VI. 342.

And in its liquid texture. Ibid., VI. 348–9.

Inimitable on earth. Ibid., III. 508.

66. Hesperian fable true. Ibid., IV. 250.

Dream of a Painter. See Northcote’s Varieties on Art in his Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, etc. (1813–1815), p. xvi. See also vol. I. The Round Table, note to Guido, p. 162.

Paul Brill. Of Antwerp (1556–1626), a follower of Titian.

67. His light shone in darkness. Cf. S. John i. 5.

Luca Jordano. Luca Giordano (1632–1705), of Naples, ‘Il Presto,’ the quick worker, who imitated all the great painters.

Grinling Gibbons. The wood carver (1648–1720), of Rotterdam. He was brought to public notice by Evelyn, the Diarist, and his work may be seen in St. Paul’s, London, and Trinity College Library, Cambridge.

68. Lords who love their ladies like. Cf. Home’s Douglas, Act I. Sc. 1: ‘As women wish to be who love their lords.’

PICTURES AT OXFORD AND BLENHEIM

From the London Magazine, November 1823

The article ends as follows:—‘We now take leave of British Galleries of Art. There are one or two others that we had intended to visit; but they are at a great distance from us and from each other; and we are not quite sure that they would repay our inquiries. Besides, to say the truth, we have already pretty well exhausted our stock of criticism, both general and particular. The same names were continually occurring, and we began sometimes to be apprehensive that the same observations might be repeated over again. One thing we can say, that the going through our regular task has not lessened our respect for the great names here alluded to; and, if we shall have inspired, in the progress of it, any additional degree of curiosity respecting the art, or any greater love of it in our readers, we shall think our labour and our anxiety to do justice to the subject most amply rewarded.’

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69. With glistering spires. Paradise Lost, III. 550.

Hold high converse. Thomson, The Seasons: Winter, 431.

No mean city. Acts xxi. 39.

All eyes shall see me. Cf. Isaiah xlv. 22–23 and Romans xiv. 11.

70. Clappeth his wings, and straightway he is gone. Cf. Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, 74:

‘Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.’

Majestic, though in ruins. Paradise Lost, II. 300.

Giuseppe Ribera. Josef Ribera (1588–1656), of San Felipe, near Valencia, a pupil of Caravaggio and leader of the realist school of his time.

71. Lucid mirror. Cowper, The Task, I. 701.

And fast by hanging in a golden chain. Paradise Lost, II. 1051.

In form resembling a goose pie. Cf. ‘A thing resembling a goose-pie,’ Swift, Vanburgh’s House, l. 104.

The old Duchess of Marlborough. Sarah Churchill, née Jennings (1660–1744), wife of John, 1st Duke of Marlborough.

72. Leave stings. Cf. ‘Would leave a sting within a brother’s heart.’

Young, Love of Fame, Sat. II. 113.

73. Sure never were seen. Sheridan, The School for Scandal, Act II. Sc. 2. [Other horses are clowns.] See vol. I. The Round Table, p. 150.

Mr. T. Moore’s ‘Loves of the Angels.’ Published Jan. 1, 1823.

75. As if increase of appetite. Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 2.

We are ignorance itself. 1 King Henry IV., Act III. Sc. 1.

CRITICISM ON HOGARTH’S MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE

See vol. I. The Round Table, pp. 25 et seq., and notes thereto.

NOTES OF A JOURNEY THROUGH FRANCE

AND ITALY

The circumstances which led to and succeeded the tour in France and Italy described in the following letters will be found detailed in the Memoirs of William Hazlitt, pp. 107 et seq. The journey began in August 1824, shortly after Hazlitt married Mrs. Bridgewater; and it ended in October 1825, by the return home alone of Hazlitt and his son.

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