7. Intuition is the attendant of genius; gradual improvement that of
talent.
8. Arrangement presupposes materials: fruits follow the bud and foliage,
and judgment the luxuriance of fancy.
9. The fiery sets his subject in a blaze, and mounts its vapours; the
melancholy cleaves the rock, or gropes through thorns for his; the
sanguine deluges all, and seizes none; the phlegmatic sucks one, and
drops off with repletion.
10. Some enter the gates of art with golden keys, and take their seats
with dignity among the demi-gods of fame; some burst the doors and leap
into a niche with savage power; thousands consume their time in chinking
useless keys, and aiming feeble pushes against the inexorable doors.
11. Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate
genius.
12. Organization is the mother of talent; practice its nurse; the
senses its dominion; but hearts alone can penetrate hearts.
13. It is the lot of genius to be opposed, and to be invigorated by
opposition: all extremes touch each other; frigid praise and censure
wait upon attainable or common powers; but the successful adventurer in
the realms of discovery leaps on an unknown or long-lost shore, ennobles
it with his name, and grasps immortality.
14. Genius without bias, is a stream without direction: it inundates
all, and ends in stagnation.
15. He who pretends to have sacrificed genius to the pursuits of
interest or fashion; and he who wants to persuade you he has
indisputable titles to a crown, but chooses to wave them for the
emoluments of a partnership in trade, deserve equal belief.
16. Taste is the legitimate offspring of nature, educated by propriety:
fashion is the bastard of vanity, dressed by art.
17. The immediate operation of taste is to ascertain the kind; the next,
to appreciate the degrees of excellence.
_Coroll._--Taste, founded on sense and elegance of mind, is reared by
culture, invigorated by practice and comparison: scantiness stops short
of it; fashion adulterates it: it is shackled by pedantry, and
overwhelmed by luxuriance.
Taste sheds a ray over the homeliest or the most uncouth subject.
Fashion frequently flattens the elegant, the gentle, and the great, into
one lumpy mass of disgust.
If "foul and fair" be all that your gross-spun sense discerns, if you
are blind to the intermediate degrees of excellence, you may perhaps be
a great man--a senator--a conqueror; but if you respect yourself, never
presume to utter a syllable on works of taste.
18. If mind and organs conspire to qualify you for a judge in works of
taste, remember that you are to be possessed of three things--the
subject of the work which you are to examine; the character of the
artist as such; and, before all, of impartiality.
_Coroll._--All first impressions are involuntary and inevitable; but
the knowledge of the subject will guide you to judge first of the whole;
not to creep on from part to part, and nibble at execution before you
know what it means to convey. The notion of a tree precedes that of
counting leaves or disentangling branches.
Every artist has, or ought to have, a character or system of his own;
if, instead of referring that to the test of nature, you judge him by
your own packed notions, or arraign him at the tribunal of schools which
he does not recognize--you degrade the dignity of art, and add another
fool to the herd of Dilettanti.
But if, for reasons best known to yourself, you come determined to
condemn what yet you have not seen, let me advise you to drop your
pursuits of art for one of far greater importance--the inquiry into
yourself; nor aim at taste till you are sure of justice.
19. Misconception of its own powers is the injurious attendant of
genius, and the most severe remembrancer of its vanity.
_Coroll._--Much of Leonardo da Vinci's life evaporated in useless
experiment and quaint research; Michael Angelo perplexed the limbs of
grandeur with the minute ramifications of anatomy; Rafaelle forsook
humanity to people a mythologic desert with clumsy gods and clumsier
goddesses; Shakspeare, trusting time and chance with Hamlet and Othello,
revised a frozen sonnet, or fondled his Adonis; whilst Milton dropt the
trumpet that had astonished hell, left Paradise, and introduced a
pedagogue to Heaven. When genius is surprised by such lethargic moments,
we can forget that Johnson wrote Irene, and Hogarth made a solemn fool
of Paul.
20. Reality teems with disappointment for him whose sources of enjoyment
spring in the elysium of fancy.
21. Where perfection cannot take place, a very high degree of general
excellence is impossible. Negligence is the shade of energy; where there
is neither, expect mediocrity, the common expletive of society; capacity
without elevation, industry without predilection, practice without
choice.
_Coroll._--"About this time," says Tacitus, "died Poppæus Sabinus, who,
from a middling origin, rose to imperial friendships, the consulate,
and the honours of the triumph: he was selected for the space of
four-and-twenty years to govern the most important provinces,[2] not for
any distinguished merit of his own, but because he was equal to his
task, and not above it."
Behold here the most comprehensive epitaph of mediocrity, and the most
unambiguous solution of every riddle with which its brilliant success
may have perplexed your mind.
22. Determine the principle on which you commence your career of art:
some woo the art itself, some its appendages; some confine their view to
the present, some extend it to futurity: the butterfly flutters round a
meadow; the eagle crosses seas.
23. In ranging the phenomena of art, remember carefully, though you
place it on the side of exceptions, that a decided bias is not always a
sign of latent power; nor indolence, indifference, or even apathy, a
sign of impotence.
24. Circumstances may assist or retard parts, but cannot make them: they
are the winds that now blow out a light, now animate a spark to
conflagration.
_Coroll._--Augustus and Mæcenas are said to have made Virgil: what was
it, then, that prevented Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and the two Antonines,
from producing at least a Lucan?
25. Deserve, but expect not, to be praised by your contemporaries, for
any excellence which they may be jealous of being allowed to possess
themselves; leave the dispensation of justice to posterity.
26. If wishes are the spawn of imbecility, precipitation is the bantling
of fool-hardiness: legitimate will, investigates and acquires the means.
Mistake not an itching finger for authentic will.
27. Some of the most genuine effusions of genius in art, some of the
most estimable qualities in society, may be beholden for our homage to
very disputable principles.
_Coroll._--The admission of a master's humanity to his slave supposes
the validity of an execrable right; and the courage shown in a duel
cannot be applauded without submitting to the dictates of feudal
barbarity. Had the poet's conception prepared us for the rashness of
Lear, the ambition of Macbeth's wife, and the villany of Iago, by the
usual gradations of nature, he could not have rushed on our heart with
the irresistibility that now subdues it. Had the line of Correggio
floated in a less expanse, he would have lost that spell of light and
shade which has enthralled all eyes; and Rubens, had he not invigorated
bodies to hills of flesh, and tinged his pencil in the rainbow, would
not have been the painter of magnificence.
28. Genius has no imitator. Some can be poets and painters only at
second-hand: deaf and blind to the tones and motions of Nature herself,
they hear or see her only through some reflected medium of art; they are
emboldened by prescription.
29. Let him who has more genius than talent give up as impossible what
he finds difficult. Talent may mimic genius with success, and
frequently impose on all but the first judges; but genius is awkward in
the attempt to use the tools of talent.
_Coroll._--Hyperides, Lysias, Isocrates, might imitate much of
Demosthenes; but he would have become ridiculous by stooping to collect
their beauties.[3] The spear of Roland might be couched to gain a lady's
favour; but its sole ornament was the heart, torn from the breast-plate
of her foe.
30. Mediocrity is formed, and talent submits, to receive prescription;
that, the liveried attendant, this, the docile client of a patron's
views or whims: but genius, free and unbounded as its _origin_, scorns
to receive commands, or in submission, neglects those it received.
_Coroll._--The gentle spirit of Rafaelle embellished the conceits of
Bembo and Divizio, to scatter incense round the triple mitre of his
prince; and the Vatican became the flattering annals of the court of
Julius and Leo: whilst Michael Angelo refused admittance to master and
to times, and doomed his purple critic to hell.[4]
31. Distinguish between genius and singularity of character; an artist
of mediocrity may be an odd man: let the nature of works be your guide.
32. The most impotent, the most vulgar, and the coldest artists
generally arrogate to themselves the most vigorous, the most dignified,
and the warmest subjects.
33. He has powers, dignity, and fire, who can inspire a trifle with
importance.
34. Know that nothing is trifling in the hand of genius, and that
importance itself becomes a bauble in that of mediocrity:--the
shepherd's staff of Paris would have been an engine of death in the
grasp of Achilles; the ash of Peleus could only have dropped from the
effeminate fingers of the curled archer.
35. Art either imitates or copies, selects or transcribes; consults the
class, or follows the individual.
36. Imitative art, is either epic or sublime, dramatic or impassioned,
historic or circumscribed by truth. The first astonishes, the second
moves, the third informs.
37. Whatever hides its limits in its greatness--whatever shows a feature
of immensity, let the elements of Nature or the qualities of animated
being make up its substance, is sublime.
38. Whatever by reflected self-love inspires us with hope, fear, pity,
terror, love, or mirth--whatever makes events, and time, and place, the
ministers of character and pathos, let fiction or reality compose its
tissue, is dramatic.
39. That which tells us, not what might be, but what is; circumscribes
the grand and the pathetic with truth of time, place, custom; what
gives "a local habitation and a name," is historic.
_Coroll._--No human performance is either purely epic, dramatic, or
historic. Novelty and feelings will make the historian sometimes launch
out into the marvellous; or will warm his bosom and extort a tear.
The dramatist while gazing at some tremendous feature, or the pomp of
superior agency, will drop the chain he holds, and be absorbed in the
sublime; whilst the epic or lyric poet, forgetting his solitary
grandeur, will sometimes descend and mix with his agents.
The tragic and the comic dramatists formed themselves on Hector and
Andromache, on Irus and Ulysses. The spirit from the prison-house
breathes like the shade of Patroclus; Octavia and the daughter of
Soranus[5] melt like Ophelia and Alcestis.
40. Those who have assigned to the plastic arts beauty, strictly so
called, as the ultimate end of imitation, have circumscribed the whole
by a part.
_Coroll._--The charms of Helen and of Niobe are instruments of
sublimity: Meleager and Cordelia fall victims to the passions; Agrippina
and Berenice give interest to truth.
41. Beauty, whether individual or ideal, consists in the concurrence of
parts to one end, or the union of the simple and the various.
_Coroll._--Whatever be your powers, assume not to legislate on beauty:
though always the same herself, her empire is despotic, and subject to
the anarchies of despotism, enthroned to-day, dethroned to-morrow: in
treating subjects of universal claim, most has been done by leaving most
to the reader's and spectator's taste or fancy. "It is difficult," says
Horace, "to pronounce exactly to every man's eye and mind, what every
man thinks himself entitled to estimate by a standard of his own."[6]
The Apollo and Medicean Venus are not by all received as the canons of
male and female beauty; and Homer's Helen is the finest woman we have
read of, merely because he has left her to be made up of the Dulcineas
of his readers.