_Coroll._--Grandeur of style and execution do not exclusively depend
upon dimensions: but in an age and amidst a race who have erected
littleness or rather diminutiveness of size to the only credentials of
admissibility into collections, to the passports without which Raffaelle
himself finds it difficult to penetrate the sanctuaries of pigmy art,
that which ennobled the age of Pericles, of Julio, and Leone, must be
content to look to posterity for its reward. If it were physiognomically
true, that the structure of every human face bears some analogy to that
of some brute, it might reasonably surprise, that an individual marked
by nature with no very remote resemblance to a Hippopotamus, should be
considered as the legislator of a taste equally noted for tameness of
conception and effeminate finish; but as it is improbable that one
individual, however favoured by circumstances or endowed with
all-persevering activity, or arrogance, could stamp the taste of a
nation exclusively with his own, it may be fairly surmised that he did
no more than find and rear the seeds of that Micromania which infects
the public taste.
239. The medium of poetry is time and action; that of the plastic arts,
space and figure. Poetry then is at its summit, when its hand arrests
time and embodies action: and these, when they wing the marble or the
canvass, and from the present moment dart rays back to the past and
forward to the future.
_Coroll._--Subjects are positive, negative, repulsive. The first are the
proper materials, the voluntary servants of invention; to the second she
gives interest and value; from the last she can escape only by the help
of execution, for execution alone can palliate her defeat by the last.
The Laocoon, the Hæmon and Antigone, the Niobe and her daughters, the
death of Ananias, the Sacrifice at Lystra, Elymas struck blind, are
positive subjects, speak their meaning with equal evidences to the
scholar and the unlettered man, and excite the sympathy due to the calls
of terror and pity with equal energy in every breast. St. Jerome
presenting the translation of his Bible to the Infant Jesus, St. Peter
at the feet of the Madonna receiving the thanksgivings of victorious
Venice, with every other votive altar-piece, little interesting to
humanity in general, owe the impression they make on us to the dexterous
arrangement, the amorous or sublime enthusiasm of the artist;--but we
lament to see invention waste its powers, and execution its skill, to
excite our feelings for an action or event that receives its real
interest from a motive which cannot be rendered intuitive; such as
Alceste expiring, the legacy of Eudamidas, the cause of Demetrius's
disorder.