relates not to form. In spite of the most portentous deformity, and
without considering the spell of his chiaroscuro, such were his powers
of nature, such the grandeur, pathos, or simplicity of his composition,
from the most elevated or extensive arrangement to the meanest and most
homely, that the best cultivated eye, the purest sensibility, and the
most refined taste dwell on them, equally enthralled. Shakspeare alone
excepted, no one combined with so much transcendent excellence, so
many, in all other men unpardonable faults—and reconciled us to them.
He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of all the tints
that float between them: he tinged his pencil with equal success in the
cool of dawn, in the noon-day ray, in the livid flash, in evanescent
twilight, and rendered darkness visible. Though made to bend a stedfast
eye on the bolder phenomena of nature, yet he knew how to follow her into
her calmest abodes, gave interest to insipidity or baldness, and plucked
a flower in every desart. None ever like Rembrandt knew to improve an
accident into a beauty, or give importance to a trifle. If ever he had
a master, he had no followers; Holland was not made to comprehend his
power. The succeeding school of colourists were content to tip the
cottage, the hamlet, the boor, the ale-pot, the shambles, and the haze of
winter, with orient hues, or the glow of setting summer suns.
In turning our eye to Switzerland we shall find great powers without
great names, those of Hans Holbein[63] and Francis Mola only excepted.
But the scrupulous precision, the high finish, and the tizianesque
colour of Hans Holbein, make the least part of his excellence for those
who have seen his Designs of the Passion, and that series of emblematic
groups, known under the name of Holbein’s Dance of Death. From Belinzona
to Basle, invention appears to have been the characteristic of Helvetic
art: the works of Tobias Stimmer, Christopher Murer, Jost Amman, Gotthard
Ringgli, are mines of invention, and exhibit a style of design, equally
poised between the emaciated dryness of Albert Durer and the bloated
corpulence of Golzius.
The seeds of mediocrity which the Carracci had attempted to scatter
over Italy, found a more benign soil, and reared an abundant harvest in
France: to mix up a compound from something of every excellence in the
catalogue of art, was the principle of their theory and their aim in
execution. It is in France where Michael Angelo’s right to the title of
a painter was first questioned. The fierceness of his line, as they call
it, the purity of the antique, and the characteristic forms of Raphael,
are only the road to the academic vigour, the librated style of Annibale
Carracci, and from that they appeal to the model; in composition they
consult more the artifice of grouping, contrast and richness, than the
subject or propriety; their expression is dictated by the theatre. From
the uniformity of this process, not to allow that the school of France
offers respectable exceptions, would be unjust; without recurring again
to the name of Nicolas Poussin, the works of Eustache le Sueur[64],
Charles le Brun, Sebastien Bourdon, and sometimes Pierre Mignard, contain
original beauties and rich materials. Le Sueur’s series of pictures in
the Chartreux exhibit the features of contemplative piety, in a purity of
style and a placid breadth of manner that moves the heart. His dignified
martyrdom of St. Laurence and the burning of the magic books at Ephesus,
breathe the spirit of Raphael. The powerful comprehension of a whole,
only equalled by the fire which pervades every part of the battles of
Alexander, by Charles le Brun, would entitle him to the highest rank in
history, had the characters been less mannered, had he not exchanged the
Argyraspids and the Macedonian phalanx for the compact legionaries of
the Trajan pillar; had he distinguished Greeks from barbarians, rather
by national feature and form than by accoutrement and armour. The seven
works of charity by Seb. Bourdon teem with surprising pathetic and always
novel images; and in the plague of David, by Pierre Mignard, our sympathy
is roused by energies of terrour and combinations of woe, which escaped
Poussin and Raphael himself.
The obstinacy of national pride[65], perhaps more than the neglect of
government or the frown of superstition, confined the labours of the
Spanish school, from its obscure origin at Sevilla to its brightest
period, within the narrow limits of individual imitation. But the degree
of perfection attained by Diego Velasquez, Joseph Ribera, and Morillo, in
pursuing the same object by means as different as successful, impresses
us with deep respect for the variety of their powers.
That the great style ever received the homage of Spanish genius, appears
not; neither Alfonso Berruguette, nor Pellegrino Tibaldi, left followers:
but that the eyes and the taste fed by the substance of Spagnuoletto and
Morillo, should without reluctance have submitted to the gay volatility
of Luica Giordano, and the ostentatious flimsiness of Sebastian Conca,
would be matter of surprize, did we not see the same principles
successfully pursued in the platfonds of Antonio Raphael Mengs, the
painter of philosophy, as he is stiled by his biographer D’Azara. The
cartoons of the frescoes painted for the royal palace at Madrid,
representing the apotheosis of Trajan and the temple of Renown, exhibit
less the style of Raphael in the nuptials of Cupid and Psyche at the
Farnesina, than the gorgeous but empty bustle of Pietro da Cortona.
From this view of art on the continent, let us cast a glance on its state
in this country, from the age of Henry VIII. to our own.—From that period
to this, Britain never ceased pouring its caravans of noble and wealthy
pilgrims over Italy, Greece and Ionia, to pay their devotions at the
shrines of virtù and taste: not content with adoring the obscure idols,
they have ransacked their temples, and none returned without some share
in the spoil: in plaister or in marble, on canvas or in gems, the arts
of Greece and Italy were transported to England, and what Petronius said
of Rome, that it was easier to meet there with a god than a man, might
be said of London. Without inquiring into the permanent and accidental
causes of the inefficacy of these efforts with regard to public taste and
support of art, it is observable, that, whilst Francis I. was busied,
not to aggregate a mass of painted and chiselled treasures merely to
gratify his own vanity, and brood over them with sterile avarice, but to
scatter the seeds of taste over France, by calling, employing, enriching
Andrea del Sarto, Rustici, Rosso, Primaticcio, Cellini, Niccolo; in
England, Holbein and Torregiano under Henry, and Federigo Zucchero
under Elizabeth, were condemned to gothic work and portrait painting.
Charles indeed called Rubens and his scholars to provoke the latent
English spark, but the effect was intercepted by his destiny. His son,
in possession of the cartoons of Raphael, and with the magnificence of
Whitehall before his eyes, suffered Verio to contaminate the walls of
his palaces, or degraded Lely to paint the Cymons and Iphigenias of his
court; whilst the manner of Kneller swept completely what yet might be
left of taste, under his successors: such was the equally contemptible
and deplorable state of English art, till the genius of Reynolds first
rescued from the mannered depravation of foreigners his own branch, and
soon extending his view to the higher departments of art, joined that
select body of artists who addressed the ever open ear, ever attentive
mind of our Royal Founder, with the first idea of this establishment.
His beneficence soon gave it a place and a name, his august patronage,
sanction, and individual encouragement: the annually increased merits
of thirty exhibitions in this place, with the collateral ones contrived
by the speculations of commerce, have told the surprising effects:
a mass of self-taught and tutored powers burst upon the general eye,
and unequivocally told the world what might be expected from the
concurrence of public encouragement—how far this have been or may be
granted or withheld, it is not here my province to surmise: the plans
lately adopted and now organizing within these walls for the dignified
propagation and support of art, whether fostered by the great, or left
to their own energy, must soon decide what may be produced by the unison
of British genius and talent, and whether the painters school of that
nation which claims the foremost honours of modern poetry, which has
produced with Reynolds, Hogarth, Gainsborough and Wilson, shall submit
to content themselves with a subordinate place among the schools we have
enumerated.
THIRD LECTURE.
INVENTION.
_PART I._
——ΤΙ Τ’ ΑΡ ΑΥ ΦΘΟΝΕΕΙΣ, ΕΡΗΙΡΟΝ ΑΟΙΔΟΝ
ΤΕΡΠΕΙΝ, ΟΠΠΗ ΟΙ ΝΟΟΣ ΟΡΝΥΤΑΙ; ΟΥ ΝΥ Τ’ ΑΟΙΔΟΙ
ΑΙΤΙΟΙ, ΑΛΛΑ ΠΟΘΙ ΖΕΥΣ ΑΙΤΙΟΣ, ὉΣΤΕ ΔΙΔΩΣΙΝ
ΑΝΔΡΑΣΙΝ ΑΛΦΗΣΤΗΣΙΝ, ΟΠΩΣ ΕΘΕΛΗΣΙΝ ΕΚΑΣΤΩΙ.
Homer. Odyss. A. 346.
ARGUMENT.
Introduction. Discrimination of Poetry and Painting. General idea
of Invention—its right to select a subject from nature itself.
Visiones—Theon—Agasias. Cartoon of Pisa—Incendio del Borgo.
Specific idea of Invention: Epic subjects—Michael Angelo. Dramatic
subjects—Raphael. Historic subjects—Poussin, &c. Invention has a right
to adopt ideas—examples. Duplicity of subject and moment inadmissible.
Transfiguration of Raphael.
THIRD LECTURE.
The brilliant antithesis ascribed to Simonides, that ‘painting is mute
poesy and poetry speaking painting,’ made, I apprehend, no part of the
technic systems of antiquity: for this we may depend on the general
practice of its artists, and still more safely on the philosophic
discrimination of Plutarch[66], who tells us, that as poetry and painting
resemble each other in their uniform address to the senses, for the
impression they mean to make on our fancy and by that on our mind, so
they differ as essentially in their _materials_ and their _modes_ of
application, which are regulated by the diversity of the organs they
address, ear and eye. _Successive action_ communicated by sounds, and
_time_, are the medium of poetry; _form_ displayed in _space_, and
momentaneous energy, are the element of painting.
As, if these premises be true, the distinct representation of continued
action is refused to an art which cannot express even in a series of
subjects, but by a supposed mental effort in the spectator’s mind, the
regular succession of their moments, it becomes evident, that instead of
attempting to impress us by the indiscriminate usurpation of a principle
out of its reach, it ought chiefly to rely for its effect on its great
characteristics space and form, singly or in apposition. In forms alone
the idea of existence can be rendered permanent. Sounds die, words
perish or become obsolete and obscure, even colours fade, forms alone
can neither be extinguished nor misconstrued; by application to their
standard alone description becomes intelligible and distinct. Thus the
effectual idea of corporeal beauty can strictly exist only in the plastic
arts: for as the notion of beauty arises from the pleasure we feel in the
harmonious co-operation of the various parts of some favourite object to
one end at once, it implies their immediate co-existence in the mass they
compose; and therefore can be distinctly perceived and conveyed to the
mind by the eye alone: hence the representation of form in figure is the
_physical_ element of the Art.
But as bodies exist in time as well as in space; as the pleasure
arising from the mere symmetry of an object is as transient as it is
immediate; as harmony of parts, if the body be the agent of an internal
power, depends for its proof on their application, it follows, that the
exclusive exhibition of inert and unemployed form, would be a mistake of
the medium for the end, and that character or action is required to make
it an interesting object of imitation. And this is the _moral_ element of
the art.
Those important moments then which exhibit the united exertion of form
and character in a single object or in participation with collateral
beings, _at once_, and which with equal rapidity and pregnancy give us a
glimpse of the past and lead our eye to what follows, furnish the true
materials of those technic powers, that select, direct, and fix the
objects of imitation to their centre.
The most eminent of these, by the explicit acknowledgment of all ages,
and the silent testimony of every breast, is _invention_. He whose eye
athwart the outward crust of the rock penetrates into the composition of
its materials, and discovers a gold mine, is surely superiour to him who
afterwards adapts the metal for use. Colombo, when he from astronomic and
physical inductions concluded to the existence of land in the opposite
hemisphere, was surely superiour to Amerigo Vespucci who took possession
of its continent; and when Newton improving accident by meditation,
discovered and established the laws of attraction, the projectile and
centrifuge qualities of the system, he gave the clue to all who after him
applied it to the various branches of philosophy, and was in fact the
author of all the benefits accruing from their application to society.
Homer, when he means to give the principal feature of man, calls him
inventor (αλφηστης.)
From what we have said it is clear that the term invention never
ought to be so far misconstrued as to be confounded with that of
_creation_, incompatible with our notions of limited being, an idea of
pure astonishment, and admissible only when we mention Omnipotence:
to _invent_ is to find: to find something, presupposes its existence
somewhere, implicitly or explicitly, scattered or in a mass: nor should I
have presumed to say so much on a word of a meaning so plain, had it not
been, and were it not daily confounded, and by fashionable authorities
too, with the term creation.
Form in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelops our
senses, and its counterpart the invisible one that agitates our mind
with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the element and the realm
of invention; it discovers, selects, combines the _possible_, the
_probable_, the _known_, in a mode that strikes with an air of truth
and novelty, at once. Possible strictly means an effect derived from a
cause, a body composed of materials, a coalition of forms, whose union or
co-agency imply in themselves no absurdity, no contradiction: applied to
our art it takes a wider latitude; it means the representation of effects
derived from causes, or forms compounded from materials, heterogeneous
and incompatible among themselves, but rendered so plausible to our
senses, that the transition of one part to another seems to be accounted
for by an air of organization, and the eye glides imperceptibly or with
satisfaction from one to the other and over the whole: that this was
the condition on which, and the limits within which alone the ancients
permitted invention to represent what was strictly speaking impossible,
we may with plausibility surmise from the picture of Zeuxis, described
by Lucian in the memoir to which he has prefixed that painter’s name,
who was probably one of the first adventurers in this species of
imagery.—Zeuxis had painted a family of centaurs; the dam a beautiful
female to the middle, with the lower parts gradually sliding into the
most exquisite forms of a young Thessalian mare half reclined in playful
repose and gently pawing the velvet ground, offered her human nipple
to one infant centaur, whilst another greedily sucked the ferine udder
below, but both with their eyes turned up to a lyon-whelp held over them
by the male centaur their father, rising above the hillock on which the
female reclined, a grim feature, but whose ferocity was somewhat tempered
by a smile. The scenery, the colour, the chiaroscuro, the finish of the
whole was no doubt equal to the style and the conception. This picture
the artist exhibited, expecting that justice from the penetration of the
public which the genius deserved that taught him to give plausibility to
a compound of heterogeneous forms, to inspire them with suitable soul,
and to imitate the laws of existence: he was mistaken. The novelty of the
conceit eclipsed the art that had embodied it, the artist was absorbed
in his subject, and the unbounded praise bestowed, was that of idle
restless curiosity, gratified. Sick of gods and goddesses, of demigods
and pure human combinations, the Athenians panted only for what was new.
The artist, as haughty as irritable, ordered his picture to be withdrawn;
cover it, Micchio, said he to his attendant, cover it and carry it home,
for this mob stick only to the clay of our art.—Such were the limits
set to invention by the ancients; secure within these, it defied the
ridicule thrown on that grotesque conglutination, which Horace exposes;
guarded by these, their mythology scattered its metamorphoses, made every
element its tributary, and transmitted the privilege to us, on equal
conditions: their Scylla and the Portress of Hell, their dæmons and our
spectres, the shade of Patroclus and the ghost of Hamlet, their naiads,
nymphs, and oreads, and our sylphs, gnomes, and fairies, their furies and
our witches, differ less in essence, than in local, temporary, social
modifications: their common origin was fancy, operating on the materials
of nature, assisted by legendary tradition and the curiosity implanted in
us of diving into the invisible[67]; and they are suffered or invited to
mix with or superintend real agency, in proportion of the analogy which
we discover between them and ourselves. Pindar praises Homer less for
that ‘winged power’ which whirls incident on incident with such rapidity,
that absorbed by the whole, and drawn from the impossibility of single
parts, we swallow a tale too gross to be believed in a dream; than for
the greater power by which he contrived to connect his imaginary creation
with the realities of nature and human passions[68]; without this the
fiction of the poet and the painter will leave us stupified rather by its
insolence than impressed by its power, it will be considered only as a
superior kind of legerdemain, an exertion of ingenuity to no adequate end.
Before we proceed to the process and the methods of invention, it is
not superfluous to advert to a question which has often been made, and
by some has been answered in the negative; _whether it be within the
artist’s province or not, to find or to combine a subject from himself,
without having recourse to tradition or the stores of history and
poetry?_ Why not, if the subject be within the limits of art and the
combinations of nature, though it should have escaped observation?
shall the immediate avenues of the mind, open to all its observers,
from the poet to the novelist, be shut only to the artist? shall he be
reduced to receive as alms from them what he has a right to share as
common property? assertions like these, say in other words, that the
Laocoon owes the impression he makes on us to his name alone, and that
if tradition had not told a story and Pliny fixed it to that work, the
artist’s conception of a father with his sons, surprised and entangled
by two serpents within the recesses of a cavern or lonesome dell, was
inadmissible and transgressed the laws of invention. I am much mistaken,
if, so far from losing its power over us with its traditional sanction,
it would not rouse our sympathy more forcibly, and press the subject
closer to our breast, were it considered only as the representation of
an incident common to humanity. The ancients were so convinced of their
right to this disputed prerogative that they assigned it its own class,
and Theon the Samian is mentioned by Quintilian, whom none will accuse
or suspect of confounding the limits of the arts, in his list of primary
painters, as owing his celebrity to that intuition into the sudden
movements of nature, which the Greeks called φαντασιας, the Romans
_visiones_, and we might circumscribe by the phrase of ‘unpremeditated
conceptions’ the reproduction of associated ideas; he explains what he
understood by it in the following passage adapted to his own profession,
rhetoric.[69] ‘We give,’ says he, ‘the name of visions to what the Greeks
call phantasies; that power by which the images of absent things are
represented by the mind with the energy of objects moving before our
eyes: he who conceives these rightly will be a master of passions; his
is that well-tempered fancy which can imagine things, voices, acts, as
they really exist, a power perhaps in a great measure dependent on our
will. For if these images so pursue us, when our minds are in a state of
rest, or fondly fed by hope, or in a kind of waking dream; that we seem
to travel, to sail, to fight, to harangue in public, or to dispose of
riches we possess not, and all this with an air of reality, why should we
not turn to use this vice of the mind?—Suppose I am to plead the case of
a murdered man, why should not every supposable circumstance of the act
float before my eyes? shall I not see the murderer unawares rush in upon
him? in vain he tries to escape—see how pale he turns—hear you not his
shrieks, his entreaties? do you not see him flying, struck, falling? will
not his blood, his ashy semblance, his groans, his last expiring gasp,
seize on my mind?’
Permit me to apply this organ of the orator for one moment to the
poet’s process: by this radiant recollection of associated ideas, the
spontaneous ebullitions of nature, selected by observation, treasured
by memory, classed by sensibility and judgment, Shakspeare became the
supreme master of passions and the ruler of our hearts; this embodied
his Falstaff and his Shylock, Hamlet and Lear, Juliet and Rosalind. By
this power he saw Warwick uncover the corpse of Gloster, and swear to his
assassination and his tugs for life; by this he made Banquo see the weird
sisters bubble up from earth, and in their own air vanish; this is the
hand that struck upon the bell when Macbeth’s drink was ready, and from
her chamber pushed his dreaming wife, once more to methodize the murder
of her guest.—
And this was the power of Theon[70]; such was the unpremeditated
conception that inspired him with the idea of that warriour, who in the
words of Ælian, seemed to embody the terrible graces and the enthusiastic
furor of the god of war. Impetuous he rushed onward to oppose the sudden
incursion of enemies; with shield thrown forward and high brandished
faulchion, his step as he swept on, seemed to devour the ground: his
eye flashed defiance; you fancied to hear his voice, his look denounce
perdition and slaughter without mercy. This figure, single and without
other accompaniments of war than what the havock of the distance shewed,
Theon deemed sufficient to answer the impression he intended to make on
those whom he had selected to inspect it. He kept it covered, till a
trumpet, prepared for the purpose, after a prelude of martial symphonies,
at once, by his command, blew with invigourated fierceness, a signal
of attack—the curtain dropped, the terrific figure appeared to start
from the canvass, and irresistibly assailed the astonished eyes of the
assembly.
To prove the relation of Ælian no hyperbolic legend, I need not insist
on the magic effect which the union of two sister powers must produce on
the senses: of what our art alone and unassisted may perform, the most
unequivocal proof exists within these walls; your eyes, your feelings,
and your fancy have long anticipated it: whose mind has not now recalled
that wonder of a figure, the misnomed gladiator of Agasias, a figure
whose tremendous energy embodies every element of motion, whilst its
pathetic dignity of character enforces sympathies, which the undisguised
ferocity of Theon’s warriour in vain solicits. But the same irradiation
which shewed the soldier to Theon, shewed to Agasias the leader: Theon
saw the passion, Agasias[71] its rule.