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.