Chapter LXXI: Appendix: I

FRAGMENTS ON ART (_continued_)

WHY THE ARTS ARE NOT PROGRESSIVE?

[Under the above heading appeared the second of two articles in the _Morning Chronicle_ (Jan. 11 and 15, 1814). See vol. I. _The Round Table_, note to p. 160. The following passages were not used in _The Round Table_ paper.]

Science and the mechanic arts depend not on the force with which the mind itself is endued, or with which it contemplates given things (for this is naturally much the same) but on the number of things, successively perceived by the same or different persons, and formally arranged and registered in books or memory, which admits of being varied and augmented indefinitely. The number of objects to which the understanding may be directed is endless, and the results, so far as they are positive, tangible things, may be set down and added one to another, and made use of as occasion requires, without creating any confusion, and so as to produce a perpetual accumulation of useful knowledge. What is once gained is never lost, and may be multiplied daily, because this increase of knowledge does not depend upon increasing the force of the mind, but on directing the same force to different things, all of them in their nature definite, demonstrable, existing to the mind outwardly and by signs, less as the power than as the form of truth, and in which all the difficulty lies in the first invention, not in the subsequent communication. In like manner the mechanic parts of painting for instance, such as the mode of preparing colours, the laws of perspective, etc., which may be taught by rule and method, so that the principle being once known, every one may avail himself of it, these subordinate and instrumental parts of the art admit of uniform excellence, though from accidental causes it has happened otherwise. But it is not so in art itself, in its higher and nobler essence. ‘There is no shuffling,’ but ‘we ourselves compelled to give in evidence even to the teeth and forehead of our faults.’[97] There is no room for the division of labour—for the accumulation of borrowed advantages; no artificial scale by which _to heaven we may ascend_; because here excellence does not depend on the quantity of representative knowledge, abstracted from a variety of subjects, but on the original force of capacity, and degree of attention, applied to the same given subject, natural feelings and images. To use the distinction of a technical philosophy, science depends on the discursive or _extensive_—art on the intuitive and _intensive_ power of the mind. One chemical or mathematical discovery may be added to another, because the degree and sort of faculty required to apprehend and retain them, are in both cases the same; but no one can voluntarily add the colouring of Rubens to the expression of Raphael, till he has the same eye for colour as Rubens, and for expression as Raphael—that is, the most

thorough feeling of what is profound in the one, or splendid in the other—of what no rules can teach, nor words convey—and of what the mind must possess within itself, and by a kind of participation with nature, or remain for ever destitute of it. Titian and Correggio are the only painters who united to perfect colouring a degree of expression, the one in his portraits, and the other in his histories, all but equal, if not equal, to the highest. But this union of different qualities they had from nature, and not by method. In fact, we judge of science by the number of effects produced—of art by the energy which produces them. The one is knowledge—the other power.

[The arts of painting and ... ‘I also was an Arcadian!’]

What have we left to console us for all this? Why, we have Mr. Rogers’s ‘Pleasures of Memory,’ and Mr. Campbell’s ‘Pleasures of Hope’; Mr. Westall’s pictures, and all West’s; Miss Burney’s new novel (which is, however, some comfort), Miss Edgeworth’s Fashionable Tales, Madame de Staël’s next work, whatever it may be, and the praise of it in the _Edinburgh Review_, and Sir James Macintosh’s _History_.

II

[See Note to page 326.]

Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Elgin Marbles.—MURRAY.

The Elgin Marbles are the best answer to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s _Discourses_. Considered in that point of view, they are invaluable: in any other, they are not worth so much as has been said. Nothing remains of them but their style; but that is everything, for it is the style of nature. Art is the imitation of nature; and the Elgin Marbles are in their essence and their perfection casts from nature,—from fine nature, it is true, but from real, living, moving nature; from objects in nature, answering to an idea in the artist’s mind, not from an idea in the artist’s mind abstracted from all objects in nature. Already these Marbles have produced a revolution in our artists’ minds, and Mr. West says, in his practice: The venerable President makes an express distinction in their favour between _dignified_ art and _systematic_ art. Mr. Chauntry considers simplicity and grandeur so nearly united in them, that it is almost impossible to separate them. Sir Thomas Laurence in returning from the Elgin Marbles to his own house, where he has casts of the finest antiques, was struck with the greater degree of ease and nature in the former. Mr. Flaxman alone holds out for the _ideal_. The whole of his evidence on this subject is, indeed, quite ideal: Mr. Payne Knight’s evidence is _learned_ evidence.—It is to be hoped, however, that these Marbles with the name of Phidias thrown into the scale of common sense, may lift the Fine Arts out of the Limbo of vanity and affectation into which they were conjured in this country about fifty years ago, and in which they have lain sprawling and fluttering, gasping for breath, wasting away, vapid and abortive ever since,—the shadow of a shade. The benefit of high examples of Art, is to prevent the mischievous effect of bad ones. A true theory of Art does not advance the student one step in practice, one hair’s-breadth nearer the goal of excellence: but it takes the fetters from off his feet, and loosens the bandages from his eyes. We lay somewhat more stress on the value of the Fine Arts than Mr. Payne Knight, who considers them (we know not for what reason) as an elegant antithesis to morality. We think they are nearly related to it. All morality seems to be little more than keeping people out of mischief, as we send children to school; and the Fine Arts are in that respect a school of morality. They bribe the senses into the service of the understanding: they kill Time, the great enemy of man; they employ the mind usefully—about nothing; and by preventing _ennui_, promote the chief ends of virtue. A taste for the Fine Arts also, in periods of luxury and refinement, not ill supplies the place of religious enthusiasm. It feeds our love and admiration of the grand, the good, the beautiful. What is the respect which is felt for the names of Raphael, of Michael Angelo, of Phidias, of Homer and of Milton, but a sort of hero worship, only with this difference, that in the one case we pay an indistinct homage to the powers of the mind, whereas the worshippers of Theseus and Hercules deified the powers and virtues of the body?

With respect to the tendency of the works here collected to promote the Fine Arts in this country, though not so sanguine as some persons, or even as the Committee of the House of Commons, we are not without our hopes.—The only possible way to improve the taste for art in a country, is by a collection of standing works of established reputation, and which are capable by the sanctity of their name of overawing the petulance of public opinion. This result can never be produced by the encouragement given to the works of contemporary artists. The public ignorance will much sooner debauch them than they will reform the want of taste in the public. But where works of the highest character and excellence are brought forward in a manner due to their merits, and rendered accessible to the public, though they may do little for the national genius, it is hard if they do not add something to the public taste. In this way also they may react upon the production of original excellence. It was in this point of view that the Gallery of the Louvre was of the greatest importance not only to France, but to Europe. It was a means to civilise the world. There Art lifted up her head and was seated on her throne, and said, All eyes shall see me, and all knees shall bow to me. Honour was done to her and all hers. There was her treasure, and there the inventory of all she had. There she had gathered together all her pomp, and there was her shrine, and there her votaries came and worshipped as in a temple. The crown she wore was brighter than that of kings. Where the triumphs of human liberty had been, there were the triumphs of human genius. For there, in the Louvre, were the precious monuments of art;—there ‘stood the statue that enchants the world’;[98] there was the _Apollo_, the _Laocoon_, the _Dying Gladiator_, the _Head of the Antinous_, _Diana_ with her _Fawn_, the _Muses_ and the _Graces_ in a ring, and all the glories of the antique world:—

‘There was old Proteus coming from the sea,
And wreathed Triton blew his winding horn.’[99]

There, too, were the two _St. Jeromes_, Correggio’s and Domenichino’s; there was Raphael’s _Transfiguration_, the _St. Mark_ of Tintoret, Paul Veronese’s _Marriage of Cana_, the _Deluge_ of Nicholas Poussin, and Titian’s _St. Peter Martyr_;—all these and more than these, of which the world was not worthy. The worshippers of hereditary power and native imbecility wanted at first to destroy these monuments of human genius, which give the eternal lie to their creed; they did not dare to do that, they have dispersed them, and they have done well. They were an insult to the assembled majesty of hereditary power and native imbecility, both in the genius that had produced them, and that had acquired them; and _it was fit that they should be removed_. They were an obstacle in the way, in case the great Duke should have to teach the great nation another great moral lesson by the burning of Paris, which has been a favourite object with some persons since the year 1792, and with others later; and _it was fit that they should be removed_. The French themselves did not think proper to defend what they had dearly bought with their blood, shed for their country, and _it was fit that they should be removed_. Besides these reasons, there were no others for their removal. The reason assigned in the Duke of Wellington’s letter, that the works of art should be sacred to conquerors, and an heir-loom of the soil that gives them birth, is quite apocryphal. Half of the works brought from Italy had been originally brought there from Greece. If works of art are to be a sort of fixtures in every country, why are the Elgin Marbles brought here, for our artists to strut and fret over this acquisition to our ‘glorious country’? If the French were not to retain their collection of perfect works of art, why should we be allowed to make one of still higher pretensions under pretence of carrying off only fragments and rubbish? The Earl of Elgin brought away the Theseus and the Neptune as bits of architecture, as loose pieces of stone; but no sooner do they get into the possession of our glorious country, than they are discovered to be infinitely superior to the _Apollo_, the _Venus_, and the _Laocoon_, and all the rest of that class, which are found out to be no better than _modern antiques_. All this may be true, but it is truth with a suspicious appearance. If works of art are contemplated with peculiar interest on the spot which gave them birth, surely Athens has charms for the eyes of learning and taste as well as Rome. If there is something classical in the very air of Venice, of Antwerp, and of Rotterdam, surely there is an air at Athens which is breathed nowhere else.

If this reasoning would apply to such works in their perfect state, it does so still more in their approaches to decay and ruin, for then the local interest belonging to them becomes the principal impression. Lord Elgin appears not to have had the slightest authority for bringing away these statues, except a _fermaun_ or permission from the Turkish Government to bring away pieces of stone from the ruins of the Parthenon, which he paid 21,000 piastres to the Governor of Athens for permission to interpret as he pleased. That it was not meant to apply to the statues, and only to fragments of the buildings, is also evident from this, that Lord Elgin had originally, and at the time the _fermaun_ was granted, no intention, as he himself says, of bringing away the statues. Lord Aberdeen approves of bringing them away, because otherwise the French might have got them. In what we have said, we do not blame Lord Elgin for what he has done; all our feelings run the contrary way. We only blame cant and hypocrisy: we only blame those who blame others, and yet would do the very same things themselves. There does not appear to be any evidence that these statues were done by Phidias. It seems extremely probable, however, that they were done by persons under his direction, and in a style that he approved. What that style is, and what the principles of art are which are to be derived from it, we shall briefly attempt to state in another article on this interesting subject.

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Footnote 97:

_Hamlet_, III. 3.

Footnote 98:

Thomson, _The Seasons_, ‘Summer,’ 1347. Cf. _ante_, p. 107.

Footnote 99:

Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘The World is too much with us.’

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh
University Press

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Changed “Poodles are the true desirés” to “Poodles are the true désirs” on p. 125. 2. Changed “feeling in rare” to “feeling is rare” on p. 277. 3. Silently corrected typographical errors. 4. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed. 5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.