Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No.394, August, 1848. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ cause it may arise, the fact is manifest that we have not a distinct School of Art. It might be quite correct to assert, that there is no characteristic school, not one founded on a principle – a principle distinguished from former influences – in any country of Europe. We do not even except the German schools; for able though the men be and honoured, they show no symptom of an inventive faculty, which can alone make a school. They are as yet in their imitative state – in that of revival. They are in the trammels of an artistic superstition. They have no one great and new idea to realise. They make their commencement from art, not from mind – forgetful of this truth, that art cannot grow out of art: for, if good, it seduces the mind into mere imitation, which soon becomes effect; if bad, it incapacitates from conceiving the beautiful. Art cannot grow out of art; it may progress from its inferior to its better state, till the idea of its principle has been completed. It must then begin again from a new – from an idea not yet embodied – or it will inevitably decline, from the causes named, to mediocrity.

      It does not at all follow, in this rise of new art – or, if we please, revival of art – that there shall be at first a consciousness of working upon a new principle, or a positive purpose to deviate (for such a purpose would be but a vagary and extravagance, relying on no principle:) there must be some want of the day strongly felt, some feeling to be embodied, some impress of the times to be stamped and made visible. Hence alone can arise a new principle of art; and it is one that cannot be preconceived, it must have its birth without forethought, and possibly without a knowledge that it exists; it may be in the artist's mind, an unconscious purpose working through the conscious processes of art. The age in which we live has a strong desire to know all about art, as to advance in knowledge of every kind; but has it in itself one characteristic feeling, one strong impulse, favourable to art, such as will make genius start up, as it were, from his slumber and his dream, and do his real work? Nor can this be prophesied of; for, if it could, it would exist somewhere, at least in the mind of the prophet. It is like the statue existing in the block; but it is the hand of time, under direction that we wot not of, that must be cutting it away. Nor is it fair, for any lack in one power of mind, to underrate the age in which we live. It may be great in another power to do a destined work; that work done, another may be required, and another power be developed, in which art may be the required means to the more perfect vivifying a new principle. The genius of our day is too busy in the world's doings, in striving to advance utility, to have leisure, or to take an interest in the ideal and poetical. A great poetry it is indeed in itself, with all its mighty engines, working with iron arms more vast and powerful than fable could imagine of Brontes and Steropes, and all the huge manufacturers of thunderbolts for an Ideal Jove. Reality has outgrown fiction, – has become the "major videri," – is doing a sublime work – one, too, in which poetry of high cast is inherent, through hands and means most unpoetical. Mind is there, thought is there, worthy of all the greatness of man's reputation for sagacity or invention, and gigantic energy; the reaching to and grasping the large powers of nature, and adding them to his own body, thus becoming, unconscious of the poetic analogy, a Titan again. This age is, after all, doing a great deed. Let the dreamer, the versifier, the searcher after visible beauty, the painter, the statuary, incapacitated as they all generally are from the knowledge of what we term the business of life, consider coolly, without prejudice for his art, and against what more commonly meets him in some interrupting and ungracious form, reality, the machinery of governments, the science of banking, the law of markets, and the innumerable detail of which he seldom thinks, but without the establishment of which he would not be allowed to think, – by which he lives his daily life; let him trace any one manufacture through all its successive ingenuities to its great uses and its great results. Let him travel a few hundred miles on a railroad, and note how all is ordered, with what precision all arrangements are made and conducted, and what a world it is in itself, moving through space like a world, and set in motion and stayed by the hand of one of his own Saxon blood; and then, in idea, transferring himself from his own work, and his pride of his own art, let him ask himself if he sees not something beyond, quite extraneous to himself, a great thing effected, which he never could have conceived nor have executed; and then let him say if there be not even in this our working world, a great and living poetry, a magnificent thought realised, a principle brought out, worthy an age; and then let him be content for a while that his own particular capacity should for a time be in abeyance, to great purposes inoperative, unproductive of the world's esteem. It may be that he will but have to wait for his season. His time may come again. Some new principle in the world's action, with possibly a secret and electric power, may reach him, enter his own mind, and set at large all his capacities, and make them felt; for that principle, whatever it is to be, will be electric, too, in the general mind. It may arise naturally out of the present state of things. Now, our schoolless art, like what has once been a mighty river, with all its tributary streams, has wandered into strange and lower lands, and been enticed away through innumerable small channels, still fertilising, in a more homely and modest way, many countries, but losing its own distinctive character and name. The streams will never flow back and unite again, but some of them, in this earth's shifts and changes, may again become rivers, and bear a rich merchandise into the large ocean, and so enrich the world. If we think upon the distinct characteristics of schools, we must be struck with this, that before each one was known, established, and confirmed in public opinion, it could not have been generally imagined and preconceived. It is altogether the creation of gifted genius. We acknowledge the setting up a great truth, of which we had not a glimpse until we see it worked out, and standing before us manifest. It is ours by natural adoption, not by a universal instinctive invention. So that it is a presumption of our weakness to believe, as some do, that the arena of art is limited, and every part occupied; and that, for the future, nothing is left but a kind of copying and imitation. Who is to set limit to the powers of mind? We can imagine a dogmatist of this low kind, before Shakspeare's day, in admiration of the Greek drama, laying down the laws of the unities as irrefragable, and that the great volume of the drama was closed with them. And some such opinions have been set forth by our Gallic neighbours, and maintained with no little pertinacity. We must have been Shakspeares to have preconceived his drama. How, for ages, was poetry limited! the epic, as it were, closed! His age knew nothing of Milton before Milton. It was a new principle coming dimly through troubadours and romances, that shone forth at length Homerically, but with a difference, in Marmion, and indeed all Sir Walter Scott's poetry, which, if it be linked to any that has preceded it, must be referred to the most remote, to that of Homer himself; so that let no man say that the world of fact and possibility is shut against art. The great classic idea, the deification, the worship of beauty, was completed by the ancients. There was a long rest, a sleep, without a dream of a new principle; but it came, and art awakened to its perception. Giotto, Della Robbo, the old Siennese school, Beato Angelico, Pisani, Donatello, evolve the Christian idea. Perugino, weak in faith, turns art towards earth, and leads Rafaelle to strive for a new beautiful; and Michael Angelo for the powerful – the former humanising the divine, the latter, if not deifying, gigantising humanity – not in the antique repose, but incorporeal energy – the whole dignity of man, as imagined in his personal condition. This was the characteristic of the Florentine school – as, after Perugino, or commencing with him, intellect, united with grace and beauty, became the characteristic of the Roman. But grace and beauty are dangerously human. The religious mind, in reverential contemplation, felt awe above humanity, and feared to invest divinity with corporeal charm. Even in heathen art, the great Athenian goddess affects not grace, but stands in a severe repose, so unlike rest, the beautiful emblem of weakness. Grace and beauty became dangerous qualities when applied to Christian devotional art. The followers of Perugino, who thought them essential, were not at first aware to what degree they were deteriorating the great principle of their school, and how they were rendering art too human for their creed. Woman – by the gift of nature, beauty personified – by more close and accurate study of her perfections, ceased to be an object of real worship, as her fascinations were felt. Even Raffaelle was under an unadoring influence. His madonnas often detract much from the idolatry which his church laboured to confirm. We must not wonder, then, if after him we find humanity in woman even dethroned from her higher and almost majestic state of heavenly purity – though legitimatised as an object of worship, the "mother of God," in that higher sanctity than it was possible to set up man, in his most saintly apotheosis, (for the boldest mind would necessarily be shocked at the idea of bestowing a divine СКАЧАТЬ