Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No.394, August, 1848. Various
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 paternity on man, even if his religion forbade it not.) Woman, in her real beauty, superseded the ideal; and, from condescending to represent inferior saints and conventual devotees, reassumed at length her more earthly empire, and threw around fascinations which rather tended to dissipate than to encourage religious sentiment. The divinity of art, which had deigned to shine with sacred lustre beneath and through the natural veil of modesty, indignantly withdrew, when that veil was rudely cast aside by the undevotional hands of her not less skilful but more deteriorated professors.
The Venetian school, with a truly congenial luxury of colour, evolved the idea of civil polity, in all its connexions with religion, with judicature, with manners, commerce, societies, dignities, triumphs; a large field, indeed, but one in which the great civic idea was the characteristic, running through every subject. Even the nude, before considered as most eligible in the display of art, yielded to civic dress and gorgeous ornament. What other ideas remain to be evolved? The world does not stand still – art may for a time. We must wait till some genius awaken us.
There is, we repeat, no modern school among us; art is pursued to an extent unprecedented, but without any fixed serious purpose, in all its multifarious forms, and with an ability sufficient to show that some moving cause is alone wanted. We progress in skill, in precision and clearness; but the hand is little directed by the mind. Our exhibition walls abound with talent, but are for the most part barren of genius: and surely this must continue to be the case, while the public mind is in its unpoetic, its utilitarian state, and shall look to art for its passing charm only as a gentle recreation, an idle amusement. If there is any tendency to a school, it is unfortunately to one which is most in opposition to that pure school which found, and cherished, and idealised the sanctity of female beauty.
We know not if it should be considered an escape or not; but certainly there was, in the earlier period of English art, one man of extraordinary genius, who, vigorously striking out a great moral idea, might have been the founder of a new school. We mean Hogarth. He was, however, too adventurously new for the age, and left no successor; nor is even now the greatness of his genius generally understood. He has been classed with "painters of drolls;" yet was he the most tragic painter this country – we were about to say, any country – has produced. We are not prepared to say