THIRD LECTURE.
The brilliant antithesis ascribed to Simonides, that 'painting is mute poesy and poetry speaking painting,' made, I apprehend, no part of the technic systems of antiquity: for this we may depend on the general practice of its artists, and still more safely on the philosophic discrimination of Plutarch[67], who tells us, that as poetry and painting resemble each other in their uniform address to the senses, for the impression they mean to make on our fancy and by that on our mind, so they differ as essentially in their materials and their modes of application, which are regulated by the diversity of the organs they address, ear and eye. Successive action communicated by sounds, and time, are the medium of poetry; form displayed in space, and momentaneous energy, are the element of painting.
As if these premises be true, the distinct representation of continued action is refused to an art which cannot express even in a series of subjects, but by a supposed mental effort in the spectator's mind, the regular succession of their moments, it becomes evident, that instead of attempting to impress us by the indiscriminate usurpation of a principle out of its reach, it ought chiefly to rely for its effect on its great characteristics space and form, singly or in apposition. In forms alone the idea of existence can be rendered permanent. Sounds die, words perish or become obsolete and obscure, even colours fade, forms alone can neither be extinguished nor misconstrued; by application to their standard alone, description becomes intelligible and distinct. Thus the effectual idea of corporeal beauty can strictly exist only in the plastic arts: for as the notion of beauty arises from the pleasure we feel in the harmonious co-operation of the various parts of some favourite object to one end at once, it implies their immediate co-existence in the mass they compose; and therefore can be distinctly perceived and conveyed to the mind by the eye alone: hence the representation of form in figure is the physical element of the Art.
But as bodies exist in time as well as in space; as the pleasure arising from the mere symmetry of an object is as transient as it is immediate; as harmony of parts, if the body be the agent of an internal power, depends for its proof on their application, it follows, that the exclusive exhibition of inert and unemployed form, would be a mistake of the medium for the end, and that character or action is required to make it an interesting object of imitation. And this is the moral element of the art.
Those important moments then which exhibit the united exertion of form and character in a single object or in participation with collateral beings, at once, and which with equal rapidity and pregnancy give us a glimpse of the past and lead our eye to what follows, furnish the true materials of those technic powers, that select, direct, and fix the objects of imitation to their centre.
The most eminent of these, by the explicit acknowledgment of all ages, and the silent testimony of every breast, is invention. He whose eye athwart the outward crust of the rock penetrates into the composition of its materials, and discovers a gold mine, is surely superior to him who afterwards adapts the metal for use. Colombo, when he from astronomic and physical inductions concluded to the existence of land in the opposite hemisphere, was surely superior to Amerigo Vespucci who took possession of its continent; and when Newton improving accident by meditation, discovered and established the laws of attraction, the projectile and centrifuge qualities of the system, he gave the clue to all who after him applied it to the various branches of philosophy, and was in fact the author of all the benefits accruing from their application to society. Homer, when he means to give the principal feature of man, calls him inventor (αλφηστης).
From what we have said it is clear that the term invention never ought to be so far misconstrued as to be confounded with that of creation, incompatible with our notions of limited being, an idea of pure astonishment, and admissible only when we mention Omnipotence: to invent is to find: to find something, presupposes its existence somewhere, implicitly or explicitly, scattered or in a mass: nor should I have presumed to say so much on a word of a meaning so plain, had it not been, and were it not daily confounded, and by fashionable authorities too, with the term creation.
Form, in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelopes our senses, and its counterpart the invisible one that agitates our mind with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the element and the realm of invention; it discovers, selects, combines the possible, the probable, the known, in a mode that strikes with an air of truth and novelty, at once. Possible strictly means an effect derived from a cause, a body composed of materials, a coalition of forms, whose union or co-agency imply in themselves no absurdity, no contradiction: applied to our art, it takes a wider latitude; it means the representation of effects derived from causes, or forms compounded from materials, heterogeneous and incompatible among themselves, but rendered so plausible to our senses, that the transition of one part to another seems to be accounted for by an air of organization, and the eye glides imperceptibly or with satisfaction from one to the other and over the whole: that this was the condition on which, and the limits within which alone the ancients permitted invention to represent what was strictly speaking impossible, we may with plausibility surmise from the picture of Zeuxis, described by Lucian in the memoir to which he has prefixed that painter's name, who was probably one of the first adventurers in this species of imagery.—Zeuxis had painted a family of centaurs; the dam a beautiful female to the middle, with the lower parts gradually sliding into the most exquisite forms of a young Thessalian mare, half reclined in playful repose and gently pawing the velvet ground, offered her human nipple to one infant centaur, whilst another greedily sucked the ferine udder below, but both with their eyes turned up to a lion-whelp held over them by the male centaur their father, rising above the hillock on which the female reclined, a grim feature, but whose ferocity was somewhat tempered by a smile.
The scenery, the colour, the chiaroscuro, the finish of the whole was no doubt equal to the style and the conception. This picture the artist exhibited, expecting that justice from the penetration of the public which the genius deserved that taught him to give plausibility to a compound of heterogeneous forms, to inspire them with suitable soul, and to imitate the laws of existence: he was mistaken. The novelty of the conceit eclipsed the art that had embodied it, the artist was absorbed in his subject, and the unbounded praise bestowed, was that of idle restless curiosity, gratified. Sick of gods and goddesses, of demigods and pure human combinations, the Athenians panted only for what was new. The artist, as haughty as irritable, ordered his picture to be withdrawn; "Cover it, Micchio," said he to his attendant, "cover it and carry it home, for this mob stick only to the clay of our art."—Such were the limits set to invention by the ancients; secure within these, it defied the ridicule thrown on that grotesque conglutination which Horace exposes; guarded by these, their mythology scattered its metamorphoses, made every element its tributary, and transmitted the privilege to us, on equal conditions: their Scylla and the Portress of Hell, their dæmons and our spectres, the shade of Patroclus and the ghost of Hamlet, their naiads, nymphs, and oreads, and our sylphs, gnomes, and fairies, their furies and our witches, differ less in essence, than in local, temporary, social modifications: their common origin was fancy, operating on the materials of nature, assisted by legendary tradition and the curiosity implanted in us of diving into the invisible;[68] and they are suffered or invited to mix with or superintend real agency, in proportion of the analogy which we discover between them and ourselves. Pindar praises Homer less for that 'winged power' which whirls incident on incident with such rapidity, that absorbed by the whole, and drawn from the impossibility of single parts, we swallow a tale too gross to be believed in a dream; than for the greater power by which he contrived to connect his imaginary creation with the realities of nature and human passions;[69] without this the fiction of the poet and the painter will leave us stupified rather by its insolence, than impressed by its power, it will be considered only as a superior kind of legerdemain, an exertion of ingenuity to no adequate end.