The questions we have now laboured to resolve, are by no means to be regarded as mere problems in abstract speculation. The subject is of the highest practical importance, and we have attempted to reduce it to practical inferences. Nothing has tended more to retard improvement, than placing genius and taste in opposition to reason and application. Each of the two former has been invested with some untangible, undefined excellence, disdaining rule, and superior to the drudgery of study. In treating of both, authors appear to have aimed at exalting their theme, by refusing certainty to the operations of the one, and stability to the principles of the other; treating each as the empiricism of talent, which it would be as vain to attempt reducing to precept as to prescribe the eagle's path through heaven. But how does this accord with fact and with usefulness? Men, the most eminent for genius, and who have bequeathed to futurity the most perfect productions, have also been the most remarkable for assiduity. This industry has been directed as much to the study of principles and rules as to the creation of new works. We have shown that there are standards, or rules, of taste, which never can be disregarded save at the peril of absurdity. If we deny regularity and certainty, or fixed and rational precepts of criticism to the labours of genius, of what advantage to succeeding knowledge can these prove? Beyond a passing pleasure—a barren sentiment, they remain without fruit. Excellence in the most refined exercises of mind is degraded to a mere knack,—to a fortunate and inexplicable aptitude. Thus, not the improvement of the human race only, but the very continuance of acquirement among men, is rendered uncertain. Yet such are the consequences of every system which considers taste as different from, and independent of knowledge; or its precepts as mutable, and not more amenable to judgment than to imagination. In whatever light, then, the views now briefly proposed be regarded, whether as respects taste as an object of mental science, or as the improver of art; whether in its influence upon the understanding or the heart, they appear to promise the surest, the most practical, and the most dignified results.
Beauty, as already observed, is the object of taste. The primitive source, and, in a great measure, the ultimate and only criterion, of this beauty, is nature. For, in the arts over which taste presides, natural beauty receives new modifications, and is subjected to new laws. Yet, in their general tendency and design, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, and even music, all contemplate one end,—to awaken associated emotion; while each employs the same means of direct or less obvious imitation of nature.
In each of these arts, however, a distinction exists, both in the manner and in the extent of instruction. They differ also in the closeness with which the respective imitations reflect their natural archetypes. But in this they correspond, that in none is mere imitation the final, or most exalted, object of the artist. In the fidelity of representation, and in the facility with which the originals in nature may be traced, Sculpture and Painting are superior to all the other imitative arts. Between the vivid creations of these, and the more varied, more imaginative, but less defined, efforts of poetry, the middle rank is occupied by Architecture, whose mighty masses and harmonious proportions fill the mind with awe or delight, as they recall the majesty or grace of the material world.
Architecture thus stands alone, in its own principles, and, it may be, in its own pre-eminence. These principles are at once more profound, or at least more abstract, and yet more determinate, than those of either of the sister arts. Indeed, so remarkable is this fact, and so nearly do the limits and the constituents of beauty verge here on demonstrative science, that we may hereafter point out their connexion with some of the preceding doctrines of taste. In the meantime, it may be sufficient merely to mention, that though architecture, as a necessary knowledge, must have been practised from the earliest formation of society; and though it furnishes their principal field to the other arts; yet it was later in arriving at perfection than Sculpture, which, besides, affords a more continuous series of monuments, and supplies the best materials for the philosophy of the subject; and in other respects, the arrangement now selected seems to promise the most clear elucidation of the history of art.
THE FINE ARTS.
SCULPTURE.