The Fine Arts Commission affords another means of remedying the evils that are besetting the profession, and through them the public taste. We do not like the Government competition system. We go further—we do not like the Government, we mean the Commission, constituting themselves judges and purveyors. This is not the way to make great men. The man of genius shrinks from the competition system; nay, he fears or doubts the judgment of his judges. Perhaps he feels that he is himself the best judge; and if he has a just confidence in himself, he ought to feel this. He will not like the check of too much dictation as to subjects, composition, or any of the detail. We are persuaded that it would be far wiser, both for the public and for art, that the commissioners should studiously select their man, without competition, not for some one or more pictures, but for a far wider range. There will be still competition enough for proper ambition in the number still to be employed. Raffaelle had the Vatican assigned to him, and that at an early age; so would we gladly see a large portion given to one man, and let the whole be of his one mind, and let him have his assistants if he please. Let him be dominant, and if he has within him a power, it will come out; and it cannot be difficult to find a few men of sense and vigour; and even though they have not as yet shown great powers, it does not follow that they have them not—trust to what they have, and more will grow. But we have some even now capable of performing beautiful works to do honour to the nation. We should rejoice to see their secretary released from the clerkship of his office, and set to work seriously with his hand and his superintending mind. We would impress this upon the consideration of the commissioners as an indisputable truth, that if they select a man of genius, they select one superior to themselves—one who is to teach, not to be taught by them—and one with whose arrangements, after their selection, they should by no means interfere. And supposing the worst, that they have actually made an unfortunate choice—what then? They have made an experiment at no very great cost, and may obliterate whatever is a disgrace. The works of other painters were obliterated in the Sistine Chapel to make room for Michael Angelo. Nor was there any hesitation in destroying the labours of previous artists, and even the suspended operations of his old master, Perugino, that the whole space might be open to the genius of the youth Raffaelle. It is whole, entire responsibility that makes great men. Throw upon the persons you select the whole weight, and thereby give them the benefit of all the glory; and whatever be their powers, you tax them to the utmost. We would have them by no means interfered with, any more than we would cripple the commander of our armies abroad with the petty counsels and restrictions of bureau-manufacture. Nor should they be too strictly limited as to time, nor subjected to the continual questionings of an ungenerous impatience. Let the trust be conferred upon them as an honour which they are to wear and enjoy, not as a notice of their servility, but of their freedom. That trust is less likely to be abused the more generously it is given. To fulfil it then, becomes an ambition; and the daily habit of this higher feeling, by making the given work the all in all of life, renders the men more fit for it. Let the nation, expecting liberality from the "Liberal Arts," bestow it—hold out high rewards, leave the artists in all respects unshackled; and, the intention of a work being approved of, let not the time it is to occupy be in the stipulation. And it would be well to look to the promise of the young as well as actual performances; for the power to do will grow. Of thirty-eight competitors convened at Florence, Lorenzo Ghiberti, only twenty-three years of age, was chosen to execute the celebrated doors; the work occupied forty years of his life. The work is immortal, if human work can be; and obtained this eulogium from Michael Angelo, that "they were worthy of being the gates of Paradise." He conferred honour upon his city, and received such as was worthy the city to bestow. "His labours were justly appreciated, and ably rewarded by his fellow citizens, who, besides granting him whatever he demanded, assigned him a portion of land, and elected him Gonfaloniere, or chief magistrate of the state. His bust was afterwards placed in the baptistery." Was the confidence, the full trust, in the power of the young Raffaelle misplaced? What wonders did he not perform in his too short life! Had he lived longer, he would without question have reached the highest honours his country had to bestow.
One word more on this subject of generosity—of national generosity. We seem to think it a great thing to bestow a knighthood upon an artist of eminence here and there, yet give not the means of keeping the dignity from conspicuous shame, of maintaining a decent hospitality among his brethren artists, by which much general improvement might evidently arise. All our real substantial honours are conferred upon soldiers and lawyers. They have estates publicly given, and are raised to the peerage; yet it is doubtful if one man of genius, in literature and the arts, does not deserve better of his country, and confer upon it more glory, than any ten of the other more favoured professions: and more than this, the name of one such genius will be remembered, perhaps with some sense of the disgrace of neglect, when all the others are forgotten. Let a lawyer be but a short period of his life upon the woolsack, he will find means to raise to himself a fortune, and retire back upon private life with an annual pension of thousands; while the man of genius in arts and literature is too often left in old age uncheered by any acknowledgment, and perhaps weighed down to death by embarrassments, from which a delighted, improved, and at the same time an ungrateful country will not relieve him. A government should know that it is for the crown to honour a profession, and thereby to make it worthy the honour. We live in a country where distinctions do much, and are worse than profitless without adequate means to sustain them. It would be well if sometimes selections were made in other directions than the law and army, and if our peerage were not unfrequently radiated with the glory of genius. Why should a barren baronetcy have been conferred on the author of Waverley? Had he been a conqueror in fifty battles, could he have conferred more benefit than he has conferred upon his country? Why is it that there is always in our government a jealousy of literature and the arts? There has not been a decent honour bestowed on either since the reign of the unfortunate Charles. Poets, painters, and sculptors, it is vulgarly thought, are scarcely "alendi," and certainly "non saginandi." The arts might at least be given a position in our universities. This, as a first step, would do much,—it would tend, too, mainly to raise the public taste, which is daily sinking lower and lower. We should be glad to see Mr Eastlake made professor of painting at Oxford, with an adequate establishment there to enable him not only to lecture, but to teach more practically by design, in the very place of all others in the kingdom where there is most in feeling congenial with art. We mention Mr Eastlake, not making an invidious distinction, but because his acquirements in literature, and his valuable contributions to it, seem most readily to point to him as a fit occupant for the professor's chair. We have repeatedly, in the pages of Maga, insisted upon the importance of establishing the fine arts in our universities, and at one time entertained a hope that the Taylor Legacy would have taken this direction. We are not, however, sorry altogether that it did not do so, for it would surely be more advantageous that such a movement should begin with the Government. It would remedy, too, more evils than one; it would give an occupation of mind, congenial with their academic studies, to our youth, and preserve them from a dangerous extravagance both of purse and of opinions. The hopes, however, of any thing really advantageous to the fine arts arising from our Government, unless very strongly urged to it, are small. They do not seem inclined at all to favour the profession; they would look upon it as solely addicted to the labour of the hand with a view to small profits—a portion of which profits, too, upon some strange principles of the political economists, they would appropriate to the nation as a fine, the penalty of genius. One would imagine, from the proposition of the Board of Trade to take 10 per cent from subscriptions to art-unions for the purchasing pictures for the National Gallery, that they considered the epithet "fine" so appropriated to the arts as intended originally to suggest a tax. They would not allow the profession a free trade. Whatever is obtained by exhibiting works of artists, should be as much their property as would the product of any other manufacture be the property of the respective adventurers, and the art-union subscriptions are undoubtedly a portion of these profits. What, in common justice, have the public to do with them? The proposed scheme is a step towards communism, and may have been borrowed from the French provisional seizure of their railroads. With equal justice might they require that every butcher and baker and tailor should give a portion of his meat, his bread, and his cloth to feed and clothe our army and navy; and this not as of a common taxation, but as an extra compliment and advantage to these trades. There is a great deal too much here of the beggarly utilitarian view. We advocate not the cause of art-unions—we think them perfectly mischievous, and would gladly see them suppressed; but surely to invite and tempt the poor artists to paint their twenty and five-and-twenty pound pictures, and coolly to take 10 per cent out of their pockets to purchase to yourself a gallery of art, is not very consonant to our general ideas of what is due to the liberal arts. The liberality is certainly not reciprocal.
Nor, indeed, when we view the state of our National Gallery, considering the building as well as what it contains, can we be induced to think that the Government are very much in earnest in their profession of a desire to raise its importance. The National Gallery has its committee, and there is the Commission of Fine Arts. The former like not a questioning Parliament, and have not sufficient confidence in themselves to disregard the uncomplimentary animadversions of a critical press; and so the National Gallery advances not. The latter appear to treat art too much as a taxable commodity, and as having a right to levy specimens, and take for the public the profit of them, when they are required to cater for any national works. We do not, however, doubt their sincere desire to promote the arts; but we do doubt if they are perfectly alive to the real importance of the work they have to do, and fear their efforts are rendered less useful by the number and conflicting tastes of the members. Divisions and subdivisions of responsibility terminate too frequently in many little things which, put together, do not make one great one.
However deficient, or however faulty in our taste, there seems to be at the present moment a more general desire to become acquainted with art and its productions in former ages. Publications of historical and critical importance are not wanting; but it is singular that the prevailing patronage is little influenced as yet by the knowledge received. From whatever 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 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 it is a school we should wish to have been established; but we assert that the genius of Hogarth incurred for us the danger. His works stand unique in art—that which can be said, perhaps, of the works of no other painter that ever existed, and obtained a name. We had written so far, when we were willing to see what a modern writer says of this great man; and we are happy to find his views in so great a degree coincide with our own. We make the follow-extract from Cleghorn's 2d volume of Ancient and Modern Art; a work, indeed, that, when we took up the pen, it was our purpose to speak of more largely, and to which we mean to devote what further space may be allowed for this paper:—
"To Hogarth, on the other hand, M. Passavant awards that justice which has been denied to him by his countrymen. Hogarth is of all English painters, and, perhaps, of all others, the one who knew how to represent the events of common life with the most humour, and, at the same time, with rare and profound truth. This truth of character is, however, visible not only in his conception of a subject, but is varied throughout in the form and colour of his figures in a no less masterly manner." "Hogarth [continues Mr Cleghorn] stands alone as an artist, having had no predecessors, rivals, nor successors. He is the more interesting, too, as being the first native English artist of celebrity. Yet a tasteless public was unable to appreciate his merits; and he was driven to the necessity of raffling his pictures for small sums, which only partially succeeded. In spite of the sneers of Horace Walpole that he was "more a writer of comedy with his pencil than a painter," and the epigrammatic saying of Augustus Von Schlegel, that 'he painted ugliness, wrote on beauty, and was a thorough bad painter,' he was a great and original artist, both painter and engraver, whose works, coming home to every man's understanding and feelings, and applicable to every age and country, can never lose their relish and interest. They are chiefly known to the public by his etchings and engravings, which, however, convey a very imperfect idea of the beauty and expression of the original paintings." We only object to stress laid upon his humour, which is not his, or at least his only, characteristic. He was a great dramatist of human life; humour was the incidental gift, tragedy the more essential. Who had more humour, more wit than Shakspeare, and who was ever so tragic, or so employed his humour as to set it beside his most tragic scenes, with an effect that made the pathos deeper? In such a sense was Hogarth "comic." His "Marriage à la Mode" is the deepest of tragedies.
We turn to Mr Cleghorn's two interesting and very useful volumes. They give a compendious, yet, for general use and information, sufficiently elaborate view of architecture, sculpture, and painting, from their very origin to their present condition. We know of no work containing so complete a view. If we are disposed at all to quarrel with his plan, it is that in every branch he comes down to too late a time. And as it is always the case with writers who find themselves committed to the present age, he evidently finds himself encumbered with the detail which this part of his plan has forced upon him. In matter it will be often found that the present age overpowers all preceding, when even it is vastly inferior in importance. Nor is it very easy to avoid a bias in speaking of contemporaries; nor can a writer safely depend upon his own judgment when he looks too nearly and intimately on men and their works, and fears the giving offence by omissions, or by too qualified praise. His divisions into schools, with general remarks on each at the end, give a very clear view, when taken together, of the history of these arts; and we are rejoiced to see them—architecture, sculpture, and painting—thus in a manner linked in history, as they were formerly in the minds and genius of the greatest men. In this he follows the good course led by Vasari. In his account of the Flemish and Dutch schools, there is a strange omission of the early Flemish painters preceding and subsequent to the Van Eycks, to the time of Rubens; nor is the influence which the brothers Van Eyck had upon art sufficiently discussed. We propose at some future day to treat more at length on this subject, and to make extracts from Michiel's very interesting little volume, his "Peintres Brugeois." Even in the short account of Van Eyck's invention, Mr Cleghorn is somewhat careless, in the omission of one important little word, sue, in his extract from Vasari, who does not exactly describe the invention as "the result of a mixture or vehicle composed of linseed oil or nut oil, boiled up with other mixtures," but "with other mixtures of his own." Vasari says, "e aggiuntevi altre sue misture fece la vernice," &c.