REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.

Lectures on Art and Poems. By Washington Allston. Edited by Richard H. Dana, Jr. New York: Baker & Scribner. 1 vol. 12mo.

The admirers of the greatest of American painters will need none of our advice to read this volume, placing as it does its accomplished author among the greatest of American writers. The Lectures are four long and elaborate essays on art; and they evince a depth and delicacy of insight, a concentrativeness and continuity of thought, a finely harmonized action of reason and imagination, and a command of subtle expression, which entitle them to a high rank among the best critical compositions of the century. The lectures treat of the highest and most exacting principles of creative art, and the passage from them to the poems is a hazardous descent. Though some of these poems have gleams of the author’s genius, they are generally characterized by a penury of imaginative expression which is painful to a reader fresh from the Lectures.

The merely literary reader will find much to delight him in the Lectures, even if he is indisposed to pay much attention to their profound discussion of principles. They contain many specimens of that word-painting which gave such popularity to Ruskin’s “Modern Painters.” The following passage on Vernet is one out of many splendid descriptions. “Now let us look at one of his Storms at Sea, when he wrought from his own mind. A dark, leaden atmosphere prepares us for something fearful; suddenly a scene of tumult, fierce, wild, disastrous, bursts upon us; and we feel the shock drive, as it were, every other thought from the mind; the terrible vision now seizes the imagination, filling it with sound and motion: we see the clouds fly, the furious waves one upon another dashing in conflict, and rolling, as if in wrath, toward the devoted ship; the wind blows from the canvas; we hear it roar through her shrouds; her masts bend like twigs, and her last forlorn hope, the close-reefed foresail, streams like a tattered flag; a terrible fascination still constrains us to look, and a dim, rocky shore looms on her lee; then comes the dreadful cry of ‘Breakers ahead!’ the crew stand appalled, and the master’s trumpet is soundless at his lips. This is the uproar of nature, and we feel it to be true; for here every line, every touch, has a meaning. The ragged clouds, the huddled waves, the prostrate ship, though forced by contrast into the sharpest angles, all agree, opposed as they seem, evolving harmony out of discord. And this is Genius, which no criticism can ever disprove.”

The criticisms in these lectures on Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, Titian, Poussin, Claude, are as unrivaled for discrimination as appreciation. No one has a quicker and deeper eye to detect the excellencies of great works, and no one seizes with more fatal sagacity upon their defects. Everybody has seen copies of Raffaelle’s great picture of the Madonna di Sisto, but few have dared to express their dissatisfaction with the seemingly beautiful figure of St. Catharine. Allston says it is an “evident rescript from the Antique, with all the received lines of beauty, as laid down by the analyst—apparently faultless, yet without a single inflection which the mind can recognize as allied to our sympathies; and we turn from it coldly as from the work of an artificer, not of an Artist. But not so can we turn from the intense life, which seems almost to breathe upon us from the celestial group of the Virgin and her child, and from the Angels below; in these we have the evidence of the divine afflatus—of inspired Art.”

Among the aphorisms written by Allston on the walls of his studio, and published in the present volume, we extract the following: