Much has been said of self-taught geniuses, as opposed to those who have been instructed by others: but the distinction, it appears to us, is without a difference; for it matters not whether we learn in a school or by ourselves,--we cannot learn any thing without in some way recurring to other minds. Let us imagine a poet who had never read, never heard, never conversed with another. Now if he will not be taught in any thing by another, he must strictly preserve this independent negation. Truly the verses of such a poet would be a miracle. Of similar self-taught painters we have abundant examples in our aborigines,--but nowhere else.
But, while we maintain, as a positive law of our nature, the necessity of mental intercourse with our fellow-creatures, in order to the full developement of the individual, we are far from implying that any thing which is actually taken from others can by any process become our own, that is, original. We may reverse, transpose, diminish, or add to it, and so skilfully that no scam or mutilation shall be detected; and yet we shall not make it appear original,--in other words, true, the offspring of one mind. A borrowed thought will always be borrowed; as it will be felt as such in its effect, even while we are ourselves unconscious of the fact: for it will want that effect of life, which only the first mind can give it[3].
Of the multifarious retailers of the second-hand in style, the class is so numerous as to make a selection difficult: they meet us at every step in the history of the Art. One instance, however, may suffice, and we select Vernet, as uniting in himself a singular and striking example of the false and the true; and also as the least invidious instance, inasmuch as we may prove our position by opposing him to himself.
In the landscapes of Vernet, (when not mere views,) we see the imitator of Salvator, or rather copyist of his lines; and these we have in all their angular nakedness, where rocks, trees, and mountains are so jagged, contorted, and tumbled about, that nothing but an explosion could account for their assemblage. They have not the relation which we sometimes find even in a random collocation, as in the accidental pictures of a discolored wall; for the careful hand of the contriver is traced through all this disorder; nay, the very execution, the conventional dash of pencil, betrays what a lawyer would call the malice prepense of the Artist in their strange disfigurement. To many this may appear like hypercriticism; but we sincerely believe that no one, even among his admirers, has ever been deceived into a real sympathy with such technical flourishes: they are felt as factitious; as mere diagrams of composition deduced from pictures.
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, towards 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 apparent discord. And this is Genius, which no criticism can ever disprove.
But all great names, it is said, must have their shadows. In our Art they have many shadows, or rather I should say, reflections; which are more or less distinct according to their proximity to the living originals, and, like the images in opposite mirrors, becoming themselves reflected and re-reflected with a kind of battledoor alternation, grow dimmer and dimmer till they vanish from mere distance.
Thus have the great schools of Italy, Flanders, and Holland lived and walked after death, till even their ghosts have become familiar to us.
We would not, however, be understood as asserting that we receive pleasure only from original works: this would be contradicting the general experience. We admit, on the contrary, that there are hundreds, nay, thousands, of pictures having no pretensions to originality of any kind, which still afford pleasure; as, indeed, do many things out of the Art, which we know to be second-hand, or imperfect, and even trifling. Thus grace of manner, for instance, though wholly unaided by a single definite quality, will often delight us, and a ready elocution, with scarce a particle of sense, make commonplace agreeable; and it seems to be, that the pain of mental inertness renders action so desirable, that the mind instinctively surrounds itself with myriads of objects, having little to recommend them but the property of keeping it from stagnating. And we are far from denying a certain value to any of these, provided they be innocent: there are times when even the wisest man will find commonplace wholesome. All we have attempted to show is, that the effect of an original work, as opposed to an imitation, is marked by a difference, not of degree merely, but of kind; and that this difference cannot fail to be felt, not, indeed, by every one, but by any competent judge, that is, any one in whom is developed, by natural exercise, that internal sense by which the spirit of life is discerned.
Every original work becomes such from the infusion, so to speak, of the mind of the Author; and of this the fresh materials of nature alone seem susceptible. The imitated works of man cannot be endued with a second life, that is, with a second mind: they are to the imitator as air already breathed.