The following note occurs in the edition of Hazlitt’s Essays on the Fine Arts, edited by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt (1873). ‘The following note is written at the foot of the [autograph MS.] by Mr. C. Cowden Clarke: “An article written for me in the Atlas newspaper, by William Hazlitt. The autograph is his, and I was at his elbow while he wrote it, which occupied him about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.”’
[435]. Mr. Shee. Sir Martin Archer Shee (1770–1850), portrait painter from the age of sixteen onwards. He was knighted upon being made President of the Royal Academy in 1830.
APPENDIX
I
FRAGMENTS ON ART (continued)
WHY THE ARTS ARE NOT PROGRESSIVE?
[Under the above heading appeared the second of two articles in the Morning Chronicle (Jan. 11 and 15, 1814). See vol. I. The Round Table, note to p. 160. The following passages were not used in The Round Table paper.]
Science and the mechanic arts depend not on the force with which the mind itself is endued, or with which it contemplates given things (for this is naturally much the same) but on the number of things, successively perceived by the same or different persons, and formally arranged and registered in books or memory, which admits of being varied and augmented indefinitely. The number of objects to which the understanding may be directed is endless, and the results, so far as they are positive, tangible things, may be set down and added one to another, and made use of as occasion requires, without creating any confusion, and so as to produce a perpetual accumulation of useful knowledge. What is once gained is never lost, and may be multiplied daily, because this increase of knowledge does not depend upon increasing the force of the mind, but on directing the same force to different things, all of them in their nature definite, demonstrable, existing to the mind outwardly and by signs, less as the power than as the form of truth, and in which all the difficulty lies in the first invention, not in the subsequent communication. In like manner the mechanic parts of painting for instance, such as the mode of preparing colours, the laws of perspective, etc., which may be taught by rule and method, so that the principle being once known, every one may avail himself of it, these subordinate and instrumental parts of the art admit of uniform excellence, though from accidental causes it has happened otherwise. But it is not so in art itself, in its higher and nobler essence. ‘There is no shuffling,’ but ‘we ourselves compelled to give in evidence even to the teeth and forehead of our faults.’[[97]] There is no room for the division of labour—for the accumulation of borrowed advantages; no artificial scale by which to heaven we may ascend; because here excellence does not depend on the quantity of representative knowledge, abstracted from a variety of subjects, but on the original force of capacity, and degree of attention, applied to the same given subject, natural feelings and images. To use the distinction of a technical philosophy, science depends on the discursive or extensive—art on the intuitive and intensive power of the mind. One chemical or mathematical discovery may be added to another, because the degree and sort of faculty required to apprehend and retain them, are in both cases the same; but no one can voluntarily add the colouring of Rubens to the expression of Raphael, till he has the same eye for colour as Rubens, and for expression as Raphael—that is, the most
thorough feeling of what is profound in the one, or splendid in the other—of what no rules can teach, nor words convey—and of what the mind must possess within itself, and by a kind of participation with nature, or remain for ever destitute of it. Titian and Correggio are the only painters who united to perfect colouring a degree of expression, the one in his portraits, and the other in his histories, all but equal, if not equal, to the highest. But this union of different qualities they had from nature, and not by method. In fact, we judge of science by the number of effects produced—of art by the energy which produces them. The one is knowledge—the other power.
[The arts of painting and ... ‘I also was an Arcadian!’]