What have we left to console us for all this? Why, we have Mr. Rogers’s ‘Pleasures of Memory,’ and Mr. Campbell’s ‘Pleasures of Hope’; Mr. Westall’s pictures, and all West’s; Miss Burney’s new novel (which is, however, some comfort), Miss Edgeworth’s Fashionable Tales, Madame de Staël’s next work, whatever it may be, and the praise of it in the Edinburgh Review, and Sir James Macintosh’s History.
II
[See Note to page [326].]
Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Elgin Marbles.—Murray.
The Elgin Marbles are the best answer to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses. Considered in that point of view, they are invaluable: in any other, they are not worth so much as has been said. Nothing remains of them but their style; but that is everything, for it is the style of nature. Art is the imitation of nature; and the Elgin Marbles are in their essence and their perfection casts from nature,—from fine nature, it is true, but from real, living, moving nature; from objects in nature, answering to an idea in the artist’s mind, not from an idea in the artist’s mind abstracted from all objects in nature. Already these Marbles have produced a revolution in our artists’ minds, and Mr. West says, in his practice: The venerable President makes an express distinction in their favour between dignified art and systematic art. Mr. Chauntry considers simplicity and grandeur so nearly united in them, that it is almost impossible to separate them. Sir Thomas Laurence in returning from the Elgin Marbles to his own house, where he has casts of the finest antiques, was struck with the greater degree of ease and nature in the former. Mr. Flaxman alone holds out for the ideal. The whole of his evidence on this subject is, indeed, quite ideal: Mr. Payne Knight’s evidence is learned evidence.—It is to be hoped, however, that these Marbles with the name of Phidias thrown into the scale of common sense, may lift the Fine Arts out of the Limbo of vanity and affectation into which they were conjured in this country about fifty years ago, and in which they have lain sprawling and fluttering, gasping for breath, wasting away, vapid and abortive ever since,—the shadow of a shade. The benefit of high examples of Art, is to prevent the mischievous effect of bad ones. A true theory of Art does not advance the student one step in practice, one hair’s-breadth nearer the goal of excellence: but it takes the fetters from off his feet, and loosens the bandages from his eyes. We lay somewhat more stress on the value of the Fine Arts than Mr. Payne Knight, who considers them (we know not for what reason) as an elegant antithesis to morality. We think they are nearly related to it. All morality seems to be little more than keeping people out of mischief, as we send children to school; and the Fine Arts are in that respect a school of morality. They bribe the senses into the service of the understanding: they kill Time, the great enemy of man; they employ the mind usefully—about nothing; and by preventing ennui, promote the chief ends of virtue. A taste for the Fine Arts also, in periods of luxury and refinement, not ill supplies the place of religious enthusiasm. It feeds our love and admiration of the grand, the good, the beautiful. What is the respect which is felt for the names of Raphael, of Michael Angelo, of Phidias, of Homer and of Milton, but a sort of hero worship, only with this difference, that in the one case we pay an indistinct homage to the powers of the mind, whereas the worshippers of Theseus and Hercules deified the powers and virtues of the body?
With respect to the tendency of the works here collected to promote the Fine Arts in this country, though not so sanguine as some persons, or even as the Committee of the House of Commons, we are not without our hopes.—The only possible way to improve the taste for art in a country, is by a collection of standing works of established reputation, and which are capable by the sanctity of their name of overawing the petulance of public opinion. This result can never be produced by the encouragement given to the works of contemporary artists. The public ignorance will much sooner debauch them than they will reform the want of taste in the public. But where works of the highest character and excellence are brought forward in a manner due to their merits, and rendered accessible to the public, though they may do little for the national genius, it is hard if they do not add something to the public taste. In this way also they may react upon the production of original excellence. It was in this point of view that the Gallery of the Louvre was of the greatest importance not only to France, but to Europe. It was a means to civilise the world. There Art lifted up her head and was seated on her throne, and said, All eyes shall see me, and all knees shall bow to me. Honour was done to her and all hers. There was her treasure, and there the inventory of all she had. There she had gathered together all her pomp, and there was her shrine, and there her votaries came and worshipped as in a temple. The crown she wore was brighter than that of kings. Where the triumphs of human liberty had been, there were the triumphs of human genius. For there, in the Louvre, were the precious monuments of art;—there ‘stood the statue that enchants the world’;[[98]] there was the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Dying Gladiator, the Head of the Antinous, Diana with her Fawn, the Muses and the Graces in a ring, and all the glories of the antique world:—
‘There was old Proteus coming from the sea,
And wreathed Triton blew his winding horn.’[[99]]
There, too, were the two St. Jeromes, Correggio’s and Domenichino’s; there was Raphael’s Transfiguration, the St. Mark of Tintoret, Paul Veronese’s Marriage of Cana, the Deluge of Nicholas Poussin, and Titian’s St. Peter Martyr;—all these and more than these, of which the world was not worthy. The worshippers of hereditary power and native imbecility wanted at first to destroy these monuments of human genius, which give the eternal lie to their creed; they did not dare to do that, they have dispersed them, and they have done well. They were an insult to the assembled majesty of hereditary power and native imbecility, both in the genius that had produced them, and that had acquired them; and it was fit that they should be removed. They were an obstacle in the way, in case the great Duke should have to teach the great nation another great moral lesson by the burning of Paris, which has been a favourite object with some persons since the year 1792, and with others later; and it was fit that they should be removed. The French themselves did not think proper to defend what they had dearly bought with their blood, shed for their country, and it was fit that they should be removed. Besides these reasons, there were no others for their removal. The reason assigned in the Duke of Wellington’s letter, that the works of art should be sacred to conquerors, and an heir-loom of the soil that gives them birth, is quite apocryphal. Half of the works brought from Italy had been originally brought there from Greece. If works of art are to be a sort of fixtures in every country, why are the Elgin Marbles brought here, for our artists to strut and fret over this acquisition to our ‘glorious country’? If the French were not to retain their collection of perfect works of art, why should we be allowed to make one of still higher pretensions under pretence of carrying off only fragments and rubbish? The Earl of Elgin brought away the Theseus and the Neptune as bits of architecture, as loose pieces of stone; but no sooner do they get into the possession of our glorious country, than they are discovered to be infinitely superior to the Apollo, the Venus, and the Laocoon, and all the rest of that class, which are found out to be no better than modern antiques. All this may be true, but it is truth with a suspicious appearance. If works of art are contemplated with peculiar interest on the spot which gave them birth, surely Athens has charms for the eyes of learning and taste as well as Rome. If there is something classical in the very air of Venice, of Antwerp, and of Rotterdam, surely there is an air at Athens which is breathed nowhere else.
If this reasoning would apply to such works in their perfect state, it does so still more in their approaches to decay and ruin, for then the local interest belonging to them becomes the principal impression. Lord Elgin appears not to have had the slightest authority for bringing away these statues, except a fermaun or permission from the Turkish Government to bring away pieces of stone from the ruins of the Parthenon, which he paid 21,000 piastres to the Governor of Athens for permission to interpret as he pleased. That it was not meant to apply to the statues, and only to fragments of the buildings, is also evident from this, that Lord Elgin had originally, and at the time the fermaun was granted, no intention, as he himself says, of bringing away the statues. Lord Aberdeen approves of bringing them away, because otherwise the French might have got them. In what we have said, we do not blame Lord Elgin for what he has done; all our feelings run the contrary way. We only blame cant and hypocrisy: we only blame those who blame others, and yet would do the very same things themselves. There does not appear to be any evidence that these statues were done by Phidias. It seems extremely probable, however, that they were done by persons under his direction, and in a style that he approved. What that style is, and what the principles of art are which are to be derived from it, we shall briefly attempt to state in another article on this interesting subject.