It is the same in love and in literature. A man makes love without thinking of the chances of success, his own disabilities, or the character of his mistress; that is, without connecting means with ends, and consulting only his own will and passion. The author sets about writing history, with the full intention of rendering all documents, dates, and facts secondary to his own opinion and will. In business it is not altogether the same; for interest acts obviously as a counterpoise to caprice and will, and is the moving principle; nor is it so in war, for then the spirit of contradiction does everything, and an Englishman will go to the devil rather than give up to any odds. Courage is pure will without regard to consequences, and this the English have in perfection. Again, poetry is our element, for the essence of poetry is will and passion. The French poetry is detail and verbiage. I have thus shown why the English fail, as a people, in the Fine Arts, namely, because with them the end absorbs the means. I have mentioned Barry as an individual instance. No man spoke or wrote with more gusto about painting, and yet no one painted with less. His pictures were dry and coarse, and wanted all that his description of those of others contained. For instance, he speaks of the dull, dead, watery look in the Medusa’s head of Leonardo, which conveys a perfect idea of it: if he had copied it, you would never have suspected anything of the kind. Again, he has, I believe, somewhere spoken of the uneasy effect of the tucker of the Titian’s Mistress, bursting with the full treasures it contains. What a daub he would have made of it! He is like a person admiring the grace of a fine rope-dancer; placed on the rope himself his head turns, and he falls: or like a man admiring fine horsemanship; set him upon a horse, and he tumbles over on the other side. Why was this? His mind was essentially ardent and discursive, not sensitive or observing; and though the immediate object acted as a stimulus to his imagination, it was only as it does to a poet’s, that is, as a link in the chain of association, as suggesting other strong feelings and ideas, and not for its intrinsic beauty or hidden details. He had not the painter’s eye though he had the painter’s knowledge. There is as great a difference in this respect as between the telescope and microscope. People in general see objects only to distinguish them in practice and by name; to know that a hat is a hat, that a chair is not a table, that John is not William; and there are painters (particularly of history) in England who look no farther. They cannot finish anything, or go over a head twice; the first view is all they would arrive at; nor can they reduce their impressions to their component parts without losing the spirit. The effect of this is grossness and want of force; for in reality the component parts cannot be separated from the whole. Such people have no pleasure in the exercise of their art as such: it is all to astonish or to get money that they follow it; or if they are thrown out of it, they regret it only as a bankrupt does a business which was a livelihood to him. Barry did not live, like Titian, in the taste of colours; they were not a pabulum to his sense; he did not hold green, blue, red, and yellow as the precious darlings of his eye. They did not therefore sink into his mind, or nourish and enrich it with the sense of beauty, though he knew enough of them to furnish hints and topics of discourse. If he had had the most beautiful object in nature before him in his painting-room in the Adelphi, he would have neglected it, after a moment’s burst of admiration, to talk of his last composition, or to scrawl some new and vast design. Art was nothing to him, or if anything, merely a stalking-horse to his ambition and display of intellectual power in general; and therefore he neglected it to daub huge allegories, or cabal with the Academy, where the violence of his will or the extent of his views found ample scope. As a painter he was valuable merely as a draughtsman, in that part of the art which may be reduced to lines and precepts, or positive measurement. There is neither colour, nor expression, nor delicacy, nor beauty, in his works.
1827.
ESSAY IX
MATTER AND MANNER
Nothing can frequently be more striking than the difference of style or manner, where the matter remains the same, as in paraphrases and translations. The most remarkable example which occurs to us is in the beginning of the Flower and Leaf, by Chaucer, and in the modernisation of the same passage by Dryden. We shall give an extract from both, that the reader may judge for himself. The original runs thus:
‘And I that all this pleasaunt sight ay sie,
Thought sodainly I felte so sweet an aire
Con of the eglentere, that certainely
There is no heart, I deme, in such dispaire,
Ne with no thoughtes froward and contraire
So overlaid, but it shoulde soone have bote,
If it had ones felt this savour sote.
And as I stood and cast aside mine eie,
I was of ware the fairest medler tree,
That ever yet in all my life I sie,
As full of blossomes as it mighte be;
Therein a goldfinch leaping pretile
Fro bough to bough; and, as him list, gan eete
Of buddes here and there and floures sweete.
And to the herber side ther was joyninge
This faire tree, of which I have you told;
And at the last the brid began to singe,
When he had eaten what he eate wolde,
So passing sweetly, that by manifolde,
It was more pleasaunt than I coude devise.
And when his song was ended in this wise,
The nightingale with so mery a note
Answered him, that all the woode rong
So sodainly, that, as it were a sote,
I stood astonied; so was I with the song
Thorow ravished, that till late and longe,
Ne wist I in what place I was, ne where;
And ay, me thoughte, she song even by mine ere.
Wherefore about I waited busily,
On every side, if that I her mighte see;
And, at the last, I gan full well aspie
Where she sat in a fresh grene laurer tree,
On the further side, even right by me,
That gave so passing a delicious smell,
According to the eglentere full well.