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LETTER XLIX.

TO THE SAME.

I KNOW of no painter, who shows more just reflection and good judgment in his way of conceiving a subject, and arranging the parts of it, than Allan. His circumstances are always most happily chosen, and the characters introduced are so skilfully delineated, as to prove that the painter has been an excellent observer of life. His pictures are full of thought, and show a most active and intelligent mind. They display most graphically the fruits of observation; and the whole of the world which they represent, is suffused over with a very rare and precious breathing of tenderness and delicacy of feeling. In short, were his subjects taken from the highest field of his art, and had they any fundamental ideas of permanent and lofty interest at the bot

tom of them, I do not see why Mr Allan should not be truly a Great Painter. But his genius has as yet been cramped and confined by a rather over-stretched compliance with the taste of the times.

The highest purpose to which painting has ever been applied, is that of expressing ideas connected with Religion; and the decay of the interest attached by mankind to ideas of that class, is evinced by nothing in a more striking manner, than by the nature of the subjects now (in preference to them) commonly chosen for painting, and most relished by the existing generation. It would seem, indeed, as if the decay of interest in great things and great ideas had not shown itself in regard to religion alone. Even subjects taken from national history seem to be scarcely so familiar to the imaginations and associations of ordinary spectators, as to be much relished or deeply felt in any modern exhibition room. It is probable, that subjects like those chosen by Wilkie (and of late, by Allan also,) come most home now-a-days to the feelings of the multitude. They pre-suppose no knowledge of the past-no cherished ideas habitually dwelt on by the imagination-no deep feeling of religion-no deep feeling of patriotism-but merely

a capacity for the most common sympathies and sensibilities of human nature. The picture makes no demand on the previous habits or ideas of the spectator-it tells its own story, and it tells it entirely-but exactly in proportion as it wants retrospective interest, I am inclined to think it wants endurance of interest. I think Wilkie's species of painting may be said to bear the same relation to the highest species, which sentimental comedies and farces bear to regular tragedies. But in all this, as I have already hinted, it is probable the public is most to blame-not the painter. Indeed, the very greatest artists, were they to go on making creations either in painting, poetry, or any other art, without being guided by the responses of public enthusiasm, would run a sad risk of losing their way. The genius of a gifted individual,-his power of inventing and conceiving,-is an instrument which he himself may not always have the judgment to employ to the best advantage, and which is more safely directed to its mark by the aggregated feelings, I will not say, of the multitude, but at least of numbers. Even the scattered suffrages of amateurs, who, by artificial culture, have acquired habits of feeling different from those of the people about them, must always be

a very trifling stimulus, when compared with the trumpet-notes of a whole nation, hailing an artist for having well expressed ideas alike interesting to them all. There is no popular sympathy in these days with those divinest feelings of the human soul, which formed the essence of interest in the works of the sculptors of Greece -still more in those of the painters of modern Italy-and the expression of which was rewarded in both cases by the enthusiasm, boundless and grateful, of those by whom these artists were habitually surrounded.

I confess, there are very few things of which I am so desirous, as of seeing a true school of painting in its highest form established among the people of Britain. But this can never be, till the painters get rid of that passion for inventing subjects, which at present seems to predominate among them all. The object of a great painter should be, not to invent subjects, but to give a graphical form to ideas universally known, and contemplated with deep feeling. An Entombing of Christ-a Madonna and Child-a Flight into Egypt, are worth all the larmoyant scenes which can ever be conceived out of the circumstances of modern life-circumstances, which, although they may be treated with the

utmost genius, can never cease to be in the main prosaic. Even the early history of any modern nation, however replete it may be with remarkable events, can present no objects of which the imagination, set a-musing by the contemplation of its likeness, does not speedily find the limits, and the barrenness from which, in a word, it does not turn away as unpoetical, after the first movements of excited curiosity and week-day sympathies have ceased. How different from all this narrowness, is the endless and immeasurable depth of a Religious Allegory, wherein the whole mystery of man and his destiny is, called up to breathe its solemn and unfading charm upon the creation of the artist, and the mind of the spectator!

When one talks to a painter of the present day about the propriety of taking to subjects of religious import-above all, to those of the simplest construction, and the most purely allegorical nature, there is nothing more common than to be told, that such subjects have been exhausted. If you are told, by way of confirmation of this, that the Scriptural pieces produced in this country are almost all very bad, you are, indeed, told nothing but the truth; because they are made up of insipid centos and compilations from