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equally hard upon others to be called vain and light? They tell us, they are the wisest, the freest, and most moral people on the face of the earth, without the frivolous accomplishments of their neighbours; but they insist upon having these too, to be upon a par in every thing with the rest of the world. We have our bards and sages('better none'), our prose-writers, our mathematicians, our inventors in useful and mechanic arts, our legislators, our patriots, our statesmen, and our fighting-men, in the field and in the ring:-In these we challenge, and justly, all the world. We are not behind-hand with any people in all that depends on hard thinking and deep and firm feeling, on long heads and stout hearts:-But why must we excel also in the reverse of these,—in what depends on lively perceptions, on quick sensibility, and on a voluptuous effeminacy of temperament and character? An Englishman does not ordinarily pretend to combine his own gravity, plainness and reserve, with the levity, loquacity, grimace, and artificial politeness (as it is called) of a Frenchman. Why then will he insist upon engrafting the fine upon the domestic arts, as an indispensable consummation of the national character? We may indeed cultivate them as an experiment in natural history, and produce specimens of them, and exhibit them as rarities in their kind, as we do hot-house plants and shrubs; but they are not of native growth or origin. They do not spring up in the open air, but shrink from the averted eye of Heaven, like a Laplander into his hut. They do not sit as graceful ornaments, but as excrescences on the English character: they are like flowers in our caps, dying or ere they sicken: '-they are exotics and aliens to the soil. do not import foreigners to dig our canals, or construct our machines, or solve difficult problems in political economy, or write Scotch novels for us-but we import our dancing-masters, our milliners, our Opera singers, our valets, and our travelling cooks,-as till lately we did our painters and sculptors.

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The English (we take it) are a nation with certain decided features and predominating traits of character; and if they have any characteristics at all, this is one of them, that their feelings are internal rather than external, reflex rather than organic, -and that they are more inclined to contend with pain than to indulge in pleasure. The stern genius of the North,' says Schlegel, throws men back upon themselves.'-The progress of the Fine Arts has hitherto been slow, and wavering and unpromising in this country, like the forced pace of a shuffling nag,' not like the flight of Pegasus; and their encouragement has been cold and backward in proportion. They have been wooed and won-as far as they have been won, which is no fur

ther than to a mere promise of marriage with coy, reluctant, amorous delay. They have not rushed into our embraces, nor been mingled in our daily pastimes and pursuits. It is two hundred and fifty years since this island was civilized to all other intellectual purposes: but, till within half a century, it was a desert and a waste in art. Were there no terræ filii in those days; no brood of giants to spring out of the ground, and launch the mighty fragments of genius from their hands; to beautify and enrich the public mind; to hang up the lights of the eye and of the soul in pictured halls, in airy porticoes, and solemn temples; to illumine the land, and weave a garland for their own heads, like the crown which Ariadne wore upon her bridal-day,' and which still shines brighter in heaven? There were: but their affections did not that way tend. They were of the tribe of Issachar, and not of Judali. There were two sisters, Poetry and Painting: one was taken, and the other was left.

Were our ancestors insensible to the charms of nature, to the music of thought, to deeds of virtue or heroic enterprise? No. But they saw them in their mind's eye: they felt them at their heart's core, and there only. They did not translate their perceptions into the language of sense: they did not embody them in visible images, but in breathing words. They were more taken up with what an object suggested to combine with the infinite stores of fancy or trains of feeling, than with the single object itself; more intent upon the moral inference, the tendency and the result, than the appearances of things, however imposing or expressive, at any given moment of time. If their first impressions were less vivid and complete, their after-reflections were combined in a greater variety of striking resemblances, and thus drew a dazzling veil over their merely sensitive impressions, which deadened and neutralized them still more. Will it be denied that there is a wide difference, as to the actual result, between the mind of a Poet and a Painter? Why then should not this difference be inherent and original, as it undoubtedly is in individuals, and, to all appearance, in nations? Or why should we be uneasy because the same country does not teem with all varieties and with cach extreme of excellence and genius?

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* We are aware that time conquers even nature, and that the characters of nations change with a total change of circumstances. The modern Italians are a very different race of people from the ancient Romans. This gives us some chance. In the decomposition and degeneracy of the sturdy old English character, which seems fast

In this importunate theory of ours, we misconstrue nature, and tax Providence amiss. In that short, but delightful season of the year, and in that part of the country where we now write, there are wild woods and banks covered with primroses and hyacinths for miles together, so that you cannot put your foot between, and with a gaudy show 'empurpling all the ground,' and branches loaded with nightingales whose leaves tremble with their liquid notes: Yet the air does not resound, as in happier climes, with shepherd's pipe or roundelay, nor are the villagemaids adorned with wreaths of vernal flowers, ready to weave the braided dance, or returning with a choral song, when evening has gone down,' What is the reason? We also are not Arcadians!' We have not the same animal vivacity, the same tendency to external delight and show, the same ear for melting sounds, the same pride of the eye, or voluptuousness of the heart. The senses and the mind are differently constituted; and the outward influences of things, climate, mode of life, national customs and character, have all a share in producing the general effect. We should say that the eye in warmer climates drinks in greater pleasure from external sights, is more open and porous to them, as the ear is to sounds; that the sense of immediate delight is fixed deeper in the beauty of the object; that the greater life and animation of character gives a greater spirit and intensity of expression to the face, making finer subjects for history and portrait; and that the circumstances in which a people are placed in a genial atmosphere, are more favourable to the study of nature and of the human form. Claude could only have painted his landscapes in the open air; and the Greek statues were little more than copies from living, everyday forms.

Such a natural aptitude and relish for the impressions of sense gives not only more facility, but leads to greater patience, refinement, and perfection in the execution of works of art. What our own artists do is often up-hill work, against the grain :-not persisted in and brought to a conclusion for the love of the thing; but, after the first dash, after the subject is got in, and the gross general effect produced, they grudge all the rest of their labour as a waste of time and pains. Their object is not to look at nature, but to have their picture exhibited and sold. The want of intimate sympathy with, and en

approaching, the mind and muscles of the country may be sufficiently relaxed and softened to imbibe a taste for all the refinements of luxury and show; and a century of slavery may yield us a crop of the Fine Arts, to be soon buried in sloth and barbarism again.

tire repose on nature, not only leaves their productions hard, violent, and crude, but frequently renders them impatient, wavering, and dissatisfied with their own walk of art, and never easy till they get into a different or higher one, where they think they can earn more money or fame with less trouble. By beginning over again, by having the same preliminary ground to go over, with new subjects or bungling experiments, they seldom arrive at that nice, nervous point that trembles on perfection. This last stage, in which art is as it were identified with nature, an English painter shrinks from with strange repugnance and peculiar abhorrence. The French style is the reverse of ours: it is all dry finishing without effect. We see their faults, and, as we conceive, their general incapacity for art: but we cannot be persuaded to see our own.

The want of encouragement, which is sometimes set up as an all-sufficient plea, will hardly account for this slow and irregular progress of English art. There was no premium offered for the production of dramatic excellence in the age of Elizabeth: there was no society for the encouragement of works of wit and humour in the reign of Charles II.: no committee of taste ever voted Congreve, or Steele, or Swift, a silver vase, or a gold medal, for their comic vein: Hogarth was not fostered in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy. In plain truth, that is not the way in which that sort of harvest is produced. The seeds must be sown in the mind: there is a fulness of the blood, a plethoric habit of thought, that breaks out with the first opportunity on the surface of society. Poetry has sprung up indigenously, spontaneously, at all times of our history, and under all circumstances, with or without encouragement: it is therefore a rich, natural product of the mind of the country, unforced, unpampered, unsophisticated. It is obviously and entirely genuine, the unbought grace of life.' If it be asked, why Painting has all this time kept back, has not dared to show its face, or retired ashamed of its poverty and deformity, the answer is plain-because it did not shoot out with equal vigour and luxuriance from the soil of English genius-because it was not the native language and idiom of the country. Why then are we bound to suppose that it will shoot up now to an unequalled height-why are we confidently told and required to predict to others that it is about to produce wonders, when we see no such thing; when these very persons tell us that there has been hitherto no such thing, but that it must and shall be revealed in their time and persons? And though they complain that that public patronage which they invoke, and which they pretend is alone wanting to produce the high and palmy state

of art to which they would have us look forward, is entirely and scandalously withheld from it, and likely to be so !

We turn from this subject to another not less melancholy or singular,—from the imperfect and abortive attempts at art in this country formerly, to its present state of degeneracy and decay in Italy. Speaking of Sir Joshua's arrival at Rome in the year 1749, Mr Farington indulges in the following remarks.

'On his arrival at Rome, he found Pompeo Battoni, a native of Lucca, possessing the highest reputation. His name was, indeed, known in every part of Europe, and was every where spoken of as almost another Raphael; but in that great school of art, such was the admiration he excited, or rather such was the degradation of taste, that the students in painting had no, higher ambition than to be his imitators.

• Battoni had some talent, but his works are dry, cold, and insipid. That such performances should have been so extolled in the very seat and centre of the fine arts, seems wonderful. But in this manner has public taste been operated upon; and from the period when art was carried to the highest point of excellence known in modern times, it has thus gradually declined. A succession of artists followed each other, who, being esteemed the most eminent in their own time, were praised extravagantly by an ignorant public; and in the several schools they established, their own productions were the only objects of study.

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So widely spread was the fame of Battoni, that, before Reynolds left England, his patron, Lord Edgcumbe, strongly urged the expediency of placing himself under the tuition of so great a This recommendation, however, on seeing the works of that master, he did not choose to follow: which showed that he was then above the level of those whose professional views all concentrated in the productions of the popular favourite. Indeed nothing could be more opposite to the spirited execution, the high relish of colour, and powerful effect, which the works of Reynolds at that time possessed, than the tame and inanimate pictures of Pompeo Battoni. Taking a wiser course, therefore, he formed his own plan, and studied chiefly in the Vatican, from the works of Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, with great diligence; such indeed was his application, that to a severe cold, which he caught in those apartments, he owed the deafness which continued during the remainder of his life.' p. 31.

This account may serve to show that Italy is no longer Italy: why it is so, is a question of greater difficulty. The soil, the climate, the religion, the people are the same; and the men and women in the streets of Rome still look as if they had walked out of Raphael's pictures; but there is no Raphael to paint them, nor does any Leo arise to encourage them. This seems to prove that the perfection of art is the destruction of art: that the models of

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