ON MEANS AND ENDS

The Monthly Magazine.][September, 1827.

‘We work by wit, and not by witchcraft.’—Iago.

It is impossible to have things done without doing them. This seems a truism; and yet what is more common than to suppose that we shall find things done, merely by wishing it?To put the will for the deedis as usual in practice as it is contrary to common sense. There is, in fact, no absurdity, no contradiction, of which the mind is not capable. This weakness is, I think, more remarkable in the English than in any other people, in whom (to judge by what I discover in myself) the will bears great and disproportioned sway. We desire a thing: we contemplate the end intently, and think it done, neglecting the necessary means to accomplish it. The strong tendency of the mind towards it, the internal effort it makes to give birth to the object of its idolatry, seems an adequate cause to produce the wished-for effect, and is in a manner identified with it. This is more particularly the case in what relates to theFine Arts, and will account for some phenomena in the national character.

The English style is distinguished by what are calledébauches[38]—rude sketches, or violent attempts at effect, with a total inattention to the details or delicacy of finishing. Now this, I apprehend, proceeds not exactly from grossness of perception, but from the wilfulness of our characters, our determination to have every thing our own way without any trouble, or delay, or distraction of mind. An object strikes us: we see and feel the whole effect at once. We wish to produce a likeness of it; but we wish to transfer the impression to the canvas as it is conveyed to us, simultaneously and intuitively—that is, to stamp it there at a blow—or, otherwise, we turn away with impatience and disgust, as if the means were an obstacle to the end, and every attention to the mechanical process were a deviation from our original purpose. We thus degenerate, by repeated failures, into a slovenly style of art; and that which was at first an undisciplined and irregular impulse, becomes a habit, and then a theory. It seems a little strange that the zealous devotion to the end should produce aversion to the means; but so it is: neither is it, however irrational, altogether unnatural. That which we are struck with, which we are enamoured of, is the general appearance or result; and it would certainly be most desirable to produce the effect we aim at by a word or wish, if it were possible, withoutbeing taken up with the mechanical drudgery or pettiness of detail, or dexterity of execution, which, though they are essential and component parts of the work, do not enter into our thoughts, or form any part of our contemplation. In a word, the hand does not keep pace with the eye; and it is the desire that it should, that causes all the contradiction and confusion. We would have a face to start out from the canvas at once—not feature by feature, or touch by touch; we would be glad to convey an attitude or a divine expression to the spectator by a stroke of the pencil, as it is conveyed by a glance of the eye, or by the magic of feeling, independently of measurements, and distances, and foreshortening, and numberless minute particulars, and all the instrumentality of the art. We may find it necessary, on a cool calculation, to go through and make ourselves masters of these; but, in so doing, we submit only to necessity, and they are still a diversion to, and a suspension of, our favourite purpose for the time—at least unless practice has given that facility which almost identifies the two together, and makes the process an unconscious one. The end thus devours up the means; or our eagerness for the one, where it is strong and unchecked, renders us in proportion impatient of the other. So we view an object at a distance, which excites in us an inclination to visit it: this, after many tedious steps and intricate windings, we do; but, if we could fly, we should never consent to go on foot. The mind, however, has wings, though the body has not; and, wherever the imagination can come into play, our desires outrun their accomplishment. Persons of this extravagant humour should addict themselves to eloquence or poetry, where the thought ‘leaps at once to its effect,’ and is wafted, in a metaphor or an apostrophe, ‘from Indus to the Pole;’ though even there we should find enough, in the preparatory and mechanical parts of those arts, to try our patience and mortify our vanity! The first and strongest impulse of the mind is to achieve any object, on which it is set, at once, and by the shortest and most decisive means; but, as this cannot always be done, we ought not to neglect other more indirect and subordinate aids; nor should we be tempted to do so, but that the delusions of the will interfere with the convictions of the understanding, and what we ardently wish, we fancy to be both possible and true. Let us take the instance of copying a fine picture. We are full of the effect we intend to produce; and so powerfully does this prepossession affect us, that we imagine we have produced it, in spite of the evidence of our senses and the suggestions of friends. In truth, after a number of violent and anxious efforts to strike off a resemblance which we passionately long for, it seems an injustice not to have succeeded; it is too late to retrace our steps, and begin over again in a differentmethod; we prefer even failure to arriving at our end by petty, mechanical tricks and rules; we have copied Titian or Rubens in the spirit in which they ought to be copied; though the likeness may not be perfect, there is a look, a tone, asomething, which we chiefly aimed at, and which we persuade ourselves, seeing the copy only through the dazzled, hectic flush of feverish imagination, we have really given; and thus we persist, and make fifty excuses, sooner than own our error, which would imply its abandonment; or, if the light breaks in upon us, through all the disguises of sophistry and self-love, it is so painful that we shut our eyes to it. The more evident our failure, the more desperate the struggles we make to conceal it from ourselves, to stick to our original determination, and end where we began.

What makes me think that this is the real stumbling-block in our way, and not mere rusticity or want of discrimination, is that you will see an English artist admiring and thrown into downright raptures by the tucker of Titian’sMistress, made up of an infinite number of little delicate folds; and, if he attempts to copy it, he proceeds deliberately to omit all these details, and dash it off by a single smear of his brush. This is not ignorance, or even laziness, I conceive, so much as what is calledjumping at a conclusion. It is, in a word, an overweening presumption. ‘A wilful man must have his way.’ He sees the details, the varieties, and their effect: he sees and is charmed with all this; but he would reproduce it with the same rapidity and unembarrassed freedom that he sees it—or not at all. He scorns the slow but sure method, to which others conform, as tedious and inanimate. The mixing his colours, the laying in the ground, the giving all his attention to a minute break or nice gradation in the several lights and shades, is a mechanical and endless operation, very different from the delight he feels in studying the effect of all these, when properly and ably executed.Quam nihil ad tuum, Papiniane, ingenium!Such fooleries are foreign to his refined taste and lofty enthusiasm; and a doubt crosses his mind, in the midst of his warmest raptures, how Titian could resolve upon the drudgery of going through them, or whether it was not rather owing to extreme facility of hand, and a sort of trick in laying on the colours, abridging the mechanical labour! No one wrote or talked more eloquently about Titian’s harmony and clearness of colouring than the late Mr. Barry—discoursing of his greens, his blues, his yellows, ‘the little red and white of which he composed his flesh-colour,’con amore; yet his own colouring was dead and dingy, and, if he had copied a Titian, he would have made it a mere daub, leaving out all that caused his wonder or admiration, or that induced him to copy it after the English or Irish fashion. We not only grudge the labour of beginning, but we stop short, forthe same reason, when we are near touching the goal of success, and, to save a few last touches, leave a work unfinished and an object unattained. The immediate steps, the daily gradual improvement, the successive completion of parts, give us no pleasure; we strain at the final result; we wish to have the whole done, and, in our anxiety to get it off our hands, sayit will do, and lose the benefit of all our pains by stinting a little more, and being unable to command a little patience. In a day or two, we will suppose, a copy of a fine Titian would be as like as we could make it: the prospect of this so enchants us, that we skip the intervening space, see no great use in going on with it, fancy that we may spoil it, and, in order to put an end to the question, take it home with us, where we immediately see our error, and spend the rest of our lives in regretting that we did not finish it properly when we were about it. We can execute only a part; we see the whole of nature or of a picture at once.Hinc illæ lachrymæ.The English grasp at this whole—nothing less interests or contents them; and, in aiming at too much, they miss their object altogether.

A French artist, on the contrary, has none of this uneasy, anxious feeling—of this desire to master the whole of his subject, and anticipate his good fortune at a blow—of thismassingand concentrating principle. He takes the thing more easy and rationally. He has none of the mental qualms, the nervous agitation, the wild, desperate plunges and convulsive throes of the English artist. He does not set off headlong without knowing where he is going, and find himself up to the neck in all sorts of difficulties and absurdities, from impatience to begin and have the matter off his mind (as if it were an evil conscience); but takes time to consider, arranges his plans, gets in his outline and his distances, and lays a foundation before he attempts a superstructure which he may have to pull in pieces again, or let it remain—a monument of his folly.He looks before he leaps, which is contrary to the true blindfold English rule; and I should think that we had invented this proverb from seeing so many fatal examples of the violation of it. Suppose he undertakes to make a copy of a picture: he first looks at it, and sees what it is. He does not make his sketch all black or all white, because one part of it is so, and because he cannot alter an idea he has once got into his head and must always run into extremes, but varies his tints (strange as it may seem) from green to red, from orange-tawny to yellow, from grey to brown, according as they vary in the original. He sees no inconsistency, no forfeiture of a principle, in this (any more than Mr. Southey in the change of the colours of his coat), but a great deal of right reason, and indeed an absolute necessity for it, if he wishes to succeed in what he is about. This is the last thing in an Englishman’sthoughts: he only wishes to have his own way, though it ends in defeat and ruin—strives hard to do what he is sensible he cannot—or, if he finds he can, gives over and leaves the matter short of a triumphant conclusion, which is too flattering an idea for him to indulge in. The French artist proceeds with due deliberation, and bit by bit. He takes some one part—a hand, an eye, a piece of drapery, an object in the back-ground—and finishes it carefully; then another, and so on to the end. When he has gone through every part, his picture is done: there is nothing more that he can add to it; it is a numerical calculation, and there are only so many items in the account. An Englishman may go onslobberinghis over for the hundredth time, and be no nearer than when he began. As he tries to finish the whole at once, and as this is not possible, he always leaves his work in an imperfect state, or as if he had begun on a new canvas—like a man who is determined to leap to the top of a tower, instead of scaling it step by step, and who is necessarily thrown on his back every time he repeats the experiment. Again, the French student does not, from a childish impatience, when he is near the end, destroy the effect of the whole, by leaving some one part eminently deficient, an eye-sore to the rest; nor does he fly from what he is about, to any thing else that happens to catch his eye, neglecting the one and spoiling the other. He is, in our old poet’s phrase, ‘constrained by mastery,’ by the mastery of common sense and pleasurable feeling. He is in no hurry to get to the end; for he has a satisfaction in the work, and touches and retouches perhaps a single head, day after day and week after week, without repining, uneasiness, or apparent progress. The very lightness and buoyancy of his feeling renders him (where the necessity of this is pointed out) patient and laborious. An Englishman, whatever he undertakes, is as if he was carrying a heavy load that oppresses both his body and mind, and that he is anxious to throw down as soon as possible. The Frenchman’s hopes and fears are not excited to a pitch of intolerable agony, so that he is compelled, in mere compassion to himself, to bring the question to a speedy issue, even to the loss of his object. He is calm, easy, collected, and takes his time and improves his advantages as they occur, with vigilance and alacrity. Pleased with himself, he is pleased with whatever occupies his attention nearly alike. He is never taken at a disadvantage. Whether he paints an angel or a joint-stool, it is much the same to him: whether it is landscape or history, still it is he who paints it. Nothing puts him out of his way, for nothing puts him out of conceit with himself. This self-complacency forms an admirable ground-work for moderation and docility in certain particulars, though not in others.

I remember an absurd instance enough of this deliberate mode of setting to work in a young French artist, who was copying the Titian’sMistressin the Louvre, some twenty years ago. After getting in his chalk-outline, one would think he might have been attracted to the face—that heaven of beauty (as it appears to some), clear, transparent, open, breathing freshness, that ‘makes a sunshine in the shady place’; or to the lustre of the golden hair; or some part of the poetry of the picture (for, with all its materiality, this picture has a poetry about it); instead of which he began to finish a square he had marked out in the right-hand corner of the picture, containing a piece of board and a bottle of some kind of ointment. He set to work like a cabinet-maker or an engraver, and appeared to have no sympathy with the soul of the picture. On a Frenchman (generally speaking), the distinction between the great and the little, the exquisite and the indifferent, is in a great measure lost: his self-satisfied egotism supplies whatever is wanting up to a certain point, and neutralizes whatever goes beyond it. Another young man, at the time I speak of, was for eleven weeks daily employed in making a black-lead pencil drawing of a small Leonardo: he sat with his legs balanced across a rail to do it, kept his hat on, every now and then consulted with his friends about his progress, rose up, went to the fire to warm himself, talked of the styles of the different masters—praising Titianpour les coloris, Raphaelpour l’expression, Poussinpour la composition—all being alike to him, provided they had each something to help him on in his harangue (for that was all he thought about),—and then returned toperfectionate(as he called it) his copy. This would drive an Englishman out of his senses, supposing him to be ever so stupid. The perseverance and the interruptions, the labour without impulse, the attention to the parts in succession, and disregard of the whole together, are to him utterly incomprehensible. He wants to do something striking, and bends all his thoughts and energies to one mighty effort. A Frenchman has no notion of this summary proceeding, exists mostly in his present sensations, and, if he is left at liberty to enjoy or trifle with these, cares about nothing farther, looking neither backwards nor forwards. They forgot the reign of terror under Robespierre in a month; they forgot that they had ever been called thegreat nationunder Buonaparte in a week. They sat in chairs on the Boulevards (just as they do at other times), when the shots were firing into the next street, and were only persuaded to quit them when their own soldiers were seen pouring down all the avenues from the heights of Montmartre, crying ‘Sauve qui peut!’ They then went home and dressed themselves to see theAlliesenter Paris, as a fine sight, just as they would witness a procession at atheatre. This is carrying the instinct of levity as far as it will go. With all their affectation and want of sincerity, there is, on the principle here stated, a kind of simplicity and nature about them after all. They lend themselves to the impression of the moment with good humour and good will, making it not much better nor worse than it is: the English constantly over-do or under-do every thing, and are either mad with enthusiasm or in despair. The extreme slowness and regularity of the French school have then arisen, as a natural consequence, out of their very fickleness and frivolity (their severally supposed national characteristics); for, owing to the last, their studious exactness costs them nothing; and, again, they have no headstrong impulses or ardent longings that urge them on to the violation of rules, or hurry them away with a subject or with the interest belonging to it. All is foreseen and settled beforehand, so as to assist the fluttering and feeble hold they have of things. When they venture beyond the literal and formal, and (mistaking pedantry and bombast for genius) attempt the grand and the impressive style, as in David’s and Girodet’s pictures, the Lord deliver us from sublimity engrafted on insipidity andpetit maître-ism! You see a solitary French artist in the Louvre copying a Raphael or a Rubens, standing on one leg, not quite sure of what he is about: you see them collected in groupes about David’s, elbowing each other, thinking them even finer than Raphael, more truly themselves, a more perfect combination of all that can be taught by the Greek sculptor and the French posture-master! Is this patriotism, or want of taste? If the former, it is excusable, and why not, if the latter?

Even should a French artist fail, he is not disconcerted—there is something else he excels in: ‘for one unkind and cruel fair, another still consoles him.’ He studies in a more graceful posture, or pays greater attention to his dress; or he has a friend, who hasbeaucoup du talent, and conceit enough for them both. His self-love has always a salvo, and comes upon its legs again, like a cat or a monkey. Not so with Bruin the Bear. If an Englishman (God help the mark!) fails in one thing, it is all over with him; he is enraged at the mention of any thing else he can do, and at every consolation offered him on that score; he banishes all other thoughts, but of his disappointment and discomfiture, from his breast—neither eats nor sleeps (it is well if he does not swallow down double ‘potations, pottle-deep,’ to drown remembrance)—will not own, even to himself, any other thing in which he takes an interest or feels a pride; and is in the horrors till he recovers his good opinion of himself in the only point on which he now sets a value, and for which his anxiety and disorder of mind incapacitate him aseffectually as if he were drunk with strong liquor instead of spleen and passion. I have here drawn the character of an Englishman, I am sure; for it is a portrait of myself, and, I am sorry to add, an unexaggerated one. I intend these Essays as studies of human nature; and as, in the prosecution of this design, I do not spare others, I see no reason why I should spare myself. I lately tried to make a copy of a portrait by Titian (after several years’ want of practice), with a view to give a friend in England some notion of the picture, which is equally remarkable and fine. I failed, and floundered on for some days, as might be expected. I must say the effect on me was painful and excessive. My sky was suddenly overcast. Every thing seemed of the colour of the paints I used. Nature in my eyes became dark and gloomy. I had no sense or feeling left, but of the unforeseen want of power, and of the tormenting struggle to do what I could not. I was ashamed ever to have written or spoken on art: it seemed a piece of vanity and affectation in me to do so—all whose reasonings and refinements on the subject ended in an execrable daub. Why did I think of attempting such a thing without weighing the consequences of exposing my presumption and incapacity so unnecessarily? It was blotting from my mind, covering with a thick veil all that I remembered of these pictures formerly—my hopes when young, my regrets since, one of the few consolations of my life and of my declining years. I was even afraid to walk out of an evening by the barrier of Neuilly, or to recall the yearnings and associations that once hung upon the beatings of my heart. All was turned to bitterness and gall. To feel any thing but the consciousness of my own helplessness and folly, appeared a want of sincerity, a mockery, and an insult to my mortified pride! The only relief I had was in the excess of pain I felt: this was at least some distinction. I was not insensible on that side. No French artist, I thought, would regretnotcopying a Titian so much as I did, nor so far shew the same value for it, however he might have the advantage of me in drawing or mechanical dexterity. Besides, I had copied this very picture very well formerly. If ever I got out of my present scrape, I had at any rate received a lesson not to run the same risk of vexation, or commit myself gratuitously again upon any occasion whatever. Oh! happy ought they to be, I said, who can do any thing, when I feel the misery, the agony, the dull, gnawing pain of being unable to do what I wish in this single instance! When I copied this picture before, I had no other resource, no other language. My tongue then stuck to the roof of my mouth: now it is unlocked, and I have done what I then despaired of doing in another way. Ought I not to be grateful and contented? Oh, yes!—and think how many thereare who have nothing to which they can turn themselves, and fail in every object they undertake. Well, then,Let bygones be bygones(as the Scotch proverb has it); give up the attempt, and think no more of Titian, or of the portrait of a Man in black in the Louvre. This would be very well for any one else; but for me, who had nearly exhausted the subject on paper, that I should take it into my head to paint a libel of what I had composed so many and such fine panegyrics upon—it was a fatality, a judgment upon me for my vapouring and conceit. I must be as shy of the subject for the future as a damned author is of the title of his play or the name of his hero ever after. Yet the picture would look the same as ever. I could hardly bear to think so: it would be hid or defaced to me as ‘in a phantasma or a hideous dream.’ I must turn my thoughts from it, or they would lead to madness! The copy went on better afterwards, and the affair ended less tragically than I apprehended. I did not cut a hole in the canvas, or commit any other extravagance: it is now hanging up very quietly facing me; and I have considerable satisfaction in occasionally looking at it, as I write this paragraph.

Such are the agonies into which we throw ourselves about trifles—our rage and disappointment at want of success in any favourite pursuit, and, our neglect of the means to ensure it. A Frenchman, under the penalty of half the chagrin at failure, would take just twice the pains and consideration to avoid it: but our morbid eagerness and blundering impetuosity, together with a certainconcretenessof imagination which prevents our dividing any operation into steps and stages, defeat the very end we have in view. The worst of these wilful mischiefs of our own making is, that they admit of no relief or intermission. Natural calamities or great griefs, as we do not bring them upon ourselves, so they find a seasonable respite in tears or resignation, or in some alleviating contrast or reflection: but pride scorns all alliance with natural frailty or indulgence; our wilful purposes regard every relaxation or moment’s ease as a compromise of their very essence, which consists in violence and effort: they turn away from whatever might afford diversion or solace, and goad us on to exertions as painful as they are unavailable, and with no other companion than remorse,—the most intolerable of all inmates of the breast; for it is constantly urging us to retrieve our peace of mind by an impossibility—the undoing of what is past. One of the chief traits of sublimity in Milton’s character of Satan is this dreadful display of unrelenting pride and self-will—the sense of suffering joined with the sense of power and ‘courage never to submit or yield’—and the aggravation of the original purpose of lofty ambition and opposition to the Almighty, with the total overthrow and signal punishment,—whichought to be reasons for its relinquishment. ‘His thoughts burn like a hell within him!’ but he gives them ‘neither truce nor rest,’ and will not even sue for mercy. This kind of sublimity must be thrown away upon the French critic, who would only think Satan a very ridiculous old gentleman for adhering so obstinately to his original pretensions, and not making the most of circumstances, and giving in his resignation to the ruling party! When Buonaparte fell, an English editor (of virulent memory) exhausted a great number of the finest passages inParadise Lost, in applying them to his ill-fated ambition. This was an equal compliment to the poet and the conqueror: to the last, for having realized a conception of himself in the mind of his enemies on a par with the most stupendous creations of imagination; to the first, for having embodied in fiction what bore so strong a resemblance to, and was constantly brought to mind by, the fearful and imposing reality! But to return to our subject.

It is the same with us in love and literature. An Englishman makes love without thinking of the chances of success, his own disadvantages, or the character of his mistress—that is, without the adaptation of means to ends, consulting only his own humour or fancy;[39]and he writes a book of history or travels, without acquainting himself with geography, or appealing to documents or dates; substituting his own will or opinion in the room of these technical helps or hindrances, as he considers them. It is not right. In business it is not by any means the same; which looks as if, where interest was the moving principle, and acted as a counterpoise to caprice and will, our headstrong propensity gave way, though it sometimes leads us into extravagant and ruinous speculations. Nor is it a disadvantage to us in war; for there the spirit of contradiction does every thing, and an Englishman will go to the devil sooner than yield to any odds. Courage is nothing but will, defying consequences; and this the English have in perfection. Burns somewhere calls out lustily, inspired by rhyme andusquebaugh,—

‘Set but a Scotsman on a hill;Say such is royal George’s will,And there’s the foe:-His only thought is how to killTwa at a blow.’

‘Set but a Scotsman on a hill;

Say such is royal George’s will,

And there’s the foe:-

His only thought is how to kill

Twa at a blow.’

I apprehend, with his own countrymen or ours, all the love and loyalty would come to little, but for their hatred of the army opposed to them. It is the resistance, ‘the two to kill at a blow,’ that is the charm, and makes our fingers’-ends tingle. The Greek cause makes no progress with us for this reason: it is one of pure sympathy, but our sympathies must arise out of our antipathies; they were devoted to the Queen to spite the King. We had a wonderful affection for the Spaniards—the secret of which was that we detested the French. Our love must begin with hate. It is so far well that the French are opposed to us in almost every way; for the spirit of contradiction alone to foreign fopperies and absurdities keeps us within some bounds of decency and order. When an English lady of quality introduces a favourite by saying, ‘This is his lordship’s physician, and my atheist,’ the humour might become epidemic; but we can stop it at once by saying, ‘That is so like a Frenchwoman!’—The English excel in the practical and mechanic arts, where mere plodding and industry are expected and required; but they do not combine business and pleasure well together. Thus, in the Fine Arts, which unite the mechanical with the sentimental, they will probably never succeed; for the one spoils and diverts them from the other. An Englishman can attend but to one thing at a time. He hates music at dinner. He can go through any labour or pain with prodigious fortitude; but he cannot make a pleasure of it, or persuade himself he is doing afine thing, when he is not. Again, they are great in original discoveries, which come upon them by surprise, and which they leave to others to perfect. It is a question whether, if they foresaw they were about to make the discovery, at the very point of projection as it were, they would not turn their backs upon it, and leave it to shift for itself; or obstinately refuse to take the last step, or give up the pursuit, in mere dread and nervous apprehension lest they should not succeed. Poetry is also their undeniable element; for the essence of poetry is will and passion, ‘and it alone is highly fantastical.’ French poetry isverbiageor dry detail.

I have thus endeavoured to shew why it is the English fail as a people in the Fine Arts, because the idea of the end absorbs that of the means. Hogarth was an exception to this rule; but then every stroke of his pencil was instinct with genius. As it has been well said, that ‘wereadhis works,’ so it might be said hewrotethem. Barry is aninstance more to my purpose. No one could argue better aboutgustoin painting, and yet no one ever painted with less. His pictures were dry, coarse, and wanted all that his descriptions of those of others indicate. For example, he speaks of ‘the dull, dead, watery look’ of the Medusa’s head of Leonardo, in a manner that conveys an absolute idea of the character: had he copied it, you would never have suspected any thing of the kind. His pen grows almost wanton in praise of Titian’s nymph-like figures. Whatdrabshe has made of his own sea-nymphs, floating in the Thames, with Dr. Burney at their head, with his wig on! He is like a person admiring the grace of an accomplished rope-dancer; place him on the rope himself, and his head turns;—or he is like Luther’s comparison of Reason to a drunken man on horseback—‘set him up on one side, and he tumbles over on the other.’ Why is this? His mind was essentially ardent and discursive, not sensitive or observant; and though the immediate object acted as a stimulus to his imagination, it was only as it does to the poet’s—that is, as a link in the chain of association, as implying other strong feelings and ideas, and not for its intrinsic beauty or individual details. He had not the painter’s eye, though he had the painter’s general knowledge. There is as great a difference in this respect between our views of things 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 black, that a chair is not a table, that John is not James; and there are painters, particularly of history in England, who look very little farther. They cannot finish any thing, or go over a head twice: the firstcoup-d’œilis all they ever arrive at, nor can they refine on their impressions, soften them down, or reduce them to their component parts, without losing their spirit. The inevitable result of this is grossness, and also want of force and solidity; for, in reality, the parts cannot be separated without injury from the whole. Such people have no pleasure in the art as such: it is merely to astonish or to thrive that they follow it; or, if thrown out of it by accident, they regret it only as a bankrupt tradesman does a business which was a handsome subsistence to him. Barry did not live, like Titian, on the taste of colours (there was here, perhaps—and I will not disguise it—in English painters in general, a defect of organic susceptibility); they were not apabulumto his senses; he did not hold green, blue, red, and yellow for ‘the darlings of his precious eye.’ They did not, therefore, sink into his mind with all their hidden harmonies, nor nourish and enrich it with material beauty, though he knew enough of them to furnish hints for other ideas and to suggest topics of discourse. If he had had the most enchanting object in nature before him in his painting-room at the Adelphi, hewould have turned from it, after a moment’s burst of admiration, to talk of the subject of his next composition, and to scrawl in some new and vast design, illustrating a series of great events in history, or some vague moral theory. The art itself was nothing to him, though he made it the stalking-horse to his ambition and display of intellectual power in general; and, therefore, he neglected its essential qualities to daub in huge allegories, or carry on cabals with the Academy, in which the violence of his will and the extent of his views found proper food and scope. As a painter, he was tolerable merely as a draftsman, or in that part of the art which may be best reduced to rules and precepts, or to positive measurements. There is neither colouring, nor expression, nor delicacy, nor striking effect in his pictures at the Adelphi. The group of youths and horses, in the representation of the Olympic Games, is the best part of them, and has more of the grace and spirit of a Greek bas-relief than any thing of the same kind in the French school of painting. Barry was, all his life, a thorn in the side of Sir Joshua, who was irritated by the temper and disconcerted by the powers of the man; and who, conscious of his own superiority in the exercise of his profession, yet looked askance at Barry’s loftier pretensions and more gigantic scale of art. But he had no more occasion to be really jealous of him than of an Irish porter or orator. It was like Imogen’s mistaking the dead body of Cloten for her lord’s—‘the jovial thigh, the brawns of Hercules’: the head, which would have detected the cheat, was missing!

I might have gone more into the subject of our apparent indifference to the pleasure of mere imitation, if I had had to run a parallel between English and Italian or even Flemish art; but really, though I find a great deal of what is finical, I find nothing of the pleasurable in the details of French more than of English art. The English artist, it is an old and just complaint, can with difficulty be prevailed upon to finish any part of a picture but the face, even if he does that any tolerable justice: the French artist bestows equal and elaborate pains on every part of his picture—the dress, the carpet, &c.; and it has been objected to the latter method, that it has the effect of making the face look unfinished; for as this is variable and in motion, it can never admit of the same minuteness of imitation as objects ofstill-life, and must suffer in the comparison, if these have the utmost possible degree of attention bestowed on them, and do not fall into their relative place in the composition from their natural insignificance. But does not this distinction shew generally that the English have no pleasure in art, unless there is an additional interest beyond what is borrowed from the eye, and that the French have the same pleasure in it, provided the mechanical operation is the same—like thefly that settles equally on the face or dress, and runs over the whole surface with the same lightness and indifference? The collar of a coat is out of drawing: this may be and is wrong. But I cannot say that it gives me the same disturbance as if the nose was awry. A Frenchman thinks that both are equally out of drawing, and sets about correcting them both with equal gravity and perseverance. A part of the back-ground of a picture is left in an unfinished state: this is a sad eye-sore to the French artist or connoisseur. We English care little about it: if the head and character are well given, we pass it over as of small consequence; and if they are failures, it is of even less. A French painter, after having made you look like a baboon, would go on finishing the cravat or the buttons of your coat with all the nicety of a man milliner or button-maker, and the most perfect satisfaction with himself and his art. This with us would be quite impossible. ‘They are careful after many things: with us, there is one thing needful’—which is effect. We certainly throw our impressions more into masses (they are not taken off by pattern, every part alike): there may be a slowness and repugnance at first; but, afterwards, there is an impulse, amomentumacquired—one interest absorbing and being strengthened by several others; and if we gain our principal object, we can overlook the rest, or at least cannot find time to attend to them till we have secured this. We have nothing of thepetit maître, of themartinetstyle about us: we run into the opposite fault. If we had time, if we had power, there could be no objection to giving every part with the utmost perfection, as it is given in a looking-glass. But if we have only a month to do a portrait in, is it not better to give three weeks to the face and one to the dress, than one week to the face and three to the dress. How often do we look at the face compared to the dress? ‘On a good foundation,’ says Sancho Panza, ‘a good house may be built’; so a good picture should have a good back-ground, and be finished in every part. It is entitled to this mark of respect, which is like providing a frame for it, and hanging it in a good light. I can easily understand how Rubens or Vandyke finished the back grounds and drapery of their pictures:—they were worth the trouble; and, besides, it cost them nothing. It was to them no more than blowing a bubble in the air. One would no doubt have every thing right—a feather in a cap, or a plant in the foreground—if a thought or a touch would do it. But to labour on for ever, and labour to no purpose, is beyond mortal or English patience. Our clumsiness is one cause of our negligence. Depend upon it, people do with readiness what they can do well. I rather wonder, therefore, that Raphael took such pains in finishing his draperies and back grounds, which he did so indifferently. Theexpression is like an emanation of the soul, or like a lamp shining within and illuminating the whole face and body; and every part, charged with so sacred a trust as the conveying of this expression (even to the hands and feet), would be wrought up to the highest perfection. But his inanimate objects must have cost him some trouble; and yet he laboured them too. In what he could not do well, he was still determined to do his best; and that nothing should be wanting in decorum and respect to an art that he had consecrated to virtue, and to that genius that burnt like a flame upon its altars! We have nothing that for myself I can compare with this high and heroic pursuit of art for its own sake. The French fancy their own pedantic abortions equal to it, thrust them into the Louvre, ‘and with their darkness dare affront that light!’—thus proving themselves without the germ or the possibility of excellence—the feeling of it in others. We at least claim some interest in art, by looking up to its loftiest monuments—retire to a distance, and reverence the sanctuary, if we cannot enter it.

‘They also serve who only stare and wait.’[40]

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