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APHORISMS, CHIEFLY RELATIVE TO THE FINE ARTS

APHORISMS

1. Life is rapid, art is slow, occasion coy, practice fallacious, and judgment partial.

2. The price of excellence is labour, and time that of immortality.

3. Art, like love, excludes all competition, and absorbs the man.

4. Art is the attendant of nature, and genius and talent the ministers of art.

5. Genius either discovers new materials of nature, or combines the known with novelty.

6. Talent arranges, cultivates, polishes, the discoveries of genius.

7. Intuition is the attendant of genius; gradual improvement that of talent.

8. Arrangement presupposes materials: fruits follow the bud and foliage, and judgment the luxuriance of fancy.

9. The fiery sets his subject in a blaze, and mounts its vapours; the melancholy cleaves the rock, or gropes through thorns for his; the sanguine deluges all, and seizes none; the phlegmatic sucks one, and drops off with repletion.

10. Some enter the gates of art with golden keys, and take their seats with dignity among the demi-gods of fame; some burst the doors and leap into a niche with savage power; thousands consume their time in chinking useless keys, and aiming feeble pushes against the inexorable doors.

11. Heaven and earth, advantages and obstacles, conspire to educate genius.

12. Organization is the mother of talent; practice its nurse; the senses its dominion; but hearts alone can penetrate hearts.

13. It is the lot of genius to be opposed, and to be invigorated by opposition: all extremes touch each other; frigid praise and censure wait upon attainable or common powers; but the successful adventurer in the realms of discovery leaps on an unknown or long-lost shore, ennobles it with his name, and grasps immortality.

14. Genius without bias, is a stream without direction: it inundates all, and ends in stagnation.

15. He who pretends to have sacrificed genius to the pursuits of interest or fashion; and he who wants to persuade you he has indisputable titles to a crown, but chooses to wave them for the emoluments of a partnership in trade, deserve equal belief.

16. Taste is the legitimate offspring of nature, educated by propriety: fashion is the bastard of vanity, dressed by art.

17. The immediate operation of taste is to ascertain the kind; the next, to appreciate the degrees of excellence.

Coroll.– Taste, founded on sense and elegance of mind, is reared by culture, invigorated by practice and comparison: scantiness stops short of it; fashion adulterates it: it is shackled by pedantry, and overwhelmed by luxuriance.

Taste sheds a ray over the homeliest or the most uncouth subject. Fashion frequently flattens the elegant, the gentle, and the great, into one lumpy mass of disgust.

If "foul and fair" be all that your gross-spun sense discerns, if you are blind to the intermediate degrees of excellence, you may perhaps be a great man – a senator – a conqueror; but if you respect yourself, never presume to utter a syllable on works of taste.

18. If mind and organs conspire to qualify you for a judge in works of taste, remember that you are to be possessed of three things – the subject of the work which you are to examine; the character of the artist as such; and, before all, of impartiality.

Coroll.– All first impressions are involuntary and inevitable; but the knowledge of the subject will guide you to judge first of the whole; not to creep on from part to part, and nibble at execution before you know what it means to convey. The notion of a tree precedes that of counting leaves or disentangling branches.

Every artist has, or ought to have, a character or system of his own; if, instead of referring that to the test of nature, you judge him by your own packed notions, or arraign him at the tribunal of schools which he does not recognize – you degrade the dignity of art, and add another fool to the herd of Dilettanti.

But if, for reasons best known to yourself, you come determined to condemn what yet you have not seen, let me advise you to drop your pursuits of art for one of far greater importance – the inquiry into yourself; nor aim at taste till you are sure of justice.

19. Misconception of its own powers is the injurious attendant of genius, and the most severe remembrancer of its vanity.

Coroll.– Much of Leonardo da Vinci's life evaporated in useless experiment and quaint research; Michael Angelo perplexed the limbs of grandeur with the minute ramifications of anatomy; Rafaelle forsook humanity to people a mythologic desert with clumsy gods and clumsier goddesses; Shakspeare, trusting time and chance with Hamlet and Othello, revised a frozen sonnet, or fondled his Adonis; whilst Milton dropt the trumpet that had astonished hell, left Paradise, and introduced a pedagogue to Heaven. When genius is surprised by such lethargic moments, we can forget that Johnson wrote Irene, and Hogarth made a solemn fool of Paul.

20. Reality teems with disappointment for him whose sources of enjoyment spring in the elysium of fancy.

21. Where perfection cannot take place, a very high degree of general excellence is impossible. Negligence is the shade of energy; where there is neither, expect mediocrity, the common expletive of society; capacity without elevation, industry without predilection, practice without choice.

Coroll.– "About this time," says Tacitus, "died Poppæus Sabinus, who, from a middling origin, rose to imperial friendships, the consulate, and the honours of the triumph: he was selected for the space of four-and-twenty years to govern the most important provinces,² not for any distinguished merit of his own, but because he was equal to his task, and not above it."

Behold here the most comprehensive epitaph of mediocrity, and the most unambiguous solution of every riddle with which its brilliant success may have perplexed your mind.

22. Determine the principle on which you commence your career of art: some woo the art itself, some its appendages; some confine their view to the present, some extend it to futurity: the butterfly flutters round a meadow; the eagle crosses seas.

23. In ranging the phenomena of art, remember carefully, though you place it on the side of exceptions, that a decided bias is not always a sign of latent power; nor indolence, indifference, or even apathy, a sign of impotence.

24. Circumstances may assist or retard parts, but cannot make them: they are the winds that now blow out a light, now animate a spark to conflagration.

Coroll.– Augustus and Mæcenas are said to have made Virgil: what was it, then, that prevented Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and the two Antonines, from producing at least a Lucan?

25. Deserve, but expect not, to be praised by your contemporaries, for any excellence which they may be jealous of being allowed to possess themselves; leave the dispensation of justice to posterity.

26. If wishes are the spawn of imbecility, precipitation is the bantling of fool-hardiness: legitimate will, investigates and acquires the means. Mistake not an itching finger for authentic will.

27. Some of the most genuine effusions of genius in art, some of the most estimable qualities in society, may be beholden for our homage to very disputable principles.

Coroll.– The admission of a master's humanity to his slave supposes the validity of an execrable right; and the courage shown in a duel cannot be applauded without submitting to the dictates of feudal barbarity. Had the poet's conception prepared us for the rashness of Lear, the ambition of Macbeth's wife, and the villany of Iago, by the usual gradations of nature, he could not have rushed on our heart with the irresistibility that now subdues it. Had the line of Correggio floated in a less expanse, he would have lost that spell of light and shade which has enthralled all eyes; and Rubens, had he not invigorated bodies to hills of flesh, and tinged his pencil in the rainbow, would not have been the painter of magnificence.

28. Genius has no imitator. Some can be poets and painters only at second-hand: deaf and blind to the tones and motions of Nature herself, they hear or see her only through some reflected medium of art; they are emboldened by prescription.

29. Let him who has more genius than talent give up as impossible what he finds difficult. Talent may mimic genius with success, and frequently impose on all but the first judges; but genius is awkward in the attempt to use the tools of talent.

Coroll.– Hyperides, Lysias, Isocrates, might imitate much of Demosthenes; but he would have become ridiculous by stooping to collect their beauties.³ The spear of Roland might be couched to gain a lady's favour; but its sole ornament was the heart, torn from the breast-plate of her foe.

30. Mediocrity is formed, and talent submits, to receive prescription; that, the liveried attendant, this, the docile client of a patron's views or whims: but genius, free and unbounded as its origin, scorns to receive commands, or in submission, neglects those it received.

Coroll.– The gentle spirit of Rafaelle embellished the conceits of Bembo and Divizio, to scatter incense round the triple mitre of his prince; and the Vatican became the flattering annals of the court of Julius and Leo: whilst Michael Angelo refused admittance to master and to times, and doomed his purple critic to hell.⁴

31. Distinguish between genius and singularity of character; an artist of mediocrity may be an odd man: let the nature of works be your guide.

32. The most impotent, the most vulgar, and the coldest artists generally arrogate to themselves the most vigorous, the most dignified, and the warmest subjects.

33. He has powers, dignity, and fire, who can inspire a trifle with importance.

34. Know that nothing is trifling in the hand of genius, and that importance itself becomes a bauble in that of mediocrity: – the shepherd's staff of Paris would have been an engine of death in the grasp of Achilles; the ash of Peleus could only have dropped from the effeminate fingers of the curled archer.

35. Art either imitates or copies, selects or transcribes; consults the class, or follows the individual.

36. Imitative art, is either epic or sublime, dramatic or impassioned, historic or circumscribed by truth. The first astonishes, the second moves, the third informs.

37. Whatever hides its limits in its greatness – whatever shows a feature of immensity, let the elements of Nature or the qualities of animated being make up its substance, is sublime.

38. Whatever by reflected self-love inspires us with hope, fear, pity, terror, love, or mirth – whatever makes events, and time, and place, the ministers of character and pathos, let fiction or reality compose its tissue, is dramatic.

39. That which tells us, not what might be, but what is; circumscribes the grand and the pathetic with truth of time, place, custom; what gives "a local habitation and a name," is historic.

Coroll.– No human performance is either purely epic, dramatic, or historic. Novelty and feelings will make the historian sometimes launch out into the marvellous; or will warm his bosom and extort a tear.

The dramatist while gazing at some tremendous feature, or the pomp of superior agency, will drop the chain he holds, and be absorbed in the sublime; whilst the epic or lyric poet, forgetting his solitary grandeur, will sometimes descend and mix with his agents.

The tragic and the comic dramatists formed themselves on Hector and Andromache, on Irus and Ulysses. The spirit from the prison-house breathes like the shade of Patroclus; Octavia and the daughter of Soranus⁵ melt like Ophelia and Alcestis.

40. Those who have assigned to the plastic arts beauty, strictly so called, as the ultimate end of imitation, have circumscribed the whole by a part.

Coroll.– The charms of Helen and of Niobe are instruments of sublimity: Meleager and Cordelia fall victims to the passions; Agrippina and Berenice give interest to truth.

41. Beauty, whether individual or ideal, consists in the concurrence of parts to one end, or the union of the simple and the various.

Coroll.– Whatever be your powers, assume not to legislate on beauty: though always the same herself, her empire is despotic, and subject to the anarchies of despotism, enthroned to-day, dethroned to-morrow: in treating subjects of universal claim, most has been done by leaving most to the reader's and spectator's taste or fancy. "It is difficult," says Horace, "to pronounce exactly to every man's eye and mind, what every man thinks himself entitled to estimate by a standard of his own."⁶ The Apollo and Medicean Venus are not by all received as the canons of male and female beauty; and Homer's Helen is the finest woman we have read of, merely because he has left her to be made up of the Dulcineas of his readers.

42. Beauty alone, fades to insipidity; and like possession cloys.

43. Grace is beauty in motion, or rather grace regulates the air, the attitudes and movements of beauty.

44. Nature makes no parade of her means – hence all studied grace is unnatural.

Coroll.– The attitudes of Parmegiano are exhibitions of studied grace. The grace of Guido is become proverbial, but it is the grace of the art.

45. All actions and attitudes of children are graceful, because they are the luxuriant and immediate offspring of the moment – divested of affectation, and free from all pretence.

Coroll.– The attitudes and motions of the figures of Rafaelle are graceful because they are poised by Nature.

46. Proportion, or symmetry, is the basis of beauty; propriety, of grace.

47. Creation gives, invention finds existence.

48. Invention in general is the combination of the possible, the probable, or the known, in a mode that strikes with novelty.

Coroll.– Invention has been said to mean no more than the moment of any fact chosen by the artist.

To say that the painter's invention is not to find or to combine its own subject, is to confine it to the poet's or historian's alms – is to annihilate its essence; it says in other words, that Macbeth or Ugolino would be no subjects for the pencil, if they had not been prepared by history and borrowed from Shakspeare and Dante.

49. Ask not – Where is fancy bred? in the heart? in the head? how begot? how nourished?

Coroll.– The critic who inquires whether in the madness of Lear, grief for the loss of empire, or the resentment of filial ingratitude preponderated – and he who doubts whether it be within the limits of art to embody beings of fancy, agitate different questions, but of equal futility.

50. Genius may adopt, but never steals.

Coroll.– An adopted idea or figure in the works of genius will be a foil or a companion; but an idea of genius borrowed by mediocrity scorns the base alliance and crushes all its mean associates – it is the Cyclop's thumb, by which the pigmy measured his own littleness, – "or hangs like a giant's robe upon a dwarfish thief."

51. Genius, inspired by invention, rends the veil that separates existence from possibility; peeps into the dark, and catches a shape, a feature, or a colour, in the reflected ray.

52. Talent, though panting, pursues genius through the plains of invention, but stops short at the brink that separates the real from the possible. Virgil followed Homer in making Mezentius speak to Rhœbus, but shrank from the reply of the prophetic courser.⁷

53. Whenever the medium of any work, whether lines, colour, grouping, diction, becomes so predominant as to absorb the subject in its splendour, the work is degraded to an inferior order.

54. The painter, who makes an historical figure address the spectator from the canvass, and the actor who addresses a soliloquy to you from the stage, have equal claims to your contempt or pity.

55. Common-place figures are as inadmissible in the grand style of painting as common-place characters or sentiments in poetry.

Coroll.– Common-place figures were first introduced by the gorgeous machinists of Venice, and adopted by the Bolognese school of Eclectics; the modern school of Rome from Carlo Maratta to Battoni knew nothing else; and they have been since indiscriminately disseminated on this side of the Alps, by those whom mediocrity obliged to hide themselves in crowds, or a knack at grouping stimulated to aggregate a rabble.

56. The copious is seldom grand.

57. Glitter is the refuge of the mean.

58. All apparatus destroys terror, as all ornament grandeur: the minute catalogue of the cauldron's ingredients in Macbeth destroys the terror attendant on mysterious darkness; and the seraglio-trappings of Rubens annihilate his heroes.

59. All conceits, not founded upon probable combinations of nature, are absurd. The capricci of Salvator Rosa, and of his imitators, are, to the fiends of Michael Angelo, what the paroxysms of a fever are to the sallies of vigorous fancy.

60. Distinguish carefully between bold fancy and a daring hand; between the powers of nature and the acquisitions of practice: most of Salvator's banditti are a medley made up of starveling models and the shreds of his lumber-room brushed into notice by a daring pencil.

61. Distinguish between boldness and brutality of hand, between the face of beauty and the bark of a tree.

62. All mediocrity pretends.

63. Invention, strictly speaking, being confined to one moment, he invents best who in that moment combines the traces of the past, the energy of the present, and a glimpse of the future.

64. Composition has been divided into natural and ornamental: that is dictated by the subject, this by effect or situation.

65. Distinguish between composition and grouping: though none can compose without grouping, most group without composing.

Coroll.– The assertion that grouping may not be composing, has been said to make a distinction without a difference: as if there had not been, still are, and always will be squadrons of artists, whose skill in grouping can no more be denied, than their claim to invention, and consequently to composition, admitted, if invention means the true conception of a subject and composition the best mode of representing it. After the demise of Lionardo and Michael Angelo, their successors, however discordant else, uniformly agreed to lose the subject in the medium. Raffaello had no followers. Tiziano and something of Tintoretto excepted, what instance can there be produced of composition in the works of the Venetian school? Are the splendid masquerades of Paolo to be dignified with that name? If composition has a part in the effusions of the great founder of the Lombard school, it surely did not arrange the celestial hubbub of his cupolas, content to inspire his Io, the Zingaro, Christ in the Garden, perhaps (I speak with diffidence) his Notte. So characteristically separate from real composition are the most splendid assemblages, the most happy combinations of figures, if founded on the mere power of grouping, that one of the first, and certainly the most courteous critic in Art of the age, in compliment to the Venetian and Flemish Schools, has thought proper to divide composition into legitimate and ornamental.

66. Ask not, what is the shape of composition? You may in vain climb the pyramid, wind with the stream, or point the flame; for composition, unbounded like Nature, and her subjects, though resident in all, may be in none of these.

67. The nature of picturesque composition is depth, or to come forward and recede.

Coroll.– Pausias, in painting a sacrifice, foreshortened the victim, and threw its shade on part of the surrounding crowd, to show its height and length.⁸

68. Sculpture composes in single groups or separate figures, but apposition is the element of basso-relievo.

Coroll.– Poussin painted basso-relievo, Algardi chiselled pictures.

69. He who treats you with all the figures of a subject save the principal, is as civil or important as he who invites you to dine with all a nobleman's family, the master only excepted: this sometimes may be no loss, but surely you cannot be said to have dined with the chief of the family.

70. Examine whether an artist treats you with a subject, or only with some of its limbs: many see only the lines, some the masses, others the colours, and not a few the mere back-ground of their subject.

71. Second thoughts are admissible in painting and poetry only as dressers of the first conception; no great idea was ever formed in fragments.

72. He alone can conceive and compose, who sees the whole at once before him.

73. He who conceives the given point of a subject in many different ways, conceives it not at all. Appeal to the artist's own feelings; you will ever find him most reluctant to give up that part of it which he conceived intuitively, and readier to dismiss that which harassed him by alteration.

74. Metaphysical composition, if it be numerous, will be oftener mistaken for dilapidation of fragments than regular distribution of materials.

Coroll.– The School of Athens as it is called, by Raffaelle, communicates to few more than an arbitrary assemblage of speculative groups: yet if the subject be the dramatic representation of philosophy, as it prepares for active life, the parts of the building are not connected with more regular gradation than those groups: fitted by physical and intellectual harmony, man ascends from himself to society, from society to God.

75. No excellence of execution can atone for meanness of conception.

76. Grandeur of conception will predominate over the most vulgar materials – if in the subjects of Jesus before Pilate, by Rembrandt, and the Resuscitation of Lazarus by Lievens,⁹ the materials had all been equal to the conception, they would have been works of superhuman powers.

77. Repetition of attitude and gesture invigorates the expression of the grand: as a torrent gives its own direction to every object it sweeps along, so the impression of a sublime or pathetic moment absorbs the contrasts of inferior agents.

78. Tameness lies on this side of expression, grimace overleaps it; insipidity is the relative of folly, eccentricity of madness.

79. The fear of not being understood, or felt, makes some invigorate expression to grimace.

80. The temple of expression, like that of religion, has a portico and a sanctuary; that is trod by all, this only admits her votaries.

81. Propriety, modesty and delicacy, guard expression from the half-conceits of the weak, the intemperance of the extravagant, and the brutality of the vulgar.

82. Sensibility is the mother of sympathy. How can he paint Beauty who has not throbbed at her charms? How shall he fill the eye with the dew of humanity whose own never shed a tear for others? How can he form a mouth to threaten or command, who licks the hereditary spittle of princes?

83. He fails with greater dignity, who expresses the principal feature of his subject and misses or neglects all the secondary, than he who consumes his powers on what is subordinate and comes exhausted to the chief.

Coroll.– Those who have asserted that Lionardo, in finishing the Last Supper, was so exhausted by his exertions to trace the characters and emotions of the disciples, that, unable to fix the physiognomy of Christ, he found himself reduced to the necessity of leaving that head unfinished, – either never saw it, or if they did, were too low to reach the height, and too shallow to fathom the depth of the conception.

84. The coward, driven to despair, leaps back into the face of danger; and the tame, stimulated to exertions and aiming at expression, puffs spirit into flutter; or tears the garb of passion and flourishes the rags.

85. Affectation cannot excite sympathy. How can you feel for him who cannot feel for himself? How can he feel for himself, who exhibits the artificial graces of studied attitude?

86. The loathsome is abominable, and no engine of expression.

Coroll. When Spenser dragged into light the entrails of the serpent, slain by the Red-cross Knight, he dreamt a butcher's dream and not a poet's: and Fletcher,¹⁰ or his partner, when rummaging the surgeon's box of cataplasms and trusses to assuage hunger, solicited the grunt of an applauding sty.

87. Sympathy and disgust are the lines that separate terror from horror: though we shudder at, we scarcely pity what we abominate.

Coroll.– Rowe, when he congratulates the ghost on bidding Hamlet spare his mother, accuses her of a crime with which the poet never charged her: that Shakspeare might be hurried on to horror let the "vile jelly" witness, which Cornwall treads from Gloster's bleeding sockets.

88. Expression animates, convulses, or absorbs form. The Apollo is animated; the warrior of Agasias is agitated; the Laocoon is convulsed; the Niobe is absorbed.

89. The being seized by an enormous passion, be it joy or grief, hope or despair, loses the character of its own individual expression, and is absorbed by the power of the feature that attracts it: Niobe and her family are assimilated by extreme anguish; Ugolino is petrified by the fate that sweeps his sons; and every metamorphosis from that of Clytie to the transfusion of Gianni Fucci¹¹ tells a new allegory of sympathetic power.

90. Reject with indignant incredulity all self-congratulations of conscious villainy, though they be uttered by Richard or by Iago.

91. The axe, the wheel, saw-dust, and the blood-stained sheet are not legitimate substitutes of terror.

92. All division diminishes, all mixtures impair the simplicity and clearness of expression.

93. The epoch which discovered expression, or what the Greeks called "manners,"¹² is marked by Pliny as that which gave importance and effect to art.

Coroll.– Homer invested his heroes with ideal powers, but copied nature in delineating their moral character. Achilles, the irresistible in arms, clad in celestial armour, is a splendid being, created by himself; Achilles the fool of passions, is the real man delivered to him by tradition.

That the plastic artist should have had an aim beyond the poet is improbable, because the poet, in general, furnished him with materials; he composed his man of beauty and ideal limbs, not to obscure, but to invigorate his character and our attention.

The limbs, the form of Ajax hurling defiance from the sea-swept rock unto the murky sky, were, no doubt, exquisite; but if the artist mitigated his expression, the indignation due to blasphemy from the spectator gave way to sterner indignation at the injustice of his gods.

The expression of the ancients, from the heights and depths of the sublime, descended and emerged to search every nook of the human breast; from the ambrosial locks of Zeus, and the maternal phantom fluttering round Ulysses,¹³ to the half-slain mother, shuddering lest the infant should suck the blood from her palsied nipple, and the fond attention of Penelope dwelling on the relation of her returned son.¹⁴

The expression of the ancients explored nature even in the mute recesses, in the sullen organs of the brute; from the Argus of Ulysses, to the lamb, the symbol of expiatory resignation, on an altar, and to the untameable feature of the toad.

The expression of the ancients roamed all the fields of licit and illicit pleasure; from the petulance with which Ctesilochus exhibited the pangs of a Jupiter delivered by celestial midwives, to the libidinous sports of Parrhasius, and from these to the indecent caricature¹⁵ which furnished Crassus with a repartee.

The ancients extended expression even to the colour of their materials in sculpture: to express the remorse of Athamas, Aristonidas the Theban mixed metals; and Alcon formed a Hercules of iron, to express the perseverance of the God.¹⁶

94. Invention, before it attends to composition, group, or contrast, classes its subject and ascertains what kind of impression it is to make on the whole.

95. Invention never suffers the action to expire, nor the spectator's fancy to consume itself in preparation, or stagnate into repose: it neither begins from the egg, nor coldly gathers the remains; for action and interest terminate together.

96. The middle moment, the moment of suspense, the crisis, is the moment of importance, big with the past and pregnant with the future: we rush from the flames with the Warrior of Agasias, and look forward to his enemy; or we hang in suspense over the wound of the Expiring Soldier,¹⁷ and poise with every drop which yet remains of life.

97. Distinguish between the hero and the actor; between exertions of study and effects of impulse.

98. Know that expression has its classes. The frown of the Hercynian phantom may repress the ardour, but cannot subdue the dignity of Drusus;¹⁸ the terror of the Centurion at the Resurrection¹⁹ is not the panic of his soldiers; the palpitation of Hamlet cannot degenerate into vulgar fright.

Coroll.– Of all the eclectics, Domenichino alone composed for expression; but his expression compared with Raffaello's is the expression of Theocritus compared with that of Homer. A detail of pretty images is rather calculated to diminish than to enforce energy with the whole: a lovely child taking refuge in the bosom of a lovely mother is an idea of nature, and pleasing in a lowly or domestic subject; but amidst the terrors of martyrdom, it is a shred tacked to a purple robe. In touching the circle that surrounds the Ananias of Raffaelle, you touch the electric chain; an irresistible spark darts from the last as from the first, and penetrates and subdues. At the Martyrdom of St. Agnes,²⁰ you saunter amidst the mob of a lane, where the silly chat of neighbouring gossips announces a topic as silly, till you find, with indignation, that instead of a broken pot, or a petty theft, you are to witness a scene for which Heaven opens, the angels descend, and Jesus rises from his throne.

99. Expression alone can invest beauty with supreme and lasting command over the eye.

Coroll.– On beauty, unsupported by vigour and expression, Homer dwells less than on active deformity; he tells us, in three lines, that Nireus led three ships, his parentage, his form, his effeminacy; but opens in Thersites a source of comedy and entertainment.