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of various stature, do not differ in their general measurement from the antique, however they may vary from those of Michael Angelo, whose men are, as Fuseli says, "a race of giants."

Students learn much from each other, and much often that is valuable; but they should always be on their guard against fashions that creep into drawing schools from the practice of clever young men, to whom the rest look up. I have lately noticed a prevailing practice, in the Life School of the Royal Academy, of an equally strong pronunciation of the outline of the entire figure, which tends to inure the eye to a hard, detached method of representing form, unlike the manner in which Nature, with all her beautiful varieties of light and shade, always addresses herself to the eye. The library of the Royal Academy possesses about seventy drawings from the life, by Stothard, some very slight, and others exquisitely wrought, though few that are completely finished. They may, however, be strongly recommended to the notice of the student, who can never examine them without improvement of his perception of the beauties of Nature; and they may, I think, prove a safeguard against his being led into mannerism by the changing fashions of schools; though not if he attempts a literal imitation of them.

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SECTION IX.

Invention and Expression.

INSTANCES FROM THE OLD MASTERS.

THE inventive faculty is of as much importance to the painter of portrait as to the painter of history; and of as much also to the painter even of local landscape, all the features of which are capable of powerful expression in the hands of genius. But, for the present, I shall confine myself to the invention of the incidents of life and the expression of the passions.

Originality and skill in inventing or telling a story, and in expressing the passions, are kept alive only by the artist's powers of observation; and the difference between the greater or lesser painter results very much from this, that the first thinks of his Art everywhere and at all times, the last in his paintingroom only and at set hours. Hogarth, describing his own habits, says, "Be where I would, while my eyes were open, I was continually at my studies, and acquiring something useful to my profession ;" and Stothard's sketch-books were filled with groups of figures and scenery made without selection, but merely of what chance offered to his notice while

travelling; sometimes objects which the window of an inn presented while horses were changing, and sometimes what he saw from the top of a stage-coach; and I would earnestly impress on all young artists, that the practice of redeeming spare moments of time by sketching whatever is thrown in their way is an invaluable one. Those who adopt it will be sure to be rewarded by often finding memoranda so made of far greater interest than they had imagined; and it will correct the habit, always fatal to originality, of going to Nature for things only that resemble what they have seen in Art. Among the drawings by Raphael, collected by Sir Thomas Lawrence, were many evidently of what chance presented to him. I recollect one, in particular, singularly elegant, of three or four young men in the dress of his time sitting at a table, and their attitudes but very slightly varied ;— an accidental group, in all probability, of his pupils. The works of Michael Angelo abound in attitudes that seem as if taken immediately from Nature; and, indeed, most of the noble range of his prophets and sibyls have this look.

A subject happily adopted from Nature should not deprive the painter of the credit due to invention; for indeed the mere faculty of inventing an incident is far more common than the nice and quick perception of that in Nature which is fitted to the purposes of Art, and which ordinary observers would pass by, or reject, perhaps, as trifling or unworthy. Burns turned up a mouse with his plough, and was heard to say by a man who was at work with him, “I'll make that mouse immortal!" And he kept his word.

The importance of the constant observation of Nature to the painter of real life will be readily admitted, but such habits are of no less value to the painter of the most imaginative class of subjects.— The supernatural is not the unnatural. The centaur,

the sphinx, the satyr, etc., are but combinations of Nature, and there is true taste shown in making these ideal beings act naturally,—as when, in a group of the Phygalian Marbles, a centaur bites his antagonist, and when Shakspeare makes Bottom, the weaver, long for hay and oats when the ass's head is on his shoulders. Indeed, two of the most exquisitely poetic conceptions of Shakspeare, the Oberon and Titania, when we look beyond the charm of their language, are the veriest man and wife that ever existed.

And here it may be useful to notice an instance of the substitution of the unnatural for the supernatural by a great master. In the picture by Nicolo Poussin, in the National Gallery, of "Perseus destroying his Adversaries by displaying the Gorgon's Head," the attempt to represent men half flesh and half stone suggests nothing to the eye but imperfect or damaged colouring. The subject, indeed, defies the painter's Art; and this failure is a single exception in the practice of a painter pre-eminently gifted with the power of making poetic fiction equally beautiful and probable to the eye.

The perception of what is false is, at least, a step towards the knowledge of what is true; and it will be found that the conventional and the affected are the result of that species of mind that will not let

Nature have her own way-that has formed, indeed, its notions of consistency independently on observation. To explain what I mean, I would say that had such a mind to deal with a story of such love as that of Romeo and Juliet, it would have deemed it a profanation of the passion to make, as Shakspeare has done, Juliet the successor of Rosaline in the heart of Romeo.

The ideal of such writers or painters is not an ideal of selection but an ideal of their own, or, I believe, in most cases, an ideal imitated from other similarly-constituted minds; for in all their productions there is a remarkable family likeness. Throughout their delineations of life there is an absence of all that delicate discrimination of the subtle lights and shades of character which a thorough and unbiassed acquaintance with the men and women that surround us can only teach. Instead of true representations of life, they give us faultless heroes and heroines opposed to characters of motiveless atrocity; -and when their subjects are above the world, they mistake the conventional so entirely for the ideal as to keep themselves equally out of the sphere of our sympathies.

Such minds remain in a state of perpetual childhood; often they are highly amiable, and as often cold and unsympathising. With the best intentions, they can effect no good, but may very much mislead —for a writer or painter can only serve the cause of morality in the degree in which he is true to Nature. In Shakspeare we discover no aim to enforce a moral,

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