England could no longer remain apathetic, but began to shake off her lethargy and to dream of the possibility of doing so likewise.

This at least has been the proximate cause; but, if we are not much mistaken, there is a deeper and more home-felt feeling, which, though not so apparent, is the real cause of the present working in men's minds on this subject. If this feeling does exist, we may hope for something great and good, which will scarcely result from rivalling the Germans, or copying the Italians or the Greeks.

The first expression of this new-born feeling was one of wrath against the poor old academy, on whom many were inclined to lay the whole blame of the depressed state of art in this country, and to demand that it should rescue us from the opprobrium; since then, however, the feeling has become stronger and more general, and it being admitted that the academy is incapable of doing any thing, the subject has been taken. up by the nation at large, and something will be done, and, if we are not mistaken, done successfully ;-for, looking at what we have accomplished in literature, and the success that has ultimately attended every undertaking to which the energies of the nation have been fairly directed, there is strong ground for hope; but it is almost equally certain, that, before the right path is hit upon, many errors will be committed, and much money and talent be wasted; for, like a man suddenly startled in the dark from a sound sleep, we are yet rubbing our eyes, and trying to collect our scattered senses; but the chances are we take a wrong direction, and break our shins more than once before we find a light, or are thoroughly awake

In all inquiries of this sort, one of the principal difficulties is to ascertain what is the real cause of the evil once the seat and cause of the disease ascertained, the physician has little difficulty in prescribing a remedy. But, in the present instance, no two persons scarcely are agreed as to what is the real cause of our ill success in art. If an artist is asked the question, his invariable reply is, "want of patronage," and his partisans re-echo the sentiment. If a gentleman, not particularly interested in the subject, is asked, he answers, "the climate is unfavorable;" and these two causes, under various names, and with such modifications as the idiosyncrasy of the respondent may suggest, fill the one with hope

that the evil may be remedied, and satisfy the other that it is no use troubling himself about the matter.

Yet it can scarcely be the former, for no class of artists of any kind were ever more employed or more liberally rewarded and made such fortunes, as our architects, and yet architecture is at a lower ebb in this country than either painting or sculpture; and it is a question that has often been mooted, whether more money is not annually spent in this country on pictures than in the highest days of Italian art? Certainly more paintings are now produced and purchased than at any preceding period, and it is scarcely assumed that any great painter is among us creating great works of art which the public cannot understand, and which will only be appreciated when too late to benefit the artist; such things have happened in this country, but could scarcely occur now when the demand for art is so great and universal.

Of course no artist thinks his merits sufficiently acknowledged or rewarded; but there is a wide difference of opinion on this subject between them and the public, and one, we fear, that will not be easily reconciled.

The artist in the present day has an advantage with regard to patronage that scarcely ever existed before; he is not subject to the taste and caprice of one great patron, but, in whatever style of art he feels himself most at home, he is, if successful, sure to find admirers among the public; as the literary men of the present day are sure of finding readers, and, not like their predecessors, forced to flatter and fawn on some great man who would kindly condescend to patronize their works. The absence of this system has produced a far healthier tone in literature, and its re-adoption now would be as prejudicial to artists as it was to poets in former days. What our artists, however, demand is not this, but government paironage; and in this, we fear, they will be much disappointed; the government of this free country have too much to occupy their minds in the struggle for place or party ever to give that attention to the subject that is requisite; and the continual change of persons in power, and the consequent continual change of tastes and opinions, render it singularly unfit, by its very constitution, for the steady following out of any great system of encouragement of art.

A king or prince might do more; but,

in this country, he can only do it as an individual, and not as the absolute monarchs of other countries, who have the resources of their nations more at command. It is to the public that our artists must learn to look for support (as our literary men have learned some time ago). The public are willing to purchase and patronize whatever they can understand, or whatever speaks to their tastes or to their feelings. But they will not buy imitations of other schools when originals are to be had, nor will they buy paintings which nobody understands the meaning of but the painter, if indeed he does, which is not always clear.

which are dwelt upon by those who look more hopefully on the state of British art, there is none that is more continually referred to, or insisted on more strongly, than the advantages we possess in our knowledge of the great works of antiquity and of what was done that was great and worthy of imitation in the middle ages; and while we possess on the one hand the Elgin marbles, and on the other such noble collections of pictures by the old masters as exist in this, and other countries to which we have access, no reasoning, at first sight, appears more specious than to suppose that, with all this knowledge, we have only to start from the culminating point which the arts of Greece just reached at their highest period of perfection, and, starting from this, to surpass all that has been done. And, as a corollary to this, artists fancy that, by copying the statues and reproducing the porticos of Greece, we are reviving Grecian art, and may, by persevering in this course, at least produce as beautiful things as the ancients; and some even hope that, by adding our knowledge to theirs, and the power of our civilization to the then less refined polity, we may surpass them. Those, however, who reason in this way, appear to us to have only glanced at the surface of the question, and to know but little of Grecian art, or of what in fact it really consisted. It was not with Grecian artists a thing borrowed from others, or something apart from their feelings or polity, but really and wholly the expression of the faith, the feeling, and the poetry of the nation.

The "climate" may be dismissed in a very few words. We acknowledge that Germany and France have done something in art, yet their climate is scarcely more favorable than ours, and the Dutch have produced a school of paintings which, in the estimation of our amateurs, rivals (if indeed its productions are not more valuable than) that of the Italians; and yet the climate of Holland is certainly worse than our own. But it is absurd to talk of climate, or of the chilling effects of modern habits and tastes to a people who have produced such a literature as ours. It is absurd to say that the countrymen of Spenser, or Shakspeare, or Milton, or the contemporaries of Scott, Byron, or Coleridge, or Wordsworth, are crushed by climate; or that there is any thing to prevent our painting as well as those men wrote. If we cannot yet boast of a Raphael or a Michael Angelo, we may rest satisfied with the comfortable assurance that there is nothing to prevent our having Favored by the most genial climate, and painters as great as Shakspeare or Milton inhabiting the most romantic region on the were as poets; and if we have no Camuc- face of the globe, it was almost impossible cini, or Cornelius, or De la Roche, we may that a young and healthful nation like the at least have painters of equal merit with Dorians could struggle on to independence modern authors. It is true, however, that and civilization without accumulating those the climate is not favorable for the produc- images of beauty and of glory, which aftertion of naked statutes or for the employ- wards shone forth in such splendor; yet ment of Doric porticos; nor is our religion they struggled on for centuries before these favorable to the revival of saints and Ma- assumed a fixed or real form that could be donnas; and were there no other sources embodied for the future. Hesiod first preof the Kalon but these, we might well de- luded with a glorious drama, and gathering spair. But our literati, after long wander- together some of the floating images of beauing in the same paths in which our artists ty with which the minds of his compatriots have now lost themselves, have at last dis- were teeming, wove them into his early covered other sources of inspiration than song. But it was Homer who first embod the mere reproduction of classic models, ied the poetry of his race, in that immortal and have restored our literature to the rank song which has been the glory of his nation it holds. Till our artists have done some- and the delight of all succeeding generathing of the same sort, there is, we fear, tions. It has been disputed whether such but little hope of progress or improvement. an individual as Homer ever lived, and Among the causes of encouragement whether this be true or not, the doubt,

cian, as being the product of a people less purely patriotic; of a nation that, with much of the vigor of youth, inherited many of the vices of decay; expressing a philosophy less exalted, and a religion which had temporarily lost much of its purity and perfection. For it is true that in the arts of a country its history is written, and that they are much more faithful interpreters of it than the chronology of its kings; in them the nation speaks for itself, without constraint; and though not quite so self-evident at first sight, as in the case of Greece or Italy, we will endeavor to show that they speak of us as clearly and distinctly as in any other country.

though scarcely tenable, in this instance ] of those times might easily predicate in what shadows forth a truth of no small impor-respects Italian art would differ from Gretance. The Iliad was not the creation of an individual, but of the Greek nation; Homer, however, first fixed, in song, those ideas which had long been struggling for utterance; and, embodying the traditions of the Greeks with their religion and their poetry, built the substructure on which the edifice of Grecian art was raised; and whether this was afterwards moulded into the dramas of Sophocles, Eschylus, or Euripides, or expressed in the lyrics of Pindar or Anacreon,-whether it found a tangible shape and form in the works of Phidias or Praxiteles, or was presented to the eye in the colors of Polygnotus, or of Zeuxis,-all these were but different modes of the same feeling, the result of a sincere and enthusiastic adoration of what was great and beautiful in art.

When in England there shall exist a social state similar to what existed in Greece and Italy at the times we refer to, we may expect similar effects in art as in every thing else; but he has studied the philosophy of art to little purpose who expects that circumstances and causes so widely different as those that now exist in this country can reproduce what other causes produced in other times.

The form once given, it required but time to complete the superstructure, though it might never have attained its glorious perfection had not other circumstances combined to add to its beauty. Had the Persian never appeared at Marathon or Thermopylæ, had Salamis and Platea never witnessed those glorious triumphs of patriot- Are then the Elgin marbles and our Italism, the mind of Greece might never have ian paintings of no use to us? and has all risen to that exalted pitch which impressed the money and trouble they have cost us so noble a stamp on all her after acts; and been spent in vain? Most certainly not! As her poetry and her arts, as the voices a means of education they are invaluablethrough which her sentiments of freedom as a means to refine the mind, to point out and of glory found an utterance, would never have acquired that power and purity which is the essence of all the productions of those young days, whether we have it now in the works of her poets or her painters, her sculptors or architects.

The flame once kindled, the emulation and rivalry between the different states was sufficient to keep up the blaze, and in this respect again Greece was fortunate; but it required a greater and more glorious cause than this to produce such poetry and such art as Greece has bequeathed to us.

truth as the highest aim, and simplicity as one of the leading characteristics of the highest style of art; for all this, and much more, they are to us of the highest value, but the moment we begin to copy them they lose these properties, and instead of rivaling them we sink into manufacturing machines.

It sounds almost like silliness to remark (though the fact is so often lost sight of) that we are neither Greeks nor Italians, that our religion is not theirs, our feelings of a widely different class, and that our civilizaA similar expression of national feeling tion has taken a very different character and of national religion produced the archi- from theirs; yet we are a great and powertecture and the arts of our mediæval ances- ful people, and our history will bear comtors, which were nothing more than the parison with the history of the proudest nareflex and expression of the poetry and pow- tions of the earth; and in literature and er of the people, written in a language science we may be equalled, but few will which all then understood, and were inter-admit that we have any superior. ested in. And it was a state of things among Had we turned our attention to the fine the young republics of Italy, not very dis- arts, and left them only to express what we similar from that which had existed in believed or felt, they might ere this have Greece, that produced the Italian school. A been as creditable to us as our other works; man who studies philosophically the history | but they have, till lately, been entirely neg

lected, and now, when we are turning our attention to them, it is only with a view to imitation.

steam engines for a new Parnassus with its legends, or a Parthenon with all its architectural perfections.

One other circumstance of vital impor- We confess we have small sympathy with tance seems to have been overlooked, these laudatores temporis acti: but whether that the Greeks as a nation, as well as the they or we are right is not now the quesItalians, gave their whole energies to the tion-the thing is done; we are a practical cultivation of the fine arts, while we, on the people, worshippers of reason and truth, contrary, have devoted ours to cultivate the and cannot now go back and become foluseful arts; and it is a problem that yet lowers of their sister imagination, or adremains to be solved, whether any nation mirers of what we do not believe, and know can succeed in successfully cultivating not to be true. Our energies are and have both. Certain it is that no nation yet has, been for centuries directed to the practical and we believe we might add no individual; arts, and the same perfection and progress still there is no à priori impossibility in the is visible in them now, that was seen in the matter, though it appears, at the same time, fine arts of Greece or Italy in their best to be tolerably certain that the fine arts of and most glorious days. Every thing that so utilitarian a nation as we are must, to be is now done-every ship, for instance, that is successful, take a much more prosaic turn built, every engine or machine made—is, cr than the poetic abandon, that characterized is meant to be, an improvement on all that the glorious days of Pericles and Leo X. was done before: the shipbuilder does not Every thing with us has, for some centuries pause first to consider whether his vessel back, been taking a more and more practi- shall be built to look like a Roman triremis cal turn, from which art will scarcely be or a Venetian galley, and then consider able to escape. Eloquence, when not ad- how he may still avail himself of modern dressed to the vulgar and ignorant, has had improvements and purposes in this disguise; her wings sadly clipt, and now its highest on the contrary, he adopts every improveflight consists of merely the best arranged ment that is introduced from every coundigest of facts stated in the clearest and try, and dispenses with every form that fewest words possible. Philosophy admits is not absolutely necessary, and every of no brilliant speculations, no cherished ornament that would interfere with his dreams, or bright imaginations. Experience construction-and he has produced or is and mathematically deduced conclusions are all that can now be admitted within her narrow portals, and even in religion, a cold spirit of inquiry has succeeded to the unsuspecting faith and all confiding trust of former days.

For more than three centuries this spirit has been gaining ground with us, and every year becoming more and more essentially a part of the public mind. Friar Bacon was our Hesiod, and he of Verulam our Homer, who first gave being and form to the gods of our idolatry—the first who fixed the belief, and directed the mind of the people into the path which they have since so steadily followed; Galileo was the Thespis of our civilization; while Kepler, Newton, and Locke, like the three great dramatists of the Greeks, moulded and brought to perfection that great branch of our glorious triumphs which Watt and Arkwright, like Phidias and Ictinus, reduced to fixed and tangible shapes.

There are no doubt many who regret that the civilization of modern Europe should have taken so prosaic a turn, and who would forego our philosophy and our

producing a thing more sublime than a Greek statue. Go and look at a ship reposing in calm security and conscious power alone on the pathless and almost boundless ocean; or see her in the storm struggling in her might with the fiercest displays of elemental war, and acknowledge that we are a great and powerful race, and dare to conceive and do things before which the minds of the ancients would sink in terrified abasement.

What would now be thought of an engineer who, in constructing a steam engine, should try to make it look like a water-mill or a horse-gin, or some equally irrelevant object? This is not the course they pursue, but every engine is better than its predecessors, though only perhaps in some detail; almost the whole nation still are employed, or at least interested in perfecting steam machines, and our progress surprises sometimes ourselves. If there is to us no poetry in them, it will not be so in succeeding generations, for mankind will learn to envy those who lived in these times and took a part in the great progress of knowledge and power that marks the present

century. In the last and greatest of our mechanical triumphs-the creation of the railway locomotive-we have surpassed all that was done before; but it is too near for us to see its greatness: we smell the oil and see the smoke-and more than this, we know the men that invented and the men that make these things, and they are not sublime;—no more were the semi-barbarous hordes who sat down before Troy; but distance has almost deified them, and we certainly deserve more of posterity than either they or their bard.

It is by thus doing with the useful arts what the Greeks did to arrive at perfection in the fine arts, that we have achieved such triumphs. Thus every new work is an improvement on all that was done beforeevery step is forward. The artisan now watches the progress of his art with the same intense anxiety as in former days the artist devoted to the creation of new beauties in his there is no retrocession, no wandering about without any aim or fixed purpose, no copying now from Greece, then from Rome, or from Italy, or Germany, or India. There is a meaning and a purpose in all that is done. Power and knowledge are gained daily; and the accumulative energy of nations is advancing science and art to a point that the boldest imagination cannot reach or even conceive.

ployers; the sea with its ships, the village with its fun and festivals, and scenes of still life or domestic interests; and if they attempted history they painted their distinguished men and women dressed as they had dressed, and doing as they had done. It was by following this path that the Dutch worked out a school which even now divides with the Italian the admiration of all Europe. Among collectors Dutch pictures generally fetch a higher price than pictures of the same relative value in the more elevated schools, and this without their possessing one single quality which writers on æsthetics are in the habit of enumerating as requisite for the production of art; but to make up for this they possess originality, and what is of more importance, truthtruth to nature and to the feelings of the artist who produced them; and though we might wish they had been of a more elevated class, all must acknowledge the charm that arises from these circumstances. And can we not do what Dutchmen have done? There is little doubt that we can do that, at least, and more if we chose to follow the same path. We are a more refined and better educated people; our chivalrous history, and, above all, our national literature, afford us higher and purer sources of inspiration than they could command, and then there is more demand for art and more leisure to enjoy it in this country than ever existed in Holland. Yet we have hitherto effected but little; for instead of doing as they did, we attempted to start at once from the high grade of Grecian or of Medieval art, and, as might have been foreseen, we failed. It was not in us nor in our sympathies or our feelings; there are no sources of such inspiration about us. We have attempted a flight from the top of the ladder; we must now go back and begin at the bottom. We must build houses and churches which shall be nothing but houses and churches; we must paint and carve men and women who will be only such, acting as we act, and feeling as we feel; if we paint saints we scarcely believe in, and gods and goddesses we laugh at, and heroes we neither understand or have any sympathy with, it is not likely we shall ever do any thing great.

It is painful to turn from the contemplation of what we have done by well-directed energy in this path, to contemplate our doings in Art properly so called, which, if it be too strong a term to say they are disgraceful to us, must still be allowed to be utterly unworthy of a great and civilized people. But in this we are not singular, for nations, our contemporaries, though loud in their boastings, are not much better off; and, though they paint acres of showy pictures, have no more real art and no more feeling for it than ourselves. Of all modern nations the Dutch alone have escaped, or nearly so, from the vicious system we have been trying to expose. When the Reformation changed their religion they left off painting saints and martyrs, but they neither stopped painting altogether, as we and the Germans did, nor did they, as the French, turn at once to copy the Italians. Of the latter the good Hol- But we have around us other sources of landers had little knowledge, and still less inspiration equal to those that any people sympathy for their productions; Dutch art-ever possessed, and such as will never be ists, therefore, fortunately free from ex- exhausted or worked out. No nation ever traneous influence, went on painting sub- loved inanimate nature more than we do, jects that interested them and their em- or had more opportunities of cultivating