FINE ARTS.

GIIIZOT ON THE FINE MITS.*

To the students of M. Guizot's works this book will present interest on more grounds than one. It is an early production; having been composed between the years 1808 and 1814, when Victory, antagonistic in her in- fluences on living art, had succeeded in making Paris the head-quarters of the art of the past ; and it exhibits in yet one more province of thought a degree of that quality of critical systematizing which has earned for its exponents the title of "Doctrinaires." With this publication M. Guizot cornea pretty near to having exercised his pen on the full round of subjects within the range of general literature and study.

The book has two main divisions ; the first consisting of a disquisition on the respective offices and capabilities of sculpture, painting, and en- graving ; the second of criticisms on individual pictures of the Italian and French schools. The considerations in the first division may be termed rather correct and sensible than profound : so, at least, they read now. So much generally recognized truth has by this time been said upon the fundamental points of these questions, that profundity flow- s-days consists more in broad development and adaptation, and in piercing subtilty of illustration, than in the adoption and level enforcement of what may be even impregnably true. For the full expression of these more important qualities a poetical style is requisite,—not florid, but im- bued with a constant sense of beauty, and reference to nature as a living reality ; and in them alone can reside whatever originality stops short of paradox or wrongheadedness.

M. Guizot defines the great aim of sculpture to be beauty, nature that of painting : the former should represent "situations," as distinguished from actions, the legitimate province of the latter. This term, "situations," is certainly more accurate and comprehensive than the vague word "repose," currently used with the same intention in refer- ence to sculpture ; and the general proposition may safely be accepted. The fixing upon beauty in the main precept does not satisfy us so thoroughly. We would say that sculpture has abstract principles ulti- mately in view. Her forms should be incarnations of principles—(we do not, of course, mean mere allegory)—something more than exempli- fications of them, such as painting is mainly, and even that not always necessarily, concerned with. The ideal, of which we hear so much in

The Fine Arts : their Nature and Relations. By M. Guizot. Translated, with the assistance of the Author, by George Grove. With Illttstrationa drawn on Wood by George ficharfjunior. Published by Bosworth.

connexion with sculpture, does indeed include beauty, or a standard of form free from accidental peculiarity ; but its very name implies that it

also includes the idea, or quintessence, of whatever is represented. We do not, however, dispute that the sculptor, in working towards the em- bodiment of abstract principles should select those of which beauty is an element ; only we conceive that this is his secondary, not his primary duty. Nor would we narrow the interpretation of our own formula : there may be an abstract principle in a dancing Faun as well as in a sym- bolism of Nature.

The broad distinctions indicated by M. Guizot will and ought to be acknowledged—at any rate, so far as they go. He states his auxiliary positions, and selects his illustrations, with judgment, an evident and now well-proved aptitude for analysis, and a perception of what will tell ; altogether, with the air of a man who has thought for himself, but who conscious that his real bent leans in another direction, is in no mood to reject established authority. This is more apparent, however, in the second section of the book ; the criticisms in which chime in with the ortho- dox Lanzi and Menge tune chorally enough. In the present section, there is a good deal of pertinent remark on the inapplicability of strong action to sculpture, and the erroneousness of a direct study of the forms of sculpture in painting. It is well observed, that "if the head of the Lao- can were to be faithfully copied, with the livid hue of suffering on the complexion, the expression of anguish in the upturned eyes, the deepened colour of the veins, and all the other lifelike touches which a painter would add, the effect would be one of unnatural, not to say distressing, exaggeration."

But we meet every now and then with arguments and illustrations less proof against confutation than the above. Thus, in combating the axiom that "the aim of sculpture is to represent the form of figures, while that of painting is to reproduce their general appearance,' —an axiom which M. Guizot terms "far from exact,"—he appears to us only to take a roundabout way of saying the same thing. After showing that a sculp- tured figure "possesses all the outward characteristics of the human body, even in detail," he proceeds—

"it is the aim of the painter, with the aid of colours, to place upon a plane surface figures which shall appear to the spectator as they would in reality if seen from a distance. Now the eyes see at once only one side of an object, and that side not a plane surface. * * * * It is by distributing the lights and shadows as he finds them in nature ; by placing his colours as they appear in the original ; and by modifying the lights and shadows by the colours on which they fall, or the colours by the light which brightens and the shade which obscures them,—and which thus give all the varieties of tint,—it is by these means that the painter attains to that faithful and lifelike representation which is the object of his efforts, and at the same time the ultimate aim of the art which he practises."

What, we would ask, is all this unless a reproduction of general ap- pearance in contradistinction to a representation of form ? The axiom may possibly not be "exact," but the reverse is not proved here. That which M. Guizot deduces from his own premises comes to the same thing, and is much less concise and self-evident. Surely, far less "exact" is his sweeping affirmation, in claiming an unlimited range for painting, that "the most eventful life has no occurrences of which she cannot avail herself." Now let us take a subject which a yet greater unprofessional proposes, in Sartor Itesartus, to "some living Angelo or Rosa," though not without doubt "whether it were easy of execution on the canvass" : "George Fox, on that morning when he spreads out his cutting-board for the last time, and cuts cow-hides by unwonted patterns" into his "one perennial suit of leather." By what process human or divine, is this to be made to represent an act of heroic protest! against shams, or anything beyond a shoemaker cutting leather— by unwonted patterns," indeed, but meaningless as unwonted—with a parade of superfluous excitement ? It were idle to answer that the few sparse individuals familiar with por- traits of Fox, and with his story, will recognize' the man and divine the incident : as well might one assert that the subject is peculiarly suited for sculpture because the imitative suit of leather could be actually per- foratedtand thus made capable of containing a real body.

The influence of French classicism, so supreme at the time this book was written, has left its traces. The author speaks of the range of his- torical painting as extending "from the death of Eudamidas to the battles of Alexander." Akin to the same feeling are the frequent quotation of Mengs and the strong predilection for the Caracci school. It is not per- haps surprising, though we think it far from a good sign, that this school should he generally admired and deferred to by cultivated persons not specially given to the study of art. Its works have a kind of lecturing qualify, as though they assumed to be the representatives of art as a pe- culiar craft ; they are evidently self-confident, and betray no signs of experimental indecision. All this has an imposing effect on such persons. They feel as if, through the canvass, a highly-qualified professor, who had directed his attention to other pursuits than their own, addressed them, saying, "Depend upon it, I know all about the thing." In itself, the school is neither intellectual nor strong in its appeal to the sympathies. Such docile admiration may be carried too far. There is a point at which every coherent intellect should make a stand and assert its own perception of right and wrong. We may sleet the case of the "St. Jerome," or " Giorno," of Correggio—an idol of the Caraeci school, and lauded heaven-high by Menge and Algarotti. M. Guizot shall describe and eulogize it

"The subject is one of a kind very common in that day, in which the painter WfI8 prompted by his individual feeling of devotion to bring together

in one picture the objects of his veneration, without much regard to the order of time. Saint Jerome is not more conspicuous than any of the other persons. He stands at the extreme left of the picture,—his knees slightly bent, as if to take off somewhat from his great height; he is accompanied by his lion, and is as naked as if still in his desert retreat; he is offering his works through an angel to the infant Saviour, who sits in the centre of the

picture in the lap of his mother. To the right is Mary Magdalen on her knees, leaning her head and arm on the Virgin ; she has taken the foot of the holy child, and is bringing it caressingly near her cheek ; behind her is an angel holding and appearing to smell the odour of the box of spikenard which Mary is at a future day to pour over the feet of her Lord.

" Correggio had a wonderful power of depicting the soft, tender, and graceful feelings ; and in this famous composition he has shown his peculiar characteristic in the very highest degree. The whole picture is filled with the charm diffused by the adorable infant. The angel, who holds open the works of the saint, and points to a place in the page, is smiling just as a grown child does over another less than itself, of which it is accustomed to take care, and that so naturally,' says Vasari, 'that one is compelled to smile with it.' The look of the child is very merry and

lively ; he is pointing with his hand as if he understood ; in the face of the Nrirgin there is a gleam of pleasure like that of a mother amused by the play of her child. The austere St. Jerome is quite absorbed in the contem- plation of this happy picture. The slight cast of melancholy which is thrown over the lovely figure of the Magdalen, is perhaps indicative less of any pre- sentiment of the fate of the child whom she caresses with such unrestrained affection, than of the fact that she is lavishing her tenderness on an infant who cannot comprehend it."

We have no intention to interfere with, or detract from, the technical merits of this picture. Let us assume that it is perfect in colour and chiaroscuro, magical in individual expression. What is its meaning—where its devotional sentiment or purpose ? Is it not, considered according to the rules of common sense, an incongruous, even a stupid jumble, disregard- ing much besides "the order of time " ? A gigantic athlete, with a medi- tative head, attended by a skull and a lion, (about as much like a sheep as a lion, by the by,) poises a tortuous form to contemplate the presenta- tion of his works, written in a subsequent age, to the earth-dwelling Ma- donna and Child_ The child is a gamesome infant, not the foreshadow of a Messiah. The work altogether is a confounding of two things essen- tially different—a symbolic religious picture, and a domestic picture, the personages of which, though themselves objects of devotion, are here pre- sented not devotionally even for a domestic treatment. It is not to be said that, according to this view, all that immense series of works in which the holy persons are portrayed in company with saints of other ages is condemned. The distinction is palpable, and was heedfully ob- served by the earlier painters. In their productions the several persons and actions are indeed approximated, but do not coalesce ; and the inte- gral result is symbolic. So it is, for instance, in the Francia in our Na- tional Gallery; where the infant Christ, the Virgin, and St. Anna, on one plane, St. Sebastian, St. Paul, St. Romuald, and St. Lawrence, on another, are present together, but not acting together. Here, on the contrary, fact, possibility, and symbolic consistency, are alike set at defi- ance. Before leaving the picture, we may observe that M. Guizot seems to have been labouring under an attack of French sentiment, when, in the meaning he attributes to the Magdalen's expression, he credited Correggio with one incongruity more.

The translation of the book has been well executed. A casual Galli- cism peers out here and there,—as where Mr. Grove talks of "the lovely figure [figure, countenance] of the Magdalen " : but generally it reads as idiomatic English. Mr. Scharf's illustrations leave something to be de- sired, especially in expression.