139.

A

good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree, -the poco-più and the poco-meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and

more.

A

140.

RTISTS are interesting to me as men. Their work, as the product of mind, should lead us to a knowledge of their own being; else, as I have often said and written, our admiration of art is a species of atheism. To forget the soul in its highest manifestation is like forgetting God in his creation.

“L

141.

Es images peints du corps humain, dans les figures où domine par trop le savoir anatomique, en révèlant trop clairement à l'homme les secrets de sa

structure, lui en découvrent aussi par trop ce qu'on pourrait appeler le point de vue matériel, ou, si l'on veut, animal."

This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have sometimes thought that his very materialism, so grand, and so peculiar in character, may have arisen out of his profound religious feeling, his stern morality, his lofty conceptions of our mortal, as well as immortal destinies. He appears to have beheld the human form only in a pure and sublime point of view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation, fearfully and wondrously constructed, for the spirit of man,

"The outward shape,

And unpolluted temple of the mind." This is the reason that Michal-Angelo's materialism affects us so differently from that of Rubens. In the first, the predominance of form attains almost a moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness. Michal-Angelo believed in the resurrection of THE BODY, emphatically; and in his Last Judgment the dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty to suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben's picture of the same subject (at Munich) the bodily presence of resuscitated life is revolting, reminding us of the text of St. Paul "Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God." Both pictures are

aesthetically false, but artistically miracles, and should thus be considered and appreciated.

I have never looked on those awful figures in the Medici Chapel without thinking what stupendous intellects must inhabit such stupendous forms — terrible in their quietude; but they are supernatural, rather than divine.

"Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde; Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Zürnender, wie ist Dein Gott!"

John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beautiful essay "MICHAEL-ANGELO, A POET," says truly that "Dante worshipped the philosophy of religion, and Michael-Angelo adored the philosophy of art." The religion of the one and the art of the other were evolved in a strange combination of mysticism, materialism, and moral grandeur. The two men were congenial in character and in genius.

Gs.

AND ON CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN HISTORY AND POETRY CONSIDERED AS SUBJECTS OF MODERN ART.

1848.

I SHOULD begin by admitting the position laid down by Frederick Schlegel, that art and nature are not identical. "Men," he says, "traduce nature, who falsely give her the epithet of artistic; " for though nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend all nature. Nature, in her sources of pleasures and contemplation is infinite; and art, as her reflection in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in her powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of art and its capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite,

has circumscribed the bounds of finite art; the one is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if poetic art in the interpreting of nature share in her infinitude, yet in representing nature through material, form, and colour, she is, - oh, how limited!

If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of limitation as determined as the musical scale, narrowest of all are the limitations of sculpture, to which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place; and it is in regard to sculpture, we find most frequently those mistakes which arise from a want of knowledge of the true principles of art.

Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the limitations of the art of sculpture as to the management of the material in giving form and expression; its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection of the complex and conventional; its bounded capabilities as to choice of subject; must we also admit, with some of the most celebrated critics of art, that there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek? And that every deviation from pure Greek art must be regarded as a depravation and perversion of the powers and subjects of sculpture? I do not see that this follows.

It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the term of its development. In so far as regards the