Let us advert for a moment to the enormous difference of difficulty between forming and amending the taste of a public – between legislation and reform: either task is that of Genius; both have adherents, disciples, champions; but persecution, derision, checks will generally oppose the efforts of the latter, whilst submission, gratitude, encouragement, attend the smooth march of the former. No madness is so incurable as wilful perverseness; and when men can once, with Medea, declare that they know what is best, and approve of it, but must, or choose to follow the worst, perhaps a revolution worse to be dreaded than the disease itself, must precede the possibility of a cure. Though, as it has been observed, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries granted to the artists little more than the attention due to ingenious craftsmen; they were, from the object of their occupations and the taste of their employers, the legitimate precursors of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, who did no more than raise their style to the sublimity and pathos of the subject. These trod with loftier gait and bolder strides a path, on which the former had sometimes stumbled, often crept, but always advanced: the public and the artist went hand in hand – but on what spot of Europe can the young artist of our day be placed to meet with circumstances equally favourable? Arm him, if you please, with the epic and dramatic powers of M. Agnolo and Raffaello, where are the religious and civic establishments, where the temples and halls open to receive, where the public prepared to call them forth, to stimulate, to reward them?
Idle complaints! I hear a thousand voices reply! You accuse the public of apathy for the Arts, while public and private exhibitions tread on each other's heels, panorama opens on panorama, and the splendour of galleries dazzles the wearied eye, and the ear is stunned with the incessant stroke of the sculptor's hammer, and our temples narrowed by crowds of monuments shouldering each other to perpetuate the memory of Statesmen who deluded, or of Heroes who bled at a Nation's call! Look round all Europe – revolve the page of history from Osymandias to Pericles, from Pericles to Constantine – and say what age, what race stretched forth a stronger arm to raise the drooping genius of Art? Is it the public's fault if encouragement is turned into a job, and dispatch and quantity have supplanted excellence and quality, as objects of the artist's emulation? – And do you think that accidental and temporary encouragement can invalidate charges founded on permanent causes? What blew up the Art, will in its own surcease terminate its success. Art is not ephemeral; Religion and Liberty had for ages prepared what Religion and Liberty were to establish among the ancients: the germ of the Olympian Jupiter, and the Minerva of Phidias, lay in the Gods of Aëgina, and that of Theseus, Hercules, and Alcibiades in the blocks of Harmodios and Aristogiton.
If the revolution of a neighbouring nation emancipated the people from the yoke of superstition, it has perhaps precipitated them to irreligion. He who has no visible object of worship is indifferent about modes, and rites, and places; and unless some great civil provisional establishment replaces the means furnished by the former system, the Arts of France, should they disdain to become the minions and handmaids of fashion, may soon find that the only public occupation left for them will be a representation of themselves, deploring their new-acquired advantages. By a great establishment, I mean one that will employ the living artists, raise among them a spirit of emulation dignified by the objects of their occupation, and inspire the public with that spirit; not an ostentatious display of ancient and modern treasures of genius, accumulated by the hand of conquest or of rapine. To plunder the earth was a Roman principle, and it is not perhaps matter of lamentation that Modern Rome, by a retaliation of her own principle, is made to pay the debt contracted with mankind. But let none fondly believe that the importation of Greek and Italian works of Art is an importation of Greek and Italian genius, taste, establishments and means of encouragement; without transplanting and disseminating these, the gorgeous accumulation of technic monuments is no more than a dead capital, and, instead of a benefit, a check on living Art.
With regard to ourselves, the barbarous, though then perhaps useful rage of image-breakers in the seventeenth century, seems much too gratuitously propagated as a principle in an age much more likely to suffer from irreligion than superstition. A public body inflamed by superstition, suffers, but it suffers from the ebullitions of radical heat, and may return to a state of health and life; whilst a public body plunged into irreligion, is in a state of palsied apathy, the cadaverous symptom of approaching dissolution. Perhaps neither of these two extremes may be precisely our own state; we probably float between both. But surely in an age of inquiry and individual liberty of thought, when there are almost as many sects as heads, there was little danger that the admission of Art to places of devotion could ever be attended by the errors of idolatry; nor have the motives which resisted the offer of ornamenting our churches perhaps any eminent degree of ecclesiastic or political sagacity to recommend them. Who would not rejoice if the charm of our Art, displaying the actions and example of the sacred Founder of our religion and of his disciples in temples and conventicles, contributed to enlighten the zeal, stimulate the feelings, sweeten the acrimony, or dignify the enthusiasm of their respective audiences? The source of the grand monumental style of Greece was Religion with Liberty. At that period the artist, as Pliny expresses himself, was the property of the public, or in other words, he considered himself as responsible for the influence of his works on public principle: with the decline of Religion and Liberty his importance and the Art declined; and though the Egyptian custom of embalming the dead and suffering the living to linger had not yet been adopted, from the organ of the public he became the tool of private patronage; and private patronage, however commendable or liberal, can no more supply the want of general encouragement, than the conservatories and hotbeds of the rich, the want of a fertile soil or genial climate. Luxury in times of taste keeps up execution in proportion as it saps the dignity and moral principle of the Art; gold is the motive of its exertions, and nothing that ennobles man was ever produced by gold. When Nero transported the Pontic Apollo to the golden house, and furnished the colossal shoulders of the god with his own head, Sculpture lent her hand to legitimate the sacrilege: why should Painting be supposed to have been more squeamish when applied to decorate the apartments of his pleasures and the cabinet of Poppæa with Milesian pollutions, or the attitudes of Elephantis?
The effect of honours and rewards has been insisted on as a necessary incentive to artists: they ought indeed to be, they sometimes are, the result of superior powers; but accidental or partial honours cannot create Genius, nor private profusion supply public neglect. No genuine work of Art ever was or ever can be produced, but for its own sake; if the artist do not conceive to please himself, he never will finish to please the world. Can we persuade ourselves that all the treasures of the globe could suddenly produce an Iliad or Paradise Lost, or the Jupiter of Phidias, or the Capella Sistina? 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. Nature herself has set her barriers between age and age, between genius and genius, which no mortal overleaps; all attempts to raise to perfection at once, what can only be reared by a succession of epochs, must prove abhortive and nugatory: the very proposals of premiums, honours, and rewards to excite talent or rouse genius, prove of themselves that the age is unfavourable to Art; for, had it the patronage of the public, how could it want them?
We have now been in possession of an Academy more than half a century; all the intrinsic means of forming a style alternate at our commands; professional instruction has never ceased to direct the student; premiums are distributed to rear talent and stimulate emulation, and stipends are granted to relieve the wants of genius and finish education. And what is the result? If we apply to our Exhibition, what does it present, in the aggregate, but a gorgeous display of varied powers, condemned, if not to the beasts, at least to the dictates of fashion and vanity? What therefore can be urged against the conclusion, that, as far as the public is concerned, the Art is sinking, and threatens to sink still deeper, from the want of demand for great and significant works? Florence, Bologna, Venice, each singly taken, produced in the course of the sixteenth century alone, more great historic pictures than all Britain taken together, from its earliest attempts at painting to its present efforts. What are we to conclude from this? that the soil from which Shakspeare and Milton sprang, is unfit to rear the Genius of Poetic Art? or find the cause of this seeming impotence in that general change of habits, customs, pursuits, and amusements, which for near a century has stamped the national character of Europe with apathy or discountenance of the