is with nature and with nature alone that the artistic faculty is to occupy itself, it is from nature and nature alone that it can be acquired. But is it necessary to his ultimate success that the artist should enter the school of nature without a teacher; or has it been decreed that in this department of activity alone the experience of one generation shall avail nothing to those which follow? Must the tide of ignorance again overflow the field of his labours, so soon as the breath has departed from the body of the discoverer; or shall he be forced to return to the bosom of nature the secret which by long solicitation he had won? Were such the case, truly of all tasks that of the artist would be the hardest, of all roads his the longest. In every other sphere of effort, before anything approaching to perfection could be reached, men have had to stand on the shoulders of men, and generations of generations. The chain by which they mounted was of many links, forged by many artificers. Nor has any one that we know of pointed out a principle according to which the arts form an exception to this law, though many at the present day seem willing to recommend its practical violation. To us it seems that no more recondite faculty than that which is known by the name of "mother wit" is requisite to enable us to conclude, that the simplest method of becoming acquainted with any process whatsoever, consists in examining the manner in which it has been performed by others; and consequently, that if the mystery of artistic treatment is to be learned at all by the majority of men, it will be by comparing those works in which it is exhibited, with the actual productions of nature. It is with the lamp of what Sir J. Reynolds calls "experience" thus lighted, that they are to seek for the golden corns of nature's permanent idea amidst the chaff of her diseased and deformed individual productions. "The investigation, I grant, is painful, and I know but of one method of shortening the road, that is, by a careful study of the works of the ancient sculptors." Such was the opinion of Sir Joshua, and notwithstanding all that has been written, and in a certain sense written learnedly and well, on æsthetics lately, we know nothing better than the chapters in which he treats of what was and was not to be acquired by, what was and was not to be sought in, these studies. The benefit which he looked for was by no means a crowding of our galleries with copies from, or variations on classical works, but the acquisition on the part of artists themselves of what he called experience of nature's modes of production, what we have called the faculty of artistic vision. But if the tendency of such studies be to develop this faculty, the absurdity of the prevalent notion that their effect is to cramp originality, becomes at once apparent; since it is its possession alone which can enable the artist, with any approach

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to safety, to quit the path which custom has trodden. Carrying as it were the secret of nature within himself, he can boldly and confidently push to the very limit of her possible working, nay, even when he altogether oversteps the possible, he need be in no terror of falling into the extravagant or eccentric, because though he has forsaken the letter, he feels that he is still guided by the spirit of her law. There is no distinction. more important, and none more frequently forgotten than that between a departure from, and a soaring above individual or specific instances, between what is odd and what is imaginative, between a perverse violation of the laws by which nature acts, and a free and unconstrained treatment of natural objects according to these laws. For the former little beyond wilfulness is requisite; the latter, which is the groundwork of all true originality, can be effected only in and through the artistic faculty of which we have spoken, and the methods which lead most directly to its culture, must not be neglected, if we wish a foundation for its exercise to be laid. "Das echte neue," says Schlegel, “keimt nur aus dem alten." All originality which is not the legitimate consequence of a law as old as the creation itself, is worthy of no better name than artistic raving, and those whose ambition it is to possess this law, or what is better still, to be possessed by it, will scarcely act wisely if they shut their eyes and their ears against the lessons of those who have been happy enough to seize it in former times. There could scarcely be a more striking proof of the fact that lawlessness is not the root to originality, than is furnished by the insignificant results of that "unchartered freedom," which modern schools of art have allowed themselves.

From what we formerly said it appears that, according to our view, the only limit to this department of art is where nature oversteps the boundaries of her regular and healthy working; and that an object, however mean, whether man, animal, or thing, if represented in its perfect state, and with no abnormal varieties of expression, would in a certain sense be a work of ideal art. But though perfection in kind thus forms the principle of exclusion, it does not furnish the principle of selection. There are many subjects which, though treated in such a manner as to satisfy the former, would by no means fulfil those of the latter; though no subject, however lofty, if treated without regard to the absolute laws of form, whatever might be the merits of the treatment otherwise, could by possibility be entitled to the appellation of a work of ideal art. The distinction between the primary and secondary requirements of a work of art, is thus pointed out by Müller, in language which, after what we have said, will require no commentary even to those least familiar with German æsthetic writings.

"The artistic form must, in the first place, in order to excite a connected emotion in the sensitive faculty, possess a general conformity to laws which is manifested in the observance of mathematical relations or organic forms of life; without this regularity, it ceases to be artistic form."

After illustrating this by music and sculpture, he continues:— "But this conformity to law is not, in itself, capable of expressing an internal life-it is only a condition of representation-the boundary of the artistic forms, which range to and fro within, modifying, but, on the whole, preserving this conformity."

He then proceeds to the secondary requirement of artistic form, with reference to which he is by no means so satisfactory.

"Whilst this regularity is the first requisite in the artistic form generally, beauty is a more immediate predicate of the artistic form in reference to sensation. We call those forms beautiful which cause the soul to feel in a manner that is grateful, truly salutary, and entirely conformable to its nature, which, as it were, produce in it vibrations that are in accordance with its inmost structure."

This seems, indeed, a threatening passage, and to those of our readers who are not metaphysically disposed, may not unnaturally have caused apprehensions that they were about to be let into a discussion of the nature of the beautiful; but we shall at once relieve them from all such terrors, by mentioning that our object in quoting it was simply to point to the necessity, in works of ideal art, of the recognition of another principle than that which we had laid down as the excluding one. It is from the right use of this latter principle, which we regard as the vehicle not only of sentiments of beauty, but of all elevated emotions whatever, that its civilizing influence must be anticipated.

If art is truly to raise the imagination and thinking of a people, it must be the expression not only of perfection in each particular kind, (in which case it would be little more than an exponent of natural history,) but of perfection, (and something more than perfection, in the negative sense, of the absence of deformity,) in the most perfect kinds, in the highest forms of organized life. Its proper function has ever been to give sensible expression to the loftiest conceptions of the age to which it belonged, and it is from the fidelity with which, in most cases, it has discharged this function, that its history comes to have such important bearings upon the general history of mental progress. Of the manner in which it thus reflects its age, the most remarkable instance, and also the most easily traceable, is to be found in its short but glorious existence in Greece. If we take the age of Phidias as the culminating point of the earlier schools, and the Peloponnesian War as marking the period of transition, we have not only a. regular progress from poverty of concep

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tion and utter barbarism of execution, through all the stages of immobility, stiffness, and hardness, to perfection on the one hand, and on the other an equally noticeable decline, through effeminacy, mannerism, and affectation to an idealess manual dexterity; but we have each of these stages corresponding to the condition of the people, and the character of the most prominent historical personages at the periods to which they correspond.

Our limits forbid the attempt to verify this observation in detail, but, by way of illustration, we may glance at the relative condition of society and the arts immediately before and after the Peloponnesian War.

In the severe majesty of the works of Phidias, the simple and manly spirit which, notwithstanding their love of magnificence, characterized the Athenians of his day, and of which Pericles may be regarded as the impersonation, found a corresponding expression. The enthusiastic and lofty selfconsciousness which the Persian successes had engendered, are scarcely more conspicuous in the monuments which have come down to us from this time, than a certain austerity which we are told Pericles exhibited even in his personal appearance and manner. "He had a gravity of countenance," says Plutarch, "which relaxed not into laughter; a firm and even tone of voice; a quiet manner of walking, and a decency of dress, which no vehemence of speaking ever put into disorder." The impression of quiet and unimpassioned dignity with which the presence of the politician inspired his friend and companion, the sculptor has conveyed by his works, and in neither case was its appearance accidental, but in both the necessary external manifestation of the internal life of the time. The subjects which Phidias selected were such as to call for the conscious expression of ideas rather than an enthusiastic resigning of the imagination to sensuous emotions. By far the greater number of his works are statues of gods, in which the majesty of the divine idea is made conspicuous through the respective characteristics of the particular divinities. The ideals which he perfected, and on which he impressed the types which were followed in after times, were the Minerva and the Jupiter facts in themselves pretty significant of the tendencies of his school. Such was the character of Athenian art, when Athenian life, social and political, was at the summit of health and vigour. But the jealousy of Sparta lighted up a war which, during a space of nearly thirty years, exerted a wasting influence on the whole Greek race.

"At its extinction," says Kugler, "not less in severe Sparta than in excitable Athens had the antique dignity of Greek life disappeared. A new generation had grown up during its continuance, who, incapable of deriving gratification from internal resources, sought it in the external enjoyments and excitements of the moment. Thus their art

also experienced a change. For the execution of great public monuments the means were often awanting, still more frequently the desire, and Architecture consequently was deprived of its main supports; whilst plastic art, in place of that quietness of spirit which characterized the works of the former period, acquired a direction towards the expression of passion, the representation of sensual longing and sensuous charms."

In these circumstances, the second Attic school arose under Scopas and Praxiteles, and the immediate change of subjects is remarkable. Minerva and Jupiter give place to Venus and Bacchus; and as the sentiments which they represented became prevalent, the ideals in which these sentiments were embodied were brought to perfection. We have no one political character who represents this period with the same fidelity with which Pericles corresponded to the other, though we may regard the ill-regulated genius of Alcibiades, to whom the love of power and enjoyment, not the sense of duty, gave law, as already foreshadowing a state of society which speedily became too relaxed to render it capable of producing a well-marked and consistent representative man.

But if the change of subjects was remarkable as an index of the state of society and the habits of thinking, that of their treatment of the same subject was no less so. We have selected one from the pages of the works before us which we shall present in a condensed form to our readers, as a specimen of the extent to which art may, in this respect, become the commentator of history. It is the ideal of Mercury :

"1st, The earliest form in which Hermes was represented was that of a bearded head on the top of a square pillar. As the bringer of good luck there was a desire in these simple times to see him at every turn, and hence it was necessary to have him in a cheap form. The practice of placing the head on a pillar existed also with reference to the other gods, and, besides the reason which we have assigned, arose no doubt from the absence of artistic skill.

"2d, Having gradually passed from the character of the god of good luck to that of an economical and mercantile deity, of a protector of profit and commerce, (zigdãos,) he became the patron of heralds, whose duty it was to facilitate the business transactions of early ages. In this manner he obtained the form under which we must think of him throughout the whole of the elder poetry, that of a sturdy active. man, with a strong pointed beard, braided hair, clad in a robe (aus) thrown back as the most suitable dress for rapid motion, with a travelling cap' on his head, wings to his feet, and in his hand the caduceus. This was the hard style of representation which preceded the Peloponnesian War.

"3d, By the younger Attic school the character of the god was regarded in an entirely new light. He was viewed as the bestower of corporeal vigour, and was consequently represented in the form of