THE KING'S SON.

A BALLAD.

BY CHARLES MACKAY.

PAINTING AND DESIGN.*

"WHAT are these marbles remarkable for?" said a respectable gentleman at the Museum, to one of the attendants, after looking attentively round all the Elgin marbles.

Why, sir," said the man, with propriety, "because they are so like life!"

"Like life!" repeated the gentleman with the greatest contempt "Why, what of that?" and walked away.

If we are to believe Mr. Haydon, this worthy gentleman must have been a Senior Royal Academician; some contemporary or follower of Reynolds, who said, "It is better to diversify our particulars from the broad and general idea of things, than vainly attempt to ascend from particulars to this general idea;"-in fact, to form a general and broad idea of nature and life, and then to condescend to study the details by which such manifest themselves. What progress could philosophy ever have made upon such principles; and what could have been expected of painting under such tuition?

It would be a profound egotism on the part of Mr. Haydon, if he were to claim to himself the sole credit of having advocated and introduced correct principles of art into this country: it came here with the pressure from without. Long ago adopted on the Continent, it came as a natural sequence of international communication, where, opposed for a time by the great portrait painters of the day, its triumph was still sure and certain. Wilkie dissected under Charles Bell with Haydon, but Wilkie contented himself with applying the principles thus gained at the fountain-head of all knowledge-intimacy with details, which can alone lend boldness to the hand-while Haydon, from a peculiarity of mental constitution, rushed into the lists of opposition, and willingly sought and gained martyrdom in the cause of art reformation. It is hard to be in the right, and never to have it allowed; and it is equally hard to see principles we have always advocated, ultimately take the ascendant, and to remember that we have toiled without reward, and suffered without relief, in their cause. But this only shews that it is wiser for genius to prove its superiority by its works, than by its arguments. This was the manner in which Byron proved to the Edinburgh reviewers, that he was a poet.

Wilkie, Edwin Landseer, Eastlake, Mulready, Lance, Collins, and a host of others, have worked on the principles advocated by Burke, Haydon, and others, of drawing with an exact knowledge of the anatomy or structure of parts. Public competition, as opened by her Majesty's Commission of Fine Arts, and, it is to be hoped, by the Art Union, offers fields independent of, and equally honourable with, the acquiescences of an Academy, even if all its members had continued in their preference of colour to correct design; and we have now a commission for the improvement of design in manufactures, and it is to be hoped we shall soon have a school of design, as applied to art generally.

Reynolds was of opinion that art would rise to its greatest glory in

* Lectures on Painting and Design. By B. R. Haydon, Historical Painter. London: Longman and Co.

England, and Haydon, who is a generous critic, says, “I know no glory to which it can rise, where his genius will not be felt." West said, he knew no people, since the Greeks, so capable of carrying it to the greatest excellence. And Richardson said, "I am no prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but if ever the great, the beautiful, and grand style of art revives, it will be in England;" to which, with his customary enthusiasm, Haydon adds, "Stay in Britain all ye who glory in enterprise; stay in Britain, and make her greater than Italy!" Every painter has his beau-ideal in art. Reynolds had his Michael Angelo; Haydon has his Phidias; and far be it from us to detract from the extraordinary merits of the so-called Elgin marbles; but we doubt very much if the Greeks were acquainted with human anatomy. Mr. Haydon argues this question at length, in the affirmative; and yet his conclusions are singular, for he almost admits that the surgeons of Greece were not, as is generally admitted, till Galen's time, acquainted with human anatomy; and yet, from a passage of Hippocrates, in which that great man says that anatomy belongs less to the medical art, than to the art of design; he believes that the adorner of the Parthenon was acquainted with anatomy, while the eminent medical men of antiquity were in ignorance thereof. Is it utterly impossible for art to have moulded the back of Theseus, or the veins on Neptune's breast, without a school of anatomy? Is it not often the province of genius to seize upon those facts which are only methodically classed ages afterwards? Did not all the great masters of the middle ages, Michael Angelo, Titian, Raffaelle, Correggio, Rubens, and Vandyke, master the human head before the great principles upon which alone the standard of perfection, in this most beautiful portion of the human figure, the most important and the most intellectual, even as now advocated by Haydon, were discovered?

But admitting, as is now done by all unperverted judgments, that correctness of design is essential to a high school of art, and that such correctness can only be obtained by a study of nature and of details, still we doubt very much if either art would be advanced or benefited, or even if it is possible to establish a standard of perfection in the human form. "The exertions of painters and sculptors," says the author of "The Studies of Nature," "in general do them much honour; but they demonstrate the weakness of art, which falls below nature just in proportion as it aims at uniting more of her harmonies." Such a standard would inevitably require to be modified with the qualities to be represented. Thus Haydon himself very truly points out that the muscular division of the arm in heroes of antiquity, born strong and high-bred, is stringy, neat, and elegant, and quite different from that vulgarity of a paviour's or blacksmith's arms, with which Michael Angelo, whose anatomy was always excessive, gifted his Moses; and yet such a design, unfit for an Achilles or a Theseus, would be quite correct in a Hercules-indeed, we see it carried to its extreme in the Torso.

Comparing the position of the eyes in man and in quadrupeds, it is found that in man they are generally at the centre, while those of the quadruped are above the centre; hence Mr. Haydon adopts this as the principle for a standard head, but there have been exceptions to this rule-Hippocrates, Socrates, Bacon, Buchanan, and Sir Walter Scott, had their eyes below the centre. The standard is not, therefore, applicable in painting high intellectual character.

Again, the standard of form in the head itself would not apply alike to a Socrates and a Nero, no more than the same contour of face would apply to a Diana and a Niobe. In such cases, as in all others, art must be regulated by the closest possible study of nature, and not of an admitted, fixed, and arbitrary standard; and it is by such a union of nature with the ideal, that high art will achieve perfection.*

It is a pleasing subject of contemplation to find that in these lectures upon the all-importance of design in painting, the basis reposes upon a sound doctrine, and that it embraces at the onset, the existing perfection of knowledge. Mr. Haydon's anatomy is not the superficial anatomy admitted by many; it comprises the anatomy of expression as first given to the scientific world by Sir Charles Bell, and those physiological theories for the peculiar formation of the human head which are becoming daily more accepted by rising anatomists. The principles, therefore, advocated by Mr. Haydon, however much they may be subsequently extended, are likely to remain in their elementary constitution, as stable as the frieze of the Parthenon itself. It is curious, however, to remark upon other points, how often he who is cunning of foil and fence is incompetent when thrown upon his own resources; so long as Mr. Haydon is on the offensive, he is sparkling and brilliant, but like many others, when he has to resign action for deed, he is much less successful; take for example his definition of composition as "the art of arranging the quantities composed of the parts, which make up the materials used to convey to the mind, through the eye, the story intended." Was ever anything less felicitously expressed? Much more agreeable is the

following:

"Let your colour be exquisite, let your light and shadow be perfect, let your expression be touching, let your forms be heroic, let your lines be the very thing, and your subject be full of action; you will miss the sympathy of the world, you will interest little the hearts of mankind, if you do not lay it down as an irrefutable law, that no composition can be complete, or ever will be interesting or deserve to be praised, that has not a beautiful woman, excepting a series." How amusing, too, his remarks upon what he calls "amiable impostors in genius," men always going to do great things, but never doing them! characters we meet with every day in all departments of human labour. "I have known men who never began, and yet were morally sincere in their intentions to begin, and yet they have died actually without beginning;" and who has not known such, and is not he the most successful author or painter who supplies the pabulum for minds so constituted; who enable them to say, "This is what I shall do when I take up the pen or the pencil," or to mutter, with pleasing self

Certain general and incontrovertible principles may be obtained, as Mr. Haydon has laid down, from a comparison of man with the brute; but these principles do not constitute a standard man—an idea which concentrates in one the perfection of many men, and not points of superiority or of distinction between man and brute. Mr. Haydon, we observe, varies his standard to suit the necessities of the subject. The principles upon which it is constructed may, therefore, be indisputably correct; and yet the result cannot be called a standard, unless we read that word in the meaning of an authoritative fact, so far as it goes; but not a fact fixed and unalterable, as a steel yard in a town-hall. That man has a broad knee-pan, and a quadruped a narrow one, is an incontrovertible fact; but a broad pan-bone no more constitutes a standard man, than does a high forehead, absent in the brute; the standard would, in this case, be the perfection of the knee or forehead in man, as compared with other men.