resembling the ancient, has been introduced within the last century, which has been praised, perhaps, quite as much as it deserves. When an art has no

other purpose or object in view than simply to administer to the fastidious cravings of luxury, it may attain to a refined and sickly elegance, but to produce anything truly great, requires a different sort of enthusiasm.

The ancient sculptors devoted their talents to public objects, and were employed for the most part by the state. Among these objects were the commemoration of great actions and events by worthy monuments, and the handing down to posterity the forms of distinguished men, who had benefited their country and the world. The same subjects remain for modern times.

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,

The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,

Or forest,

by slow stream, or pebbly spring,

Or chasms and watʼry depths; — all these have vanished;

They live no longer in the faith of reason! "1

Neither, therefore, can they live in marble; no fine touch can ever call them up again from the dead. But great men are a worthy subject for the chisel in all times alike; nor is there any reason why, in this field, the modern may not rival the ancient sculptor.

1 Coleridge's Poems, "The Piccolomini,” act ii. sc. 4.

XII.

PAINTING.

CHAPTER XIII,

PAINTING.

THE next of the arts, in point of age, if we mean by the age of the fine arts their natural order of succession in time, is painting. Painting is younger than sculpture, in the sense, that the former is never found preceding the latter among any people where the arts have followed the natural order of their development. The shaping or moulding of an object in the totality of its dimensions is a more obvious process than the attempt to represent the same dimensions on a plane surface. In another sense, however, painting is older than sculpture; namely, in the sense in which manhood is older than youth, though it comes after it. Youth may be more beautiful than manhood in reference to the beauty of outward form; but beauty of character, beauty of intellectual and moral force, requires a harmonious combination of more strongly defined contrasts, such as the maturity of age alone presents. Painting belongs to a period of more advanced culture than statuary.

The fact said to have been recently brought to

light, if it is a fact, that some of the finest productions of the Grecian chisel were painted; 1 the fact that figures in relief, sculptured on the inner walls of the Egyptian temples, are overlaid with colors, and that the same seems to have been true of the rude attempts at sculpture by the semicivilized people who once inhabited the central regions of our own continent, may be regarded as the unconscious expression of a conviction, in the feelings of those times, that sculpture is an imperfect art, inadequate, after all, to bring out fully, within the compass of its own sphere and resources, the whole conception of the artist. But such is the incompatibility of the two arts, that they cannot possibly be so combined together as that one may supply the deficiencies of the other. A painted statue, instead of uniting the advantages of sculpture and painting in one common production, loses at once the peculiar excellences of each; the purity and dignity of form is lowered, while nothing at all is gained in expression. A few unsuccessful attempts to unite together arts so entirely diverse from each other in their means, ends, and resources, would soon lead men to see the necessity of cultivating them independently.

The first thing we have to consider in painting, as an art by itself, is the material it employs. Many of the distinctive, and most important, char

1 See Kugler, Kleine Kunstschriften; Antike Polychromie.