CHAPTER VII. RELATION OF ART TO NATURE. THERE is another point not to be overlooked in speaking of what belongs essentially to a work of art. In all such productions, the hand of man must be clearly recognized. We must be distinctly aware that what we contemplate is a production of art, and not of nature. It might seem as if there could be no danger of ever mistaking the one for the other, and in fact there is none. But still, the essence of art is supposed by many to consist in imitation; hence it would seem to follow, if they are right, that the nearer the copy came to the original, the nearer it was brought to a complete illusion, the nearer art would approach to its perfection. This is the notion which many entertain, as if the end of art were deception. The true principle, on the other hand, is, that we must always see in such works the forming hand and mind of man, and yet the productive power must seem to have acted just as free from constraint, and as unconfined by rules, as if its work were, in fact, an unconscious production of nature. In the first place, in order to feel the power of art, its work must not only be clearly distinguishable, but actually distinguished, from nature. I mean, the perfection of art does not consist in so deceiving the senses as to make one believe that, instead of the mere representation of a thing, he has before him the real object represented. I am always glad to avail myself of the authority of good English writers on these subjects, wherever I find them expressing the truth so exactly as, on the point before us, seems to me to have been done by the author of "Modern Painters." "Whenever anything looks like what it is not, the resemblance being so great as nearly to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, an agreeable excitement of mind, exactly the same in its nature as that which we receive from juggling. Whenever we perceive this in something produced by art, that is to say, whenever the work is seen to resemble something which we know it is not, we receive what I call an idea of imitation. The most perfect ideas and pleasures of imitation are, is contradicted by another, both carrying as positive evidence on the subject as each is capable of alone; as when the eye says a thing is round, and the finger says it is flat; they are therefore never felt in so high a degree as in painting, where appearance of projection, roughness, hair, velvet, etc., are given with a smooth surface; or in wax-work, where the first evidence of the senses when one sense is perpetually contradicted by their experience; but the moment we come to marble, our definition checks us, for a marble figure does not look like what it is not; it looks like marble, and like the form of a man; but then it is marble, and it is the form of a man. .. We see, then, the limits of an idea of imitation; it extends only to the sensation of trickery and deception occasioned by a thing's intentionally seeming different from what it is; and the degree of the pleasure depends on the degree of difference and the perfection of the resemblance, not on the nature of the thing resembled. The simple pleasure in the imitation would be precisely of the same degree (if the accuracy could be equal), whether the subject of it were the hero or his horse." 1 In the year 1787, when the arts in this country were yet in their infancy, my grandfather, a New England clergyman,2 made a journey to Philadelphia, and while there went to see, among other interesting objects, a celebrated collection of paintings and natural curiosities belonging to the elder Peele. "We were conducted," he says in his journal, " into a room by a boy who told us, that Mr. Peele would wait on us in a minute or two. He desired us, however, to walk into the room where the curiosities were, and showed us a long narrow entry 1 Ruskin, Modern Painters, Pt. i. sect i. ch. iv. 2 Rev. Manasseh Cutler, of Hamilton, Mass. |
