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Many sarcastic remarks were uttered and more written on the wild insobriety of his productions, and as he was not spared himself, neither did he spare others. His vanity was galled, not wounded, by the random strictures of criticism; and his reign at the table of Johnson, the bookseller, where he appeared weekly, was sometimes rendered uneasy by the satire of Wolcot, to whom the oddities of the artist presented a broad mark. But it was impossible to dethrone him. He had reigned there forty years, adorning the society by his learning, and enlivening it with his wit, and in both he was a match for any of the distinguished men, and those were not few, whom it was his fortune to encounter.

When Barry lost the professorship of painting, in the year 1799, it was bestowed with acclamation on Fuseli, and as his mind was overflowing with knowledge of all kinds, he found little difficulty and much pleasure in fulfilling the duties of his new station During his professorship he delivered nine lectures of which the following six only are printed--on an cient art, modern art, invention, composition, expres sion, and chiaro-scuro. The first three are the best In them he has poured out learning, observation and feeling with a lavish hand, and there is an origi nal power in his diction, such as no man has exhi bited before or since in a language not his own The first three lectures were delivered in 1801: the crowds who went to hear them were great, and their cheers vehement. His disquisition upon Invention has been deservedly admired. It is difficult to select a single passage which will give a sufficien notion of the author's original grasp of mind.

"Form, in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelopes our senses, and its counterpart, the invisible one, that agitates our mind with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the element and realm of invention: it discovers, selects, combines the possible, the probable the known, in a mode that strikes

wh an air of truth and novelty. Possible, strictly, means an effect derived from a cause, a body com posed of materials, a coalition of forms whose union or coagency imply in themselves no absurdity, no contradiction: applied to our art, it takes a wider latitude; it means the representation of effects derived from causes, or forms compounded from materials heterogeneous and incompatible among them- ' selves, but rendered so plausible to our senses, that the transition of one part to another seems to be accounted for by an air of organization, and the eye glides imperceptibly, or with satisfaction, from one to the other, or over the whole: that this was the condition on which, and the limits within which, the ancients permitted invention to represent what was, strictly speaking, impossible, we may with plausibility surmise from the picture of Zeuxis, described by Lucian in the memoir to which he has prefixed that painter's name, who was probably one of the first adventurers in this species of imagery. Zeuxis had painted a family of Centaurs: the dam, a beautiful female to the middle, with the lower parts gradually sliding into the most exquisite forms of a young Thessalian mare, half-reclined in playful repose, and gently pawing the velvet ground, offered her human nipple to one infant centaur, while another greedily sucked the feline udder below, but both with their eyes turned up to a lion whelp held over them by the male centaur, their father, rising above he hillock on which the female reclined, a grim eature, but whose ferocity was somewhat tempered y a smile.

"This picture the artist exhibited, expecting that justice from the penetration of the public which the genius deserved that taught him to give plausibility to a compound of heterogeneous forms, to inspire them with suitable soul, and to imitate the laws of existence he was mistaken. The novelty of the conceit eclipsed the art that had imbodied it; the

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artist was absorbed in his subject, and the unbounded praise bestowed was that of idle restless curiosity gratified. Sick of gods and goddesses, of demigods and pure human combinations, the Athenians panted only for what was new. The artist, as

haughty, as irritable, ordered his picture to be withdrawn. Cover it, Micchio,' said he to his attendant, cover it, and carry it home; for this mob stick only to the clay of our art.' Such were the limits set to invention by the ancients: secure within these it defied the ridicule thrown on that grotesque conglutination which Horace exposes: guarded by these, their mythology scattered its metamorphoses, made every element its tributary, and transmitted the privilege to us on equal conditions. Their Scylla and our Portress of Hell-their demons and our spectresthe shade of Patroclus and the ghost of Hamlettheir naïads, nymphs, and oreads, and our sylphs, gnomes, and fairies-their furies and our witchesdiffer less in essence than in local temporary social modifications: their common origin was fancy operating upon the materials of nature, assisted by legendary tradition and the curiosity implanted in us of diving into the invisible; and they are suffered or invited to mix with or superintend real agency, in proportion to the analogy which we discover between them and ourselves. Pindar praises Homer less for that winged power' which whirls incident on incident with such rapidity, that, absorbed by the whole, and drawn from the impossibility of single parts, we swallow a tale too gross to be believed in a dream, than for the greater power by which he contrived to connect his imaginary creation with the realities of nature and human passions: without this, the fiction of the poet and the painter will leave us rather stupified by its insolence than impressed by its power; it will be considered only as a superior kind of legerdemain—an exertion of ingenuity to no adequate end."

The chief aim of the new professor was to im press on his audience a sense of the nobleness of art, and the high purposes to which alone it ought to be dedicated. With his own pencil he endeavoured to obey his own maxims, and the subjects which he painted were all in their nature poetical. Neither the advice of friends, the taunts of enemies, nor the offers of the wealthy, could induce him to descend farther down the scale of art. Like some of the old preachers, who, in their fierce sermons, ordered the profane, and those who were not chosen, to rise and depart, he dismissed from his lectureroom all students with sordid minds, who looked upon art as the way to gain-and who had none of the fervour of natural genius. On those who made mere fac-similes of human life, or who painted newmown meadows, or well-fed oxen, he had little mercy. He asserted in conversation, if not in lectures, that the Royal Academy robbed the plough and the shoemaker's stall of very meritorious persons, and that many came to the sculptor's chisel, and the painter's pencil, who might have handled the joiner's plane or the tailor's scissors with greater advantage to the public and profit to themselves.

To support his theory of Invention, he was ready with illustration from ancient lore and the stores of an inexhaustible imagination. On one occasion he introduced the following happy quotation from Quintilian::-"We give,” says that eminent Roman," the name of visions to what the Greeks call phantasies: that power by which the images of ancient things are represented by the mind with the energy of objects moving before our eyes: he who conceives these rightly will be a master of passions; his is that well-tempered fancy which can imagine things, voices, acts, as they really exist-a power, perhaps, in a great measure, dependent on our will. For if those images so pursue us when our minds are in a state of rest, or fondly fed by hope, or in a kind of VOL. II.-Y

waking dream; that are seen to travel, to sail, to fight, to harangue in public, or dispose of riches we possess not, and all this with an air of reality, why should we not turn to account this view of the mind? Suppose I am to plead the case of a murdered man, why should not every supposable circumstance of the act float before my eyes? Shall I not see the murderer, unawares, rush in upon him-in vain he tries to escape-see how pale he turns-hear you not his shrieks-his entreaties ?-do you not see him flying, struck, falling? Will not his blood, his ashy semblance, his groans, his last expiring gasp, seize on every mind?"

"By this radiant recollection of associated ideas," continues Fuseli, "the spontaneous ebullitions of nature, selected by observation, treasured by memory, classed by sensibility and judgment, Shakspeare became the supreme master of passions and the ruler of our hearts: this imbodied his Falstaff and his Shylock-Hamlet and Lear-Juliet and Rosalind. By this power he saw Warwick uncover the corpse of Gloucester and swear to his assassination and his tugs for life: by this he made Banquo see the Weird Sisters bubble up from earth, and in their own air vanish: this is the hand that struck upon the bell when Macbeth's drink was ready, and from her chamber pushed his dreaming wife once more to methodize the murder of her guest:-and this was the power of Theon; such was the unpremeditated conception which inspired him with the idea of that warrior, who, in the words of Elian, seemed to imbody the terrible graces and the enthusiastic furor of the god of war. Impetuous he rushed onward to oppose the sudden incursion of enemies-with shield thrown forward and high brandished falchion, his step, as he swept on, seemed to devour the ground; his eye flashed defiance-you fancied to hear his voice-his looks denounce perdition and slaughter without mercy. His figure, single, and

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