234 OH Means and End*. [SEPT. 



other." Why is this? His mind was essentially ardent and discursive, 

 not sensitive or observant ; and though the immediate object acted as a 

 stimulus to his imagination, it was only as it does to the poet's that is, as 

 a link in the chain of association, as implying other strong feelings and 

 ideas, and not for its intrinsic beauty or individual details. He had not 

 the painter's eye, though he had the painter's general knowledge. There 

 is as great a difference in this respect between our views of things as 

 between the telescope and microscope. People in general see objects 

 only to distinguish them in practice and by name to know that a hat is 

 black, that a chair is not a table, that John is not James ; and there are 

 painters, particularly of history in England, who look very little farther. 

 They cannot finish any thing, or go over a head twice : the first coup-d'cetl 

 is all they ever arrive at; nor can they refine on their impressions, soften 

 them down, or reduce them to their component parts, without losing their 

 spirit. The inevitable result of this is grossness, and also want of force and 

 solidity ; for, in reality, the parts cannot be separated without injury from 

 the whole. Such people have no pleasure in the art as such : it is merely 

 to astonish or to thrive that they follow it; or, if thrown out of it by acci- 

 dent, they regret it only as a bankrupt tradesman does a business which 

 was a handsome subsistence to him. Barry did not live, like Titian, on 

 the taste of colours (there was here, perhaps and I will not disguise it 

 in English painters in general, a defect of organic susceptibily) ; they were 

 not a pabulum to his senses ; he did not hold green, blue, red, and yellow 

 for "the darlings of his precious eye." They did not, therefore, sink into 

 his mind with all their hidden harmonies, nor nourish and enrich it with 

 material beauty, though he knew enough of them to furnish hints for other 

 ideas and to suggest topics of discourse. If he had had the most enchant- 

 ing object in nature before him in his painting-room at the Adelphi, he 

 would have turned from it, after a moment's burst of admiration, to talk of 

 the subject of his next composition, and to scrawl in some new and vast 

 design, illustrating a series of great events in history, or some vague moral 

 theory. The art itself was nothing to him, though he made it the stalk- 

 ing-horse to his ambition and display of intellectual power in general ; 

 and, therefore, he neglected its essential qualities to daub in huge alle- 

 gories, or carry on cabals with the Academy, in which the violence of his 

 will and the extent of his views found proper food and scope. As a 

 painter, he was tolerable merely as a draftsman, or in that part of the art 

 which may be best reduced to rules and precepts, or to positive measure- 

 ments. There is neither colouring, nor expression, nor delicacy, nor 

 striking effect in his pictures at the Adelphi. The group of youths and 

 horses, in the representation of the Olympic Games, is the best part of 

 them, and has more of the grace and spirit of a Greek bas-relief than any 

 thing of the same kind in the French school of painting. Barry was, all 

 his life, a thorn in the side of Sir Joshua, who was irritated by the tem- 

 per and disconcerted by the powers of the man ; and who, conscious of his 

 own superiority in the exercise of his profession, yet looked askance at 

 Barry's loftier pretensions and more gigantic scale of art. But he had no 

 more occasion to be really jealous of him than of an Irish porter or orator. 

 It was like Imogen's mistaking the dead body of Cloten for her lord's 

 " the jovial thigh, the brawns of Hercules :" the head, which would have 

 detected the cheat, was missing ! 



I might have gone more into the subject of our apparent indifference to 

 the pleasure of mere imitation, if I had had to run a parallel between 

 English and Italian or even Flemish art; but really, though I find a great 



