ON CERTAIN INCONSIDERATE CRITICISMS. 245 



and law of poetry, painting, and sculpture is to please and interest 

 the mind and feelings, without exceeding decorum, general probabi- 

 lity, or general nature. I have instanced where historical truth is 

 necessary, and with this reserve, the universal practice of Greece 

 and Rome proves this law to be founded in unerring principles. 

 An attempt to judge of the arts and to rule artists in all things by 

 the conventional and fluctuating congruities of modern society, is 

 an endeavour to set up a cold *' punctilio of reason" against the 

 practice of all ages or countries, in which the arts have flourished. 

 It is calculated to dull the imaginative powers of genius and de- 

 grade the arts. 



As " The Installation" is an extraordinary manifestation of va- 

 rious powers by one of the most extraordinary geniuses of the pre- 

 sent day, I am anxious to prevent any ill effect from this charge of 

 incongruity, and I shall add one more authority — that of Sir Joshua 

 Reynolds — in the following extract from his Discourses : " In all 

 the pictures which Raflaelle painted of the Apostles, he has drawn 

 them with great nobleness ; and he has given them as much digni- 

 ty as the human form is ca])able of receiving ; yet we are expressly 

 told, in Scripture, they had no such respectable appearance ; and of 

 St. Paul in particular, we are told by himself, that his bodily pre- 

 sence was mean, Alexander is said to have been of low stature ; a 

 painter ought not so to represent him : Agesilaus was low, lame, 

 and of a mean appearance ; none of those defects ought to appear 

 in a piece of which he is the hero. * * All this is not falsifying 

 any fact, it is only taking an allowed poetical license."* 



Sir Joshua Reynolds also remarks, " the conduct of Rubens in 

 the Luxembourg gallery, where that great master has mixed alle- 

 gorical figures with the representations of real personages, which 

 must be acknowledged to be a fault ; yet if the artist considered 

 himself as engaged to furnish this gallery with a rich, various, and 

 splendid ornament, this could not be done — at least in an equal 

 degree — without peopling the air and water with those allegorical 

 figures ; he, therefore, accomplished all that he proposed. In this 

 case, all lesser considerations, which tend to obstruct the great end of 



• Discourse IV. 



^J 



