THE ESSENCE OF THE FINE ARTS. 



faculty than reason; for the creative faculty is certainly beyond those which merely per- 

 ceive and compare. It is the chief part of genius —genius, to which all creation admin- 

 isters. To its sleepless eye lies open all the human heart, and all the stores of nature. 

 A frequenter of the highways and thoroughfares of life, the man of genius, whether poet, 

 or painter, or architect, is a watcher of events, "the votary of circumstance:" alive to 

 every influence of nature, awake to the varied and complicated truths of existence, he lives 

 with more than life about him; and the difference between the mind of the artist or poet 

 and ordinary minds is this,— to the latter, the model, theme, subject, or whatever else the 

 groundwork may be called on which the material expressions of genius are founded, ap- 

 pears or sounds in simple unconnectedness, unsuggested and unsuggesting, and exciting 

 no further sensations than are contained within its known limits; but to the true artist it 

 is the type of a past revelation, or the symbol of something intuitively foreseen. It is a 

 point in an infinite series, coming down from the past, and leading off to the future in an 

 interminable perspective. And thus he to whom is given " the vision and the faculty di- 

 vine," sees or hears in his subject that which, till he has materially realised it, is to other 

 men invisible,— inaudible. The truest, subtlest alchymy is his who, from seeming dross, 

 works the true metal of undying thought. 



Genius, however, is not always a producer : there are those who are recipients of the 

 tide of inspiration from nature, and yet yield no fruit to the storehouse of Art. They form 

 and nurture their ideal but for their own solace and delight. Dissatisfied with human 

 power of execution, and free, perchance, from "that last infirmity of noble minds," they 

 build only in the region of dream-land, and shrink from all material realization of their 

 works, lest they should betray the grandeur of their subject. They are what a French 

 writer calls the " virgins of the mind," who " die without leaving any trace of them- 

 selves behind them upon earth." 



The beauty existing in the mind is higher in degree than that in either of the other 

 realms of the beautiful: — ^It may be considered as superior to nature, as no individual, 

 however beautiful was its archetype; and it is superior to that in Art, as no power of exe- 

 cution can do justice to the conceptions of genius. It is superior both to its antetype and 

 to the iniage through which it is expressed : the eye never saw it in nature, nor, as I shall 

 by and by endeavor to show, has the hand embodied it in Art. It is neither copied from 

 a beiiutiful individual, nor compounded of the faultless features of a species, "create of 

 every creature's best." No beauty was ever so formed, either in the mind or in Art. The 

 mind operated upon and inspired by the general beauty of nature, has become pregnant 

 with a new beauty, greater than all. By what steps the process was conducted we can no 

 more explain than we can the production of some vivid dream of the night from dull wak- 

 ing thoughts and incidents. The ideal of landscape Art is also in advance of nature; 

 every plant, flower, and herb has its Venus or Apollo of ideal beauty : nature's general 

 beauty has inspired and suggested a beauty beyond the individual, and ideas may be form- 

 ed, and have been formed, of various inanimate objects, which perhaps no individual ever 

 has reached, or ever Avill. 



One object, perhaps, kindled it at first, but by constant studj^and observation — by catch- 

 ing nature in her highest moments — in her happiest moods — and fixing on marble or can- 

 vas the most fleeting beauties, it was corrected and improved. An artist once told me, 

 that after he had placed the model in the finest position he could think of for exhibiting 

 the beauty and grace of the figure, by an accidental movement, he (the model) has him- 

 imcdiatcly gone into one infinitely finer, and which he, (the artist,) could never 

 imagined nor dreampt of. This he has no sooner fixed on his canvas, than a slight 



