22 Architecture in the United States. 



ft 



that give him complete satisfaction ; but bis pleasure from these is of 

 the purest and most exquisite kind. He proceeds now to lines of a 

 less simple kind, and continues the same rigid discipline through 

 these. When his taste has grown so familiar with them as to decide 

 witli instinctive quickness and certainty on their merit, he ascends to 

 the higher character of the art, expression in single lines. Should 

 we look at him now, we should find that his labor has become anxious 

 and toilsome. As he bends over it his features become animated 

 and swollen : pleasure and vexation by turns pass rapidly over them : 

 he draws line after line, looks intentlv at them and then brushes them 



hastily away to renew the attempt and to please himself no better 

 than before. Why is this? Other men can see nothing to cause 

 his sensations : they behold only a few lines and these so simple that 

 any one could make them : in this simplicity, however, be 6nds their 

 greatest difficulty and their greatest charm ; each one of them has 

 expression, and some strong feeling is acted upon by every one. 

 Yet he is not satisfied : there is some part of that feeling left un- 

 touched ; his art must reach the whole of it ; he tries again, and rests 

 not till these simple lines take the full mastery of his soul. His 

 taste well disciplined on these, he proceeds to combinations of lines 

 and to expression in these, to complete figures, to posture, and then 

 to grouping, and is now prepared to enter the lists with the giants of 

 his art. In all these his taste has the same difficult duty to perform. 

 I do not mean to say that all painters go through diis course : proba- 

 bly iid\w could trace one so regular as this in the acquisition of dieir 

 skill : but I believe that every painter of eminence proceeds through 

 one similar to it. The numerous steps by which he rises are 

 probably little known even to himself; for many of them scarcely 

 proceed furdier tlian his own mind : he gives them no sha])e on pa- 

 per ; they pass unheeded, and he is scarcely aware himself that 

 his taste is constantly exercised, and that it is becoming each moment 

 more critical and more powerful, simply from this exercise. The 

 first known effort of West was in a portrait of his infant brother : a por- 

 trait requires little exercise of taste compared with imaginary forms; 

 but how much this faculty had been previously exercised we have no 

 means of judging, and probably he could not have told us himself- 

 How much however must have passed between this and his painting 

 of Christ healing the sick, we can easily imagine. I do not mean to say 

 that a skilful painter may not exist without a critical taste ; a man 

 may be an excellent copyist of nature ; there are such men, a species 



