350 The Functions of Art. 



THE FUNCTIONS OF ART. 



We do not intend to criticise any individual pictures in the 

 Royal Academy Exhibition or elsewhere. The number of 

 pieces that will receive popular praise or blame will depend 

 chiefly upon the expectations the visitors to the various 

 galleries form concerning the functions of art. If they ask the 

 painter only for clever finger work, they may soon fill up a 

 large laudatory list; but if they demand clever brain work 

 also, they will strike the pen of condemnation through the 

 majority of the names of pieces which they were compelled to 

 praise upon mere technical grounds. 



In reading the works of our best modern historians, the 

 graphic power of reproducing and idealizing characters and 

 events gives a charm and value to their pages that we seldom 

 find when we turn from paper to canvas, and expect the 

 pencil to rival or transcend what the pen has accomplished 

 to make us realize the past. If the historian puts together 

 his sentences with technical skill, if his periods are flowing, 

 his grammar unexceptionable, and his meaning plain, we 

 esteem him little, unless he rouses our emotions, excites our 

 sympathies, and gives us some insight into that eternal linking 

 of cause and effect, without which life would be a disjointed 

 and purposeless drama, and the incidents of human story mere 

 rags and tatters of a many-chequered scene. No cleverness of 

 composition makes us merciful to the writer who fails in those 

 higher purposes which composition ought to serve ; and why 

 should the man who speaks to us through the mechanism of 

 oils, pigments, and canvas, obtain laudation upon easier terms ? 

 li' he undertakes to bring beforo our eyes scenes connected 

 with the assertion of political liberty, or with the insurrection 

 of mind against the conventional forms of dead systems, we 

 ought, before praising his picture, to ask whet her, after studying 

 it, wo know more of the subject than wo did before his labours 

 wen- exposed to onr view, and whether the meaning of the 

 event is more distinctly felt and seen. His anatomy maybe 

 unexceptionable, bones and muscles may be in their places; 

 his figures may be well arranged, and their drapery of shape 

 and hue iliat is pleasing (<> the gaze; but still, he has failed 

 as an artist, unless (lie smd and sentiment of tho subject glows 

 through, every lineament, and gives a moral and intellectual 

 reality to all his work. What is the use of telling an heroic 

 ; .tory so ;is to excite nobody to heroic thoughts or deeds? 



Passing from tho historic to tho domestic, what do tho 

 silks and satins, the muslins and the crinolines matter, and 

 what are they worth on canvas more than so much linen- 



