You have likened art to
a river rising pure, and rolling a turbid volume into the ocean. I
have a comparison equally just. The career of one artist contains in
itself the whole of art-history; its every phase is presented by him
in the course of his life. Savage art is beheld in his childish
scratchings and barbarous glimmerings; Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian
art in his boyish rigidity and crude fixedness of idea and purpose;
Mediaeval, or pre-Raffaelle art is seen in his youthful timid
darings, his unripe fancies oscillating between earth and heaven;
there where we expect truth, we see conceit; there where we want
little, much is given--now a blank eyed riddle,--dark with excess of
self,--now a giant thought--vast but repulsive,--and now angel
visitors startling us with wisdom and touches of heavenly beauty.
Every where is seen exactness; but it is the exactness of hesitation,
and not of knowledge--the line of doubt, and not of power: all the
promises for ripeness are there; but, as yet, all are immature. And
mature art is presented when all these rude scaffoldings are thrown
down--when the man steps out of the chrysalis a complete idea--both
Psyche and Eros--free-thoughted, free-tongued, and free-handed;--a
being whose soul moves through the heavens and the earth--now
choiring it with angels--and now enthroning it, bay-crowned, among
the men-kings;--whose hand passes over all earth, spreading forth its
beauties unerring as the seasons--stretches through cloudland,
revealing its delectable glories, or, eagle-like, soars right up
against the sun;--or seaward goes seizing the cresting foam as it
leaps--the ships and their crews as they wallow in the watery
valleys, or climb their steeps, or hang over their flying
ridges:--daring and doing all whatsoever it shall dare to do, with
boundless fruitfulness of idea, and power, and line; that is mature
art--art of the time of Phidias, of Raffaelle, and of Shakspere.
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