mon practitioners think every objection answered, when some respectable authority is adduced; though perhaps the only point proved by such authority is that the person, who uses it, does not understand it, or know how to apply it. 55. In painting an appearance of lightness depends, not only on the forms, and proportions of the objects delineated, but on the mode of imitation, which the artist employs; a slow pencil, and heavy manner of execution, will make almost any object appear heavy in the picture; and, on the contrary, a brilliant, free, and sketchy one will always make the same appear light; although the imitation be equally exact in both. This difference is, however, more easily discernible in drawings than in paintings; and in slight, than in finished per formances; for the more is left to the imagination, the more free and spontaneous will the association of ideas, between the style of the imitation, and that of the thing imitated, be; and the more readily will the mind transfer the properties, which it observes in the former, to the notions, which it has formed of the latter. Objects, that are not circumscribed by straight, or very determinate outlines, but of which the forms are loose and flowing, are peculiarly well adapted to this free and sketchy style of imitation; and are, therefore, properly CHAP. II. Of Imagina tion. CHAP. II. Of Imagination. to be considered as picturesque. Rubens, who of all the painters, was most eminent for this facility or bravura of execution, has shown himself most attached to these kinds of forms; the columns of his buildings being generally twisted and fluted; and the limbs of his figures always bent, and the muscles charged and prominent upon the same principle was, probably, his fondness for painting fat and flabby women; whose shapeless bodies were entirely freed from those regular and determined outlines which he seemed to consider as insurmountable enemies of his art. It is curious to observe how he has twisted and distorted them in his attempts to improve the drawings of the old Roman and Florentine masters; whose meagre upright figures have their muscles swoln, and their limbs bent into all those flowing and undulating lines, which have been called the lines of grace and beauty; how truly, the compositions of Rubens, in which they always predominate, and those of Raphael, in which they are never employed, but incidentally, may decide*. They may, * See Idler, No. 76; where Sir Joshua Reynolds has introduced, with much humour, a systematic connoisseur just returned from Italy with his head full of harmonic proportions, flowing lines of grace and beauty, pyramidal principles of grouping, &c. &c.; by which he criticises the cartoons of Raphael, and laments that no traces of them are to be found in those celebrated works of so extraordinary a genius; thus, as the author observes, pretending however, be justly called picturesque, in the most limited and proper sense of the word, as being peculiarly appropriate to painting. 56. Corregio has employed similar outlines, as uniformly, but with more of the modesty and moderation of nature than Rubens; his women. being always desirable, and the expression of their countenances, and character of their attitudes, elegant and pleasing: whence they have been thought handsome; though their general forms have as little of that beauty, which arises from correct and just symmetry, as those of any of the Flemish painters; and this beauty, perhaps, is the only one in the human figure, whether male or female, which can strictly and philosophically be considered as a beauty for all the others depend, in a great measure, upon sexual or social sympathies; and therefore belong as much to the peculiar properties of the minds, which feel, as to those of the persons, which display them. 57. I am aware, indeed, that it would be no easy task to persuade a lover that the forms, upon which he dotes with such rapture, are not really beautiful, independent of the medium of affection, passion, and appetite, through which great admiration for a name of fixed reputation, and, at the same time, raising objections against those very qualities, by which that great name was acquired. CHAP. II. Of Imagination. CHAP. II. Of Imagina tion. he views them. But before he pronounces either the infidel or the sceptic guilty of blasphemy against nature, let him take a mould from the lovely features or lovely bosom of this master-piece of creation, and cast a plum-pudding in it (an object by no means disgusting to most men's appetites) and, I think, he will no longer be in raptures with the form, whatever he may be with the substance. Display, too, the most beautiful of the sex, in all the freshness of youth and bloom of health, to any animal of another kind, and she will be viewed with perfect indifference; though many of them show the nicest and most discriminating sensibility to different colours; green being, as before observed, grateful to all, and scarlet evidently offensive and painful to some. Even in the females of their own species, they seem to be quite insensible to the charms of this freshness of youth and bloom of health, which we value so much in ours: for it has been observed that a ram always gives the preference to the oldest of his flock; his appetites being excited by that, which is one of the most effectual extinguishers of ours. 58. Men, it is true, often fall violently in love at first sight; and when the momentary impression, made by the object on the organ of vision, is all that they can know of her: but, nevertheless, this organic impression is, as before ob served, no further the cause of love, than as it serves to communicate the object to the mind; the mere sensual pleasure of sight having little or nothing to do with it. 59. That love, which arises from an union of rational esteem, sympathetic sentiment, and animal desire, is, I believe, peculiar to civilized man; brutes seeking for nothing more in their females than the gratification of their periodical appetites; and savage men considering them merely as slaves, whose only valuable qualifications are those, which befit them for useful labour or sensual pleasure. The sexual affections, indeed, of some kinds of birds seem to be productive of something like mental attachment; especially in their co-operation in fostering their eggs and nourishing their young: but, nevertheless, its principle appears to be merely a natural and instinctive propensity; whereas that of rational and sentimental love is entirely artificial and acquired, otherwise such love would not be limited to men in an artificial state of society. 60. When, however, the propensity is acquired, it may exist, like all other propensities, without any determinate object: for when, at the age of puberty, animal desire obtrudes itself on a mind already qualified to feel and enjoy the charms of intellectual merit, the imagination immediately begins to form pictures of perfec CHAP. II. Of Imagina tion. |