ART. VII. (1.) First, Second, and Third Reports of the Commissioners on the Fine Arts.

(2.) Reports to the Government School of Design. By H. J. TOWNSEND, Esq., and Mrs. M'IAN.

Ir cannot, we think, have escaped the notice of any one conversant with what is passing among us, that the fine arts are beginning to occupy a much larger share of popular estimation than formerly, and that a lively interest in relation to them is now felt among classes to whose thoughts, a few years since, the subject would have been found utterly alien. Such a taste must always imply some degree of cultivation-the awakening of the mental and moral faculties which lie waste in a rude, uneducated populace, and leave them to toil on under the burden of their daily cares, a prey to the seductions of intemperance and vice. But more than this, we regard it as one of the symptoms of a great national movement, the happy results of which it is difficult now sufficiently to estimate, but which may be studied meanwhile as the first token of a new channel wherein the national energies are at work-a pathway, as it were, through a vast and hitherto unexplored country, wherein travellers of other lands have journeyed far, and brought home wealth, to the astonishment and admiration of their own and other times, while we have been but struggling on in wayward and fitful wanderings around its outskirts; save here and there some more daring and gifted genius—a Hogarth, perchance, or a Flaxman, or a Reynolds, who in solitary vigour has cleaved a path through the rough, debatable land with which it is enclosed, and opened no uncertain vista into the goodly prospect beyond; but the effort has ever proved solitary and unaided: the gifted one has accomplished, ay, and well accomplished his task, and died pointing the way onward in the worthy career; but he was before his time; the age was all unprepared for the work; and while the gratification of personal vanity secured to Reynolds such appreciation as has been shared in a measure no less abundant by scores of the veriest daubs that ever strove to immortalize a simper, the thoroughly national works of Hogarth are yet the food of criticism, and England in the nineteenth century, has not quite made up her mind, whether she should regard her most original painter as indeed a true genius, or as no more than a clever caricaturist.

But other times, we believe, are at hand. Art, which has heretofore been only as one of the many playthings wherewith the

wealthy idler might fence off some half-hour of care, is now for the first time becoming a thing for the people; not an object of worth to a fortunate few, but a mighty engine, if it shall yet be carried out in all its capabilities, for the elevation of the nation.

It is indeed a curious and interesting inquiry how it should be that England, which has so long held undisputed pre-eminence among the nations in arms, in national energy, and, may we not add also, in moral worth; should yet have lagged so far behind them in those nobler arts that have hung so rich a halo round the older memories of Greece and Italy; no doubt it is an inquiry easily answered by those whom it least concerns;-from a nation of shopkeepers, say they, and with a climate whose eternal fogs cloud the intellect, and drag down the understanding to a level with such petty cares, what hope of better progress could be entertained? But to this the reply is ready and unanswerable ;—if Italy had her Dante, her Petrarch, and her Tasso; have not Chaucer, and Spencer, and Shakspeare, and Milton also a country; and what other nation in the world's history, save the Greeks, can match these names? Some other reason, then, it would seem, must be found; and the more so, as in the monuments of art of our William of Wykeham, or Reginald de Braye, our cathedrals and colleges; which still survive, notwithstanding all the mutilations that revolutions and civil war have effected; we have abundant evidence that, up to the period of the revival of learning in the fifteenth century, England was not a whit behind the most advanced of the continental nations in her monuments of art. The sculptures still preserved in the niches of Wells Cathedral, including one hundred and fifty-three statues of the size of life and larger, besides more than double the number of a smaller size, exhibit a variety of invention and fancy that has excited the highest admiration of Flaxman and Stothard; while the tomb of Queen Eleanor, in Westminster Abbey, has served our own Chantry as a model of grace and beauty. Flaxman observes, in his Lectures on Sculpture:

'It is very remarkable that the sculpture on the western front of Wells Cathedral was finished in 1242, two years after the birth of Cimabue, the restorer of painting in Italy; and the work was going on at the same time that Nicholo Pisano, the Italian restorer of sculpture, exercised the art in his own country; it was also finished fortysix years before the Cathedral of Amiens, and thirty-six before that of Orvieto was begun ; and it seems to be the first specimen of such magnificent and varied sculpture, united in a series of sacred history, that is to be found in Western Europe.'

So that, up to that date at least, it would seem that England was

taking the lead among European nations in the revival of the

arts.

The progress of art and of literature rarely presents a strict parallel in any nation. Literature with every new effort acquires a wider platform and a higher position, from whence, even though it sink into torpidity for a time, it starts anew as from a vantage ground, to aim at higher achievements. Art, on the contrary, has waited in every age for some great impulse, when the people, roused to new life by some earnest struggle, acquire fresh vigour and elasticity. But our object is not to write a formal history of art, but to take just such a practical review of the past as may best help us to discover what is now needed, and what we may ourselves hope to accomplish.

As to the patronage of the fine arts among the Romans, it seems to have borne no distant resemblance to that which has been so long prevalent among ourselves, and with apparently no more effect on the people. Old Rome had her Asinius Pollio, her Verres and her Vindex, with their ancient masters and their grand art, their Apelles and Praxiteles, just as we have had for well nigh a couple of centuries, our Devonshire House or Strawberry-hill collections, accumulating under the chance whim of each successive inheritor; here a Van Dyke added, there a Van Daub, as taste or fashion dictated; and Raphaelle's and Corregio's, altar-pieces and memorial offerings of bygone times, contending with bijouterie, Otaheittian idols, or cracked china, for the honour of chief furniture-piece in the mansions of the great!

But it may not be useless to glance for a moment at a far different epoch in the history of the world, when the iron age of Old Rome passed away, and the Byzantine capital, nursing for a while the still smouldering embers of Greek art, at length kindled the flame that burst forth at the close of the fourteenth century. Here again it only waited to adorn the progress of popular power. Not in Papal Rome, under its ecclesiastical rule, did modern art receive its birth; but in the republic of Florence, under its citizen magistrates. There, in free and honourable competition, the gates of the Baptistry were executed by Lorenzo Giberti, the admiration of every succeeding age; and by the impulse of that struggle, the fine arts awoke into life through the Peninsula.

See Bell's Notes to Rollin's Arts of the Ancients, pp. 146-170, &c.; for these, as well as for an account of different Roman importations; as many as 419 statues in bronze and 230 in marble, from Asia Minor, by Nobilior and Lucius Scipio ; and, again, 250 wagons filled with statutes from Macedonia, by melius Paulus; for these and other curious facts we are indebted to the industry of Sickler, a German antiquary.

But however much England may now mourn that the fifteenth century, that bright period in the history of the world, has passed by, and left no records of the new life it had brought with it, in sculptured marble or painted canvas; she has no need to look back on the era of the Reformation with shame. To her detractors may well be applied Foster's noble defence of Howard, under like circumstances The mere man of taste ought to be 'silent regarding such a man; he is above their sphere of judgment. The invisible, spirits who fulfil their commission of philanthropy among mortals, do not care about pictures, and statues, and sumptuous buildings; and no more did he, when the time in which he inspected and admired them would have 'been taken from the work to which he had consecrated his life.' There are nobler objects even than the fine arts offer, and aims more pregnant with the true riches of a nation than those which produced the marvellous works, concerning which our own age has witnessed a concourse of crowned heads, holding solemn conclave, and, by treaty and law of nations, determining to whom they should belong. While the stern Pius, and the luxurious Leo X. were peopling the Vatican with the productions of Raphaelle and Michael Angelo, a far loftier work of inspiration absorbed the energies of the people of England; and a worthy boast will it be for her, if, looking now upon such virtue as the socalled vértu of Italian taste has produced, it should be given her, standing on surer ground, and trusting to more stable foundations, to add to these better things' the graceful virtues of ennobling art, and enroll among her great men, painters and sculptors not unworthy to take their place beside her Shakspeare, or Bacon, or Newton; her Cranmer, her Howe, and her Bunyan.

6

Graver occupations, we have seen, precluded the advancement of the arts in England during the period of the Reformation. Nor must we forget that the misapplication of the fine arts, as a means of giving fascination to the errors against which they were then contending, led the early reformers to view every effort connected with them with suspicion and distrust. Sculpture appeared but as the handmaid of idolatry, and painting as nearly allied to irreverent superstition; while the well-known warcry of Knox to his iconoclasts, Ding down the nests, and the rooks will flee away! has left but scanty ruins of the noblest monuments of art of the middle ages.

With Charles I. a period of great promise arrived; Rubens visited the court, and adorned the new palace of Whitehall with his pencil; Vandyke also found ready welcome; and Lord Arundel, whom Mrs. Jameson styles, the first virtuoso, not only of his own country, but his own time,' began that magnifi

cent collection, a portion of which now adorns the Imperial Palace of St. Petersburg. The taste of the young monarch followed his example with such zeal and judgment, that the scattered paintings from the royal collection, dispersed at the Revolution, are in our own day the prized treasures of the public and private galleries of Europe; and had he escaped the troubles of his unhappy reign, there is little doubt that, under his auspices, England might have done the work two centurics ago which she is now only beginning to do. But here the popular movement was again exposed to influences unfavourable to the arts. The ill-disguised Romanism of Laud, with all the show and pomp which he was anew calling in to the aid of religion, naturally forced his opponents to the opposite extreme; and that great revolution, which fixed the constitution and secured the liberties of England, banished the fine arts from the country, dispersed or destroyed the finest gallery then existing out of Italy, and stamped on the popular mind a distaste for art which has left its effects to our own time. Yet none but the most superficial observer will fail to discriminate between the natural excesses of a popular movement, wherein great principles were at stake, and the true character of those principles in their relation to pure taste; as if the faith of Milton, or even the aims of Cromwell, could be antagonist in their nature to the true and beautiful : -the aims of Cromwell, we say; for to those who yet know him only through the medium of vulgar prejudice, it may be necessary to recal the fact, that it is to him we are indebted for the preservation of the Cartoons, as well as for their possession at the present day.

From that time to our own, the patronage of art has been but a shifting mode, changing with the fashions of the day; the smile of royalty could do more for a painter than the touch of Vandyke, or the colouring of Titian; and its history, whether identified with artists or patrons, or with the societies formed with the professed object of advancing it, is so mixed up with petty jealousies, and court squabble and intrigue, that the student of art turns from it in disgust. Old masters (so called), by the gross, have been yearly imported into England,-70,000, it is said, according to the Custom-house reports, during the last five years; and among these, from time to time, some true gem, worth the weight of all the rest in sterling gold,and Dilettantism has inspected it through her critical glass, -and rival connoisseurs have dilated on its merits, and at length it has been decided, against all appeal, that there is no country like England in the patronage of art! And yet what