blance in singing strike us at the theatre if the singer excel, nor do the constraints of dramatic action force on us its subserviency, if perfection in the language of the passions is present to conceal from us all the expedients that the poet brings into play.

Each of the fine arts finds in the perfection of its own individual means, a corrective for the pretended imperfection of its nature, a compensation for what is necessarily fictious, and a substitute for what is incomplete. But it must be confessed that genius alone can discover that substitute, and sentiment alone can enjoy it. Mediocrity finds it a shorter way to plunder what it cannot acquire, and ignorance, more easy to give itself up to the reality of gross and sensual emotions.

There can scarcely be an individual who has not at some time or other recognized this ascendancy of perfection, who has not unsuspectingly experienced its influence in some art or other, and has not had an opportunity of learning that such influence frequently derives its strength from that very impotence which the art has to conceal, from that difficulty which it must needs overcome. One advantage that poetry possesses over painting, is its very want of colours; its merit consists in not having need of them. Does not the contrivance in its pictures lie in their being rendered sensible, and one may even say visible, though without substance, form, or colouring? Is there

ground for complaint that the traits of the personages delineated by the great poets remain unknown and incomprehensible? Who is unacquainted with Achilles, Hector, Ulysses or Eneas? Who, in such pictures as the descriptions of battles, or of enchantments in the works of Tasso, has ever perceived the want of life or of reality? Who then doubts but that he has seen them?

Do we remark that there is matter in the master-pieces of sculpture? Do we wish for the addition of colour? Do we regret, in paintings, that their beautiful scenes are presented to us only on one side, or that their figures are motionless? What then would we have? In the painting of the fate of Heliodorus, do not the two ministers of heavenly vengeance fly, as they dart upon their victim? Do we not really pass round the Antiope of Correggio or the Venus of Titian? Are shrieks wanting to the torments of Laocoon, or the accents of lamentation to the anguish of Niobe? He who has never heard sounds from the chorus of the dream of Atys, has never seen aught but motion in the pantomimes of Noverre.

To what, therefore, are those arts indebted for their fascinations? Precisely to that deficiency which prevents them from deceiving us. They are owing to the very efforts they must make to supply what nature has denied them. How then -should we repine at privations to which they owe

their riches, and an impotence which becomes the cause of their power?

To that fortunate impotence are we indebted for the prodigies of art.

The artist obliged continually to keep in view the weak side of his art, which, like the assailable point of a fortress requires so much the more care, puts all his means in requisition to point attention to the side where he is strongest, and this diversion he is enabled to bring about by virtue of that perfection, which can belong only to art. We shall indeed find that there is no art, however inferior in many respects to its model, that is not able to defy, nay, even to surpass it in some one. For each, from the very circumstance of its being imitation, may subject its works to combinations which cannot extend their influence to the operations of nature. Art, moreover, to excite an interest in its limited creation, places its reliance on a single point of view, while nature, amid the boundless extent of objects she includes, neglects the care of minute details that would be unavailable to her purpose. But this will elsewhere be further developed. (See Part II. Chap. vii.)

I have already said enough for my readers to comprehend, why the happiest results of imitation depend on a faithful adherence to its elementary principle, why art owes the only superiority its images can possess over reality, to their keeping within the bounds of their particular nature; why

it is precisely to what is fictious and incomplete in his imitation that the artist is indebted for its efficacy; and finally, why he rises superior to his model, from the very cause that would be supposed to retain him beneath it.

But this also explains to us how and why tame works, in which the perfection of art is wanting, have, or at least appear to have, an effect so inferior to those of nature, and so slight an action on the mind and the senses, which has justly given occasion to say that there is no degree between the mediocre and the bad.

What but the coldness of its marble or the rigidity of matter, remains to that statue in which genius, sentiment, and skill have neither created the character, ennobled the expression, nor perfected the form? What, to those painted compositions of figures devoid of aim, and without truth of action, but the shock their immobility causes to the senses? Nothing is flatter to the eye than a picture, the lines of which are not flowing; nothing more mute than a pantomime, where the motions are expressive of no passions; more fruitless than a concert of sounds productive only of noise; nor more prosaic than verses which have nothing beyond the metre and the rhyme.

Imitative perfection, which every art may attain by its own proper means, is alone adequate to re-establish the equilibrium between the imitated and imitating object, between the original

and the image. Every other expedient derived from borrowed or stolen resources, not only aggravates the defect it disguises, but deprives art of the only compensation that can enable it to vie successfully with nature.

To counterfeit nature is not to imitate her. < That fruitless pretension to identical similarity, which belies and foils itself, is worthy of no other name than that of counterfeit, mimicry, or parody.< Reality, life, motion, are prerogatives of nature; it is by means of those that she gives pleasure. The privilege of art is that it needs neither life nor reality in order to please, and that, like nature, it pleases, notwithstanding all that it falls short of being nature. Its privilege is, not to present reality, but to supply its place.