a friend;" this delightful companionship lasted unbroken till the death of Johnson. It was probably through Johnson that Reynolds gradually became intimate with Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Percy. In their company he grew accustomed to intellectual exercises and to a witty turn of language such as no other artists of that day were proficient in or comprehended. a painfully depressing illness, on the 23rd of February 1792, and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. FROM "THE TENTH DISCOURSE" (December 11, 1780). Sculpture is an art of much more simplicity and uniformity than painting; it cannot with propriety, and the best effect, be applied to many subjects. The object of its pursuit may be comprised in two words, Form and Character; and those qualities are presented to us but in one manner, or in one style only; whereas the powers of Painting, as they are more various and extensive, so they are exhibited in a great variety of manners. The Roman, Lombard, Florentine, Venetian, and Flemish Schools, all pursue the same end by different means. But Sculpture, having but one style, can only to one style of Painting have any relation; and to this, which is indeed the highest and most dignified that Painting can boast, it has a relation so close, that it may be said to be almost the same art operating upon different materials. The sculptors of the last age, from not attending sufficiently to this discrimination of the different styles of painting, have been led into many errors. Though they well knew that they were allowed to imitate, or take ideas for the improvement of their own art from the grand style of painting, they were not permitted to borrow in the same manner from the ornamental. When they endeavour to copy the picturesque effects, contrasts, or petty excellencies of whatever kind, which not improperly find a place in the inferior branches of painting, they doubtless imagine themselves improving and extending the boundaries of their art by this imitation; but they are in reality violating its essential characters, by giving a different direction to its operations, and proposing to themselves either what is unattainable, or at best a meaner object of pursuit. The grave and austere character of sculpture requires the utmost degree of formality in composition; picturesque contrasts have here no place; everything is carefully weighed and measured, one side making almost an exact equipoise to the other: a child is not a proper balance to a full-grown figure, nor is a figure sitting or stooping a companion to an upright figure. The central portion of the eighteenth century marks a progress in the democratisation of literature. The love of books and the habit of reading spread rapidly and widely through all parts of the country and all ranks of society. The world of letters was no longer, as it had been in the age of Anne, a small circle of sub-aristocratic bourgeois who wrote for one another and for the polite toilets of London. The capital was no longer remarkable for the importance of its literary representatives; the life of letters was in the provinces, was almost cosmopolitan. English literature now, for the first time, became European, and in order to obtain that distinction, it was forced more and more to cast aside its original characteristics and to relinquish its insularity. That it did so with effect is proved by the very interesting fact that, while up to this date we have seen. England either solitary or affected by Italy or France without the knowledge of those powers, we find it now suddenly producing the most powerfully radiating literature in Europe, and forming the taste of Germany, France, and the world. The final actor in the work of fusing the Saxon and the Latin literatures in one general style was Rousseau, who combined, as Mme. de Staël noted, the taste and habits of France with the ideas and sentiments of the North. The freedom and rough simplicity of English life, its energy, its cultivation of truth and sincerity-qualities, no doubt, viewed by the Continental Anglomaniacs under too rosy a light, but still, in outline, recognisably national these were what fascinated, in their different ways, Voltaire, Prévost, Diderot, and above all Rousseau. Conducted by these enthusiasts, the literature of barbarous England was received with open arms in all the academies and salons of Europe, and a new literature was everywhere stimulated into existence by the rivalry of such Englishmen as Young, Richardson, and Hume. On the other hand, it is impossible to overlook the influence of Montesquieu on such English minds as those of Gray, Gibbon, and Adam Ferguson; and the Scotch writers, in particular, consciously gallicised their style, in the pursuit of that elegant plausibility which they found so charming in French models. These reverberations of taste aided one another, and increased the facility with which English and Continental readers acquainted themselves mutually with the rival literature. But this marks a condition of things hitherto unparalleled, and we may roughly give the year 1750 as the date at which the wall which had from the earliest times surrounded and concealed our intellectual products, began to crumble down and expose us to the half-admiring, half-scornful gaze of Europe. This communion with exotic forms of intelligence, and the renewed sympathy for antique and romantic forms of thought and expression, tended, no doubt, to prepare our literature for the revolution which was coming. But even so late as 1780 there were few signs of change. Individual men of genius forced the language to say, for them and through them, things which had not been said before, but the pedagogic shackles were practically unloosened. It was in the insidious forms of "sensibility," as it was called, the new species of tender and self-satisfying pity, that the rigid rules of life. were being most directly broken. This warm stream of sentiment, amounting at times to something like enthusiasm, tended to melt the horny or stony crust which the recognised conditions of thought had spread over every kind of literature. Grace, eloquence, intellectual curiosity, dignity-all these were still possible under the hard formular régime; but the more spiritual movements of the mind- lyrical passion, daring speculation, real sublimity, splendid caprice were quite impossible within a space so cramped, and were, as a matter of fact, scarcely attempted. When we consider, then, how unfavourable the conditions were in which literature was confined during the central years of the eighteenth century, we may marvel, not at the poverty, but at the richness of the actual product. If the creation of the novel was the greatest triumph of the age, it was not its only one. These years brought forth a number of men whose intellectual vitality was so commanding, that it negatived the sterile qualities of the soil from which they sprang. If Butler, Gibbon, Johnson, and Gray had been born in an age which aided instead of retarding the flow of their ideas, their periods might have been fuller, their ornament more splendid. But so intense was their individuality, so definite their sense of what their gift was to the age, that they overcame their disabilities, and produced work which we, regarding it with deep sympathy and respect, cannot conceive being cast in a form more pertinent or more characteristic. And it is a sentimental error to suppose that the winds of God blow only through the green tree; it is sometimes the dry tree which is peculiarly favourable to their passage. END OF VOLUME III Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO |