ESSAY III.

ON MEANS AND ENDS.

Ir is impossible to have things done without doing them. This seems a truism; and yet what is more common than to suppose that we shall find things done, merely by wishing it? To put the will for the deed is as usual in practice as it is contrary to common sense. There is in fact no absurdity, no contradiction, of which the will is not capable. This is, I think, more remarkable in the English than in any other people, in whom (to judge by what I discover in myself) the will bears great and disproportioned sway. We will a thing: we contemplate the end intensely, and think it done, neglecting the necessary means to accomplish it. The strong tendency of the mind towards it, the internal effort it makes to give being to the object of its idolatry, seems an adequate cause to produce the effect, and in a manner identified with it. This is more particularly the case in what relates to the fine arts, and will account for some phenomena of the national character.

The English school is distinguished by what are called ébauches, rude, violent attempts at effect, and a total inattention to the details or delicacy of finishing. Now this, I think, proceeds not exactly from grossness of perception, but from the wilfulness of our character; our desire to have things our own way, without any trouble or distraction of purpose. An object strikes us we see and feel the whole effect. We wish to produce a likeness of it; but we want to transfer this impression to the canvas as it is conveyed to us, simultaneously and intuitively, that is, to stamp it there at a blow, or otherwise we turn away with impatience and disgust, as if the means were an obstacle to the end, and every attention to the mechanical part of art were a deviation from our original purpose. We thus degenerate, after repeated failures, into a slovenly style of art; and that which was at first an undisciplined and irregular impulse becomes a habit, and then a theory. It seems strange that the love of the end should produce aversion to the means-but so it is; neither is it altogether unnatural. That which we are struck with, which we are enamoured of, is the general appearance and result; and it would certainly be most desirable to produce the effect in the same manner by a mere word

or wish, if it were possible, without entering into any mechanical drudgery or minuteness of detail or dexterity of execution, which though they are essential and component parts of the work, do not enter into our thoughts, and form no part of our contemplation. We may find it necessary on a cool calculation to go through and learn these, but in so doing we only submit to necessity, and they are still a diversion to and a suspension of our purpose for the time, at least unless practice gives that facility which almost identifies the two together or makes the process an unconscious one. The end thus devours up the means, or our eagerness for the one, where it is strong and unchecked, is in proportion to our impatience of the other. We view an object at a distance that excites an inclination to visit it, which we do after many tedious steps and intricate ways; but if we could fly, we should never walk. The mind however has wings though the body has not, and it is this that produces the contradiction in question. The first and strongest impulse of the mind is to produce any work at once and by the most energetic means; but as this cannot always be done, we should not neglect other more mechanical ones, but that delusions of passion overrule the convictions of the under

VOL. I.

standing, and what we strongly wish we fancy to be possible and true. We are full of the effect we intend to produce, and imagine we have produced it, in spite of the evidence of our senses, and suggestions of our friends. In fact, after a number of fruitless efforts and violent throes to produce an effect which we passionately long for, it seems an injustice not to have produced it; if we have not commanded success, we have done more, we have deserved it; we have copied nature or Titian in the spirit in which they ought to be copied, and we see them before us in our mind's eye; there is the look, the expression, the something or other which we chiefly aimed at, and thus we persist and make fifty excuses to deceive ourselves and confirm our errors, or if the light breaks upon us through all the disguises of sophistry and self-love, it is so painful that we shut our eyes to it; the greater the

mortification the more violent the effort to throw it off, and thus we stick to our determination and end where we began. What makes me think that this is the process of our minds, and not mere rusticity or want of apprehension is, that you will see an English artist admiring and thrown into raptures by the tucker of Titian's mistress, made up of an infinite number of little folds, but if he attempts to copy it, he proceeds to omit

all these details, and dash it off by a single smear of his brush. This is not ignorance, or even laziness, but what is called jumping at a conclusion. It is, in a word, an overweening purpose. He sees the details, the varieties, and their effects and he admires them, but he sees them with a glance of his eye, and as a wilful man must have his way, he would reproduce them by a single dash of the pencil. The mixing his colours, the putting in and out, the giving his attention to a minute break, or softening in the particular lights and shades, is a mechanical and everlasting operation, very different from the delight he feels in contemplating the effect of all this when properly and finely done. Such details are foreign to his refined taste, and some doubts arise in his mind in the midst of his gratitude and his raptures, as to how Titian could resolve upon the drudgery of going through them, and whether it was not done by extreme facility of hand, and a sort of trick, abridging the mechanical labour. No one wrote or talked more enthusiastically about Titian's harmony of colouring than the late Mr Barry, yet his own colouring was dead and dry, and if he had copied a Titian, he would have made it a mere splash, leaving out all that caused his wonder or admiration, after his