Haydon discussed “High Art” as if it depended solely on the knowledge and the appreciation of _form_. In this lay his great mistake. Form is but the vehicle of the highest art.
Southey says that the Franciscan Order “excluded all art, all science;—no pictures might profane their churches.” This is a most extraordinary instance of ignorance in a man of Southey’s universal learning. Did he forget Friar Bacon? had he not heard of that museum of divine pictures, the Franciscan church and convent at Assisi? And that some of the greatest mathematicians, architects, mosaic workers, carvers, and painters, of the 13th and 14th centuries were Franciscan friars?
Wordsworth’s remark on Sir Joshua Reynolds as a painter, that “he lived too much for the age and the people among whom he lived,” is hardly just; as a portrait-painter he could not well do otherwise; his profession was to represent the people among whom he lived. An artist who takes the higher, the creative and imaginative walks of art, and who thinks he can, at the same time, live for and with the age, and for the passing and clashing interests of the world, and the frivolities of society, does so at a great risk: there must be perilous discord between the inner and the outer life—such discord as wears and irritates the whole physical and moral being. Where the original material of the character is not strong, the artistic genius will be gradually enfeebled and conventionalised, through flattery, through sympathy, through misuse. If the material be strong, the result may perhaps be worse; the genius may be demoralised and the mind lose its balance. I have seen in my time instances of both.
“The man,” says Coleridge, “who reads a work meant for immediate effect on one age, with the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined gentleman but a very sorry critic.”
This is especially true with regard to art: but Coleridge should have put in the word, _only_, (“only the notions and feelings of another age,”) for a very great pleasure lies in the power of throwing ourselves into the sentiments and notions of one age, while feeling _with_ them, and reflecting _upon_ them, with the riper critical experience which belongs to another age.