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Untitled Article
of vice in the pictorial , which corresponds to rant in the histrionic art , we would advise him to walk once up and once down the gallery of the Luxembourg ; even now when David , the great corrupter of taste , has been translated from this world to the next , and from the Luxembourg , consequently , into the more elevated
sphere of the Louvre . Every figure in French painting or statuary seems to be showing itself off before spectators : they are in the worst style of corrupted eloquence , but in no style of poetry at all . The best are stiff and unnatural ; the worst resemble figures of cataleptic patients . The French artists fancy themselves imitators
of the classics , yet they seem to have no understanding and no feeling of that repose which was the peculiar and pervading character of Grecian art , until it began to decline : a repose tenfold more indicative of strength than all their stretching and straining ; for strength , as Thomas Carlyle says , does not manifest itself in spasms .
There are some productions of art which it seems at first difficult to arrange in any of the classes above illustrated . The direct aim of art as such , is the production of the beautiful ; and as there are other things beautiful besides states of mind , there is much of art which may seem to have nothing to do with either poetry or eloquence as we have defined them . Take for instance
a composition of Claude , or Salvator Rosa . There is here creation of new beauty : by the grouping of natural scenery , conformably indeed to the laws of outward nature , but not after any actual model ; the result being a beauty more perfect and faultless than is perhaps to be found in any actual landscape . Yet there is a character of poetry even in these , without which they could not
be so beautiful . The unity , and wholeness , and cesthetic congruity of the picture still lies in singleness of expression ; but it is expression in a different sense from that in which we have hitherto employed the term . The objects in an imaginary landscape cannot be said ,, like the words of a poern or the notes of a melody , to be the actual-utterance of a feeling ; but there must be some feeling with which they harmonize , and which they have a tendency
to raise up in the spectator ' s mind . They must inspire a feeling of grandeur , a loveliness , a cheerfulness , a wildness , a melancholy , a terror . The painter must surround his principal objects with such imagery as would spontaneously arise in a highl y imaginative mind , when contemplating those objects under the impression of the feelings which they are intended to inspire . This , if it be not poetry , is so nearly allied to it , as scarcely to require being
distinguished . In this sense we may speak of the poetry of architecture . AH architecture , to be impressive , must be the expression or symbol of some interesting idea ; some thought , which has power over the emotions . The reason why modern architecture is so paltry , is simply that it is not the expression of any idea ; it is a mere
Untitled Article
What is Poetry T 69
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1833, page 69, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2606/page/69/
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