ON

THE ELGIN MARBLES.

Who to the life an exact piece would make,
Must not from others' work a copy take;
No, not from Rubens or Vandyke:
Much less content himself to make it like
Th' ideas and the images which lie
In his own Fancy or his Memory.
No: he before his sight must place
The natural and living face;

The real object must command

Each judgment of his eye and motion of his hand.

THE true lesson to be learnt by our students and professors from the Elgin marbles is the one which the ingenious and honest Cowley has expressed in the above spirited lines. The great secret is to recur at every step to nature

-To learn

Her manner, and with rapture taste her style.

It is evident to any one who views these admirable remains of Antiquity (nay, it is acknowledged by our artists themselves, in despite

of all the melancholy sophistry which they have been taught or have been teaching others for half a century) that the chief excellence of the figures depends on their having been copied from nature, and not from imagination. The communication of art with nature is here everywhere immediate, entire, palpable. The artist gives himself no fastidious airs of superiority over what he sees. He has not arrived at that stage of his progress described at much length in Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses, in which, having served out his apprenticeship to nature, he can set up for himself in opposition to her. According to the old Greek form of drawing up the indentures in this case, we apprehend they were to last for life. At least, we can compare these Marbles to nothing but human figures petrified: they have every appearance of absolute fac-similes or casts taken from nature. The details are those of nature; the masses are those of nature; the forms are from nature; the action is from nature; the whole is from nature. Let any one, for instance, look at the leg of the Ilissus or River-God, which is bent under him-let him observe the swell and undulation of the calf, the inter-texture of the muscles, the distinction and union of all the parts, and the effect of action every where impressed on the external form, as if the very marble were a flexible substance, and contained the various springs of life and motion within itself, and

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he will own that art and nature are here the same thing. It is the same in the back of the Theseus, in the thighs and knees, and in all that remains unimpaired of these two noble figures. It is not the same in the cast (which was shown at Lord Elgin's) of the famous Torso by Michael Angelo, the style of which that artist appears to have imitated too well. There every muscle has obviously the greatest prominence and force given to it of which it is capable in itself, not of which it is capable in connection with others. This fragment is an accumulation of mighty parts, without that play and re-action of each part upon the rest, without that "alternate action and repose," which Sir Thomas Lawrence speaks of as characteristic of the Theseus and the Ilissus, and which are as inseparable from nature as waves from the sea. The learned, however, here make a distinction, and suppose that the truth of nature is, in the Elgin marbles, combined with ideal forms. If by ideal forms they mean fine natural forms, we have nothing to object; but if they mean that the sculptors of the Theseus and Ilissus got the forms out of their own heads, and then tacked the truth of nature to them, we can only say, "Let them look again, let them look again." We consider the Elgin Marbles as a demonstration of the impossibility of separating art from nature, without a proportionable loss at every

remove. The utter absence of all setness of appearance proves that they were done as studies from actual models. The separate parts of the human body may be given from scientific knowledge:-their modifications or inflections can only be learnt by seeing them in action; and the truth of nature is incompatible with ideal form, if the latter is meant to exclude actually existing form. The mutual action of the parts cannot be determined where the object itself is not seen. That the forms of these statues are not common nature, such as we see it every day, we readily allow: that they were not select Greek nature, we see no convincing reason to suppose. That truth of nature, and ideal or fine form, are not always or generally united, we know; but how they can ever be united in art, without being first united in nature, is to us a mystery, and one that we as little believe as understand!

Suppose, for illustration's sake, that these Marbles were originally done as casts from actual nature, and then let us enquire whether they would not have possessed all the same qualities that they now display, granting only that the forms were in the first instance selected with the eye of taste, and disposed with knowledge of the art and of the subject.

First, the larger masses and proportions of entire limbs and divisions of the body would have been found in the casts, for they would

have been found in nature. The back, and trunk, and arms, and legs, and thighs, would have been there, for these are parts of the natural man, or actual living body, and not inventions of the artist, or ideal creations borrowed from the skies. There would have been the same sweep in the back of the Theseus; the same swell in the muscles of the arm on which he leans; the same division of the leg into calf and small, i. e. the same general results, or aggregation of parts, in the principal and most striking divisions of the body. The upper part of the arm would have been thicker than the lower, the thighs larger than the legs, the body larger than the thighs, in a cast taken from common nature; and in casts taken from the finest nature they would have been so in the same proportion, form, and manner, as in the statue of the Theseus, if the Theseus answers to the idea of the finest nature; for the idea and the reality must be the same; only, we contend that the idea is taken from the reality, instead of existing by itself, or being the creature of fancy. That is, there would be the same grandeur of proportions and parts in a cast taken from finely developed nature, such as the Greek sculptors had constantly before them, naked and in action, that we find in the limbs and masses of bone, flesh, and muscle, in these much and justly admired remains.

Again, and incontestibly, there would have