Ireland, that has produced so many
powerful spirits, has produced no great sculptors or painters. Cross
into England. The inaptitude for the plastic art strikingly
diminishes, as soon as the German, not the Celtic element,
preponderates in the race. And yet in England, too, in the English
race, there is something which seems to prevent our reaching real
mastership in the plastic arts, as the more unmixed German races have
reached it. Reynolds and Turner are painters of genius, who can
doubt it? but take a European jury, the only competent jury in these
cases, and see if you can get a verdict giving them the rank of
masters, as this rank is given to Raphael and Correggio, or to Albert
Durer and Rubens. And observe in what points our English pair
succeed, and in what they fall short. They fall short in
architectonice, in the highest power of composition, by which
painting accomplishes the very uttermost which it is given to
painting to accomplish; the highest sort of composition, the highest
application of the art of painting, they either do not attempt, or
they fail in it. Their defect, therefore, is on the side of art, of
plastic art. And they succeed in magic, in beauty, in grace, in
expressing almost the inexpressible: here is the charm of Reynolds's
children and Turner's seas; the impulse to express the inexpressible
carries Turner so far, that at last it carries him away, and even
long before he is quite carried away, even in works that are justly
extolled, one can see the stamp-mark, as the French say, of insanity.
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