210 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

for the exponent of Sense, Painting is chosen as the peculiar expression of Spirit. “The painting of Christendom is that of an immortal spirit conversing with its God.” But in a note to the first chapter of the second volume, he will be surprised to find painting become a “twin of intellect,” and architecture suddenly advanced from a type of sense to a type of spirit:-

“Sculpture and Painting, twins of Intellect, rejoice and breath freest in the pure ether of Architecture, or Spirit, like Castor or Pollux under the breezy heaven of their father Jupiter.”-Vol. ii. p. 14.

42. Prepared by this passage to consider painting either as spiritual or intellectual, his patience may pardonably give way on finding in the sixth letter-(what he might, however, have conjectured from the heading of the third period in the chart of the schools)-that the peculiar prerogative of painting-colour, is to be considered as a sensual element, and the exponent of sense, in accordance with a new analogy, here for the first time proposed, between spirit, intellect, and sense, and expression, from, and colour. Lord Lindsay is peculiarly unfortunate in his adoptions from previous writers. He has taken this division of art from Fuseli and Reynolds, without perceiving that in those writers it is one of convenience merely, and, even so considered, is as injudicious as illogical. In what does expression consist but in form and colour? It is one of the ends which these accomplish, and may be itself an attribute of both. Colour may be expressive or inexpressive, like music; form expressive or inexpressive, like words; but expression by itself cannot exist; so that to divide painting into colour, form, and expression, is precisely as rational as to divide music into notes, words, and expression. Colour may be pensive, severe, exciting, appalling, gay, glowing, or sensual; in all these modes it is expressive: form may be tender or abrupt, mean or majestic, attractive or overwhelming, discomfortable or delightsome; in all these modes, and many more, it is expressive; and if Lord Lindsay’s analogy be in anywise applicable to either form or colour, we should have colour sensual

[Version 0.04: March 2008]