These arts have likewise their points of union as well as of contrast. They happily illustrate the obser vation of Cicero regarding the mutual blending of the different provinces of human pursuit. In the chart which exhibits the empire of genius, the central por tion of each division is strongly marked, but the dis tant confines melt into each other, nor is it easy to ascertain with precision the exact boundary. Thus in sculpture, relievo approaches the varied composi tion and illusive effects of painting and perspective, while in simple chiar'oscuro, painting adds nothing, save fiction, to the elements of the sister art. But an important distinction is here to be remarked. While the painter derives power from borrowing the sim plicity and learned outline of sculpture, even should his works, like those of the Roman masters and fathers of the art, thus acquire a degree of harshness; yet the sculptor cannot transplant one charm peculiar to painting which does not become a meretricious or nament, detracting equally from the unity and dignity of his composition.
Sculpture, or the actual representation of form by its tangible properties, being the more obvious in ap plication, and the easier in execution, was most proba bly the earlier cultivated of the arts of design.
Respecting its origin, much has been written, great ingenuity displayed, and authors have claimed for various favourite nations the praise of invention. The same remark applies equally to all the arts. But here theory appears to be not more judiciously applied, than would be speculations on the priority of invent ing sight or hearing. Poetry and music—sculpture and painting, each has its spring in a law of human nature, whose necessary operation is to create desires which point to the respective objects of these arts. The imagination only requires to be stimulated by desire, whether natural or artificial, quickly to disco ver the means of gratification. Accordingly, we shall find it more agreeable to fact, as it certainly is the simpler and more philosophical view, to regard every art as arising insensibly among different nations, and as cultivated independently, though with unequal suc cess, from the earliest period. Nor is similarity of style evidence of continuous imitation. In the infancy of society, men in all countries resemble each other very closely; their wants are the same, their means of supplying these at first but little varied, and the progress from the naked and uninformed savage, to the possessor of some degree of knowledge and of social comfort, is marked by nearly similar gradations.
The primitive efforts of invention among every peo ple, as compared with those of other and distant na tions, will consequently present little of diversified or peculiar character. The first statues of Egypt and of Greece exhibit almost identical lineaments, and even corresponding attitude,—simply because each had to contend against the same difficulties, with nearly equal facilities of surmounting them. If im perfect instruments, unyielding materials, and inex perience of hand, obliged the Egyptian artist to re present his figures in a constrained posture, with the knees pressed together, arms hanging down and close to the sides, and this not even in the earliest state of the art; the same restraints imposed a similar mode of representation on the Grecian, although from the operation of external causes the advance of genius was very unequal in the two countries. - Surely then it is little less unphilosophical to maintain, that the latter must have been a copyist of the former, than it would be to assert that the wigwam, on the shores of the Maragnon or the Illinois, must have been borrowed from the same plan as the aboriginal hut which subse quently rose into the temple and the portico on the banks of the Eurotas or Cephisus. The hut and the wigwam are antitypes of each other, because both are the same primordial rudiment of an art having its scanty origin in necessity, before exalted by taste into a source of beauty and of grandeur. The idols of the Hindoos, the carvings of the South Sea islanders, are not unlike to descriptions of the early images of Greece, sculptured by the predecessors of Phidias and of Praxiteles. Does this resemblance arise from reciprocal imitation, from a common instructor? Consistency would require an affirmative reply. But with equal probability might it be assumed, that the harmonious language and no mean strains of the Ma lay bard, are derived from Ionia and from I-Iomer.* All these kindred arts owe their birth to the same law of necessity—necessity of ministering—not to the wants of the body, but to the more ardent aspirations of the heart and of the affections—to piety, to patriot ism, to friendship. In this view, though with excus able vanity they assigned to their own country the earliest knowledge•of those delightful pursuits, the Greeks evinced a true feeling of their native original, by veiling these claims in beautiful allegory. To love, under which name every noble emotion was included, the ancient poets attributed the gift of the arts.