wn meanness. Power is not wisdom, it
is true; but it equally ensures its own objects. It does not exact, but
dispenses with talent. When a man creates this power, or new-moulds the
state by sage counsels and bold enterprises, it is a different thing
from overturning it with the levers that are put into his baby hands.
In general, however, it may be argued that great transactions and
complicated concerns ask more genius to conduct them than smaller ones,
for this reason, viz. that the mind must be able either to embrace a
greater variety of details in a more extensive range of objects, or must
have a greater faculty of generalising, or a greater depth of insight
into ruling principles, and so come at true results in that way.
Buonaparte knew everything, even to the names of our cadets in the East
India service; but he failed in this, that he did not calculate the
resistance which barbarism makes to refinement. He thought that the
Russians could not burn Moscow, because the Parisians could not burn
Paris. The French think everything must be French. The Cossacks, alas!
do not conform to etiquette: the rudeness of the seasons knows no rules
of politeness! Some artists think it a test of genius to paint a large
picture; and I grant the truth of this position, if the large picture
contains more than a small one. It is not the size of the canvas, but
the quantity of truth and nature put into it, that settles the point. It
is a mistake, common enough on this subject, to suppose that a miniature
is more finished than an oil-picture. The miniature is inferior to the
oil-picture only because it is less finished, because it cannot follow
nature into so many individual and exact particulars. The proof of which
is, that the copy of a good portrait will always make a highly finished
miniature (see for example Mr. Bone's enamels), whereas the copy of a
good miniature, if enlarged to the size of life, will make but a very
sorry portrait. Several of our best artists, who are fond of painting
large figures, invert this reasoning. They make the whole figure
gigantic, not that they may have room for nature, but for the motion of
their brush (as if they were painting the side of a house), regarding
the extent of canvas they have to cover as an excuse for their slovenly
and hasty manner of getting over it; and thus, in fact, leave their
pictures nothing at last but overgrown miniatures, but huge caricatures.
It is not necessary in any case (eit