A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 28

"There is an instinctive sense of propriety and reality in every mind; and it is not true, as some great authority has said, that in art we are satisfied with contemplating the work without thinking of the artist. On the contrary, the artist himself is one great object in the work. It is as embodying the energies and excellences of the human mind, as exhibiting the efforts of genius, as symbolising high feeling, that we most value the creations of art; without design the representations of art are merely fantastical, and without the thought of a design acting upon fixed principles in accordance with a high standard of goodness and truth, half the charm of design is lost."

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98.

"Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanising nature, of infusing the thoughts and pa.s.sions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation. Colour, form, motion, sound, are the elements which it combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a _moral_ idea."

This is Coleridge's definition:-Art then is nature, _humanised_; and in proportion as humanity is elevated by the interfusion into our life of n.o.ble aims and pure affections will art be spiritualised and moralised.

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99.

If faith has elevated art, superst.i.tion has everywhere debased it.

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100.

Goethe observes that there is no patriotic art and no patriotic science-that both are universal.

There is, however, _national_ art, but not _national_ science: we say "national art," "natural science."

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101.

"Verse is in itself music, and the natural symbol of that union of pa.s.sion with thought and pleasure, which const.i.tutes the essence of all poetry as contradistinguished from history civil or natural."-_Coleridge._

In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse is to prose-a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.

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102.

Subjects and representations in art not elevated nor interesting in themselves, become instructive and interesting to higher minds from the _manner_ in which they have been treated; perhaps because they have pa.s.sed through the medium of a higher mind in taking form.

This is one reason, though we are not always conscious of it, that the Dutch pictures of common and vulgar life give us a pleasure apart from their wonderful finish and truth of detail. In the mind of the artist there must have been the power to throw himself into a sphere _above_ what he represents. Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been something far better than a sot; Ostade something higher than a boor; though the habits of both led them into companionship with sots and boors. In the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a depth of feeling and observation which remind me of the humour of Goldsmith; and Teniers, we know, was in his habits a refined gentleman; the brilliant elegance of his pencil contrasting with the grotesque vulgarity of his subjects. To a thinking mind, some of these Dutch pictures of character are full of material for thought, pathetic even where least sympathetic: no doubt, because of a latent sympathy with the artist, apart from his subject.

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103.

Coleridge says,-"Every human feeling is greater and larger than the exciting cause." (A philosophical way of putting Rochefoucauld's neatly expressed apophthegm: "Nous ne sommes jamais ni si heureux ni si malheureux que nous l'imaginons.") "A proof," he proceeds, "that man is designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied in music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate expression."

But not music only, every production of art ought to excite emotions greater and thoughts larger than itself. Thoughts and emotions which never perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were antic.i.p.ated, never were intended by him-may be strongly suggested by his work. This is an important part of the morals of art, which we must never lose sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit, but for good and for evil.

Goethe (in the _Dichtung und Wahrheit_) describes the reception of Marie Antoinette at Strasbourg, where she pa.s.sed the frontier to enter her new kingdom. She was then a lovely girl of sixteen. He relates that on visiting before her arrival the reception room on the bridge over the Rhine, where her German attendants were to deliver her into the hands of the French authorities, he found the walls hung with tapestries representing the ominous story of Jason and Medea-of all the marriages on record the most fearful, the most tragic in its consequences. "What!"

he exclaims, his poetical imagination struck with the want of moral harmony, "was there among these French architects and decorators no man who could perceive that pictures represent things,-that they have a meaning in themselves,-that they can impress sense and feeling,-that they can awaken presentiments of good or evil?" But, as he tells us, his exclamations of horror were met by the mockery of his French companions, who a.s.sured him that it was not everybody's concern to look for significance in pictures.

These self-same tapestries of the story of Jason and Medea were after the Restoration presented by Louis XVIII. to George IV., and at present they line the walls of the Ball-room in Windsor Castle. We might repeat, with some reason, the question of Goethe; for if pictures have a significance, and speak to the imagination, what has the tragedy of Jason and Medea to do in a ball-room?

Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that works of art speak to the feelings and the conscience, and can awaken a.s.sociations tending to good and evil, by some strange inconsistency places art and artists out of the sphere of morals. He speaks somewhere with contempt and ridicule of those who take their conscience and their morality with them to an opera or a picture gallery. Yet surely he is wrong. Why should we not? Are our conscience and our morals like articles of dress which we can take off and put on again as we fancy it convenient or expedient?-shut up in a drawer and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or a gallery of art?

or are they not rather a part of ourselves-our very life-to graduate the worth, to fix the standard of all that mingles with our life? The idea that what we call _taste_ in art has something quite distinctive from conscience, is one cause that the popular notions concerning the productions of art are abandoned to such confusion and uncertainty; that simple people regard _taste_ as something forensic, something to be learned, as they would learn a language, and mastered by a study of rules and a dictionary of epithets; and they look up to a professor of taste, just as they would look up to a professor of Greek or of Hebrew.

Either they listen to judgments lightly and confidently promulgated with a sort of puzzled faith and a surrender of their own moral sense, which are pitiable; as if art also had its infallible church and its hierarchy of dictators!-or they fly into the opposite extreme, and seeing themselves deceived and misled, fall away into strange heresies. All from ignorance of a few laws simple in their form, yet infinite in their application;-_natural_ laws we must call them, though here applied to art.

In my younger days I have known men conspicuous for their want of elevated principle, and for their dissipated habits, held up as arbiters and judges of art; but it was to them only another form of epicurism and self-indulgence; and I have seen them led into such absurd and fatal mistakes for want of the power to distinguish and to generalise, that I have despised their judgment, and have come to the conclusion that a really high standard of taste and a low standard of morals are incompatible with each other.

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104.

"The fact of the highest artistic genius having manifested itself in a polytheistic age, and among a people whose moral views were essentially degraded, has, we think, fostered the erroneous notion that the sphere of art has no connection with that of morality. The Greeks, with penetrative insight, dilated the essential characteristics of man's organism as a vehicle of superior intelligence, while their intense sympathy with physical beauty made them alive to its most subtle manifestations; and reproducing their impressions through the medium of art, they have given birth to models of the human form, which reveal its highest possibilities, and the excellence of which depends upon their being individual expressions of ideal truth. Thus, too, in their descriptions of nature, instead of multiplying insignificant details, they seized instinctively upon the characteristic features of her varying aspects, and not unfrequently embodied a finished picture in one comprehensive and harmonious word. In a.s.sociation with their marvellous genius, however, we find a cruelty, a treachery, and a licence which would be revolting if it were not for the historical interest which attaches to every genuine record of a bygone age. Their low moral standard cannot excite surprise when we consider the debasing tendency of their worship, the objects of their adoration being nothing more than their own degraded pa.s.sions invested with some of the attributes of deity. Now, among the modifications of thought introduced by Christianity, there is perhaps none more pregnant with important results than the harmony which it has established between religion and morality. The great law of right and wrong has acquired a sacred character, when viewed as an expression of the divine will; it takes its rank among the eternal verities, and to ignore it in our delineations of life, or to represent sin otherwise than as treason against the supreme ruler, is to retain in modern civilisation one of the degrading elements of heathenism. Conscience is as great a fact of our inner life as the sense of beauty, and the harmonious action of both these instinctive principles is essential to the highest enjoyment of art, for any internal dissonance disturbs the repose of the mind, and thereby shatters the image mirrored in its depths."-_A. S._

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105.

"Mais vous autres artistes, vous ne considerez pour la plupart dans les uvres que la beaute ou la singularite de l'execution, sans vous penetrer de l'idee dont cet uvre est la forme; ainsi votre intelligence adore souvent l'expression d'un sentiment que votre cur repousserait s'il en avait la conscience."-_George Sand._

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106.

Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual, the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.

What then shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted the hands of his men and women, not from individual nature, but from a model hand-his own very often?-and every one who considers for a moment will see in Van Dyck's portraits, that, however well painted and elegant the hands, they in very few instances harmonise with the _personalite_;-that the position is often affected, and as if intended for display,-the display of what is in itself a positive fault, and from which some little knowledge of comparative physiology would have saved him.

There are hands of various character; the hand to catch, and the hand to hold; the hand to clasp, and the hand to grasp. The hand that has worked or could work, and the hand that has never done anything but hold itself out to be kissed, like that of Joanna of Arragon in Raphael's picture.

Let any one look at the hands in t.i.tian's portrait of old Paul IV.: though exquisitely modelled, they have an expression which reminds us of claws; they belong to the face of that grasping old man, and could belong to no other.

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107.

Mozart and Chopin, though their genius was differently developed, were alike in some things: in nothing more than this, that the artistic element in both minds wholly dominated over the social and practical, and that their art was the element in which they moved and lived, through which they felt and thought. I doubt whether either of them could have said, "_D'abord je suis homme et puis je suis artiste_;"