A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 31

[Ill.u.s.tration]

129.

In the Greek tragedy, love figures as one of the laws of nature-not as a power, or a pa.s.sion; these are the aspects given to it by the Christian imagination.

Yet this higher idea of love _did_ exist among the ancients-only we must not seek it in their poetry, but in their philosophy. Thus we find it in Plato, set forth as a beautiful philosophical theory; not as a pa.s.sion, to influence life, nor as a poetic feeling, to adorn and exalt it. Nor do we moderns owe this idea of a mystic, elevated, and elevating love to the Greek philosophy. I rather agree with those who trace it to the mingling of Christianity with the manners of the old Germans, and their (almost) superst.i.tious reverence for womanhood. In the Middle Ages, where morals were most depraved, and women most helpless and oppressed, there still survived the theory formed out of the combination of the Christian spirit, and the Germanic customs; and when in the 15th century Plato became the fashion, then the theory became a science, and what had been religion became again philosophy. This sort of speculative love became to real love what theology became to religion; it was a thesis to be talked about and argued in universities, sung in sonnets, set forth in art; and so being kept as far as possible from all bearings on our moral life, it ceased to find consideration either as a primaeval law of G.o.d, or as a moral motive influencing the duties and habits of our existence; and thus we find the social code in regard to it diverging into all the vagaries of celibacy on one hand, and all the vilenesses of profligacy on the other.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

130.

Wilkie's "Life and Letters" have not helped me much. His opinions and criticisms on his own art are sensible, not suggestive. I find, however, one or two pa.s.sages strongly ill.u.s.trative of the value of _truth_ as a principle in art, and the sort of _vitality_ it gives to scenery and objects.

He writes, when travelling in Holland, to his friend, Sir George Beaumont;-

"One of the first circ.u.mstances that struck me wherever I went was what you had prepared me for; the resemblance that everything bore to the Dutch and Flemish pictures. On leaving Ostend, not only the people, houses, trees, but whole tracks of country reminded me of Teniers, and on getting further into the country this was only relieved by the pictures of Rubens and Wouvermans, or some other masters taking his place.

"I thought I could trace the particular districts in Holland where Ostade, Cuyp, and Rembrandt had studied, and could almost fancy the spot where the pictures of other masters had been painted. Indeed nothing seemed new to me in the whole country; and what one could not help wondering at, was, that these old masters should have been able to draw the materials of so beautiful a variety of art, from so contracted and monotonous a theme."

Their variety arose out of their truthfulness. I had the same feeling when travelling in Holland and Belgium. It was to me a perpetual succession of reminiscences, and so it has been with others. Rubens and Rembrandt (as landscape painters)-Cuyp, Hobbima, were continually in my mind; occasionally the yet more poetical Ruysdaal; but who ever thinks of Wouvermans, or Bergham, or Karel du Jardin, as national or natural painters? their scenery is all _got up_ like the scenery in a ballet, and I can conceive nothing more tiresome than a room full of their pictures, elegant as they are.

131.

Again, writing from Jerusalem, Wilkie says, "Nothing here requires revolution in our opinions of the finest works of art: with all their discrepancies of detail, they are yet constantly recalled by what is here before us. The background of the Heliodorus of Raphael is a Syrian building; the figures in the Lazarus of Sebastian del Piombo are a Syrian people; and the indescribable tone of Rembrandt is brought to mind at every turn, whether in the street, the Synagogue, or the Sepulchre." And again: "The painter we are always referring to, as one who has most truly given the eastern people, is Rembrandt."

He partly contradicts this afterwards, but says, that Venetian art reminds him of Syria. Now, the Venetians were in constant communication with the East; all their art has a tinge of orientalism. As to Rembrandt, he must have been in familiar intercourse with the Jew merchants and Jewish families settled in the Dutch commercial towns; he painted them frequently as portraits, and they perpetually appear in his compositions.

132.

In the following pa.s.sage Wilkie seems unconsciously to have antic.i.p.ated the invention (or rather the _discovery_) of the Daguerreotype, and some of its results. He says:-"If by an operation of mechanism, animated nature could be copied with the accuracy of a cast in plaster, a tracing on a wall, or a reflection in a gla.s.s, without modification, and without the proprieties and graces of art, all that utility could desire would be perfectly attained, but it would be at the expense of almost every quality which renders art delightful."

One reason why the Daguerreotype portraits are in general so unsatisfactory may perhaps be traced to a natural law, though I have not heard it suggested. It is this: every object that we behold we see not with the eye only, but with the soul; and this is especially true of the human countenance, which in so far as it is the expression of mind we see through the medium of our own individual mind. Thus a portrait is satisfactory in so far as the painter has sympathy with his subject, and delightful to us in proportion as the resemblance reflected through _his_ sympathies is in accordance with _our own_. Now in the Daguerreotype there is no such medium, and the face comes before us without pa.s.sing through the human mind and brain to our apprehension.

This may be the reason why a Daguerreotype, however beautiful and accurate, is seldom satisfactory or agreeable, and that while we acknowledge its truth as to fact, it always leaves something for the sympathies to desire.

133.

He says, "One thing alone seems common in all the stages of early art; the desire of making all other excellences tributary to the expression of thought and sentiment."

The early painters had _no other_ excellences except those of thought and expression; therefore could not sacrifice what they did not possess.

They drew incorrectly, coloured ineffectively, and were ignorant of perspective.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

134.

When at Dusseldorf, I found the President of the Academy, Wilhelm Schadow, employed on a church picture in three compartments; Paradise in the centre; on the right side, Purgatory; on the left side, h.e.l.l. He explained to me that he had not attempted to paint the interior of Paradise as the sojourn of the blessed, because he could imagine no kind of occupation or delight which, prolonged to eternity, would not be wearisome. He had therefore represented the exterior of Paradise, where Christ, standing on the threshold with outstretched arms, receives and welcomes those who enter. (This was better and in finer taste than the more common allegory of St. Peter and his keys.) On one side of the door, the Virgin Mary and a group of guardian angels encourage those who approach. Among these we distinguish a martyr who has died for the truth, and a warrior who has fought for it. A care-worn, penitent mother is presented by her innocent daughter. Those who were "in the world and the world knew them not," are here acknowledged-and eyes dim with weeping, and heads bowed with shame, are here uplifted, and bright with the rapturous gleam which shone through the portals of Paradise.

The idea of Purgatory, he told me, was suggested by a vision or dream related by St. Catherine of Genoa, in which she beheld a great number of men and women shut up in a dark cavern; angels descending from heaven, liberate them from time to time, and they are borne away one after another from darkness, pain, and penance, into life and light-again to behold the face of their Maker-reconciled and healed. In his picture, Schadow has represented two angels bearing away a liberated soul. Below in the fore-ground groups of sinners are waiting, sadly, humbly, but not unhopefully, the term of their bitter penance. Among these he had placed a group of artists and poets who, led away by temptation, had abused their glorious gifts to wicked or worldly purposes;-t.i.tian, Ariosto, and, rather to my surprise, the beautiful, lamenting spirit of Byron.

Then, what was curious enough, as types of ambition, Lady Macbeth and her husband, who, it seems, were to be ultimately saved, I do not know why-unless for the love of Shakespeare.

h.e.l.l, like all the h.e.l.ls I ever saw, was a failure. There was the usual amount of fire and flames, dragons and serpents, ghastly, despairing spirits, but nothing of original or powerful conception. When I looked in Schadow's face, so beautiful with benevolence, I wondered _how_ he could-but in truth he could _not_-realise to himself the idea of a h.e.l.l; all the materials he had used were borrowed and common-place.

But among his cartoons for pictures already painted, there was one charming idea of quite a different kind. It was for an altar, and he called it "THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE." Above, the sacrificed Redeemer lies extended in his mother's arms. The pure abundant Waters of Salvation, gushing from the rock beneath their feet, are received into a great cistern. Saints, martyrs, teachers of the truth, are standing round, drinking or filling their vases, which they present to each other. From the cistern flows a stream, at which a family of poor peasants are drinking with humble, joyful looks; and as the stream divides and flows away through flowery meadows, little sportive children stoop to drink of it, scooping up the water in their tiny hands, or sipping it with their rosy smiling lips. A beautiful and significant allegory beautifully expressed, and as intelligible to the people as any in the "Pilgrim's Progress."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

135.

Haydon discussed "High Art" as if it depended solely on the knowledge and the appreciation of _form_. In this lay his great mistake. Form is but the vehicle of the highest art.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

136.

Southey says that the Franciscan Order "excluded all art, all science;-no pictures might profane their churches." This is a most extraordinary instance of ignorance in a man of Southey's universal learning. Did he forget Friar Bacon? had he not heard of that museum of divine pictures, the Franciscan church and convent at a.s.sisi? And that some of the greatest mathematicians, architects, mosaic workers, carvers, and painters, of the 13th and 14th centuries were Franciscan friars?

[Ill.u.s.tration]

137.

Wordsworth's remark on Sir Joshua Reynolds as a painter, that "he lived too much for the age and the people among whom he lived," is hardly just; as a portrait-painter he could not well do otherwise; his profession was to represent the people among whom he lived. An artist who takes the higher, the creative and imaginative walks of art, and who thinks he can, at the same time, live for and with the age, and for the pa.s.sing and clashing interests of the world, and the frivolities of society, does so at a great risk: there must be perilous discord between the inner and the outer life-such discord as wears and irritates the whole physical and moral being. Where the original material of the character is not strong, the artistic genius will be gradually enfeebled and conventionalised, through flattery, through sympathy, through misuse. If the material be strong, the result may perhaps be worse; the genius may be demoralised and the mind lose its balance. I have seen in my time instances of both.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

138.

"The man," says Coleridge, "who reads a work meant for immediate effect on one age, with the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined gentleman but a very sorry critic."

This is especially true with regard to art: but Coleridge should have put in the word, _only_, ("only the notions and feelings of another age,") for a very great pleasure lies in the power of throwing ourselves into the sentiments and notions of one age, while feeling _with_ them, and reflecting _upon_ them, with the riper critical experience which belongs to another age.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

139.

A _good_ taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a _just_ taste discriminates the degree,-the _poco-piu_ and the _poco-meno_. A _good_ taste rejects faults; a _just_ taste selects excellences. A _good_ taste is often unconscious; a _just_ taste is always conscious. A _good_ taste may be lowered or spoilt; a _just_ taste can only go on refining more and more.

[Ill.u.s.tration]