Frederic Lord Leighton Part 7

His success in the one is to be explained, we shall find, in very much the same way as his success in the other. Like most speakers of any distinction, Lord Leighton left nothing to chance. In his speeches and Discourses, as in his pictures, the most careful and exact preparation was made for every effect, however apparently casual it may have seemed.

His Discourses were obviously based upon cla.s.sic models; for their full periods, sonorously and deliberately arranged, have a rhythm that attends to the whole period, and not merely, as is often the way with English speakers, to each sentence in turn.

In quoting from these Discourses, we do so, however, with an eye to his own proper art as a painter, and to his whole theory and sentiment of that art and its functions, and its allied plastic arts, even more than to his art as a speaker. Indeed, the Discourses form a unique contribution to the art criticism of our time; they cover the most interesting and various periods in the history of the Art of Europe; and although the cycle he had mapped out was interrupted before he had completed it--first by illness which postponed the biennial discourse, and then by death--the portions already delivered touch incidentally on the theory and philosophy of all Art in a highly suggestive and eloquent way.

In his first Discourse, delivered to the Academy students on the 10th of December, 1879, the new President took occasion to estimate the modern predicament and general position of Art, as a prelude to the consideration of its special developments, in later Discourses. "I wish in so doing," he said, "to seek the solution of certain perplexities and doubts which will often, in these days of restless self-questioning in which we live, arise in the minds and weigh on the hearts of students who think as well as work."

In answering the question of questions in Art for us to-day--that is, what are its chances in the present, compared with the glory and splendour of its achievement in the past?--Leighton provides us with some memorable pa.s.sages in his first Discourse. Speaking of the "Evolution of Painting in Italy," he turned it to notable account in his argument, as in this reference to the Florentine school:

"It is, perhaps," he said, "in Tuscany, and notably in Florence, that we see the national temperament most clearly declared in its art, as indeed in all its intellectual productions; here we see that strange mixture of Attic subtlety and exquisiteness of taste, with a sombre fervour and a rude Pelasgic strength which marks the Tuscans, sending forth a Dante, a Brunelleschi, and a Michael Angelo,--a Fiesole, a Boccaccio, and a Botticelli, and we find that eagerness in the pursuit of the knowledge of men and things, which was so characteristic of them, summed up in a Macchiavelli and a Lionardi da Vinci."

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CONTRAST]

How different the conditions when we turn to consider English Art, as it stands to-day: "The whole current of human life setting resolutely in a direction opposed to artistic production; no love of beauty, no sense of the outward dignity and comeliness of things, calling on the part of the public for expression at the artist's hands; and, as a corollary, no dignity, no comeliness for the most part, in their outward aspect; everywhere a narrow utilitarianism which does not include the gratification of the artistic sense amongst things useful; the works of artists sought for indeed, but too often as a profitable merchandise, or a vehicle of speculation, too often on grounds wholly foreign to their intrinsic worth as productions of a distinctive form of human genius, with laws and conditions of its own."

The modern student may well question, whether the great artists of the past, if they lived now under our different conditions, would achieve all that they did then. For further bewilderment, the differences to be seen in the past itself, between school and school, and one age and another, may lead him to doubt "whether Art be not indeed an ephemeral thing, a mere efflorescence of the human intelligence, an isolated development, incapable of organic growth." To such doubts, comes the rea.s.suring answer: "That Art is fed by forces that lie in the depth of our nature, and which are as old as man himself; of which therefore we need not doubt the durability; and to the question whether Art with all its blossoms has but one root, the answer we shall see to be: a.s.suredly it has; for its outward modes of expression are many and various, but its underlying vital motives are the same."

The new President concluded his first Discourse with an eloquent plea for sincerity in Art: "Without sincerity of emotion no gift, however facile and specious, will avail you to win the lasting sympathies of men"--a truth which perhaps needs more repeating to-day than ever it did!

In the second Discourse (December 10th, 1881), we are called upon to consider that other question which has so often perplexed the artist, especially the English artist, in whom the moral sentiment is apt to take a threatening form on occasion: "What is the relation in which Art stands to Morals and to Religion?"

For his reply, Leighton took in turn the two contentions: one, that the first duty of all artistic productions is the inculcation of a moral lesson, if not indeed of a Christian truth; the other, that Art is altogether independent of ethics. His conclusion is the only sagacious and sane one: that whilst Art in itself is indeed independent of ethics, yet is there no error so deadly as to deny that "the moral complexion, the ethos, of the artist does in truth tinge every work of his hand, and fashion, in silence, but with the certainty of fate, the course and current of his whole career." The steps that lead irresistibly to this conclusion, are very clearly indicated in the course of this Discourse; and the more convincingly, because the speaker is himself so sympathetic to the religious inspiration of Italian art, on the one hand, and to its merely natural aesthetic growth on the other.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A STUDY IN OILS]

"The language of Art," he said then, "is not the appointed vehicle of ethic truths;... On the other hand, there is a field in which she has no rival. We have within us the faculty for a range of emotion, of exquisite subtlety and of irresistible force, to which Art, and Art alone amongst human forms of expression, has a key; these then, and no others, are the chords which it is her appointed duty to strike; and form, colour, and the contrasts of light and shade are the agents through which it is given to her to set them in motion. Her duty is, therefore, to awaken those sensations directly emotional and indirectly intellectual, which can be communicated only through the sense of sight, to the delight of which she has primarily to minister. And the dignity of these sensations lies in this, that they are inseparably connected by a.s.sociation of ideas with a range of perception and feelings of infinite variety and scope. They come fraught with dim complex memories of all the evershifting spectacle of inanimate creation and of the more deeply stirring phenomena of life; of the storm and the lull, the splendour and the darkness of the outer world; of the storm and the lull, the splendour and the darkness of the changeful and the transitory lives of men."

In his third Discourse, which was delivered on the 10th December, 1883, the President entered on his exhaustive discussion, continued in many subsequent Discourses, of "The relation of Artistic Production to the conditions of time and place under which it is evolved, and to the characteristics of the races to which it is due." In this Discourse he briefly and suggestively reviews the Art of Egypt, a.s.syria, and Greece, endeavouring to account for the main characteristics of each. In Egypt he shows how a nation securely established in a peace and pre-eminence lasting for ages, blessed beyond measure in a fertile and prospering climate, a nation beyond all things pious and occupied in reverential care of the dead, should give birth to an art serene, magnificent, and vast. "Those whose fortune it has been," he eloquently said, "to stand by the base of the Great Pyramid of Khoofoo, and look up at its far summit flaming in the violet sky, or to gaze on the wreck of that solemn watcher of the rising sun, the giant Sphinx of Gizeh, erect, still, after sixty centuries in the desert's slowly rising tide; or who have rested in the shade of the huge shafts which tell of the pomp and splendour of hundred-gated Thebes; must, I think, have received impressions of majesty and of enduring strength which will not fade within their memory."

After old Egypt, and the account of Chaldaean and a.s.syrian Art, with its warlike expression, we are led on in turn to the consideration of Greek Art, and the causes of its development. "Nothing that I am aware of in the history of the human intelligence," he said, "is for a moment comparable to the dazzling swiftness of the ripening of Greek Art in the fifth century before Christ." After speaking of the fortunate balance and interaction of races which resulted in the Greek Art of that era, he goes on to speak of the exceptionally favouring circ.u.mstances of the people: "Here are no vast alluvial plains, such as those along which, in the East, whole empires surged to and fro in battle; no mighty flood of rivers, no towering mountain walls: instead, a tract of moderate size; a fretted promontory thrust out into the sea--far out, and flinging across the blue a mult.i.tude of purple isles and islets towards the Ionian, kindred, sh.o.r.es." Such a fortunate environment, joined to the extraordinarily high ideal formed by the Greeks of citizenship, had much to do with the fostering of Greek Art, in all "its n.o.bility and its serenity, its exquisite balance, its searching after truth, and its thirst for the ideal."

[Ill.u.s.tration: HEAD OF A YOUNG GIRL A STUDY IN OILS]

In his fourth Discourse Lord Leighton carried on his inquiry upon the origins and conditions of Art into the difficult region of the Etruscans; whose plastic work, like their speech, he considers, was at best an uncouth, vigorous imitation, or re-shaping, of Greek models.

As examples of Etruscan Art, we are referred to "the two lovely bronze mirrors, preserved at Perugia and Berlin, representing,--one, Helen between Castor and Pollux,--the other, Bacchus, Semele, and Apollo....

In either case, the design is distinctly Greek; nevertheless a certain ruggedness of form and handling is felt in both, betraying a temper less subtle than the h.e.l.lenic; and we read without surprise on the one 'Pultuke,' and 'Phluphluus' on the other." Lest it should be thought that something less than justice is done to Etruscan Art, take this fine description of the tomb of Volumnus Violens:

"The rec.u.mbent effigy of the Volumnian is, indeed, rude and of little merit; rude also in execution is the monument on which it rests, but in conception and design of a dignity almost Dantesque. Facing the visitor, as he enters the sepulchral chamber, this small sarcophagus--small in dimensions, but in impressiveness how great!--rivets him at once under the taper's fitful light. Raised on a rude bas.e.m.e.nt, the body of the monument figures the entrance to a vault; in the centre, painted in colours that have nearly faded, appears a doorway, within the threshold of which four female figures gaze wistfully upon the outer world; on either side two winged genii, their brows girt with the never-failing Etruscan serpents, but wholly free from the quaintness of early Etruscan treatment, sit cross-legged, watching, torch in hand, the gate from which no living man returns. Roughly as they are hewn, it would be difficult to surpa.s.s the stateliness of their aspect or the art with which they are designed; Roman gravity, but quickened with Etruscan fire, invests them: ... and our thoughts are irresistibly carried forward to the supreme sculptor whom the Tuscan land was one day to bear."

From Etruria, we pa.s.s naturally on to Rome; for, as we are significantly reminded, "The Romans lay, until the tide of Greek Art broke on them after the fall of Syracuse, wholly under the influence of the Etruscans.... Etruria gave them kings, augurs, doctors, mimes, musicians, boxers, runners; the royal purple, the royal sceptre, the fasces, the curule chair, the Lydian flute, the straight trumpet, and the curved trumpet. The education of a Roman youth received its finishing touches in Etruria: Tuscan engineers had girt Rome with walls; Tuscan engineers had built the great conduit through which the swamp, which was one day to be the Forum, was drained into the Tiber. What wonder, then, that in architecture, also in painting, in sculpture, in jewellery, and in all the things of taste, Etruscans gave the law to the ruder and less cultured race?"

This influence lasted, until the counter-current of Greece found an inlet to Roman life, filtering "through Campania into Rome from the opposite end of the peninsula." And then, from the fall of Syracuse, and the bringing of its spoils to Rome, we find a perfect craze for Grecian marbles, bronzes, pictures, gems, inflaming the magnates, n.o.bles, and _nouveaux riches_ of Rome. How fortunate that influence was in another field, that of literature, we know. In plastic art, by reason of the essentially inartistic spirit of the Roman race, the result was practically small; save indeed in one department, that of portraiture, to which the essential impulse was, as Leighton very suggestively shows, "ethic, not aesthetic." Even in Roman architecture, our critic finds little to weaken his view of the Roman aesthetic inefficiency. "It was not," he said, "the spontaneous utterance of an aesthetic instinct, but the outcome of material needs and of patriotic pride," and hence only an incomplete expression of Roman civilization. "To them, in brief, art was not vernacular: their purest taste, their brightest gifts of mind, found no utterance in it."

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF A HEAD]

"We have seen Art," he concluded, "such Art as it was given to Rome to achieve--rise and fall with the virtues of the Roman people. From the lips of the most seeing of its sons we know the solvent in which those virtues perished: that solvent was the greed, the insatiate greed, of gold--'auri sacra fames'--the rot of luxury. 'More deadly than arms,'

Juvenal magnificently exclaims, 'luxury has swept down upon us, and avenges the conquered world.'

...... 'Saevior armis Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem.'"

From Rome we are taken, in the fifth Discourse, delivered on the 10th December, 1887, to the making and the racial re-shaping of Italy, that began with the fifth century. All through these Discourses the speaker laid great stress upon the ethnological history of the European races, as he turned to one after another, and essayed to trace their artistic idiosyncracy and their artistic evolution. Italy is, to the ethnologist as well as to the art student, one of the most interesting countries in Europe. Rome almost alone, among the Italian provinces, retained her racial and aesthetic peculiarities, unaffected to the end of the chapter; and even when she wielded "the sceptre of the Christian world," still she produced no one flower of native genius, we are reminded, unless Giulio Romano, that "brawny and prolific plagiarist of Raphael," as Leighton well stigmatizes him, be thought a genius; which criticism forbid!

It was different with Tuscany, where the introduction of new racial elements had a distinct effect. This "new amalgam" produced in the field of Art, we are told, an infinitely n.o.bler and more exquisite result than had grown out of the old conditions. Still, however, the old Etruscan allied grace and harsh strength lingered on in the art of Christian Etruria. "Of the subtle graces which breathe in that art, from Giotto to Lionardo, it is needless to speak; and surely in the rugged angularities of a Verocchio, a Signorelli, or a Donatello, and in the shadow of sadness which broods over so much of the finest Florentine work, the more sombre phase of the Etruscan temper still lives on."

In the end, if we try to account for the artistic power and mastery of one people in Italy, and the lack of that power in another, we are driven to the conclusion that the source of the artistic gift is hidden and obscure. One may cite the opposite examples of Venice and of Genoa,--the one so masterfully artistic; the other so impotent. And yet the same favouring conditions, _a priori_, might have seemed to exist for both.

With the intermingling of the peoples, and the rejuvenescence of the physical life, came the spiritual outburst of Christianity. And the influence, again, of Christianity upon Italian Art was immense. In place of joy in the ideals of bodily perfection, "loathing of the body and its beauty, as of the vehicle of all temptation, a yearning for a life in which the flesh should be shaken off, a spirit of awe, of pity, and of love, became the moving forces that shaped its creations."

After great religious periods, we often find that great scientific periods follow. The ethical impulse that religion gives, is converted into other forms of energy, by reason of man's awakened consciousness of the meaning of things, physical and material as well as spiritual.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF A HEAD]

In Italy a reaction against the Christian doctrine of the degradation of the flesh led to a new recognition of the beauty of man and of his physical environment. Anatomy and perspective were studied, accordingly, with a new sense of their significance in Art. The spirit of science led to "such amazing studies of leaf and flower as Lionardo loved to draw.

Thus to Tuscan artists the new movement brought the love of nature, and the light of science."

We come upon Dante and Petrarch in this Discourse, in tracing the history of Italian Art during the centuries of transition: "With Dante we reach the threshold of the Renaissance. He stands on the verge of the middle ages; in him the old order ends. With Petrarch the new order begins." It is not so much as a poet, however, that Petrarch counts in this process from one period to another; but rather as an intellectual pioneer, leading the way into the great pagan world. Petrarch "was the first Humanist," in short.

We cannot stay to dwell upon the effect of the Humanists and all they stood for, good and evil, in Italian Art and Letters. We pa.s.s on, now, from Petrarch and the influence the movement had on Italian literature, to its effect on Italian Art. The Renaissance did not affect Art in the same way, as Botticelli may serve to show. "But perhaps," said the lecturer, "the various operations in the province of Art of the two main motive forces of the Renaissance--the impulse towards the scientific study of nature, and the impulse to reinstate the cla.s.sic spirit--may be best ill.u.s.trated by reference to Lionardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo." The pa.s.sages in which Leighton characterised these three masters are among the most striking of all those uttered by him within the walls of the Academy. Lionardo's scientific "avidity of research,"

Raphael's "cla.s.sic serenity," and Angelo's "mediaeval ardour," are turned to admirable effect in the pages of this Discourse; and the tribute paid to them on the part of an English painter who has zealously sought to live and work in the light of their great examples, has indeed an interest that is personal, in a sense, as well as general and critical.

Take this concluding sentence upon Raphael:

"Whatever was best in the cla.s.sic spirit was absorbed and eagerly a.s.similated by him, and imparted to the work of his best day that rhythm, that gentle gravity, and that n.o.ble plenitude of form, which are its stamp, and proclaim him the brother of Mozart and of Sophocles."

Or this, again, on Michael Angelo, as distinguishing him from Raphael:

"The type of human form which he lifted to the fullest expressional force is the last development of a purely indigenous conception of human beauty, whereas the type which we know as Raphaelesque is a cla.s.sic ideal warmed with Christian feeling. Sublimely alone as Buonarotti's genius stands, towering and unapproached, ... it does but mark the highest summit reached in the magnificent continuity of its evolution, by the purely native genius of Tuscan Art."

Having arrived at Tuscan Art, and at Michael Angelo, in whom it reaches its consummate development, we leave Italy, and turn now to the description of Art in Spain, given by Lord Leighton in his Discourse of December, 1889. And first we have some account of the extraordinarily various racial strains which were contributed to form the significant figure of the fifteenth-century Spaniard. On the ancient Iberian stock was grafted Celtic, Greek, Phoenician, and Carthaginian blood; and to these infusions succeeded the great invasion of the Visigoths of the fifth century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STUDY OF A HEAD]

"The Art of Spain," he said, "was, at the outset, wholly borrowed, and from various sources; we shall see heterogeneous, imported elements, a.s.similated sometimes in a greater or less degree, frequently flung together in illogical confusion, seldom, if ever, fused into a new, harmonious whole by that inner welding fire which is genius; and we shall see in the sixteenth century a foreign influence received and borne as a yoke"--(that of the Italian Renaissance) "because no living generative force was there to throw it off--with results too often dreary beyond measure; and, finally, we shall meet this strange freak of nature, a soil without artistic initiative bringing forth the greatest initiator--observe, I do not say the greatest artist--the greatest initiator perhaps since Lionardo in modern art--except it be his contemporary Rembrandt--Diego Velasquez."

In his Discourse of December, 1891, we have, rapidly sketched, the Evolution of Art in France. Touching again on the question of race, the lecturer adduced the great race of Gauls, submitting first to Roman, and afterwards to Frankish, or Teutonic, domination and admixture. The main characteristics of the Gaulish people he judges to be, "a love of fighting and a magnificent bravery, great impatience of control, a pa.s.sion for new things, a swift, brilliant, logical intelligence, a gay and mocking spirit--for 'to laugh,' says Rabelais, 'is the proper mark of man,'--an inextinguishable self-confidence." With the reign of Charlemagne began the development of the architecture of France, but not until the tenth and eleventh centuries did the "movement reach its full force; and its development was due mainly to the great monastic community, which, founded by St. Benedict early in the sixth century, had poured from the heights of Monte Ca.s.sino its beneficent influence over Western Europe."

Here we have it explained how the principle of Gothic architecture, "the subst.i.tution of a balance of active forces for the principle of inert resistance," was gradually evolved. This principle once found, Gothic architecture reached its most splendid period in a wonderfully short s.p.a.ce of time; cathedrals and churches were built everywhere, and before the end of the thirteenth century, the most splendid Gothic buildings were begun or completed. With the end of the thirteenth century Gothic architecture began to decline, lured by the "fascination of the statical _tour de force_, the craving to bring down to an irreducible minimum the amount of material that would suffice to the stability of a building extravagantly lofty."