On the Old Road Volume I Part 8

130. But there is a farther and more essential ground of difference in system of shadow between the Flemish and Italian colorists. It is a well-known optical fact that the color of shadow is complemental to that of light: and that therefore, in general terms, warm light has cool shadow, and cool light hot shadow. The n.o.blest masters of the northern and southern schools respectively adopted these contrary keys; and while the Flemings raised their lights in frosty white and pearly grays out of a glowing shadow, the Italians opposed the deep and burning rays of their golden heaven to ma.s.ses of solemn gray and majestic blue. Either, therefore, their preparation must have been different, or they were able, when they chose, to conquer the warmth of the ground by superimposed color. We believe, accordingly, that Correggio will be found--as stated in the notes of Reynolds quoted at p. 495--to have habitually grounded with black, white, and ultramarine, then glazing with golden transparent colors; while t.i.tian used the most vigorous browns, and conquered them with cool color in ma.s.s above. The remarkable sketch of Leonardo in the Uffizii of Florence is commenced in brown--over the brown is laid an olive green, on which the highest lights are struck with white.

Now it is well known to even the merely decorative painter that no color can be brilliant which is laid over one of a corresponding key, and that the best ground for any given opaque color will be a comparatively subdued tint of the complemental one; of green under red, of violet under yellow, and of _orange_ or _brown_ therefore under _blue_. We apprehend accordingly that the real value of the brown ground with t.i.tian was far greater than even with Rubens; it was to support and give preciousness to cool color above, while it remained itself untouched as the representative of warm reflexes and extreme depth of transparent gloom. We believe this employment of the brown ground to be the only means of uniting majesty of hue with profundity of shade. But its value to the Fleming is connected with the management of the lights, which we have next to consider. As we here venture for the first time to disagree in some measure with Mr. Eastlake, let us be sure that we state his opinion fairly. He says:--

"The light warm tint which Van Mander a.s.sumes to have been generally used in the oil-priming was sometimes omitted, as unfinished pictures prove. Under such circ.u.mstances, the picture may have been executed at once on the sized outline. In the works of Lucas van Leyden, and sometimes in those of Albert Durer, the thin yet brilliant lights exhibit a still brighter ground underneath (p. 389).... It thus appears that the method proposed by the inventors of oil-painting, of preserving light within the colors, involved a certain order of processes. The princ.i.p.al conditions were: first, that the outline should be completed on the panel before the painting, properly so called, was begun. The object, in thus defining the forms, was to avoid alterations and repaintings, which might ultimately render the ground useless without supplying its place. Another condition was to avoid loading _the opaque_ colors. _This limitation was not essential with regard to the transparent colors, as such could hardly exclude the bright ground_ (p. 398).... The system of coloring adopted by the Van Eycks may have been influenced by the practice of gla.s.s-painting. They appear, in their first efforts at least, to have considered the white panel as representing light behind a colored and transparent medium, and aimed at giving brilliancy to their tints by allowing the white ground to shine through them. If those painters and their followers erred, it was in sometimes too literally carrying out this principle. _Their lights are always transparent_ (mere white excepted) and their shadows sometimes want depth. This is in accordance with the effect of gla.s.s-staining, in which transparency may cease with darkness, but never with light. The superior method of Rubens consisted in preserving transparency chiefly in his darks, and in contrasting their lucid depth with solid lights (p. 408).... Among the technical improvements on the older process may be especially mentioned the preservation of transparency in the darker ma.s.ses, the lights being loaded as required. The system of exhibiting the bright ground through the shadows still involved an adherence to the original method of defining the composition at first; and the solid painting of the lights opened the door to that freedom of execution which the works of the early masters wanted." (p. 490.)

131. We think we cannot have erred in concluding from these scattered pa.s.sages that Mr. Eastlake supposes the brilliancy of the high lights of the earlier schools to be attributable to the under-power of the white ground. This we admit, so far as that ground gave value to the transparent flesh-colored or brown preparation above it; but we doubt the transparency of the highest lights, and the power of any white ground to add brilliancy to opaque colors. We have ourselves never seen an instance of a _painted brilliant_ light that was not loaded to the exclusion of the ground. Secondary lights indeed are often perfectly transparent, a warm hatching over the under-white; the highest light itself may be so--but then it is the white ground itself subdued by transparent _darker_ color, not supporting a light color. In the Van Eyck in the National Gallery all the brilliant lights are loaded; mere white, Mr. Eastlake himself admits, was always so; and we believe that the flesh-color and carnations are painted with color as _opaque_ as the white head-dress, but fail of brilliancy from not being _loaded enough_; the white ground beneath being utterly unable to add to the power of such tints, while its effect on more subdued tones depended in great measure on its receiving a transparent coat of warm color first. This _may_ have been sometimes omitted, as stated at p. 389; when it was so, we believe that an utter loss of brilliancy must have resulted; but when it was used, the highest lights must have been raised from it by opaque color as distinctly by Van Eyck as by Rubens. Rubens' Judgment of Paris is quoted at [p. 388] as an example of the best use of the bright gesso ground:--and how in that picture, how in all Rubens' best pictures, is it used? Over the ground is thrown a transparent glowing brown tint, varied and deepened in the shadow; boldly over that brown glaze, and into it, are struck and painted the opaque gray middle tints, already concealing the ground totally; and above these are loaded the high lights like gems--note the sparkling strokes on the peac.o.c.k's plumes. We believe that Van Eyck's high lights were either, in proportion to the scale of picture and breadth of handling, as loaded as these, or, in the degree of their thinness, less brilliant. Was then his system the same as Rubens'? Not so; but it differed more in the management of middle tints than in the lights: the main difference was, we believe, between the careful preparation of the gradations of drawing in the one, and the daring a.s.sumption of ma.s.sy light in the other. There are theorists who would a.s.sert that their system was the same--but they forget the primal work, with the point underneath, and all that it implied of transparency above. Van Eyck secured his drawing in dark, then threw a pale transparent middle tint over the whole, and recovered his _highest_ lights; all was _transparent_ except these. Rubens threw a dark middle tint over the whole at first, and then gave the _drawing_ with opaque gray. All was _opaque_ except the shadows. No slight difference this, when we reflect on the contrarieties of practice ultimately connected with the opposing principles; above all on the eminent one that, as all Van Eyck's color, except the high lights, must have been equivalent to a glaze, while the great body of _color_ in Rubens was solid (ultimately glazed occasionally, but not necessarily), it was possible for Van Eyck to mix his tints to the local hues required, with far less danger of heaviness in effect than would have been incurred in the solid painting of Rubens. This is especially noticed by Mr. Eastlake, with whom we are delighted again to concur:--

"The practice of using compound tints has not been approved by colorists; the method, as introduced by the early masters, was adapted to certain conditions, but, like many of their processes, was afterwards misapplied. Vasari informs us that Lorenzo di Credi, whose exaggerated nicety in technical details almost equaled that of Gerard Dow, was in the habit of mixing about thirty tints before he began to work. The opposite extreme is perhaps no less objectionable. Much may depend on the skillful use of the ground. The purest color in an opaque state and superficially light only, is less brilliant than the foulest mixture through which light shines. Hence, as long as the white ground was visible within the tints, the habit of matching colors from nature (no matter by what complication of hues, provided the ingredients were not chemically injurious to each other) was likely to combine the truth of negative hues with clearness."--_Ib._ p. 400.

132. These pa.s.sages open to us a series of questions far too intricate to be even cursorily treated within our limits. It is to be held in mind that one and the same quality of color or kind of brilliancy is not always the best; the phases and phenomena of color are innumerable in reality, and even the modes of imitating them become expedient or otherwise, according to the aim and scale of the picture. It is no question of mere authority whether the mixture of tints to a compound one, or their juxtaposition in a state of purity, be the better practice. There is not the slightest doubt that, the ground being the same, a stippled tint is more brilliant and rich than a mixed one; nor is there doubt on the other hand that in some subjects such a tint is impossible, and in others vulgar. We have above alluded to the power of Mr. Hunt in water-color. The fruit-pieces of that artist are dependent for their splendor chiefly on the juxtaposition of pure color for compound tints, and we may safely affirm that the method is for such purpose as exemplary as its results are admirable. Yet would you desire to see the same means adopted in the execution of the fruit in Rubens'

Peace and War? Or again, would the lusciousness of tint obtained by Rubens himself, adopting the same means on a grander scale in his painting of flesh, have been conducive to the ends or grateful to the feelings of the Bellinis or Albert Durer? Each method is admirable as applied by its master; and Hemling and Van Eyck are as much to be followed in the mingling of color, as Rubens and Rembrandt in its decomposition. If an award is absolutely to be made of superiority to either system, we apprehend that the palm of mechanical skill must be rendered to the latter, and higher dignity of moral purpose confessed in the former; in proportion to the n.o.bleness of the subject and the thoughtfulness of its treatment, simplicity of color will be found more desirable. Nor is the far higher perfection of drawing attained by the earlier method to be forgotten. Gradations which are expressed by delicate execution of the _darks_, and then aided by a few strokes of recovered light, must always be more subtle and true than those which are struck violently forth with opaque color; and it is to be remembered that the handling of the brush, with the early Italian masters, approached in its refinement to drawing with the point--the more definitely, because the work was executed, as we have just seen, with little change or play of local color. And--whatever discredit the looser and bolder practice of later masters may have thrown on the hatched and penciled execution of earlier periods--we maintain that this method, necessary in fresco, and followed habitually in the first oil pictures, has produced the n.o.blest renderings of human expression in the whole range of the examples of art: the best works of Raphael, all the glorious portraiture of Ghirlandajo and Masaccio, all the mightiest achievements of religious zeal in Francia, Perugino, Bellini, and such others. Take as an example in fresco Masaccio's hasty sketch of himself now in the Uffizii; and in oil, the two heads of monks by Perugino in the Academy of Florence; and we shall search in vain for any work in portraiture, executed in opaque colors, which could contend with them in depth of expression or in fullness of _recorded_ life--not mere imitative vitality, but chronicled action. And we have no hesitation in a.s.serting that where the object of the painter is expression, and the picture is of a size admitting careful execution, the transparent system, developed as it is found in Bellini or Perugino, will attain the most profound and serene color, while it will never betray into looseness or audacity. But if in the mind of the painter invention prevail over veneration,--if his eye be creative rather than penetrative, and his hand more powerful than patient--let him not be confined to a system where light, once lost, is as irrecoverable as time, and where all success depends on husbandry of resource. Do not measure out to him his sunshine in inches of gesso; let him have the power of striking it even out of darkness and the deep.

133. If human life were endless, or human spirit could fit its compa.s.s to its will, it is possible a perfection might be reached which should unite the majesty of invention with the meekness of love. We might conceive that the thought, arrested by the readiest means, and at first represented by the boldest symbols, might afterwards be set forth with solemn and studied expression, and that the power might know no weariness in clothing which had known no restraint in creating. But dilation and contraction are for molluscs, not for men; we are not ringed into flexibility like worms, nor gifted with opposite sight and mutable color like chameleons. The mind which molds and summons cannot at will trans.m.u.te itself into that which clings and contemplates; nor is it given to us at once to have the potter's power over the lump, the fire's upon the clay, and the gilder's upon the porcelain. Even the temper in which we behold these various displays of mind must be different; and it admits of more than doubt whether, if the bold work of rapid thought were afterwards in all its forms completed with microscopic care, the result would be other than painful. In the shadow at the foot of Tintoret's picture of the Temptation, lies a broken rock-bowlder.[19] The dark ground has been first laid in, of color nearly uniform; and over it a few, not more than fifteen or twenty, strokes of the brush, loaded with a light gray, have quarried the solid block of stone out of the vacancy. Probably ten minutes are the utmost time which those strokes have occupied, though the rock is some four feet square. It may safely be affirmed that no other method, however laborious, could have reached the truth of form which results from the very freedom with which the conception has been expressed; but it is a truth of the simplest kind--the definition of a stone, rather than the painting of one--and the lights are in some degree dead and cold--the natural consequence of striking a mixed opaque pigment over a dark ground. It would now be possible to treat this skeleton of a stone, which could only have been knit together by Tintoret's rough temper, with the care of a Fleming; to leave its fiercely-stricken lights emanating from a golden ground, to gradate with the pen its ponderous shadows, and in its completion, to dwell with endless and intricate precision upon fibers of moss, bells of heath, blades of gra.s.s, and films of lichen. Love like Van Eyck's would separate the fibers as if they were stems of forest, twine the ribbed gra.s.s into fanciful articulation, shadow forth capes and islands in the variegated film, and hang the purple bells in counted chiming. A year might pa.s.s away, and the work yet be incomplete; yet would the purpose of the great picture have been better answered when all had been achieved? or if so, is it to be wished that a year of the life of Tintoret (could such a thing be conceived possible) had been so devoted?

134. We have put in as broad and extravagant a view as possible the difference of object in the two systems of loaded and transparent light; but it is to be remembered that both are in a certain degree compatible, and that whatever exclusive arguments may be adduced in favor of the loaded system apply only to the ultimate stages of the work. The question is not whether the white ground be expedient in the commencement--but how far it must of necessity be preserved to the close? There cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever the object, whatever the power of the painter, the white ground, as intensely bright and perfect as it can be obtained, should be the base of his operations; that it should be preserved as long as possible, shown wherever it is possible, and sacrificed only upon good cause. There are indeed many objects which do not admit of imitation unless the hand have power of superimposing and modeling the light; but there are others which are equally unsusceptible of every rendering except that of transparent color over the pure ground.

It appears from the evidence now produced that there are at least three distinct systems traceable in the works of good colorists, each having its own merit and its peculiar application. First, the white ground, with careful chiaroscuro preparation, transparent color in the middle tints, and opaque high lights only (Van Eyck). Secondly, white ground, transparent brown preparation, and solid painting of lights above (Rubens). Thirdly, white ground, brown preparation, and solid painting both of lights and shadows above (t.i.tian); on which last method, indisputably the n.o.blest, we have not insisted, as it has not yet been examined by Mr. Eastlake. But in all these methods the white ground was indispensable. It mattered not what transparent color were put over it: red, frequently, we believe, by t.i.tian, before the brown shadows--yellow sometimes by Rubens:--whatever warm tone might be chosen for the key of the composition, and for the support of its grays, depended for its own value upon the white ges...o...b..neath; nor can any system of color be ultimately successful which excludes it. n.o.ble arrangement, choice, and relation of color, will indeed redeem and recommend the falsest system: our own Reynolds, and recently Turner, furnish magnificent examples of the power attainable by colorists of high caliber, after the light ground is lost--(we cannot agree with Mr. Eastlake in thinking the practice of painting first in white and black, with cool reds only, "equivalent to its preservation"):--but in the works of both, diminished splendor and sacrificed durability attest and punish the neglect of the best resources of their art.

135. We have stated, though briefly, the major part of the data which recent research has furnished respecting the early colorists; enough, certainly, to remove all theoretical obstacles to the attainment of a perfection equal to theirs. A few carefully conducted experiments, with the efficient aids of modern chemistry, would probably put us in possession of an amber varnish, if indeed this be necessary, at least not inferior to that which they employed; the rest of their materials are already in our hands, soliciting only such care in their preparation as it ought, we think, to be no irksome duty to bestow. Yet we are not sanguine of the immediate result. Mr. Eastlake has done his duty excellently; but it is hardly to be expected that, after being long in possession of means which we could apply to no profit, the knowledge that the greatest men possessed no better, should at once urge to emulation and gift with strength. We believe that some consciousness of their true position already existed in the minds of many living artists; example had at least been given by two of our Academicians, Mr. Mulready and Mr. Etty, of a splendor based on the Flemish system, and consistent, certainly, in the first case, with a high degree of permanence; while the main direction of artistic and public sympathy to works of a character altogether opposed to theirs, showed fatally how far more perceptible and appreciable to our present instincts is the mechanism of handling than the melody of hue. Indeed we firmly believe, that of all powers of enjoyment or of judgment, that which is concerned with n.o.bility of color is least communicable: it is also perhaps the most rare. The achievements of the draughtsman are met by the curiosity of all mankind; the appeals of the dramatist answered by their sympathy; the creatures of imagination acknowledged by their fear; but the voice of the colorist has but the adder's listening, charm he never so wisely.

Men vie with each other, untaught, in pursuit of smoothness and smallness--of Carlo Dolci and Van Huysum; their domestic hearts may range them in faithful armies round the throne of Raphael; meditation and labor may raise them to the level of the great mountain pedestal of Buonarotti--"vest.i.to gia de' raggi del pianeta, che mena dritto altrui per ogni calle;" but neither time nor teaching will bestow the sense, when it is not innate, of that wherein consists the power of t.i.tian and the great Venetians. There is proof of this in the various degrees of cost and care devoted to the preservation of their works. The gla.s.s, the curtain, and the cabinet guard the preciousness of what is petty, guide curiosity to what is popular, invoke worship to what is mighty;--Raphael has his palace--Michael his dome--respect protects and crowds traverse the sacristy and the saloon; but the frescoes of t.i.tian fade in the solitudes of Padua, and the gesso falls crumbled from the flapping canvas, as the sea-winds shake the Scuola di San Rocco.

136. But if, on the one hand, mere abstract excellence of color be thus coldly regarded, it is equally certain that no work ever attains enduring celebrity which is eminently deficient in this great respect.

Color cannot be indifferent; it is either beautiful and auxiliary to the purposes of the picture, or false, froward, and opposite to them. Even in the painting of Nature herself, this law is palpable; chiefly glorious when color is a predominant element in her working, she is in the next degree most impressive when it is withdrawn altogether: and forms and scenes become sublime in the neutral twilight, which were indifferent in the colors of noon. Much more is this the case in the feebleness of imitation; all color is bad which is less than beautiful; all is gross and intrusive which is not attractive; it repels where it cannot inthrall, and destroys what it cannot a.s.sist. It is besides the painter's peculiar craft; he who cannot color is no painter. It is not painting to grind earths with oil and lay them smoothly on a surface. He only is a painter who can melodize and harmonize _hue_--if he fail in this, he is no member of the brotherhood. Let him etch, or draw, or carve: better the unerring graver than the unfaithful pencil--better the true sling and stone than the brightness of the unproved armor. And let not even those who deal in the deeper magic, and feel in themselves the loftier power, presume upon that power--nor believe in the reality of any success unless that which has been deserved by deliberate, resolute, successive operation. We would neither deny nor disguise the influences of sensibility or of imagination, upon this, as upon every other admirable quality of art;--we know that there is that in the very stroke and fall of the pencil in a master's hand, which creates color with an unconscious enchantment--we know that there is a brilliancy which springs from the joy of the painter's heart--a gloom which sympathizes with its seriousness--a power correlative with its will; but these are all vain unless they be ruled by a seemly caution--a manly moderation--an indivertible foresight. This we think the one great conclusion to be received from the work we have been examining, that all power is vain--all invention vain--all enthusiasm vain--all devotion even, and fidelity vain, unless these are guided by such severe and exact law as we see take place in the development of every great natural glory; and, even in the full glow of their bright and burning operation, sealed by the cold, majestic, deep-graven impress of the signet on the right hand of Time.

SAMUEL PROUT.[20]

137. The first pages in the histories of artists, worthy the name, are generally alike; records of boyish resistance to every scheme, parental or tutorial, at variance with the ruling desire and bent of the opening mind. It is so rare an accident that the love of drawing should be noticed and fostered in the child, that we are hardly ent.i.tled to form any conclusions respecting the probable result of an indulgent foresight; it is enough to admire the strength of will which usually accompanies every n.o.ble intellectual gift, and to believe that, in early life, direct resistance is better than inefficient guidance. Samuel Prout--with how many rich and picturesque imaginations is the name now a.s.sociated!--was born at Plymouth, September 17th, 1783, and intended by his father for his own profession; but although the delicate health of the child might have appeared likely to induce a languid acquiescence in his parent's wish, the love of drawing occupied every leisure hour, and at last trespa.s.sed upon every other occupation. Reproofs were affectionately repeated, and every effort made to dissuade the boy from what was considered an "idle amus.e.m.e.nt," but it was soon discovered that opposition was unavailing, and the attachment too strong to be checked.

It might perhaps have been otherwise, but for some rays of encouragement received from the observant kindness of his first schoolmaster. To watch the direction of the little hand when it wandered from its task, to draw the culprit to him with a smile instead of a reproof, to set him on the high stool beside his desk, and stimulate him, by the loan of his own pen, to a more patient and elaborate study of the child's usual subject, his favorite cat, was a modification of preceptorial care as easy as it was wise; but it perhaps had more influence on the mind and after-life of the boy than all the rest of his education together.

138. Such happy though rare interludes in school-hours, and occasional attempts at home, usually from the carts and horses which stopped at a public-house opposite, began the studentship of the young artist before he had quitted his pinafore. An unhappy accident which happened about the same time, and which farther enfeebled his health, rendered it still less advisable to interfere with his beloved occupation. We have heard the painter express, with a melancholy smile, the distinct recollection remaining with him to this day, of a burning autumn morning, on which he had sallied forth alone, himself some four autumns old, armed with a hooked stick, to gather nuts. Unrestrainable alike with pencil or crook, he was found by a farmer, towards the close of the day, lying moaning under a hedge, prostrated by a sunstroke, and was brought home insensible. From that day forward he was subject to attacks of violent pain in the head, recurring at short intervals; and until thirty years after marriage not a week pa.s.sed without one or two days of absolute confinement to his room or to his bed. "Up to this hour," we may perhaps be permitted to use his own touching words, "I have to endure a great fight of afflictions; can I therefore be sufficiently thankful for the merciful gift of a buoyant spirit?"

139. That buoyancy of spirit--one of the brightest and most marked elements of his character--never failed to sustain him between the recurrences even of his most acute suffering; and the pursuit of his most beloved Art became every year more determined and independent. The first beginnings in landscape study were made in happy truant excursions, now fondly remembered, with the painter Haydon, then also a youth. This companionship was probably rather cemented by the energy than the delicacy of Haydon's sympathies. The two boys were directly opposed in their habits of application and modes of study. Prout unremitting in diligence, patient in observation, devoted in copying what he loved in nature, never working except with his model before him; Haydon restless, ambitious, and fiery; exceedingly imaginative, never captivated with simple truth, nor using his pencil on the spot, but trusting always to his powers of memory. The fates of the two youths were inevitably fixed by their opposite characters. The humble student became the originator of a new School of Art, and one of the most popular painters of his age. The self-trust of the wanderer in the wilderness of his fancy betrayed him into the extravagances, and deserted him in the suffering, with which his name must remain sadly, but not unjustly, a.s.sociated.

140. There was, however, little in the sketches made by Prout at this period to indicate the presence of dormant power. Common prints, at a period when engraving was in the lowest state of decline, were the only guides which the youth could obtain; and his style, in endeavoring to copy these, became cramped and mannered; but the unremitting sketching from nature saved him. Whole days, from dawn till night, were devoted to the study of the peculiar objects of his early interest, the ivy-mantled bridges, mossy water-mills, and rock-built cottages, which characterize the valley scenery of Devon. In spite of every disadvantage, the strong love of truth, and the instinctive perception of the chief points of shade and characters of form on which his favorite effects mainly depended, enabled him not only to obtain an acc.u.mulated store of memoranda, afterwards valuable, but to publish several elementary works which obtained extensive and deserved circulation, and to which many artists, now high in reputation, have kindly and frankly confessed their early obligations.

141. At that period the art of water-color drawing was little understood at Plymouth, and practiced only by Payne, then an engineer in the citadel. Though mannered in the extreme, his works obtained reputation; for the best drawings of the period were feeble both in color and execution, with commonplace light and shadow, a dark foreground being a _rule absolute_, as may be seen in several of Turner's first productions. But Turner was destined to annihilate such rules, breaking through and scattering them with an expansive force commensurate with the rigidity of former restraint. It happened "fortunately," as it is said,--naturally and deservedly, as it _should_ be said,--that Prout was at this period removed from the narrow sphere of his first efforts to one in which he could share in, and take advantage of, every progressive movement.

142. The most respectable of the Plymouth amateurs was the Rev. Dr.

Bidlake, who was ever kind in his encouragement of the young painter, and with whom many delightful excursions were made. At his house, Mr.

Britton, the antiquarian, happening to see some of the cottages sketches, and being pleased with them, proposed that Prout should accompany him into Cornwall, in order to aid him in collecting materials for his "Beauties of England and Wales." This was the painter's first recognized artistical employment, as well as the occasion of a friendship ever gratefully and fondly remembered. On Mr. Britton's return to London, after sending to him a portfolio of drawings, which were almost the first to create a sensation with lovers of Art, Mr.

Prout received so many offers of encouragement, if he would consent to reside in London, as to induce him to take this important step--the first towards being established as an artist.

143. The immediate effect of this change of position was what might easily have been foretold, upon a mind naturally sensitive, diffident, and enthusiastic. It was a heavy discouragement. The youth felt that he had much to eradicate and more to learn, and hardly knew at first how to avail himself of the advantages presented by the study of the works of Turner, Girtin, Cousins, and others. But he had resolution and ambition as well as modesty; he knew that

"The n.o.blest honors of the mind On rigid terms descend."

He had every inducement to begin the race, in the clearer guidance and n.o.bler ends which the very works that had disheartened him afforded and pointed out; and the first firm and certain step was made. His range of subject was as yet undetermined, and was likely at one time to have been very different from that in which he has since obtained pre-eminence so confessed. Among the picturesque material of his native place, the forms of its shipping had not been neglected, though there was probably less in the order of Plymouth dockyard to catch the eye of the boy, always determined in its preference of purely picturesque arrangements, than might have been afforded by the meanest fishing hamlet. But a strong and lasting impression was made upon him by the wreck of the "Dutton" East Indiaman on the rocks under the citadel; the crew were saved by the personal courage and devotion of Sir Edward Pellew, afterwards Lord Exmouth. The wreck held together for many hours under the cliff, rolling to and fro as the surges struck her. Haydon and Prout sat on the crags together and watched her vanish fragment by fragment into the gnashing foam. Both were equally awe-struck at the time; both, on the morrow, resolved to paint their first pictures; both failed; but Haydon, always incapable of acknowledging and remaining loyal to the majesty of what he had seen, lost himself in vulgar thunder and lightning. Prout struggled to some resemblance of the actual scene, and the effect upon his mind was never effaced.

144. At the time of his first residence in London, he painted more marines than anything else. But other work was in store for him. About the year 1818, his health, which as we have seen had never been vigorous, showed signs of increasing weakness, and a short trial of continental air was recommended. The route by Havre to Rouen was chosen, and Prout found himself, for the first time, in the grotesque labyrinths of the Norman streets. There are few minds so apathetic as to receive no impulse of new delight from their first acquaintance with continental scenery and architecture; and Rouen was, of all the cities of France, the richest in those objects with which the painter's mind had the profoundest sympathy. It was other then than it is now; revolutionary fury had indeed spent itself upon many of its n.o.blest monuments, but the interference of modern restoration or improvement was unknown. Better the unloosed rage of the fiend than the scrabble of self-complacent idiocy. The facade of the cathedral was as yet unenc.u.mbered by the blocks of new stonework, never to be carved, by which it is now defaced; the Church of St. Nicholas existed, (the last fragments of the niches of its gateway were seen by the writer dashed upon the pavement in 1840 to make room for the new "Hotel St. Nicholas"); the Gothic turret had not vanished from the angle of the Place de la Pucelle, the Palais de Justice remained in its gray antiquity, and the Norman houses still lifted their fantastic ridges of gable along the busy quay (now fronted by as formal a range of hotels and offices as that of the West Cliff of Brighton). All was at unity with itself, and the city lay under its guarding hills, one labyrinth of delight, its gray and fretted towers, misty in their magnificence of height, letting the sky like blue enamel through the foiled s.p.a.ces of their crowns of open work; the walls and gates of its countless churches wardered by saintly groups of solemn statuary, clasped about by wandering stems of sculptured leaf.a.ge, and crowned by fretted niche and fairy pediment--meshed like gossamer with inextricable tracery: many a quaint monument of past times standing to tell its far-off tale in the place from which it has since perished--in the midst of the throng and murmur of those shadowy streets--all grim with jutting props of ebon woodwork, lightened only here and there by a sunbeam glancing down from the scaly backs, and points, and pyramids of the Norman roofs, or carried out of its narrow range by the gay progress of some snowy cap or scarlet camisole. The painter's vocation was fixed from that hour. The first effect upon his mind was irrepressible enthusiasm, with a strong feeling of a new-born attachment to Art, in a new world of exceeding interest. Previous impressions were presently obliterated, and the old embankments of fancy gave way to the force of overwhelming antic.i.p.ations, forming another and a wider channel for its future course.

145. From this time excursions were continually made to the continent, and every corner of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy ransacked for its fragments of carved stone. The enthusiasm of the painter was greater than his ambition, and the strict limitation of his aim to the rendering of architectural character permitted him to adopt a simple and consistent method of execution, from which he has rarely departed. It was adapted in the first instance to the necessities of the moldering and mystic character of Northern Gothic; and though impressions received afterwards in Italy, more especially at Venice, have retained as strong a hold upon the painter's mind as those of his earlier excursions, his methods of drawing have always been influenced by the predilections first awakened. How far his love of the picturesque, already alluded to, was reconcilable with an entire appreciation of the highest characters of Italian architecture we do not pause to inquire; but this we may a.s.sert, without hesitation, that the picturesque _elements_ of that architecture were unknown until he developed them, and that since Gentile Bellini, no one had regarded the palaces of Venice with so affectionate an understanding of the purpose and expression of their wealth of detail. In this respect the City of the Sea has been, and remains, peculiarly his own. There is, probably, no single piazza nor sea-paved street from St. Georgio in Aliga to the a.r.s.enal, of which Prout has not in order drawn every fragment of pictorial material. Probably not a pillar in Venice but occurs in some one of his innumerable studies; while the peculiarly beautiful and varied arrangements under which he has treated the angle formed by St.

Mark's Church with the Doge's palace, have not only made every successful drawing of those buildings by any other hand look like plagiarism, but have added (and what is this but indeed to paint the lily!) another charm to the spot itself.

146. This exquisite dexterity of arrangement has always been one of his leading characteristics as an artist. Notwithstanding the deserved popularity of his works, his greatness in composition remains altogether unappreciated. Many modern works exhibit greater pretense at arrangement, and a more palpable system; ma.s.ses of well-concentrated light or points of sudden and dextrous color are expedients in the works of our second-rate artists as attractive as they are commonplace. But the moving and natural crowd, the decomposing composition, the frank and unforced, but marvelously intricate grouping, the breadth of inartificial and unexaggerated shadow, these are merits of an order only the more elevated because un.o.btrusive. Nor is his system of color less admirable. It is a quality from which the character of his subjects naturally withdraws much of his attention, and of which sometimes that character precludes any high attainment; but, nevertheless, the truest and happiest a.s.sociation of hues in sun and shade to be found in modern water-color art,[21] (excepting only the studies of Hunt and De Wint) will be found in portions of Prout's more important works.

147. Of his _peculiar_ powers we need hardly speak; it would be difficult to conceive the circle of their influence widened. There is not a landscape of recent times in which the treatment of the architectural features has not been affected, however unconsciously, by principles which were first developed by Prout. Of those principles the most original was his familiarization of the sentiment, while he elevated the subject, of the picturesque. That character had been sought, before his time, either in solitude or in rusticity; it was supposed to belong only to the savageness of the desert or the simplicity of the hamlet; it lurked beneath the brows of rocks and the eaves of cottages; to seek it in a city would have been deemed an extravagance, to raise it to the height of a cathedral, an heresy. Prout did both, and both simultaneously; he found and proved in the busy shadows and sculptured gables of the Continental street sources of picturesque delight as rich and as interesting as those which had been sought amidst the darkness of thickets and the eminence of rocks; and he contrasted with the familiar circ.u.mstances of urban life, the majesty and the aerial elevation of the most n.o.ble architecture, expressing its details in more splendid acc.u.mulation, and with a more patient love than ever had been reached or manifested before his time by any artist who introduced such subjects as members of a general composition. He thus became the interpreter of a great period of the world's history, of that in which age and neglect had cast the interest of ruin over the n.o.blest ecclesiastical structures of Europe, and in which there had been born at their feet a generation other in its feelings and thoughts than that to which they owed their existence, a generation which understood not their meaning, and regarded not their beauty, and which yet had a character of its own, full of vigor, animation, and originality, which rendered the grotesque a.s.sociation of the circ.u.mstances of its ordinary and active life with the solemn memorialism of the elder building, one which rather pleased by the strangeness than pained by the violence of its contrast.

148. That generation is pa.s.sing away, and another dynasty is putting forth its character and its laws. Care and observance, more mischievous in their misdirection than indifference or scorn, have in many places given the mediaeval relics the aspect and a.s.sociations of a kind of cabinet preservation, instead of that air of majestic independence, or patient and stern endurance, with which they frowned down the insult of the regardless crowd. Nominal restoration has done tenfold worse, and has hopelessly destroyed what time, and storm, and anarchy, and impiety had spared. The picturesque material of a lower kind is fast departing--and forever. There is not, so far as we know, one city scene in central Europe which has not suffered from some jarring point of modernization. The railroad and the iron wheel have done their work, and the characters of Venice, Florence, and Rouen are yielding day by day to a lifeless extension of those of Paris and Birmingham. A few l.u.s.ters more, and the modernization will be complete: the archaeologist may still find work among the wrecks of beauty, and here and there a solitary fragment of the old cities may exist by toleration, or rise strangely before the workmen who dig the new foundations, left like some isolated and tottering rock in the midst of sweeping sea. But the life of the middle ages is dying from their embers, and the warm mingling of the past and present will soon be forever dissolved. The works of Prout, and of those who have followed in his footsteps, will become memorials the most precious of the things that have been; to their technical value, however great, will be added the far higher interest of faithful and fond records of a strange and unreturning era of history. May he long be spared to us, and enabled to continue the n.o.ble series, conscious of a purpose and function worthy of being followed with all the zeal of even his most ardent and affectionate mind. A time will come when that zeal will be understood, and his works will be cherished with a melancholy grat.i.tude when the pillars of Venice shall lie moldering in the salt shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have become ballast for the barges of the Seine.

SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.[22]

149. Long ago discarded from our National Gallery, with the contempt logically due to national or English pictures,--lost to sight and memory for many a year in the Ogygian seclusions of Marlborough House--there have reappeared at last, in more honorable exile at Kensington, two great pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two, with others; but these alone worth many an entanglement among the cross-roads of the West, to see for half an hour by spring sunshine:--the _Holy Family_, and the _Graces_, side by side now in the princ.i.p.al room. Great, as ever was work wrought by man. In placid strength, and subtlest science, unsurpa.s.sed;--in sweet felicity, incomparable.

150. If you truly want to know what good work of painter's hand is, study those two pictures from side to side, and miss no inch of them (you will hardly, eventually, be inclined to miss one): in some respects there is no execution like it; none so open in the magic. For the work of other great men is hidden in its wonderfulness--you cannot see how it was done. But in Sir Joshua's there is no mystery: it is all amazement.

No question but that the touch was so laid; only that it _could_ have been so laid, is a marvel forever. So also there is no painting so majestic in sweetness. He is lily-sceptered: his power blossoms, but burdens not. All other men of equal dignity paint more slowly; all others of equal force paint less lightly. Tintoret lays his line like a king marking the boundaries of conquered lands; but Sir Joshua leaves it as a summer wind its trace on a lake; he could have painted on a silken veil, where it fell free, and not bent it.

151. Such at least is his touch when it is life that he paints: for things lifeless he has a severer hand. If you examine that picture of the _Graces_ you will find it reverses all the ordinary ideas of expedient treatment. By other men flesh is firmly painted, but accessories lightly. Sir Joshua paints accessories firmly,[23] flesh lightly;--nay, flesh not at all, but spirit. The wreath of flowers he feels to be material; and gleam by gleam strikes fearlessly the silver and violet leaves out of the darkness. But the three maidens are less substantial than rose petals. No flushed nor frosted tissue that ever faded in night wind is so tender as they; no hue may reach, no line measure, what is in them so gracious and so fair. Let the hand move softly--itself as a spirit; for this is Life, of which it touches the imagery.

152. "And yet----" Yes: you do well to pause. There is a "yet" to be thought of. I did not bring you to these pictures to see wonderful work merely, or womanly beauty merely. I brought you chiefly to look at that Madonna, believing that you might remember other Madonnas, unlike her; and might think it desirable to consider wherein the difference lay:--other Madonnas not by Sir Joshua, who painted Madonnas but seldom.

Who perhaps, if truth must be told, painted them never: for surely this dearest pet of an English girl, with the little curl of lovely hair under her ear, is _not_ one.

153. Why did not Sir Joshua--or could not--or would not Sir Joshua--paint Madonnas? neither he, nor his great rival-friend Gainsborough? Both of them painters of women, such as since Giorgione and Correggio had not been; both painters of men, such as had not been since t.i.tian. How is it that these English friends can so brightly paint that particular order of humanity which we call "gentlemen and ladies,"

but neither heroes, nor saints, nor angels? Can it be because they were both country-bred boys, and for ever after strangely sensitive to courtliness? Why, Giotto also was a country-bred boy. Allegri's native Correggio, t.i.tian's Cadore, were but hill villages; yet these men painted, not the court, nor the drawing-room, but the Earth: and not a little of Heaven besides: while our good Sir Joshua never trusts himself outside the park palings. He could not even have drawn the strawberry girl, unless she had got through a gap in them--or rather, I think, she must have been let in at the porter's lodge, for her strawberries are in a pottle, ready for the ladies at the Hall. Giorgione would have set them, wild and fragrant, among their leaves, in her hand. Between his fairness, and Sir Joshua's May-fairness, there is a strange, impa.s.sable limit--as of the white reef that in Pacific isles encircles their inner lakelets, and shuts them from the surf and sound of sea. Clear and calm they rest, reflecting fringed shadows of the palm-trees, and the pa.s.sing of fretted clouds across their own sweet circle of blue sky. But beyond, and round and round their coral bar, lies the blue of sea and heaven together--blue of eternal deep.

154. You will find it a pregnant question, if you follow it forth, and leading to many others, not trivial, Why it is, that in Sir Joshua's girl, or Gainsborough's, we always think first of the Ladyhood; but in Giotto's, of the Womanhood? Why, in Sir Joshua's hero, or Vandyck's, it is always the Prince or the Sir whom we see first; but in t.i.tian's, the man.

Not that t.i.tian's gentlemen are less finished than Sir Joshua's; but their gentlemanliness[24] is not the princ.i.p.al thing about them; their manhood absorbs, conquers, wears it as a despised thing. Nor--and this is another stern ground of separation--will t.i.tian make a gentleman of everyone he paints. He will make him so if he is so, not otherwise; and this not merely in general servitude to truth, but because in his sympathy with deeper humanity, the courtier is not more interesting to him than anyone else. "You have learned to dance and fence; you can speak with clearness, and think with precision; your hands are small, your senses acute, and your features well-shaped. Yes: I see all this in you, and will do it justice. You shall stand as none but a well-bred man could stand; and your fingers shall fall on the sword-hilt as no fingers could but those that knew the grasp of it. But for the rest, this grisly fisherman, with rusty cheek and rope-frayed hand, is a man as well as you, and might possibly make several of you, if souls were divisible.

His bronze color is quite as interesting to me, t.i.tian, as your paleness, and his h.o.a.ry spray of stormy hair takes the light as well as your waving curls. Him also I will paint, with such picturesqueness as he may have; yet not putting the picturesqueness first in him, as in you I have not put the gentlemanliness first. In him I see a strong human creature, contending with all hardship: in you also a human creature, uncontending, and possibly not strong. Contention or strength, weakness or picturesqueness, and all other such accidents in either, shall have due place. But the immortality and miracle of you--this clay that burns, this color that changes--are in truth the awful things in both: these shall be first painted--and last."

155. With which question respecting treatment of character we have to connect also this further one: How is it that the attempts of so great painters as Reynolds and Gainsborough are, beyond portraiture, limited almost like children's? No domestic drama--no history--no n.o.ble natural scenes, far less any religious subject:--only market carts; girls with pigs; woodmen going home to supper; watering-places; gray cart-horses in fields, and such like. Reynolds, indeed, once or twice touched higher themes,--"among the chords his fingers laid," and recoiled: wisely; for, strange to say, his very sensibility deserts him when he leaves his courtly quiet. The horror of the subjects he chose (Cardinal Beaufort and Ugolino) showed inherent apathy: had he felt deeply, he would not have sought for this strongest possible excitement of feeling,--would not willingly have dwelt on the worst conditions of despair--the despair of the ign.o.ble. His religious subjects are conceived even with less care than these. Beautiful as it is, this Holy Family by which we stand has neither dignity nor sacredness, other than those which attach to every group of gentle mother and ruddy babe; while his Faiths, Charities, or other well-ordered and emblem-fitted virtues are even less lovely than his ordinary portraits of women.

It was a faultful temper, which, having so mighty a power of realization at command, never became so much interested in any fact of human history as to spend one touch of heartfelt skill upon it;--which, yielding momentarily to indolent imagination, ended, at best, in a Puck, or a Thais; a Mercury as Thief, or a Cupid as Linkboy. How wide the interval between this gently trivial humor, guided by the wave of a feather, or arrested by the enchantment of a smile,--and the habitual dwelling of the thoughts of the great Greeks and Florentines among the beings and the interests of the eternal world!

156. In some degree it may indeed be true that the modesty and sense of the English painters are the causes of their simple practice. All that they did, they did well, and attempted nothing over which conquest was doubtful. They knew they could paint men and women: it did not follow that they could paint angels. Their own gifts never appeared to them so great as to call for serious question as to the use to be made of them.

"They could mix colors and catch likeness--yes; but were they therefore able to teach religion, or reform the world? To support themselves honorably, pa.s.s the hours of life happily, please their friends, and leave no enemies, was not this all that duty could require, or prudence recommend? Their own art was, it seemed, difficult enough to employ all their genius: was it reasonable to hope also to be poets or theologians?

Such men had, indeed, existed; but the age of miracles and prophets was long past; nor, because they could seize the trick of an expression, or the turn of a head, had they any right to think themselves able to conceive heroes with Homer, or G.o.ds with Michael Angelo."

157. Such was, in the main, their feeling: wise, modest, unenvious, and unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of high art with incoherent pa.s.sion; arrogated to themselves an equality with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidae.

But the two great--the two only painters of their age--happy in a reputation founded as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind, demanded no higher function than that of soothing the domestic affections; and achieved for themselves at last an immortality not the less n.o.ble, because in their lifetime they had concerned themselves less to claim it than to bestow.