DISCOURSES ON ART
We must next speak of the late President's Addresses and Discourses on
Art, and of that other art of oratory, which, we shall find, as he
conceived it, had something of the same monumental quality he imparted
to his painting. His presidential speeches at the annual banquet of the
Academy would alone be sufficient to show this; but it is of course to
his Addresses and Discourses that we must turn if we would understand
his feeling for the two unallied arts.
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 classic 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 passages 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."
[Illustration: 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
reassuring 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: Assuredly
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 æsthetic growth on the other.
[Illustration: 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
association 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, Assyria, 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 Chaldæan and Assyrian 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 circumstances 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 multitude of purple isles and islets towards the Ionian,
kindred, shores." 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 nobility and its
serenity, its exquisite balance, its searching after truth, and its
thirst for the ideal."
[Illustration: 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 Hellenic; 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 recumbent 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 basement, 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 surpass 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 pass 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, nobles, 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 æsthetic." Even in Roman architecture, our critic finds
little to weaken his view of the Roman æsthetic inefficiency. "It was
not," he said, "the spontaneous utterance of an æsthetic 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."
[Illustration: 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.'
...... 'Sævior 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 æsthetic 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 nobler 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, _à 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.
[Illustration: 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 pass 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 classic spirit--may be
best illustrated by reference to Lionardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael
Angelo." The passages 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 "classic serenity," and Angelo's "mediæval 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 classic spirit was absorbed and eagerly
assimilated by him, and imparted to the work of his best day that
rhythm, that gentle gravity, and that noble 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 classic
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.
[Illustration: 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,
assimilated 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
passion 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 Cassino its beneficent influence
over Western Europe."
Here we have it explained how the principle of Gothic architecture, "the
substitution 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
space 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."
Many more extracts we would gladly make, whether from the account of the
French sculpture of this period, marked as it was by "sincerity and
freshness, often by great beauty and stateliness;" or from the criticism
of such artists as Jean Cousin, who painted windows which were "limpid
with hues of amethyst, sapphire, and topaz, and fair as a May morning;"
or again, of Watteau, of whom we are told that "in the vivacity and
grace of his drawing, in the fascination of his harmonies, rich and
suave at once, in the fidelity with which he reflected his times without
hinting at their coarseness, this wizard of the brush remains one of the
most interesting, as he is one of the most fascinating, masters of his
country's art."
In the Discourse of 1893 the History of Gothic Architecture was pursued,
from its native France to its adopted home in Germany. At the end of
last century Goethe declared that not only was the Gothic style native
to Germany, but no other nation had a peculiar style of its own; "for,"
he said, "the Italians have none, and still less the Frenchmen"!
According to Leighton, "the Germans, as a race, were, speaking broadly,
never at one in spirit with ogival architecture. The result was such as
you would expect; in the use of a form of architecture which was not of
spontaneous growth in their midst, and unrestrained, moreover, as they
were, by a sound innate instinct of special fitness, German builders
were often led into solecisms, incongruities, and excesses, from which
in the practice of their native style they have been largely free." Of
this style, which may be called the German-Romanesque, the best examples
are to be found among the churches of the Rhineland. In the thirteenth
century this style, admirably as it expressed the genius of the Teuton,
succumbed to invading French influence. "I have often wondered," he
continued, "at the strange contrast between the reticent and grave
sobriety of the architecture of Germany before the fall of the
Hohenstaufens, and its erratic self-indulgence in the Gothic period."
There is much, however, to be said in praise of the Gothic churches of
Germany, their fine colouring, suggestiveness, and variety. Take the
description of the Church of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg. "Nothing could
well be more delightful than the impression which you receive on
entering it; the beauty of the dark brown stone, the rich hues of the
stained glass, the right relation of tone value, to use a painter's
term, between the structure and the lights--the sombre blazoned shields
which cluster along the walls, the succession on pier beyond pier of
pictures powerful in colour and enhanced by the gleaming gold of
fantastic carven frames, above all the succession of picturesque objects
in mid-air above you, a large chandelier, a stately rood-cross, and to
crown all, Veit Stoss's masterpiece, the Annunciation, rich with gold
and colour; all these things conspire to produce a whole, delightful and
poetic, in spite of much that invites criticism in the architectural
forms themselves." Still more interesting is the word-picture of the
great Cathedral of Cologne, "a monument of indomitable will, of science,
and of stylistic orthodoxy ... its beautiful rhythm, its noble
consistency and unity, its soaring height, rivet the beholder's gaze";
and yet, the building, in spite of all, does not entirely convince: "the
kindling touch of genius" seems to be wanting.
Take, finally, this description of Albert Dürer: "He was a man of a
strong and upright nature, bent on pure and high ideals, a man ever
seeking, if I may use his own characteristic expression, to make known
through his work the mysterious treasure that was laid up in his heart;
he was a thinker, a theorist, and as you know, a writer; like many of
the great artists of the Renaissance, he was steeped also in the love of
science.... Superbly inexhaustible as a designer, as a draughtsman he
was powerful, thorough, and minute to a marvel, but never without a
certain almost caligraphic mannerism of hand, wanting in spontaneous
simplicity--never broadly serene. In his colour he was rich and vivid,
not always unerring in his harmonies, not alluring in his
execution--withal a giant."
With this tribute to a great predecessor we must leave these Discourses,
which need, to be properly appreciated, to be studied as a whole; as
indeed they form Leighton's deliberate exposition of his whole
principles of Aesthetics. In working this out, Discourse by Discourse,
he was not content to rely upon convenient literary sources, or
previously acquired knowledge of his subject; but undertook special
journeys, and spent long periods, abroad, to procure his own evidence
at first hand. This gives his Discourses all the value of original
research, based on new materials, to add to their purely critical value.
Had they been completed, they would have formed an invaluable
contribution to the history and the philosophy of Art.