Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What
does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic
music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and
epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful
sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's
Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because
its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety
of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not
through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely
and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with
lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and
with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the
greater art. Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the
portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of? The
painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have
fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the
Louvre, and stand before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in
that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,' I
murmur to myself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like
the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the
grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day
about her: and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and,
as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of
Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing
lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.' And I say to my
friend, 'The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to
desire'; and he answers me, 'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of
the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary.'
And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and
reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the
music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-
player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and
poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any
one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and experience of the
world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to
refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the
lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition
and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias?' He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none
of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain
arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious
colour-harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason that
the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It
treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It
does not confine itself--let us at least suppose so for the moment--to
discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.
And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing
is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in
his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the
beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and
sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital
portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of
what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.--_The Critic as
Artist_.