59. It is a wild March day,--the 20th; and very probably due course of
English Spring will bring as wild a May-day by the time this writing
meets anyone's eyes; but at all events, as yet the days are rough, and
as I look out of my fitfully lighted window into the garden, everything
seems in a singular hurry. The dead leaves; and yonder two living ones,
on the same stalk, tumbling over and over each other on the lawn, like a
quaint mechanical toy; and the fallen sticks from the rooks' nests, and
the twisted straws out of the stable-yard--all going one way, in the
hastiest manner! The puffs of steam, moreover, which pass under the
wooded hills where what used to be my sweetest field-walk ends now,
prematurely, in an abyss of blue clay; and which signify, in their
silvery expiring between the successive trunks of wintry trees, that
some human beings, thereabouts, are in a hurry as well as the sticks and
straws, and, having fastened themselves to the tail of a manageable
breeze, are being blown down to Folkestone.
60. In the general effect of these various passages and passengers, as
seen from my quiet room, they look all very much alike. One begins
seriously to question with one's self whether those passengers by the
Folkestone train are in truth one whit more in a hurry than the dead
leaves. The difference consists, of course, in the said passengers
knowing where they are going to, and why; and having resolved to go
there--which, indeed, as far as Folkestone, may, perhaps, properly
distinguish them from the leaves: but will it distinguish them any
farther? Do many of them know what they are going to Folkestone
for?--what they are going anywhere for? and where, at last, by sum of
all the days' journeys, of which this glittering transit is one, they
are going for peace? For if they know not this, certainly they are no
more making haste than the straws are. Perhaps swiftly going the wrong
way; more likely going no way--any way, as the winds and their own
wills, wilder than the winds, dictate; to find themselves at last at the
end which would have come to them quickly enough without their seeking.
61. And, indeed, this is a very preliminary question to all measurement
of the rate of going, this "where to?" or, even before that, "are we
going on at all?"--"getting on" (as the world says) on any road
whatever? Most men's eyes are so fixed on the mere swirl of the wheel of
their fortunes, and their souls so vexed at the reversed cadences of it
when they come, that they forget to ask if the curve they have been
carried through on its circumference was circular or cycloidal; whether
they have been bound to the ups and downs of a mill-wheel or of a
chariot-wheel.
That phrase, of "getting on," so perpetually on our lips (as indeed it
should be), do any of us take it to our hearts, and seriously ask where
we can get on _to_? That instinct of hurry has surely good grounds. It
is all very well for lazy and nervous people (like myself for instance)
to retreat into tubs, and holes, and corners, anywhere out of the dust,
and wonder within ourselves, "what all the fuss can be about?" The fussy
people might have the best of it, if they know their end. Suppose they
were to answer this March or May morning thus:--"Not bestir ourselves,
indeed! and the spring sun up these four hours!--and this first of May,
1865, never to come back again; and of Firsts of May in perspective,
supposing ourselves to be 'nel mezzo del cammin,' perhaps some twenty or
twenty-five to be, not without presumption, hoped for, and by no means
calculated upon. Say, twenty of them, with their following groups of
summer days; and though they may be long, one cannot make much more than
sixteen hours apiece out of them, poor sleepy wretches that we are; for
even if we get up at four, we must go to bed while the red yet stays
from the sunset: and half the time we are awake, we must be lying among
haycocks, or playing at something, if we are wise; not to speak of
eating, and previously earning whereof to eat, which takes time: and
then, how much of us and of our day will be left for getting on? Shall
we have a seventh, or even a tithe, of our twenty-four hours?--two hours
and twenty-four minutes clear, a day, or, roughly, a thousand hours a
year, and (violently presuming on fortune, as we said) twenty years of
working life: twenty thousand hours to get on in, altogether? Many men
would think it hard to be limited to an utmost twenty thousand pounds
for their fortunes, but here is a sterner limitation; the Pactolus of
time, sand, and gold together, would, with such a fortune, count us a
pound an hour, through our real and serviceable life. If this time
capital would reproduce itself! and for our twenty thousand hours we
could get some rate of interest, if well spent? At all events, we will
do something with them; not lie moping out of the way of the dust, as
you do."
62. A sufficient answer, indeed; yet, friends, if you would _make_ a
little less dust, perhaps we should all see our way better. But I am
ready to take the road with you, if you mean it so seriously--only let
us at least consider where we are now, at starting.
Here, on a little spinning, askew-axised thing we call a
planet--(impertinently enough, since we are far more planetary
ourselves). A round, rusty, rough little metallic ball--very hard to
live upon; most of it much too hot or too cold: a couple of narrow
habitable belts about it, which, to wandering spirits, must look like
the places where it has got damp, and green-moldy, with accompanying
small activities of animal life in the midst of the lichen. Explosive
gases, seemingly, inside it, and possibilities of very sudden
dispersion.
63. This is where we are; and roundabout us, there seem to be more of
such balls, variously heated and chilled, ringed and mooned, moved and
comforted; the whole giddy group of us forming an atom in a milky mist,
itself another atom in a shoreless phosphorescent sea of such Volvoces
and Medusae.
Whereupon, I presume, one would first ask, have we any chance of getting
off this ball of ours, and getting on to one of those finer ones? Wise
people say we have, and that it is very wicked to think otherwise. So we
will think no otherwise; but, with their permission, think nothing about
the matter now, since it is certain that the more we make of our little
rusty world, such as it is, the more chance we have of being one day
promoted into a merrier one.
64. And even on this rusty and moldy Earth, there appear to be things
which may be seen with pleasure, and things which might be done with
advantage. The stones of it have strange shapes; the plants and the
beasts of it strange ways. Its air is coinable into wonderful sounds;
its light into manifold colors: the trees of it bring forth pippins, and
the fields cheese (though both of these may be, in a finer sense, "to
come"). There are bright eyes upon it which reflect the light of other
eyes quite singularly; and foolish feelings to be cherished upon it; and
gladdenings of dust by neighbor dust, not easily explained, but
pleasant, and which take time to win. One would like to know something
of all this, I suppose?--to divide one's score of thousand hours as
shrewdly as might be. Ten minutes to every herb of the field is not
much; yet we shall not know them all, so, before the time comes to be
made grass of ourselves! Half an hour for every crystalline form of clay
and flint, and we shall be near the need of shaping the gray flint stone
that is to weigh upon our feet. And we would fain dance a measure or two
before that cumber is laid upon them: there having been hitherto much
piping to which we have not danced. And we must leave time for loving,
if we are to take Marmontel's wise peasant's word for it, "_Il n'y a de
bon que c'a!_" And if there should be fighting to do also? and weeping?
and much burying? truly, we had better make haste.
65. Which means, simply, that we must lose neither strength nor moment.
Hurry is not haste; but economy is, and rightness is. Whatever is
rightly done stays with us, to support another right beyond, or higher
up: whatever is wrongly done, vanishes; and by the blank, betrays what
we would have built above. Wasting no word, no thought, no doing, we
shall have speed enough; but then there is that farther question, what
shall we do?--what we are fittest (worthiest, that is) to do, and what
is best worth doing? Note that word "worthy," both of the man and the
thing, for the two dignities go together. Is _it_ worth the pains? Are
we worth the task? The dignity of a man depends wholly upon this
harmony. If his task is above him, he will be undignified in failure; if
he is above it, he will be undignified in success. His own composure and
nobleness must be according to the composure of his thought to his toil.
66. As I was dreaming over this, my eyes fell by chance on a page of my
favorite thirteenth century psalter, just where two dragons, one with
red legs, and another with green,--one with a blue tail on a purple
ground, and the other with a rosy tail on a golden ground, follow the
verse "_Quis ascendet in montem Domini_," and begin the solemn "_Qui non
accepit in vano animam suam_." Who hath not lift up his soul unto
vanity, we have it; and [Greek: elaben epi mataio], the Greeks (not that
I know what that means accurately): broadly, they all mean, "who has not
received nor given his soul in vain," this is the man who can make
haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the
right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the
white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus
to roll his fantastic stone up--image, himself, forever of the greater
part of our wise mortal work.
67. Now all this time, whatever the reader may think, I have never for a
moment lost sight of that original black line with which is our own
special business. The patience, the speed, the dignity, we can give to
that, the choice to be made of subject for it, are the matters I want to
get at. You think, perhaps, that an engraver's function is one of no
very high dignity;--does not involve a serious choice of work. Consider
a little of it. Here is a steel point, and 'tis like Job's "iron
pen"--and you are going to cut into steel with it, in a most deliberate
way, as into the rock forever. And this scratch or inscription of yours
will be seen of a multitude of eyes. It is not like a single picture or
a single wall painting; this multipliable work will pass through
thousand thousand hands, strengthen and inform innumerable souls, if it
be worthy; vivify the folly of thousands if unworthy. Remember, also, it
will mix in the very closest manner in domestic life. This engraving
will not be gossiped over and fluttered past at private views of
academies; listlessly sauntered by in corners of great galleries. Ah,
no! This will hang over parlor chimney-pieces--shed down its hourly
influence on children's forenoon work. This will hang in little luminous
corners by sick beds; mix with flickering dreams by candlelight, and
catch the first rays from the window's "glimmering square." You had
better put something good into it! I do not know a more solemn field of
labor than that _champ d'acier_. From a pulpit, perhaps a man can only
reach one or two people, for that time,--even your book, once carelessly
read, probably goes into a bookcase catacomb, and is thought of no more.
But this; taking the eye unawares again and again, and always again:
persisting and inevitable! where will you look for a chance of saying
something nobly, if it is not here?
68. And the choice is peculiarly free; to you of all men most free. An
artist, at first invention, cannot always choose what shall come into
his mind, nor know what it will eventually turn into. But you, professed
copyists, unless you have mistaken your profession, have the power of
governing your own thoughts, and of following and interpreting the
thoughts of others. Also, you see the work to be done put plainly before
you; you can deliberately choose what seems to you best, out of myriads
of examples of perfect Art. You can count the cost accurately; saying,
"It will take me a year--two years--five--a fourth or fifth, probably,
of my remaining life, to do this." Is the thing worth it? There is no
excuse for choosing wrongly; no other men whatever have data so full,
and position so firm, for forecast of their labor.
69. I put my psalter aside (not, observe, vouching for its red and
green dragons:--men lifted up their souls to vanity sometimes in the
thirteenth as in the nineteenth century), and I take up, instead, a book
of English verses, published--there is no occasion to say when. It is
full of costliest engravings--large, skillful, appallingly laborious;
dotted into textures like the dust on a lily leaf,--smoothed through
gradations like clouds,--graved to surfaces like mother-of-pearl; and by
all this toil there is set forth for the delight of Englishwomen, a
series of the basest dreams that ungoverned feminine imagination can
coin in sickliest indolence,--ball-room amours, combats of curled
knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties,
charities in costume,--a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish
vanity--impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir,
and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as
such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural
veracity; the faces falsely drawn--the lights falsely cast--the forms
effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and sense extinguished in
the vicious scum of lying sensation.
And this, I grieve to say, is only a characteristic type of a large mass
of popular English work. This is what we spend our Teutonic lives in;
engraving with an iron pen in the rock forever; this, the passion of the
Teutonic woman (as opposed to Virgilia), just as foxhunting is the
passion of the Teutonic man, as opposed to Valerius.
70. And while we deliberately spend all our strength, and all our
tenderness, all our skill, and all our money, in doing, relishing,
buying, this absolute Wrongness, of which nothing can ever come but
disease in heart and brain, remember that all the mighty works of the
great painters of the world, full of life, truth, and blessing, remain
to this present hour of the year 1865 unengraved! There literally exists
no earnestly studied and fully accomplished engraving of any very great
work, except Leonardo's Cena. No large Venetian picture has ever been
thoroughly engraved. Of Titian's Peter Martyr, there is even no worthy
memorial transcript but Le Febre's. The Cartoons have been multiplied
in false readings; never in faithful ones till lately by photography. Of
the Disputa and the Parnassus, what can the English public know? of the
thoughtful Florentines and Milanese, of Ghirlandajo, and Luini, and
their accompanying hosts--what do they yet so much as care to know?
"The English public will not pay," you reply, "for engravings from the
great masters. The English public will only pay for pictures of itself;
of its races, its rifle-meetings, its rail stations, its
parlor-passions, and kitchen interests; you must make your bread as you
may, by holding the mirror to it."
71. Friends, there have been hard fighting and heavy sleeping, this many
a day, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cause, as you suppose,
of Freedom against slavery; and you are all, open-mouthed, expecting the
glories of Black Emancipation. Perhaps a little White Emancipation on
this side of the water might be still more desirable, and more easily
and guiltlessly won.
Do you know what slavery means? Suppose a gentleman taken by a Barbary
corsair--set to field-work; chained and flogged to it from dawn to eve.
Need he be a slave therefore? By no means; he is but a hardly-treated
prisoner. There is some work which the Barbary corsair will not be able
to make him do; such work as a Christian gentleman may not do, that he
will not, though he die for it. Bound and scourged he may be, but he has
heard of a Person's being bound and scourged before now, who was not
therefore a slave. He is not a whit more slave for that. But suppose he
take the pirate's pay, and stretch his back at piratical oars, for due
salary, how then? Suppose for fitting price he betray his fellow
prisoners, and take up the scourge instead of enduring it--become the
smiter instead of the smitten, at the African's bidding--how then? Of
all the sheepish notions in our English public "mind," I think the
simplest is that slavery is neutralized when you are well paid for it!
Whereas it is precisely that fact of its being paid for which makes it
complete. A man who has been sold by another, may be but half a slave
or none; but the man who has sold himself! He is the accurately Finished
Bondsman.
72. And gravely I say that I know _no_ captivity so sorrowful as that of
an artist doing, consciously, bad work for pay. It is the serfdom of the
finest gifts--of all that should lead and master men, offering itself to
be spit upon, and that for a bribe. There is much serfdom, in Europe, of
speakers and writers, but they only sell words; and their talk, even
honestly uttered, might not have been worth much; it will not be thought
of ten years hence; still less a hundred years hence. No one will buy
our parliamentary speeches to keep in portfolios this time next century;
and if people are weak enough now to pay for any special and flattering
cadence of syllable, it is little matter. But _you_, with your painfully
acquired power, your unwearied patience, your admirable and manifold
gifts, your eloquence in black and white, which people will buy, if it
is good (and has a broad margin), for fifty guineas a copy--in the year
2000; to sell it all, as Ananias his land, "yea, for so much," and hold
yourselves at every fool's beck, with your ready points, polished and
sharp, hasting to scratch what _he_ wills! To bite permanent mischief in
with acid; to spread an inked infection of evil all your days, and pass
away at last from a life of the skillfulest industry--having done
whatsoever your hand found (remuneratively) to do, with your might, and
a great might, but with cause to thank God only for this--that the end
of it all has at last come, and that "there is no device nor work in the
Grave." One would get quit of _this_ servitude, I think, though we
reached the place of Rest a little sooner, and reached it fasting.
73. My English fellow-workmen, you have the name of liberty often on
your lips; get the fact of it oftener into your business! talk of it
less, and try to understand it better. You have given students many
copy-books of free-hand outlines--give them a few of free _heart_
outlines.
It appears, however, that you do not intend to help me with any
utterance respecting these same outlines.[70] Be it so: I must make out
what I can by myself. And under the influence of the Solstitial sign of
June I will go backwards, or askance, to the practical part of the
business, where I left it three months ago, and take up that question
first, touching Liberty, and the relation of the loose swift line to the
resolute slow one and of the etched line to the engraved one. It is a
worthy question, for the open field afforded by illustrated works is
tempting even to our best painters, and many an earnest hour and active
fancy spend and speak themselves in the black line, vigorously enough,
and dramatically, at all events: if wisely, may be considered. The
French also are throwing great passion into their _eaux fortes_--working
with a vivid haste and dark, brilliant freedom, which looked as if they
etched with very energetic waters indeed--quite waters of life (it does
not look so well, written in French). So we will take, with the reader's
permission, for text next month, "Rembrandt, and strong waters."
FOOTNOTES:
[69] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 129-30. May 1865.--ED.
[70] I have received some interesting private letters, but cannot make
use of them at present, because they enter into general discussion
instead of answering the specific question I asked, respecting the power
of the black line; and I must observe to correspondents that in future
their letters should be addressed to the Editor of this Journal, not to
me; as I do not wish to incur the responsibility of selection.