74. The work I have to do in this paper ought, rightly, to have been
thrown into the form of an appendix to the last chapter; for it is no
link of the cestus of Aglaia we have to examine, but one of the crests
of canine passion in the cestus of Scylla. Nevertheless, the girdle of
the Grace cannot be discerned in the full brightness of it, but by
comparing it with the dark torment of that other; and (in what place or
form matters little) the work has to be done.
"Rembrandt Van Rhyn"--it is said, in the last edition of a very valuable
work[72] (for which, nevertheless, I could wish that greater lightness
in the hand should be obtained by the publication of its information in
one volume, and its criticism in another)--was "the most attractive and
original of painters." It may be so; but there are attractions, and
attractions. The sun attracts the planets--and a candle, night-moths;
the one with perhaps somewhat of benefit to the planets;--but with what
benefit the other to the moths, one would be glad to learn from those
desert flies, of whom, one company having extinguished Mr. Kinglake's
candle with their bodies, the remainder, "who had failed in obtaining
this martyrdom, became suddenly serious, and clung despondingly to the
canvas."
75. Also, there are originalities, and originalities. To invent a new
thing, which is also a precious thing; to be struck by a divinely-guided
Rod, and become a sudden fountain of life to thirsty multitudes--this is
enviable. But to be distinct of men in an original Sin; elect for the
initial letter of a Lie; the first apparent spot of an unknown plague; a
Root of bitterness, and the first-born worm of a company, studying an
original De-Composition,--this is perhaps not so enviable. And if we
think of it, most human originality is apt to be of that kind. Goodness
is one, and immortal; it may be received and communicated--not
originated: but Evil is various and recurrent, and may be misbegotten in
endlessly surprising ways.
76. But, that we may know better in what this originality consists, we
find that our author, after expatiating on the vast area of the
Pantheon, "illuminated solely by the small circular opening in the dome
above," and on other similar conditions of luminous contraction, tells
us that "to Rembrandt belongs the glory of having first embodied in Art,
and perpetuated, these rare and beautiful effects of nature." Such
effects are indeed rare in nature; but they are not rare, absolutely.
The sky, with the sun in it, does not usually give the impression of
being dimly lighted through a circular hole; but you may observe a very
similar effect any day in your coal-cellar. The light is not
Rembrandtesque on the current, or banks, of a river; but it is on those
of a drain. Color is not Rembrandtesque, usually, in a clean house; but
is presently obtainable of that quality in a dirty one. And without
denying the pleasantness of the mode of progression which Mr. Hazlitt,
perhaps too enthusiastically, describes as attainable in a background of
Rembrandt's--"You stagger from one abyss of obscurity to another"--I
cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as
Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of
his darkness, and the dullness of his light. Glorious, or inglorious,
the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim
of the best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by
sunlight. It was the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he
could see--by rushlight.
77. By rushlight, observe: material and spiritual. As the sun for the
outer world; so in the inner world of man, that which "[Greek: ereuna
tameua koilias]"[73]--"the candle of God, searching the inmost parts."
If that light within become but a more active kind of darkness;--if,
abdicating the measuring reed of modesty for scepter, and ceasing to
measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we
can find, and make our soul's light into a _tallow_ candle, and
thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination
about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers--encumbered with its
lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease--that we
may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight
of a divine Virgin--only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's
ass;--that, having to paint the good Samaritan, we may see only in
distance the back of the good Samaritan, and in nearness the back of the
good Samaritan's dog;--that having to paint the Annunciation to the
Shepherds, we may turn the announcement of peace to men, into an
announcement of mere panic to beasts; and, in an unsightly firework of
unsightlier angels, see, as we see always, the feet instead of the head,
and the shame instead of the honor;--and finally concentrate and rest
the sum of our fame, as Titian on the Assumption of a spirit, so we on
the dissection of a carcass,--perhaps by such fatuous fire, the less we
walk, and by such phosphoric glow, the less we shine, the better it may
be for us, and for all who would follow us.
78. Do not think I deny the greatness of Rembrandt. In mere technical
power (none of his eulogists know that power better than I, nor declare
it in more distinct terms) he might, if he had been educated in a true
school, have taken rank with the Venetians themselves. But that type of
distinction between Titian's Assumption, and Rembrandt's Dissection,
will represent for you with sufficient significance the manner of choice
in all their work; only it should be associated with another
characteristic example of the same opposition (which I have dwelt upon
elsewhere) between Veronese and Rembrandt, in their conception of
domestic life. Rembrandt's picture, at Dresden, of himself, with his
wife sitting on his knee, a roasted peacock on the table, and a glass of
champagne in his hand, is the best work I know of all he has left; and
it marks his speciality with entire decision. It is, of course, a dim
candlelight; and the choice of the sensual passions as the things
specially and forever to be described and immortalized out of his own
private life and love, is exactly that "painting the foulest thing by
rushlight" which I have stated to be the enduring purpose of his mind.
And you will find this hold in all minor treatment; and that to the
uttermost: for as by your broken rushlight you see little, and only
corners and points of things, and those very corners and points ill and
distortedly; so, although Rembrandt knows the human face and hand, and
never fails in these, when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains
with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even
familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of
the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled
energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of
the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in an
animal.
79. His landscape, and foreground vegetation, I mean afterwards to
examine in comparison with Duerer's; but the real caliber and nature of
the man are best to be understood by comparing the puny, ill-drawn,
terrorless, helpless, beggarly skeleton in his "Youth Surprised by
Death," with the figure behind the tree in Duerer's plate (though it is
quite one of Duerer's feeblest) of the same subject. Absolutely ignorant
of all natural phenomena and law; absolutely careless of all lovely
living form, or growth, or structure; able only to render with some
approach to veracity, what alone he had looked at with some approach to
attention,--the pawnbroker's festering heaps of old clothes, and caps,
and shoes--Rembrandt's execution is one grand evasion, and his temper
the grim contempt of a strong and sullen animal in its defiled den, for
the humanity with which it is at war, for the flowers which it tramples,
and the light which it fears.
80. Again, do not let it be thought that when I call his execution
evasive, I ignore the difference between his touch, on brow or lip, and
a common workman's; but the whole school of etching which he founded,
(and of painting, so far as it differs from Venetian work) is inherently
loose and experimental. Etching is the very refuge and mask of
sentimental uncertainty, and of vigorous ignorance. If you know anything
clearly, and have a firm hand, depend upon it, you will draw it clearly;
you will not care to hide it among scratches and burrs. And herein is
the first grand distinction between etching and engraving--that in the
etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton
speed. There is, however, no real necessity for such a distinction; an
etched line may have been just as steadily drawn, and seriously meant,
as an engraved one; and for the moment, waiving consideration of this
distinction, and opposing Rembrandt's work, considered merely as work of
the black line, to Holbein's and Duerer's, as work of the black line, I
assert Rembrandt's to be inherently _evasive_. You cannot unite his
manner with theirs; choice between them is sternly put to you, when
first you touch the steel. Suppose, for instance, you have to engrave,
or etch, or draw with pen and ink, a single head, and that the head is
to be approximately half an inch in height more or less (there is a
reason for assigning this condition respecting size, which we will
examine in due time): you have it in your power to do it in one of two
ways. You may lay down some twenty or thirty entirely firm and visible
lines, of which every one shall be absolutely right, and do the utmost a
line can do. By their curvature they shall render contour; by their
thickness, shade; by their place and form, every truth of expression,
and every condition of design. The head of the soldier drawing his
sword, in Duerer's "Cannon," is about half an inch high, supposing the
brow to be seen. The chin is drawn with three lines, the lower lip with
two, the upper, including the shadow from the nose, with five. Three
separate the cheek from the chin, giving the principal points of
character. Six lines draw the cheek, and its incised traces of care;
four are given to each of the eyes; one, with the outline, to the nose;
three to the frown of the forehead. None of these touches could anywhere
be altered--none removed, without instantly visible harm; and their
result is a head as perfect in character as a portrait by Reynolds.
81. You may either do this--which, if you can, it will generally be very
advisable to do--or, on the other hand, you may cover the face with
innumerable scratches, and let your hand play with wanton freedom, until
the graceful scrabble concentrates itself into shade. You may
soften--efface--retouch--rebite--dot, and hatch, and redefine. If you
are a great master, you will soon get your character, and probably keep
it (Rembrandt often gets it at first, nearly as securely as Duerer); but
the design of it will be necessarily seen through loose work, and
modified by accident (as you think) fortunate. The accidents which occur
to a practiced hand are always at first pleasing--the details which can
be hinted, however falsely, through the gathering mystery, are always
seducing. You will find yourself gradually dwelling more and more on
little meannesses of form and texture, and lusters of surface: on cracks
of skin, and films of fur and plume. You will lose your way, and then
see two ways, and then many ways, and try to walk a little distance on
all of them in turn, and so, back again. You will find yourself thinking
of colors, and vexed because you cannot imitate them; next, struggling
to render distances by indecision, which you cannot by tone. Presently
you will be contending with finished pictures; laboring at the etching,
as if it were a painting. You will leave off, after a whole day's work
(after many days' work if you choose to give them), still unsatisfied.
For final result--if you are as great as Rembrandt--you will have most
likely a heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the
first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have
a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,--instead of a face,
a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every
texture and form--ugly, assuredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and
manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, accidental, undelightful,
ignoble success.
Undelightful; note this especially, for it is the peculiar character of
etching that it cannot render beauty. You may hatch and scratch your way
to picturesqueness or to deformity--never to beauty. You can etch an old
woman, or an ill-conditioned fellow. But you cannot etch a girl--nor,
unless in his old age, or with very partial rendering of him, a
gentleman.
82. And thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their
choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on
unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind
is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of
men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of foul and
vicious cities. A sensitive and imaginative youth, early driven to get
his living by his art, has to lodge, we will say, somewhere in the
by-streets of Paris, and is left there, tutorless, to his own devices.
Suppose him also vicious or reckless, and there need be no talk of his
work farther; he will certainly do nothing in a Duereresque manner. But
suppose him self-denying, virtuous, full of gift and power--what are the
elements of living study within his reach? All supreme beauty is
confined to the higher salons. There are pretty faces in the streets,
but no stateliness nor splendor of humanity; all pathos and grandeur is
in suffering; no purity of nature is accessible, but only a terrible
picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base
concomitants. Huge walls and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but
plastered with advertisement bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than
ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of
massy streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and
degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with
apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly
quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque,
indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues
of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of
wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet
windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white
orchards, checked here by the Ile Notre Dame, to receive their nightly
sacrifice, and after playing with it among their eddies, to give it up
again, in those quiet shapes that lie on the sloped slate tables of the
square-built Temple of the Death-Sibyl, who presides here over spray of
Seine, as yonder at Tiber over spray of Anio. Sibylline, indeed, in her
secrecy, and her sealing of destinies, by the baptism of the quick
water-drops which fall on each fading face, unrecognized, nameless in
_this_ Baptism forever. Wreathed thus throughout, that Paris town, with
beauty, and with unseemly sin, unseemlier death, as a fiend-city with
fair eyes; forever letting fall her silken raiment so far as that one
may "behold her bosom and half her side." Under whose whispered
teaching, and substitution of "Contes Drolatiques" for the tales of the
wood fairy, her children of Imagination will do, what Gerome and Gustave
Dore are doing, and her whole world of lesser Art will sink into shadows
of the street and of the boudoir-curtain, wherein the etching point may
disport itself with freedom enough.[74]
83. Nor are we slack in our companionship in these courses. Our
imagination is slower and clumsier than the French--rarer also, by far,
in the average English mind. The only man of power equal to Dore's whom
we have had lately among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately
took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily
circumstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our
thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our
work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own;
for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as
resulting from my own teaching, I am more answerable than most men.
Having spoken earnestly against painting without thinking, I now find
our exhibitions decorated with works of students who think without
painting; and our books illustrated by scratched wood-cuts, representing
very ordinary people, who are presumed to be interesting in the picture,
because the text tells a story about them. Of this least lively form of
modern sensational work, however, I shall have to speak on other
grounds; meantime, I am concerned only with its manner; its incontinence
of line and method, associated with the slightness of its real thought,
and morbid acuteness of irregular sensation; ungoverned all, and one of
the external and slight phases of that beautiful Liberty which we are
proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and shall presently,
I suppose, when we have had enough of it here, proclaim also to the
stars, with invitation to them _out_ of their courses.
84. "But you asked us for 'free-heart' outlines, and told us not to be
slaves, only thirty days ago."[75]
Inconsistent that I am! so I did. But as there are attractions, and
attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and
liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its
spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think.
Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh--soaking in slow
shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the
poisonous reeds and unresisting slime--it is free also. You may choose
which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and
edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now
glorifying,--and of its opposite continence--which is the clasp and
[Greek: chrusee perone] of Aglaia's cestus--we will try to find out
something in next chapter.[76]
FOOTNOTES:
[71] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 177-8. June 1865.--ED.
[72] Wornum's "Epochs of Painting." I have continual occasion to quarrel
with my friend on these matters of critical question; but I have deep
respect for his earnest and patient research, and we remain friends--on
the condition that I am to learn much from him, and he (though it may be
questionable whose fault that is) nothing from me.
[73] Prov. xx, 27.
[74] As I was preparing these sheets for press, I chanced on a passage
in a novel of Champfleury's, in which one young student is encouraging
another in his contest with these and other such evils;--the evils are
in this passage accepted as necessities; the inevitable deadliness of
the element is not seen, as it can hardly be except by those who live
out of it. The encouragement, on such view, is good and right; the
connection of the young etcher's power with his poverty is curiously
illustrative of the statements in the text, and the whole passage,
though long, is well worth such space as it will ask here, in our small
print.
"Cependant," dit Thomas, "on a vu des peintres de talent qui etaient
partis de Paris apres avoir expose de bons tableaux et qui s'en
revenaient classiquement ennuyeux. C'est done la faute de
l'enseignement de l'Academie."
"Bah!" dit Gerard, "rien n'arrete le developpement d'un homme
puisqu'il comprend l'art, pourquoi ne fait-il pas d'art?"
"Parce qu'il gagne a peu pres sa vie en faisant du commerce."
"On dirait que tu ne veux pas me comprendre, toi qui as justement
passe par la. Comment faisais-tu quand tu etais compositeur d'une
imprimerie?"
"Le soir," dit Thomas, "et le matin en hiver, a partir de quatre
heures, je faisais des etudes a la lampe pendant deux heures,
jusqu'au moment ou j'allais a l'atelier."
"Et tu ne vivais pas de la peinture?"
"Je ne gagnais pas un sou."
"Bon!" dit Gerard; "tu vois bien que tu faisais du commerce en
dehors de l'art et que cependant tu etudiais. Quand tu es sorti de
l'imprimerie comment as-tu vecu?"
"Je faisais cinq ou six petites aquarelles par jour, que je vendais,
sous les arcades de l'Institut, six sous piece."
"Et tu en vivais; c'est encore du commerce. Tu vois done que ni
l'imprimerie, ni les petits dessins, a cinq sous, ni la privation,
ni la misere ne t'ont empeche d'arriver."
"Je ne suis pas arrive."
"N'importe, tu arriveras certainement. . . . Si tu veux d'autres
exemples qui prouvent que la misere et les autres pieges tendus sous
nos pas ne doivent rien arreter, tu te rappelles bien ce pauvre
garcon dont vous admiriez les eaux-fortes, que vous mettiez aussi
haut que Rembrandt, et qui aurait ete lion, disiez-vous, s'il
n'avait tant souffert de la faim. Qu'a-t-il fait le jour ou il lui
est tombe un petit heritage du ciel?"
"Il est vrai," dit Thomas, embarrasse; "qu'il a perdu tout son
sentiment."
"Ce n'etait pas cependant une de ces grosses fortunes qui tuent un
homme, qui le rendent lourd, fier et insolent: il avait juste de
quoi vivre, six cents francs de rentes, une fortune pour lui, qui
vivait avec cinq francs par mois. Il a continue a travailler; mais
ses eaux-fortes n'etaient plus supportables; tandis qu'avant, il
vivait avec un morceau de pain et des legumes; alors il avait du
talent. Cela, Thomas, doit te prouver que ni les mauvais
enseignements, ni les influences, ni la misere, ni la faim, ni la
maladie, ne peuvent corrompre une nature bien douee. Elle souffre;
mais trouve moi un grand artiste qui n'ait pas souffert. Il n'y a
pas un seul homme de denie heureux depuis que l'humanite existe."
"J'ai envie," dit Thomas, "de te faire cadeau d'une jolie cravate."
"Pourquoi?" dit Gerard.
"Parce que tu as bien parle."
[75] See _ante_, p. 343, Sec. 73.--ED.
[76] Chapter VI., which is here omitted, having been already reprinted
in _The Queen of the Air_ (Sec.Sec. 142-159), together with the last paragraph
(somewhat altered) of the present chapter. After the publication of