culture as a man. He has learned not in head only, but also in heart:
not from Art and Literature, but also by action and passion, in the
rugged school of Experience. If asked what was the grand characteristic
of his writings, we should not say knowledge, but wisdom. A mind that
has seen, and suffered, and done, speaks to us of what it has tried
and conquered. A gay delineation will give us notice of dark and
toilsome experiences, of business done in the great deep of the spirit;
a maxim, trivial to the careless eye, will rise with light and solution
over long perplexed periods of our own history. It is thus that heart
speaks to heart, that the life of one man becomes a possession to all.
Here is a mind of the most subtle and tumultuous elements; but it is
governed in peaceful diligence, and its impetuous and ethereal faculties
work softly together for good and noble ends. Goethe may be called a
Philosopher; for he loves and has practised as a man the wisdom which,
as a poet, he inculcates. Composure and cheerful seriousness seem to
breathe over all his character. There is no whining over human woes:
it is understood that we must simply all strive to alleviate or remove
them. There is no noisy battling for opinions; but a persevering effort
to make Truth lovely, and recommend her, by a thousand avenues, to the
hearts of all men. Of his personal manners we can easily believe the
universal report, as often given in the way of censure as of praise,
that he is a man of consummate breeding and the stateliest presence:
for an air of polished tolerance, of courtly, we might almost say
majestic repose, and serene humanity, is visible throughout his works.
In no line of them does he speak with asperity of any man; scarcely
ever even of a thing. He knows the good, and loves it; he knows the
bad and hateful, and rejects it; but in neither case with violence:
his love is calm and active; his rejection is implied, rather than
pronounced; meek and gentle, though we see that it is thorough, and
never to be revoked. The noblest and the basest he not only seems to
comprehend, but to personate and body forth in their most secret
lineaments: hence actions and opinions appear to him as they are, with
all the circumstances which extenuate or endear them to the hearts
where they originated and are entertained. This also is the spirit of
our Shakespeare, and perhaps of every great dramatic poet. Shakespeare
is no sectarian; to all he deals with equity and mercy; because he
knows all, and his heart is wide enough for all. In his mind the world
is a whole; he figures it as Providence governs it; and to him it is
not strange that the sun should be caused to shine on the evil and the
good, and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
Goethe has been called the German Voltaire; but it is a name which
does him wrong, and describes him ill. Except in the corresponding
variety of their pursuits and knowledge, in which, perhaps, it does
Voltaire wrong, the two cannot be compared. Goethe is all, or the best
of all, that Voltaire was, and he is much that Voltaire did not dream
of. To say nothing of his dignified and truthful character as a man,
he belongs, as a thinker and a writer, to a far higher class than this
_enfant gate du monde qu'il gata_. He is not a questioner and a
despiser, but a teacher and a reverencer; not a destroyer, but a
builder-up; not a wit only, but a wise man. Of him Montesquieu could
not have said, with even epigrammatic truth: _Il a plus que personne
l'esprit que tout le monde a_. Voltaire was the _cleverest_ of all
past and present men; but a great man is something more, and this he
surely was not.
As poets, the two live not in the same hemisphere, not in the same
world. Of Voltaire's poetry, it were blindness to deny the polished
intellectual vigour, the logical symmetry, the flashes that from time
to time give it the colour, if not the warmth, of fire: but it is in
a far other sense than this that Goethe is a poet; in a sense of which
the French literature has never afforded any example. We may venture
to say of him, that his province is high and peculiar; higher than any
poet but himself, for several generations, has so far succeeded in,
perhaps even has steadfastly attempted. In reading Goethe's poetry,
it perpetually strikes us that we are reading the poetry of our own
day and generation. No demands are made on our credulity; the light,
the science, the scepticism of the age, are not hid from us. He does
not deal in antiquated mythologies, or ring changes on traditionary
poetic forms; there are no supernal, no infernal influences, for _Faust_
is an apparent rather than a real exception: but there is the barren
prose of the nineteenth century, the vulgar life which we are all
leading; and it starts into strange beauty in his hands; and we pause
in delighted wonder to behold the flower of Poesy blooming in that
parched and rugged soil. This is the end of his _Mignons_ and _Harpers_,
of his _Tassos_ and _Meisters_. Poetry, as he views it, exists not in
time or place, but in the spirit of man; and Art, with Nature, is now
to perform for the poet, what Nature alone performed of old. The
divinities and demons, the witches, spectres, and fairies, are vanished
from the world, never again to be recalled: but the Imagination which
created these still lives, and will forever live in man's soul; and
can again pour its wizard light over the Universe, and summon forth
enchantments as lovely or impressive, and which its sister faculties
will not contradict. To say that Goethe has accomplished all this,
would be to say that his genius is greater than was ever given to any
man: for if it was a high and glorious mind, or rather series of minds,
that peopled the first ages with their peculiar forms of poetry, it
must be a series of minds much higher and more glorious that shall so
people the present. The angels and demons that can lay prostrate our
hearts in the nineteenth century must be of another and more cunning
fashion than those that subdued us in the ninth. To have attempted,
to have begun this enterprise, may be accounted the greatest praise.
That Goethe ever meditated it, in the form here set forth, we have no
direct evidence: but indeed such is the end and aim of high poetry at
all times and seasons; for the fiction of the poet is not falsehood,
but the purest truth; and if he would lead captive our whole being,
not rest satisfied with a part of it, he must address us on interests
that _are_, not that _were_, ours; and in a dialect which finds a
response, and not a contradiction, within our bosoms.
How Goethe has fulfilled these conditions in addressing us, an
inspection of his works, but no description, can inform us. Let me
advise the reader to study them, and see. If he come to the task with
an opinion that poetry is an amusement, a passive recreation; that its
highest object is to supply a languid mind with fantastic shows and
indolent emotions, his measure of enjoyment is likely to be scanty,
and his criticisms will be loud, angry, and manifold. But if he know
and believe that poetry is the essence of all science, and requires
the purest of all studies; if he recollect that the new may not always
be the false; that the excellence which can be seen in a moment is not
usually a very deep one; above all, if his own heart be full of feelings
and experiences, for which he finds no name and no solution, but which
lie in pain imprisoned and unuttered in his breast, till the Word be
spoken, the spell that is to unbind them, and bring them forth to
liberty and light; then, if I mistake not, he will find that in this
Goethe there is a new world set before his eyes; a world of Earnestness
and Sport, of solemn cliff and gay plain; some such temple--far
inferior, as it may well be, in magnificence and beauty, but a temple
of the same architecture--some such temple for the Spirit of our age,
as the Shakespeares and Spensers have raised for the Spirit of theirs.
This seems a bold assertion: but it is not made without deliberation,
and such conviction as it has stood within my means to obtain. If it
invite discussion, and forward the discovery of the truth in this
matter, its best purpose will be answered. Goethe's genius is a study
for other minds than have yet seriously engaged with it among us. By
and by, apparently ere long, he will be tried and judged righteously;
he himself, and no cloud instead of him; for he comes to us in such
a questionable shape, that silence and neglect will not always serve
our purpose. England, the chosen home of justice in all its senses,
where the humblest merit has been acknowledged, and the highest fault
not unduly punished, will do no injustice to this extraordinary man.
And if, when her impartial sentence has been pronounced and sanctioned,
it shall appear that Goethe's earliest admirers have wandered too far
into the language of panegyric, I hope it may be reckoned no
unpardonable sin. It is spirit-stirring rather than spirit-sharpening,
to consider that there is one of the Prophets here with us in our own
day: that a man who is to be numbered with the Sages and _Sacri Vates_,
the Shakespeares, the Tassos, the Cervanteses of the world, is looking
on the things which we look on, has dealt with the very thoughts which
we have to deal with, is reigning in serene dominion over the
perplexities and contradictions in which we are still painfully
entangled.
That Goethe's mind is full of inconsistencies and shortcomings, can
be a secret to no one who has heard of the Fall of Adam. Nor would it
be difficult, in this place, to muster a long catalogue of darknesses
defacing our perception of this brightness: but it might be still less
profitable than it is difficult; for in Goethe's writings, as in those
of all true masters, an apparent blemish is apt, after maturer study,
to pass into a beauty. His works cannot be judged in fractions, for
each of them is conceived and written as a whole; the humble and common
may be no less essential there than the high and splendid: it is only
Chinese pictures that have no shade. There is a maxim, far better known
than practised, that to detect faults is a much lower occupation than
to recognize merits. We may add also, that though far easier in the
execution, it is not a whit more certain in the result. What is the
detecting of a fault, but the feeling of an incongruity, of a
contradiction, which may exist in ourselves as well as in the object?
Who shall say in which? None but he who sees this object as it is, and
himself as he is. We have all heard of the critic fly; but none of us
doubts the compass of his own vision. It is thus that a high work of
art, still more that a high and original mind, may at all times
calculate on much sorriest criticism. In looking at an extraordinary
man, it were good for an ordinary man to be sure of _seeing_ him,
before attempting to _oversee_ him. Having ascertained that Goethe is
an object deserving study, it will be time to censure his faults when
we have clearly estimated his merits; and if we are wise judges, not
till then.
WALTER PATER.
(1839-1894)
XI.--SANDRO BOTTICELLI.
Of the critics who have written during the last sixty years, Mr. Pater
is probably the most remarkable. His work is always weighted with
thought, and his thought is always fused with imagination. He unites,
in a singular degree of intensity, the two crucial qualities of the
critic, on the one hand a sense of form and colour and artistic
utterance, on the other hand a speculative instinct which pierces
behind these to the various types of idea and mood and character that
underlie them. He is equally alive to subtle resemblances and to subtle
differences, and art is to him not merely an intellectual enjoyment,
but something which is to be taken into the spirit of a man and to
become part of his life. Of the _history_ of literature, and the
problems that rise out of it, he takes but small account. But for the
other function assigned by Carlyle to criticism, for criticism as a
"creative art, aiming to reproduce under a different shape the existing
product of the artist, and painting to the intellect what already lay
painted to the heart and the imagination"--for this no man has done
more than Mr. Pater. With wider knowledge and a clearer consciousness
of the deeper issues involved, he may be said to have taken up the
work of Lamb and to have carried it forward in a spirit which those
who best love Lamb will be the most ready to admire.
Of Mr. Pater's literary criticisms, those on Wordsworth and Coleridge
are perhaps the most striking. But he was probably still more at home
in interpreting the work of the great painters. And of his
"appreciations" of painters none is more characteristic than his study
of Botticelli. It was written in 1870, and published in _The
Renaissance_ in 1873.
In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned
by name--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance
only, but to some it will appear a result of deliberate judgment; for
people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and his
name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important.
In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much
of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to
the great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion
which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the
simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and
flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the
modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings
of his own of classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents,
painted them with an undercurrent of original sentiment, which touches
you as the real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible
subject. What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality
of pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us, and
which we cannot get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to
speak of a comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question
which a critic has to answer.
In an age when the lives of artists were full of adventure, his life
is almost colourless. Criticism, indeed, has cleared away much of the
gossip which Vasari accumulated, has touched the legend of Lippo and
Lucrezia, and rehabilitated the character of Andrea del Castagno. But
in Botticelli's case there is no legend to dissipate. He did not even
go by his true name: Sandro is a nickname, and his true name is
Filipepi, Botticelli being only the name of the goldsmith who first
taught him art. Only two things happened to him--two things which he
shared with other artists: he was invited to Rome to paint in the
Sistine Chapel, and he fell in later life under the influence of
Savonarola, passing apparently almost out of men's sight in a sort of
religious melancholy, which lasted till his death in 1515, according
to the received date. Vasari says that he plunged into the study of
Dante, and even wrote a comment on the _Divine Comedy_. But it seems
strange that he should have lived on inactive so long; and one almost
wishes that some document might come to light, which, fixing the date
of his death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him, of his
dejected old age.
He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story
and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line
and colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes the
illustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481,
the blank spaces left at the beginning of every canto, for the hand
of the illuminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto
of the _Inferno_, with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by
way of experiment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the
three impressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much
awry, in the midst of the luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the
followers of Giotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had not
learned to put that weight of meaning into outward things--light,
colour, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the _Divine Comedy_
involves, and before the fifteenth century Dante could hardly have
found an illustrator. Botticelli's illustrations are crowded with
incident, blending, with a naive carelessness of pictorial propriety,
three phases of the same scene into one plate. The grotesques, so often
a stumbling-block to painters, who forget that the words of a poet,
which only feebly present an image to the mind, must be lowered in key
when translated into visible form, make one regret that he has not
rather chosen for illustration the more subdued imagery of the
_Purgatorio_. Yet in the scene of those who "go down quick into hell",
there is an inventive force about the fire taking hold on the upturned
soles of the feet, which proves that the design is no mere translation
of Dante's words, but a true painter's vision; while the scene of the
Centaurs wins one at once, for, forgetful of the actual circumstances
of their appearance, Botticelli has gone off with delight on the thought
of the Centaurs themselves, bright, small creatures of the woodland,
with arch baby faces and _mignon_ forms, drawing their tiny bows.
Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have
been a mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in his work
of that alert sense of outward things, which, in the pictures of that
period, fills the lawns with delicate living creatures, and the
hillsides with pools of water, and the pools of water with flowering
reeds. But this was not enough for him; he is a visionary painter, and
in his visionariness he resembles Dante. Giotto, the tried companion
of Dante, Masaccio, Ghirlandajo even, do but transcribe, with more or
less refining, the outward image; they are dramatic, not visionary
painters; they are almost impassive spectators of the action before
them. But the genius of which Botticelli is the type usurps the data
before it as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own; in this
interest it plays fast and loose with those data, rejecting some and
isolating others, and always combining them anew. To him, as to Dante,
the scene, the colour, the outward image or gesture, comes with all
its incisive and importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by
some subtle law of his own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one
else, of which it is the double or repetition, and which it clothes,
that all may share it, with visible circumstance.
But he is far enough from accepting the conventional orthodoxy of Dante
which, referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory,
heaven, and hell, leaves an insoluble element of prose in the depths
of Dante's poetry. One picture of his, with the portrait of the donor,
Matteo Palmieri, below, had the credit or discredit of attracting some
shadow of ecclesiastical censure. This Matteo Palmieri (two dim figures
move under that name in contemporary history) was the reputed author
of a poem, still unedited, _La Citta Divina_, which represented the
human race as an incarnation of those angels who, in the revolt of
Lucifer, were neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies, a fantasy of
that earlier Alexandrian philosophy about which the Florentine intellect
in that century was so curious. Botticelli's picture may have been
only one of those familiar compositions in which religious reverie has
recorded its impressions of the various forms of beatified
existence--_Glorias_, as they were called, like that in which Giotto
painted the portrait of Dante; but somehow it was suspected of embodying
in a picture the wayward dream of Palmieri, and the chapel where it
hung was closed. Artists so entire as Botticelli are usually careless
about philosophical theories, even when the philosopher is a Florentine
of the fifteenth century, and his work a poem in _terza rima_. But
Botticelli, who wrote a commentary on Dante, and became the disciple
of Savonarola, may well have let such theories come and go across him.
True or false, the story interprets much of the peculiar sentiment
with which he infuses his profane and sacred persons, comely, and in
a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement or loss
about them--the wistfulness of exiles, conscious of a passion and
energy greater than any known issue of them explains, which runs through
all his varied work with a sentiment of ineffable melancholy.
So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell,
Botticelli accepts: that middle world in which men take no side in
great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals.
He thus sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by
any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest
is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico's saints, nor the
untempered evil of Orcagna's _Inferno_; but with men and women, in
their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed
sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but
saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from
which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this
sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the
true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so
forcible a realist.
It is this which gives to his Madonnas their unique expression and
charm. He has worked out in them a distinct and peculiar type, definite
enough in his own mind, for he has painted it over and over again,
sometimes one might think almost mechanically, as a pastime during
that dark period when his thoughts were so heavy upon him. Hardly any
collection of note is without one of these circular pictures, into
which the attendant angels depress their heads so naively. Perhaps you
have sometimes wondered why those peevish-looking Madonnas, conformed
to no acknowledged or obvious type of beauty, attract you more and
more, and often come back to you when the Sistine Madonna and the
Virgins of Fra Angelico are forgotten. At first, contrasting them with
those, you may have thought that there was something in them mean or
abject even, for the abstract lines of the face have little nobleness,
and the colour is wan. For with Botticelli she too, though she holds
in her hands the "Desire of all nations", is one of those who are
neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies; and her choice is on her face.
The white light on it is cast up hard and cheerless from below, as
when snow lies upon the ground, and the children look up with surprise
at the strange whiteness of the ceiling. Her trouble is in the very
caress of the mysterious child, whose gaze is always far from her, and
who has already that sweet look of devotion which men have never been
able altogether to love, and which still makes the born saint an object
almost of suspicion to his earthly brethren. Once, indeed, he guides
her hand to transcribe in a book the words of her exaltation, the
_Ave_, and the _Magnificat_, and the _Gaude Maria_, and the young
angels, glad to rouse her for a moment from her dejection, are eager
to hold the inkhorn and to support the book. But the pen almost drops
from her hand, and the high cold words have no meaning for her, and
her true children are those others, among whom, in her rude home, the
intolerable honour came to her, with that look of wistful inquiry on
their irregular faces which you see in startled animals--gipsy children,
such as those who, in Apennine villages, still hold out their long
brown arms to beg of you, but on Sundays become _enfants du choeur_,
with their thick black hair nicely combed, and fair white linen on
their sunburnt throats.