PICTORIAL POETRY
TIME was, and not very long ago at that, when an argument for poetic
thought in art would have been considered superfluous. Everyone was
agreed that the higher aim of language was to convey an idea, a feeling,
or an emotion. That the language should be beautiful in itself was an
advantage, but there was never any doubt that the thought expressed was
greater than the manner of its expression. To-day it would seem that we
have changed all that. The moderns are insisting that language is
language for its own sake, and art is art for art’s sake. They are, to a
certain extent, right in their contention; for there is great beauty in
methods, materials and the general decorative appearance.[6] But perhaps
they insist too much. We are not yet prepared to admit that because
Tennyson’s poetry sounds well, his thoughts have no value; nor, for all
Tintoretto’s fine form and color, can we believe his poetic imagination
a wholly unnecessary factor in his art.
Footnote 6:
I have stated the case for the decorative side and for the technical
beauties of painting in _Art for Art’s Sake_, New York, 1902.
The technical and the decorative beauties of painting, however important
they may be, are not necessarily the final aim of the picture. In the
hands of all the great painters of the world they have been only a means
to an end. The Michael Angelos, the Rembrandts, the Raphaels, and the
Titians have generally had an ulterior meaning in their work. And by
“meaning” I do not mean anything very abstruse or metaphysical, nor am I
thinking of anything ethical, allegorical, or anecdotal. The idea which
a picture may contain is not necessarily one that points a moral, nor
need it have anything to do with heroic action or romantic sentiment or
fictional occurrence. There are many ideas, noble in themselves, that
find expression in literature better than in painting, and it is a sound
rule in all the arts that a conception which can be well told in one art
has no excuse for being badly told in another art. The materials and
their application to the best advantage are always to be regarded. Why
waste effort in cutting glass when you can blow it? Why chisel curtains
in marble when you can weave them in cloth? Why tell sequential stories,
moral, narrative, or historical, in paint when it can be done more
easily in writing? And why describe landscapes in writing when you can
do it so much better in painting? It is mere consumption of energy and
distortion of materials to write down the colors of the sunset or to
paint the history of Greece or Rome.
[Illustration:
XVI.—DAUBIGNY, Spring. Louvre, Paris.
]
It is well for us then at the start that we have no misunderstanding
about the relationship between literature and art. That they are related
in measure may be said with equal truth of preaching and science, of
poetry and politics, of music and history. Science has been preached and
politics have been poetized, and history has been shrieked in a high
treble at the opera. Just so art has illustrated literature and
literature art; but it can hardly be contended that any one of them has
been put to its proper purpose. The main affair of literature is to
illustrate literature, and the business of art is primarily to produce
art. They are independent pursuits and there is no need of confounding
their aims or being confused by their apparent resemblances.
Therefore, in using the phrase pictorial poetry I would be understood as
meaning _pictorial_ poetry and not _literary_ poetry. They are two quite
different things by virtue of their means of expression. The idea in
art, whether poetic or otherwise, has its material limitations, which we
must not fail to take into account. The first limitation is the major
one and it demands that painting deal with things _seen_. We have
referred to this in speaking of Tintoretto’s “Annunciation,” but it is
worth while to take it up again and more definitely.
The couplet,
“The mind that broods o’er guilty woes
Is like the scorpion girt by fire,”
is certainly a poetic image; but fancy, if you can, how a painter would
paint that brooding mind. He could not do it. Why? Because it is not
tangible, it cannot be seen, it has no form or color. It is an abstract
idea to be comprehended by the mind through sound, and belongs to
literature. Perhaps you think the painter might have rendered it by
showing a sad face and a wrinkled brow, but how would you know whether
the wrinkles came from mental or from physical pain? And what can he say
to you about “guilty woes” with a paint brush? The writer can tell you
about the inside and the outside of the head, but the painter is limited
to the outside.
The inability of painting to deal with sound—a something without
tangible form—may be further illustrated by Millet’s celebrated picture
of the “Angelus.” It has already served me for illustration, but I shall
not at this time go out of my way for a newer example. The expressed
thought of the picture, the whole story, hinges on the sound of a
church-bell—the Angelus bell of sunset. How does Millet attempt to
picture this sound? Why, by painting far back in the distance a
church-spire seen against a sunset sky, and in the foreground two
peasants with bowed heads. But the effort at sound is inadequate. The
peal of the bell is beyond the reach of paints and brushes. The most
brilliant colors make no sound. It is not to be wondered at, therefore,
that there have been half a dozen different readings of the picture’s
meaning. The idea of the Angelus is in the picture only because it has
been read into it by the title of the work. That is a leaning upon
literature which is unnecessary in art. The painting should require no
explanation by language.
It need not be denied that the Angelus story is poetic; but it is
perfectly just and proper to contend that by its dependence upon sound
it is better fitted for literature than for art. A Tennyson could have
made a poem about it wherein the sound of the bells would have been in
the cadences of the language—in the very syllables breaking upon the
ear. We all remember his flying notes from the horns of Elfland in “The
Princess.”
“Oh hark, oh hear! how thin and clear
And thinner, clearer, further going.
Ah! sweet and far, from cliff and scar,
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing.”
In those lines we have the idea of sound conveyed to us most forcibly.
The flow of the words describes exactly (and they even imitate) the long
travel of the bugle notes, far across the lake, up the vales, and
finally dying away into the remotest distance. Surely the thought of
that passage is best told in language. What could pigments do with it?
What could a fine technician like Bargue or a poet in paint like
Delacroix make of that mellow music? They might picture someone with a
horn to his lips and a mountain lake in the background; but the fetching
part of those Elfland horns is not their _look_, but their _sound_. What
could the painters do with the sound? Why nothing except to let it
alone. A flat canvas will not discourse music like the board of a piano.
Forms and colors may talk very eloquently to the eye, but they say
nothing to the ear. The old division of the arts made over a century ago
by Lessing is still acceptable to-day. The fine arts of architecture,
sculpture, and painting address the sense of sight; the fine arts of
music and literature address the sense of hearing. Therefore, let us
assume that such thoughts, ideas, or emotions, poetic or otherwise, as a
painter may wish to express in painting should be primarily pictorial by
addressing the sense of sight.
[Illustration:
XVII.—BENOZZO GOZZOLI, Adoration of Kings (detail). Riccardi Palace,
Florence.
]
There is another, a minor limitation put upon painting which in its way
is quite as binding as the major one. This is the time limit. A painting
is not a shifting panorama like a drama. It cannot picture (though it
may hint at) the past or the future; it can deal adequately only with
the present. You may turn the leaves of a book and pass from Greek days
to the present time as you read; but you cannot do that with a picture.
It does not turn or shift or show any more than the one face. Therefore
the idea in art, generally speaking, should not concern itself with
time, or be dependent upon shiftings of scene, or deal with anything
that has gone before or is to come after. A picture of Charlotte Corday
on the way to the guillotine indicates a present happening, and, so far
as it offers something complete in itself, it is pictorial enough; but
the picture fails to tell us that some days before she assassinated
Marat, and that some minutes later she herself will be done away with by
the executioner’s knife. The title of the picture may tell us her story,
but then that is leaning upon literature again. A painting of “Alexander
Entering Babylon” by Lebrun may show us marching troops, elephants,
chariots, and Alexander himself surrounded by his generals. It is a
present scene; but how shall the picture tell you who Alexander was,
what battles he fought, what ending he came to? It may suggest the past
and the future by the present condition, but the suggestion is often too
vague for human comprehension. Time-movement, sequential events are
really beyond the reach of pigments.
It is much easier deciding what painting can picture than what it
cannot. We have only to ask ourselves if the subject is one that may be
comprehended by the unaided eye, and if it is a theme completed in
present time. Painting moves freely only within these boundaries,
whereas literature moves within and without them as it pleases, and with
measurable success even in pictorial themes. Here is a word-landscape by
Scott that illustrates my meaning:
“Sweet Teviot, on thy silver tide
The glaring bale-fires blaze no more,
No longer steel-clad warriors ride
Along thy wild and willowed shore.”
There we have a picture painted in words. Scott has gone poaching into
the domain of pictorial art, and with astonishing results. It is a
picture. Literature is certainly capable of dealing with forms and
colors as with abstractions of the mind, but it cannot handle them so
well, perhaps, as painting. We have here not abstractions, but entities
of form and color. There is something for the painter to grasp with
pencil and brush. Perhaps he can paint the “silver tide” and the
“willowed shore” more effectively than Scott can describe them; and if
he should paint them with that feeling which would give us the wildness
of the shore, the weirdness of the bale-fires, the crush and rush of
steel-clad warriors along the banks, paralleling the push-forward of the
stream itself, we should have what I am disposed to call pictorial
poetry.
But, if you please, it is not to be inferred that this pictorial poetry
is to be gotten out of literary poetry only. Painting is no mere servant
of literature, whose duty it is to illustrate rather than create. There
is no reason why the painter, looking at the river Teviot, should not
see poetry in it as well as the writer. Delacroix not only could but did
see it. Turner saw the same kind of romantic sentiment as Scott in all
the rivers he ever pictured. Daubigny saw it less romantically, but with
more of the real charm of nature, along the banks of the Marne; and
Claude Monet has certainly shown us many times the poetry of light,
color, and rushing, dancing water on the Seine. Monet is just as
susceptible to poetic impressions as Leconte de Lisle, only his poetry
comes to him in forms and colors rather than in the measured cadences of
language. It is painter’s poetry, not writer’s poetry.
It is true enough that painting has often taken its themes from the
play, the novel, and the poem, and not without success. All the older
painters of England spent their time illustrating Shakespeare and
Milton. But it was not at all necessary, nor did it result in the best
kind of art. And as for literature taking its theme from painting, one
can pick illustrations of it in quantity from any anthology. For
instance, what is more probable than that Scott was looking at a
painting when writing this:
“No earthly flame blazed e’er so bright
It shone like heaven’s own blessed light,
And, issuing from the tomb,
Showed the monk’s cowl and visage pale,
Danced on the dark-browed warrior’s mail,
And kissed his waving plume.”
The light-and-shade of the scene seems to bring to mind some lost
Correggio. And how like Giorgione is the “flame” dancing on the
warrior’s mail, and “kissing his waving plume!” (Plate 24.) In reading
the “Faery Queene” one finds a whole gallery of pictures painted with
words. Spenser would have made a painter, for he had the pictorial mind.
Milton is not unlike him; and Shakespeare goes hither and yon over all
fields and through all departments. Here, for example, is his _genre_
picture of the hounds of Theseus:
“My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flewed, so sanded: and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-kneed and dew-lapp’d like Thessalian bulls.”
[Illustration:
XVIII.—VAN DYCK, Jean Grusset Richardot. Louvre, Paris.
]
Surely a very striking picture, but after all you cannot see
Shakespeare’s hounds so completely and perfectly as those of Velasquez
or Snyders or Troyon.
Sculpture, too, may furnish material for good poetry, as witness this
description of the marble figures upon the tomb in the Church of Brou.
“So rest, forever rest, O princely Pair!
In your high church ‘mid the still mountain air,
Where horn and hound and vassals never come.
Only the blessed saints are smiling dumb
From the rich painted windows of the nave
On aisle and transept and your marble grave;
· · · ·
So sleep, forever sleep, O marble Pair!
Or if ye wake, let it be then, when fair
On the carved western front a flood of light
Streams from the setting sun, and colors bright
Prophets, transfigured Saints and Martyrs brave,
In the vast western window of the nave;
And on the pavement round the tomb there glints
A chequer-work of glowing sapphire tints
And amethyst and ruby....”
Matthew Arnold has certainly made a striking picture in words out of the
tomb and its figures, but again the poetry is plastic—that is, fitted
for sculpture or painting.
So it is—to repeat and summarize—that the writer with his words shows
things picturesque and sculpturesque—inadequately perhaps as compared
with the plastic mediums, but nevertheless effectively; but not so the
painter with his colors. The brush will not reveal and can scarcely do
more than hint at things without form. It is perhaps possible for
painting to be as clear-cut and as definite in its ideas as literature,
but, as a matter of fact, it seldom is so. More often there is
suggestion than realization, and the poetry comes to us in an almost
indescribable feeling or sentiment of the painter. Indeed, the greater
part of what we have called “pictorial poetry” lies in a glimmering
consciousness of beauty, an impression that charms, a feeling that
sways, rather than in any exact statement.
Now that word “feeling” is not a cant expression of dilettanteism. It
has a distinct meaning in all the arts. In the presence of beauty the
artist “feels” that beauty and is emotionally moved by it as you or I
might be moved by an heroic action, a splendid sunset, or a fine burst
of orchestral music. He responds to the charm and yet is not able to
express his whole feeling, not even in words, much less in forms and
colors. With all the resources of language and with all his skill in
expression Tennyson is not cunning enough to tell the whole passionate
tale of Arthur and Launcelot and Guinevere—the three who lived and loved
and died so many years ago and now lie “low in the dust of
half-forgotten kings.” All the heroism, the nobility, the splendid
pathos of those lives, could not be put into words. Tennyson could only
summon up a sentiment about them, and deeply imbued with that sentiment,
he left a tinge of unutterable sadness in the poem which you and I feel
and love, and yet can but poorly describe. We do not know it like a
mathematical problem; we _feel_ it.
And consider that old man forsaken of his children—Lear. His complaints
and tempers seem almost childish at times; and yet through that play,
more than through any other written expression of human woe, runs the
feeling and the passion of a great heart breaking through ingratitude.
Again think of that last act in “The Cenci,” with Beatrice cursed by
fate, stained with crime, and finally brought face to face with trial
and death. Have you ever read or known of such another whirlwind of
wildness and calmness, of weakness and fortitude, of courage and fear!
And the ghastly, creeping horror of it all! Can you not feel it? Neither
Shakespeare nor Shelley can chart and scale upon a board the passion he
would show us. It could not be pinned down or summed up scientifically.
It can, in fact, be brought home to us only by that great under-current
running through all notable art—feeling.
Consider once again Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung!” How would it be possible
to tell with musical notes all the tragic power that lies in that opera?
Wagner himself was not able to do it. What he did was to summon up a
romantic mood of mind by contemplating the theme in his imagination and
then, to suggest by a choice of motives and orchestration, the immense
passion of the story. By following the orchestration rather than the
individual singers you can feel in the different _motifs_ the poetry of
that heroic age—the glorious achievements, the sad passing, the mournful
sunset, the fading into oblivion of those who ruled the beautiful world.
If you cannot feel the mystery, the sadness, the splendor of it all, I
am afraid it argues some want of music and romance in your soul rather
than a want of poetry in the opera. The feeling is there; it is the last
thing perhaps to be recognized by the student of music, and yet it is
the one thing above all others that has made Wagner a great poet. He
could suggest more than he could describe, and because he suggests and
does not describe is one reason why he is, at first, so difficult to
understand.
[Illustration:
XIX.—GAINSBOROUGH, Mrs. Siddons. National Gallery, London.
]
The picture in this respect, is not different from music or literary
poetry. Poetic feeling in painting may be and has been shown in many
subjects and in many ways. If we go back to the Gothic period in Italy,
when the painters were just emerging from mediævalism, we shall find a
profound feeling for religion. It shows in Giotto and the Florentines,
in Duccio and the Sienese. They do not know how to draw, color, or light
a picture correctly; they are just learning to paint, and like children
they feel infinitely more than they can express. And they do not try to
express any precise or detailed account of Christianity. They could not
if they would. That which is called “religious feeling” in the
altar-pieces of the Gothic period and the early Renaissance is really a
mental and emotional attitude of the painter—a fine sentiment, an
exquisite tenderness in the presentation of biblical themes and
characters. It is no matter whether the sentiment is really religious or
merely human; it is in either case poetic. And it is no matter whether
the painter’s devotion and earnestness were misplaced or not; at least
they were sincere. There never was a time in the history of painting
when the body of artists believed more thoroughly in their theme, their
work, and themselves than during that early Italian time.
You can see this well exemplified in Orcagna—in his “Last Judgment” in
Santa Maria Novella. The Madonna looking up at her Son is an embodiment
of all the pietistic sentiment of the time. The figure is ill-drawn,
stiff, archaic-looking; but in the white-cowled face what purity, what
serenity, what pathos! The clasped hands seem moved in prayer; the
upturned eyes look unutterable adoration. Orcagna is bent upon telling
the faith of the Madonna in her Son, but he can only do so by telling
the faith that is within his own soul. His revelation is a
self-revelation, but it is not the less a religious feeling and a poetic
feeling. Is this not equally true of that pious monk of San Marco, Fra
Angelico? Can there be any doubt about his life-long sympathy with
religion and the religious theme in art? It was his sympathy that begat
his painting. That sweet, fair face full of divine tenderness, which we
have so often seen in the copies of his trumpet-blowing angels, is it
not the earthly embodiment of a divine spirit?
Fra Angelico was the last of the great religionists in art, and before
his death the sentiment of religion began to wane in the works of his
contemporaries. They were straying from the religious to the
naturalistic subject, but wherever their sympathy extended their feeling
showed. When Masaccio, Benozzo, Botticelli, and Leonardo began to study
the outer world with what earnestness and love they pictured the
humanity, the trees, the grasses, the flowers, the long, flowing
hill-lines, and the wide, expanding Italian sky. Botticelli’s “Allegory
of Spring” (Plate 29) or Benozzo’s “Adoration of the Magi” in the
Riccardi palace (Plates 2 and 17) or Leonardo’s face of “Mona Lisa” must
have been seen sympathetically and thought over passionately, else we
never should have felt their beauty. Benozzo, inheriting his religious
point of view from Fra Angelico, blends his love of man, animals, and
landscape with his belief that they are all made for righteousness;
Botticelli is so intense that he is half-morbid in his sensitiveness;
and Leonardo, with that charm of mood and sweetness of disposition in
the “Mona Lisa,” is really transcendental. It is all fine, pictorial
poetry, howbeit more in the suggestion than in the absolute realization.
This quality of poetry shown so largely in what I have called “feeling”
is apparent in all great art, regardless of nationality or subject. The
Venetians, for example, had none of the intense piety of the Umbrians,
but they had perhaps just as much poetry. Even the early Venetians, like
Carpaccio and Bellini, were more material than Fra Angelico and
Filippino. They painted the Madonna with all seriousness and sincerity,
with belief in the truth of their theme, but with a human side, as noble
in its way as the spiritual, and just as truly marked by poetic feeling
(Plate 7). After them came another painter, of greater skill and power.
He was not so boyish in his enthusiasm as Carpaccio, but Theocritus in
love with pastoral nature never had so much feeling for the pure joy of
living as Giorgione. His shepherds seated on a hill-side playing and
singing, in a fine landscape and under a blue sky, make up a picture far
removed in spirit from theology, philosophy, science, war, or commerce.
The world of action is forgotten and in its place there is Arcadia with
sunlight and flowers, with beautiful women and strong men. But is it not
nobly poetic? When Giorgione painted the Castelfranco Madonna (Plate 24)
he did not change his spirit to suit the subject. The picture has
written upon the face of the Madonna as upon the face of the landscape:
“I believe in the beauty and glory of the world.” You may call this a
pagan belief if you choose, but it is with Giorgione a sincere and a
poetic belief.
Correggio at Parma was not materially different from Giorgione as
regards the spirit of his art. His religious characters were only so in
name. He never had the slightest sympathy with the melodramatic side of
the Christian faith and could not depict the tragic without becoming
repulsive; but he saw the beauty of women and children in landscape and
he felt the splendor of sunlight and shadow and color (Plate 8). There
is no mystery or austerity or solemnity or intellectuality about his
characters. They are not burdened with the cares of the world; but how
serenely and superbly they move and have their being! What grace of
action! What poetry of motion! What loveliness of color! Shall you say
that there is no poetry in that which appeals directly to the senses,
that which belongs only to the earth? As well contend that there is no
beauty in the blue sky, no loveliness in flowers, no grace in the wave
that curves and falls on the beach.
[Illustration:
XX.—GÉRÔME, Napoleon before the Sphinx.
]
If we move to the north, passing the splendid achievements of Titian,
Tintoretto, Palma, and Paolo Veronese, passing the mysticism of Dürer
and the intense humanity of Holbein, passing the radiant splendor of
Rubens and the courtly elegance of Van Dyck, we shall come eventually to
Holland and to those Dutchmen whom the academicians declared had no
style. There we shall find the arch-heretic, Rembrandt, who had nothing
of Greek form and academic composition, and yet possessed what was worth
far more—deep human feeling. His characters are only poor Dutch
peasants; his Christ is a forlorn, bare-footed, frail-bodied outcast;
his back-grounds are generally squalid, ill-lighted interiors. There is
no splendor of architecture, no glamour of wealth, no fair Italian
valley with a deep-blue sky above it. His materials for making the
pictorial poem were slight enough; but never a picture was painted with
so much poetic pathos as that little “Supper at Emmaus” in the Louvre.
The intense sympathy of Rembrandt going out to the poor and oppressed
all his life, went out above all others to that One who was poor and
despised—the lowly One who taught the gospel of love. No one can look
upon any of the peasants of Rembrandt without being conscious of the
man’s deep feeling. His _technique_, of course, is marvellous; but so is
his insight and his capacity to feel. If it were not so we should gain
little pleasure from his subjects.
Have you never wondered what it is in art that makes a painter’s
interpretation of a scene more agreeable than the scene itself? If you
had a few sheep, a French peasant, a straw-thatched cottage, and a
barren plain you would have the materials for a Millet picture. Suppose
you lived in a fine country place, how long would the cottage stand near
you before you had it torn down, or the shepherd and sheep roam your
lawns before you had them driven off by dogs? You would not care for
them, they would not be beautiful, they would not even be interesting
after the first day. Why is it then that you pay thousands of dollars
for a picture of the shepherd and his sheep to hang in your
drawing-room, when you would not have the originals within gun-shot? Is
it not that the materials have something added to them? Are they not
helped in their representation by the painter’s insight and his capacity
to feel?
Rembrandt saw a deeper meaning in his commonplace materials than you or
I. He saw that under the tattered gaberdine of the Amsterdam Jew beat
the heart and throbbed the brain of all humanity. The Jew was typical of
universal suffering—an epitome of humanity, and at the same time an
exemplar of inhumanity. And think you there is no force, no nobility in
the uncouth, heavy-set peasant of Holland? Can you not see the stamp of
character in the deep-marked face and the labor-worn form? Can you not
see that the man is self-made, made strong by hardships; that he has
been developed and brought to maturity through adversity? It is this
beauty of character that Rembrandt is bringing to your notice. And can
you believe that there is no charm in the low-lying land of the
Dutchman—the land where clouds roll out to sea by day, and fogs drift
inland by night? Can you not see that here, too, is something developed
through adversity, that this domain has been wrested from the sea and
turned into flower-spattered meadows, fields of grain, ranks of polders,
groves of trees? Have not man and country a peculiar beauty of their
own—a beauty of character?
And how different is it with the peasantry of France? These gleaners in
the fields as they bend forward to gather the stray stalks, how fine
they are in their great simple outlines, how substantial in body, how
excellent in motion (Plate 4)! And see how they harmonize with the
coloring of the stubble and fit into their atmospheric place, so that
they are of a piece with the foreground, background, and sky—cemented,
blended into one, by the warm haze of a July afternoon. Is then this
flat space of stubble under the burning summer sun, this bare treeless
field, “La belle France” which every Frenchman and many a foreigner
raves about? Yes; only doubly intensified. This is the substance and the
solidity of France—the yielding, arable soil that makes the wealth of
France. And this sower moving silently in the shadow of the hill, moving
with such rhythmic motion, tired and worn yet swinging and sowing—the
sun gone down and twilight upon him, yet still without a murmur, without
a falter, swinging and sowing the grain—is this the brave Frenchman
whose kith and kin fought at Marengo and Waterloo? Yes; only doubly
intensified. He is the brawn and muscle of France—the original producer,
the planter and sustainer of the race. Has he, who has so labored, so
wrestled with stubborn circumstance and wrought success from meagre
opportunity, has he not a character of his own that may be called
beautiful in art? And the land he has broken and made so productive, the
soil that he sprang from and is so intimately associated with, has it
not a character of landscape peculiarly its own and again pictorially
beautiful?
[Illustration:
XXI.—MICHAEL ANGELO, Delphic Sibyl. Sistine Chapel, Rome.
]
Millet and Rembrandt knew this truth of character in both man and
nature, and often they must have thrown down their brushes in despair of
ever telling it; but knowing it so well and feeling it so deeply, they
could not choose but leave the mark of their feeling in their pictures.
And they produced great democratic art—the assertion that all beauty
does not lie in the straight nose, the Apollo mouth, and the Apoxyomenos
form; and that poetry is not alone the tale of classic heroes and
mediæval marauders. The man, though rag-patched, may be a king; the
land, though no Arcadian grove, is still the great productive
mother-earth. Shall we have an aristocracy solely of wealth, or an
aristocracy solely of birth? May there not also be an aristocracy of
character?
I have said that this poetic feeling in art found its way into many
subjects. The examples given are but a handful from that vast world of
life from which the painter is privileged to draw; and you must not
infer that it has to do with religion and the pathos of humble life
alone. Corot, for instance, never painted anything that expressed
either. His was the poetry of light (Plate 9) as Rousseau’s the poetry
of the forest and Daubigny’s the poetry of the meadow and the river-bank
(Plate 16). And are there not pæans of beauty unmixed in the voyaging
clouds of Constable, the serene blue skies of Courbet, the silvery mists
of Maris, the stormy coasts of Winslow Homer? A portrait by Gainsborough
(Plate 19) or Van Dyck (Plate 18), an interior by Van der Meer of Delft
or Pieter de Hooge, a Venetian scene by Guardi or Bunce, a battle or
shipwreck by Delacroix, a tiger and a serpent by Barye, may any or all
of them be poetic. The poetry is in the man, not the subject. Whatever
the poet sees, if it appeals to him emotionally, may start that train of
feeling which evitably creeps into the canvas—creeps in just as when one
is in a gay or sad mood his gayety or sadness will tinge the current of
his playing or his singing or be apparent in his conversation.
Again let me repeat that the thought in pictures, whether poetic or
otherwise, is seldom so definite or precise as in literature. Meissonier
in his “Napoleon in 1814” wishes to tell you of the Emperor’s defeat,
but the only way he can do it is to paint a man on horseback alone on
the brow of a hill with a gloomy, set face and a dark sky. It is
suggestion rather than realization. Gérôme is one of the best
story-tellers with the paint-brush of the present times, but what does
he mean by his “Napoleon before the Sphinx” (Plate 20)? Evidently a
contrast has been thought of—a contrast between the tiny figure on
horseback and the colossal head looming above the desert sands—but what
precisely does the contrast mean? Is this the modern world against the
whole vast past? Is it France, the latest of nations, conquering Egypt,
the earliest of nations? Or is this little man on horseback the
intellectual force, the Œdipus of the West, come at last to Egypt to
solve the riddle of the Sphinx? You see the actual thought is not so
accurately read. Again, I am disposed to think that in Mr. Watts’s “Love
and Death” the little god upon the doorstep falling back among the
flowers before the great outstretched arm of Death means that into every
house where love and joy and flowers have been supreme, the spectre of
death must sooner or later enter. But I do not know that Mr. Watts had
quite that idea when he painted the picture. It is because the thought
in painting is always more or less indefinite as compared with
literature that so many different meanings are read into or out of
celebrated pictures. Art-critics and historians are still explaining
Titian’s “Venus Equipping Cupid” and Botticelli’s “Allegory of Spring.”
Pictorial language is not like the vernacular of speech; it is not even
written so that all alike may comprehend its spirit. At best it is a
sign language that permits of varying interpretations, and it is not by
any means the best medium of conveying abstract ideas from one mind to
another. But like music it is very responsive to emotional feeling and
conveys the poetic mood or sentiment, sometimes with great force.
Indeed, true pictorial feeling finds its way into still less clear
conceptions than we have cited. The very means of expression are often
tinged by it. There may be no deep sentiment in the subject or
characters. It may be only a group of tavern brawlers by Jan Steen or a
smirking fish-wife by Frans Hals, and yet the picture may be handled in
color and light with such charm as to produce a prismatic poem. Diaz
could and did paint flowers as worthy of Paradise as Ghiberti’s “Gates
of the Baptistery,” solely because of his fine feeling for color.
Sometimes there is a feeling for the sweep and flow of lines, as in
Raphael, Tintoretto, and Rubens, that is poetic in the best sense of the
word, and in Delacroix’s colors there is often the haunting suggestion
of passion, fury, fire, and death. The subject may count for little.
What the painter feels about it may make it poetic. Decamp got poetry
out of the exact value of a spot of sunshine falling on the floor; and
Chardin found it in the textures of pots and pans in a kitchen.
Paint itself may be made poetic by the sympathetic handling of it, just
as words and sentences in literature. There is nothing remarkably poetic
in thought about Byron’s
“Before St. Mark’s still glow his steeds of brass,
Their gilded collars glittering in the sun,”
but can you not feel in the expression of it the stately and majestic
march of numbers? You may think there is nothing remarkable in thought
in the flying figures of William Blake. They are descriptions like
Byron’s couplet, but under them is the feeling of vast sweeping power.
This is all poetry of a most sovereign kind; and that, too, shown in the
means of expression—in the _technique_ of art. The same kind of feeling
appears in the contours of Leonardo, in the light-and-shade of
Correggio, in the coloring of Paolo Veronese, in the modelling of
Velasquez, in the brush-work of Manet. It rises to the sublime with
Michael Angelo; it abides in the smallest things of earth in the hands
of the Japanese. Into the infinitely little as into the infinitely great
the feeling of the man may infuse that true poetry of painting which is
perhaps the highest as it is the ultimate aim of pictorial art. That it
is not the only aim we shall see immediately when we come to discuss the
decorative value of painting.
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