There is something to our minds, not unseasonable in directing our thoughts to such a spectacle of mere human greatness, at this (Christmas) sacred time. So much mischief, crime, and misery, and yet so much power, intelligence, progress, and a certain dreadful usefulness in the career of such a man. What a contrast to His life, who entered our world 1850 years ago, and whose birth was heralded by the angel song, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men;" whose religion and example, and continual living influence, has kept this strange world of ours from being tenfold more wicked and miserable than it is. We would conclude with the words of the poet of _In Memoriam_--
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring happy bells across the snow,
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
"Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler forms of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
"Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
"Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace."
$THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
|If this picture in any degree fulfil its object, if we are impressed and moved by it, then it is not matter for words, it partakes of the unspeakableness of its subject. If it fall short of this, it fails utterly, and is not worth any words but those of displeasure, for nothing is more worthless, nothing is more truly profane, and few things are more common, than the attempt to represent sacred ideas by a man who is himself profane, and incapable of impressing others. For it is as unseemly, and in the true sense as profane, for a painter to paint such subjects if he do not feel them, as it is for a man to preach the great truths of our most holy faith, being himself an unbeliever, or at the best a Gallio, in both cases working merely for effect, or to bring in wages.
This picture is not liable to any such rebuke. Whatever may be thought of its central idea and of its expression, no one can doubt--no one can escape coming-under--its power, its true sacredness. Watch the people studying it; listen, not to their words, but to their silence; they are all as if performing an act of worship, or at least of devout reverence. The meaning of the picture reaches you at once: that lonely, serious, sorrowful, majestic countenance and form; those wonderful listening eyes, so full of concern, of compassion--"acquainted with grief;" the attitude of anxious hearkening, as if "waiting to be gracious." This idea rules the whole. We all feel who He is, and what He is desiring; and we feel, perhaps it may be in a way never felt before, the divine depth of.the words, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man open unto me, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me;" and we see that though He is a king, and is "travelling in the greatness of his strength, mighty to save," He cannot open the door--it must open from within--He can only stand and knock.
We confess that, with this thought filling our mind, we care little for the beautiful and ingenious symbols with which the painter has enriched his work; that garden run wild, that Paradise Lost, with the cold starlight indicating and concealing its ruin--all things waste, the light from the lantern falling on the apple (a wonderful bit of painting)--"the fruit of that forbidden tree the darnel or tares choking up the door, and the gentle but inveterate ivy grasping it to the lintel; the Jewish and the Gentile emblems clasped together across his breast; the crown, at once royal and of thorns set with blood-red carbuncles; and many other emblems full of subtle spiritual meaning. We confess to rather wishing the first impression had been left alone.
The faults of the picture as a work of art are, like its virtues, those of its school--imitation is sometimes mistaken for representation. There is a want of the unity, breadth, and spaciousness of nature about the landscape, as if the painter had looked with one eye shut, and thus lost the stereoscopic effect of reality--the solidarity of binocular vision; this gives a displeasing flatness. It is too full of astonishing bits, as if it had been looked at, as well as painted, piece-meal. With regard to the face of our Saviour, this is hardly a subject for criticism,--as we have said, it is full of majesty and tenderness and meaning; but we have never yet seen any image of that face so expressive as not to make us wish that it had been left alone to the heart and imagination of each for himself. In the "Entombment," by Titian, one of the three or four greatest pictures in the world, the face of the dead Saviour is in shadow, as if the painter preferred leaving it thus, to making it more definite; as if he relied on the idea--on the spiritual image--rising up of itself; as if he dared not be definite; thus showing at once his greatness and modesty by acknowledging that there is "that within which passeth show."
$RIZPAH.
|Take one of Turner's sketches in his _Liber Studiorum_, a book which, for truth and power, and the very highest imaginative _vis_, must be compared, not with any other book of prints, but with such word-pictures as you find in Dante, in Cowper, in Wordsworth, or in Milton. It is a dark foreground filled with gloom, savage and wild in its structure; a few grim heavy trees deepen the gloom: in the centre, and going out into the illimitable sky, is a brief, irregular bit of the purest radiance, luminous, but far off. There is a strange meaning about the place; it is "not uninformed with phantasy, and looks that threaten the profane." You look more keenly into it. In the centre of the foreground sits a woman, her face hidden, her whole form settled down as by some deep sorrow; she holds up, but with her face averted, a flaming torch; behind, and around her, lie stretched out seven bodies as of men, half-naked, and dimly indicating far-gone decay; at their feet are what seem like crowns. There is a lion seen with extended tail slinking off, and a bittern has just sprung up in the corner from a reedy pool. The wraning moon is lying as if fainting in the grey heavens. The harvest sheaves stand near at hand, against the sky. The picture deepens in its gloom. The torch gives more of its fitful light as you steadily gaze. What is all this? These are two sons and five grandsons of Saul, who "fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the beginning of barley harvest." And she who sits there solitary is "Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, who took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night." For five months did this desolate mother watch by the bodies of her sons! She is at her ceaseless work, morn, noon, and night incessantly. How your heart now fills, as well as your eyes! How you realize the idea! What a sacred significance it gives to the place, and receives from it! What thoughts it awakens! Saul and his miserable story, David and his lamentation, the mountains of Gil-boa, the streets of Askelon. The king of beasts slinking off once more, hungry, angry, and afraid--finding her still there. The barley sheaves, indicating by a touch of wonderful genius, that it is nearer the beginning than the end of her time, so that we project our sympathy forward upon the future months. No one but a great artist would have thought of this. And that unfailing, forlorn woman, what love! That only love which He whose name and nature it has honoured by admitting to be nearest, though at an infinite distance from His own. "Can a woman forget?--Yea, she may forget." Here we have a scene in itself impressive, and truthfully rendered, enriched, and sanctified by a subject of the highest dignity, and deepest tenderness, and in perfect harmony with it.
Many may say we bring out much that is not in it. This maybe partly true, and is rather to that extent an enhancement of its worth. But the real truth is, that there is all this in it, if it be but sought for and received in simplicity and reverence. The materials for imagination are there; let the spectator apprehend them in the like spirit, and he will feel all, and more than we have described. Let a man try to bring anything out of some of the many landscapes we see in our Exhibitions, and he may be strong and willing, but it will prove too hard for him; it is true here as everywhere else---ex nihilo nihil Jit--ex parvo, parvum--ex falso, falsum--ex magno, magnum--ex Deo, Optimo, Maximo, maximum, optimum, divinum._
$THE GLEN OF THE ENTERKIN.
|This is a representation by Mr. Harvey of a deep, upland valley; its truthfulness is so absolute, that the geologist could tell from it what formation was under that grass. The store-farmer could say how many sheep it could feed, and what breed those are which are busy nibbling on that sunny slope. The botanist could tell not only that that is a fern, but that it is the _Aspidium filix-mas_; and the naturalist knows that that water-wagtail on that stone is the _Motacilla Yarrelli_. To all this, the painter has added his own thoughts and feelings when he saw and when he painted this consummate picture. It is his idea of the place, and, like all realized ideals, it has first crept into his study of imagination, before it comes into the eye and prospect of his soul or of ours. We feel the spirit of the place, its gentleness, its unspeakable seclusion. The one shepherd with his dog far up on the hillside, grey and steadfast as any stone, adding the element of human solitude, which intensifies the rest. It were worth one's while to go alone to that glen to feel its beauty, and to know something of what is meant by the "sleep that is among the lonely hills," and to feel, moreover, how much more beautiful, how much more full of life the picture is than the reality, unless indeed we have the seeing eye, the understanding heart, and then we may make a picture to ourselves.
$DAWN--LUTHER IN THE CONVENT LIBRARY AT ERFURT.
|This is, we think, Mr. Paton's best work. We do not say his greatest, for that may be held to include quantity of genius as well as quality. He has done other things as full of imagination, and more full of fancy; but there is a seriousness and depth, a moral and spiritual meaning and worth about this which he has never before shown, and which fully deserve the word best.
The picture requires no explanation. It is Luther, the young monk of four-and-twenty, in the Library of the Convent of Erfurt. He is at his desk, leaning almost wildly forward, one knee on the seat--its foot has dropped the rude and worn sandal--the other foot on the floor, as it were pressing him forward. He is gazing into the open pages of a huge Vulgate--we see it is the early chapters of the Romans. A bit of broken chain indicates that the Bible was once chained--to be read, but not possessed--it is now free, and his own. His right hand is eagerly, passionately drawing the volume close to him. His face is emaciated to painfulness; you see the traces of a sleepless night--the mind sleepless, and worse, seeking rest, and as yet finding none, but about to find it--and this takes away from what might otherwise be a _plus_ of pain. Next moment he will come upon--or it on him--the light from heaven, shining out from the words, "Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God and in intimation of this, His dawn, the sweet, pearly light of morning, shining in at the now open lattice, is reflected from the page upon his keen anxious face--"faint yet pursuing." If you look steadily into that face, you will see that the bones of the mighty Reformer's face, so well known to us, are all there, and need but good food and sleep, and the open air, and peace of mind, and the joy of victorious faith and work, to fill it up and make it plump, giving it that look of energy in repose, of enough and to spare, of masculine power, which that broad, massive, but soft and kindly visage, wears written all over it; and the slightly upturned head, the clear, open, deep eyes, and that rich chin and neck, "dewlapped like a Thessalian bull."
And we know that all this misery, and examination, and wasting are true. We know that when his friend Alexis was struck down dead by lightning at his side as they walked together, he also was struck down in his mind; and in the words of Principal Tulloch in his admirable sketch, he carried out his resolve in a way curiously and entirely his own--"One evening he invites some of his fellow-students to supper, gives them of his best cheer, music and jest enliven the company, and the entertainment closes with a burst of merriment. The same night there is a solitary knock at the door of the Augustinian Convent, and two volumes alone of all his books in his hand--Plautus and Virgil--Luther passes under its portal." Three long, dreary years he has been there; doing all sorts of servile work--sweeping the floors, begging in the streets with his wallet--"_Saccum per nackum_"--for food and dainties to his lazy brethren. Sometimes four days without meat or drink--hiding himself for a week with his books in his cell, where, when broken in upon, he is found lying cold and senseless on the floor; and all this bodily wretchedness, struggle, and unrest but a material type of the mental agony within trying to work out his own salvation with all sorts of "fear and trembling." And now the natural dawn has found him still at his book, and is pouring its "innocent brightness" everywhere, and its fresh airs are stirring the white blossoms of the convolvulus outside, and making them flutter and look in like doves--the dew of their youth and of the morning glistering, if looked for. And this time it has found him with his morn beginning too--the clear shining after the rain, the night far past, the day at hand; he has "cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light." The Sun of Righteousness is about to arise upon him. Henceforth you know well what he is to become and do--a child of the light, he walks abroad like one, and at liberty he goes forth upon his work, rejoicing like a strong man to run his race. That great human spirit finds rest and a resting-place--has got that fulcrum on which, with his strong heart and his lever, he is to move a world. That warm, urgent, tender, impetuous human heart is to be satisfied with the fellowship of his kind, and with the love of his Catherine--"his heart-loved housewife and sow-marketress, and whatever more she may be"--and to run over in babble (as who ever else did?) to his "Johnny," his "Philip and his Joe," or overflow with tears as he looks on his "darling Lena" in her coffin, saving, "How strange it is to know so surely that she is at peace and happy, and yet for me to be so sad."
And now that this dominant, central idea--which is the heart and soul, the motive power of the piece--is taken in and moves you, examine the rest--the great Vulgate and St. Augustine De Civitate Dei, and Thomas Aquinas, and the other old fellows, old and strong, lying all about, as if taken up and thrown down in restless search, how wonderfully they are painted! or rather, how wonderfully you never think of them as painted! and yet they are not merely imitated--you don't mistake them for actual books, they are the realized ideas of books. And that sacred, unspeakable scene, dim, yet unmistakable, looking out upon you from the back of his desk--the Agony of the Garden--carved and partly coloured and gilt; look at it--that is religious painting. Our Saviour on his knees "praying more earnestly"--the sleepers lying around--the mystic, heavy, sombre olive-trees, shutting out the light of heaven, and letting the lanterns of those "with swords and staves" gleam among their stems; him who was a thief, crouching, stealing on with his bag and his crew, and the curse heavy upon him--all this is in it, and all subordinate, and yet done to the quick, as if a young Albert Durer or Van Eyck had had his knife in the wood, and his soul at his knife. Then, on the plastered wall behind the young monk is an oval portrait of Alexander the Sixth, the tremendous Borgia, that prodigy of crime and power--his face, what a contrast to the wasted boy's beneath! he is fat and flourishing, rosy and full of blood and of the pride of life, insolent and at his ease; Luther like a young branch all but withered in the leaves of his spring--the Vicar of God spreading like a green bay tree. He is holding up his two first fingers in the Apostolic benediction, with a something between a scowl and a leer--all this rendered, and yet nothing overdone. This portrait hangs on a rude drawing of the Crucifixion, as if by a young and adoring hand, full of feeling and with a touching uncertainty in the lines, as if the hand that traced it was unaccustomed and trembling; it conceals our Saviour's face. As we have said, the lattice has been opened, and the breath of the morning is flowing into the dark, stifling room. The night lamp has gone out, paling its ineffectual fires, and its reek is curling up and down, and away. This, as a piece of handiwork, is wonderful. When you look narrowly into the picture, you see a chrysalis in the gloom, just opening its case, ready when struck by the light and heat to expand and fly. The sunlight throws across towards Borgia the rich blooms of the stained glass, the light made gloriously false in passing through its disturbing medium; while the pure, white light of heaven passes straight down upon the Word of God, and shines up into the face of the young reader.
Such is a mere notion of this excellent picture; it is painted throughout with amazing precision, delicacy, sweetness, and strength, in perfect diapason from first to last, everything subordinate to the one master note. Every one will be surprised, and some may be shocked, at the face, and hands, and look of Luther, but let them remember where he is, and what he has been and is doing and suffering. This amount of pain gives a strange and true relish, if it is taken up and overpowered and transfigured into its opposite by our knowledge that it was to be "but for a moment," and then the "fat-more exceeding" victory and joy.
$BEAUTY, ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE.
|We are not now going to try our'prentice hand upon a new theory of Beauty, after so many masters have failed; but we cannot help thinking that the dispute would be at an end if it were but allowed at once, that there are two kinds of beauty, that there is a material and necessary element of beauty, and another which is contingent and relative--a natural and a spiritual delightfulness to and through the eye; and that sometimes we see both together, as in the face and eyes of a beautiful and beloved woman; and moreover, that there is no more reason for denying either the sense or the emotion of beauty, because everybody does not agree about the kind or measure of either of these qualities in all objects, than there is for affirming that there is no such thing as veracity or natural affection, because the Spartans commended lying, and the Cretians practised it, or the New Zealanders the eating of one's grandmother. Why should the eye, the noblest, the amplest, the most informing of all our senses, be deprived of its own special delight? The light is sweet, and it is a pleasant thing for the eye to behold the sun; and why, when the ear has sound for informing, and music for delight--when there is smell and odour, taste and flavour, and even the touch has its sense of pleasant smoothness and softness--why should there not be in the eye a pleasure born and dying with the sights it sees? it is like the infinite loving-kindness of Him who made the trees of the garden pleasant to the eye as well as good for food. We say nothing here of Relative or Associative Beauty,--this has never been doubted either in its essence or its value. It is as much larger in its range, as much nobler in its meaning and uses, as the heavens are higher than the earth, or as the soul transcends the body. This, too, gives back to material beauty more than it received: it was after man was made, that God saw, and, behold, everything was very good.
Our readers may perhaps think we make too much of imagination as an essential element--as the essential element--in Art. With our views of its function and its pervading influence in all the ideal arts, we can give it no other place. A man can no more be a poet or painter in the spiritual and only true sense without imagination, than an animal can be a bird without wings; and as, other things being equal, that bird can be longest on the wing and has the greatest range of flight which has the strongest pinions, so that painter is likely to have the farthest and keenest vision of all that is within the scope of his art, and the surest and most ample faculty of making known to others what he himself has seen, whose imagination is at once the most strong and quick. At the same time, if it be true that the body without the spirit is dead, so it is equally true that the spirit without the body is vain, ineffectual, fruitless. Imagination alone can no more make a painter or a poet than wings can constitute a bird. Each must have a body. Unfortunately, in painting we have more than enough of body without spirit. Correct drawing, wonderful imitative powers, cleverness, adaptiveness, great facility and dexterity of hand, much largeness of quotation, and many material and mechanical qualities, all go to form an amusing, and, it may be, useful spectacle, but not a true picture. We have also, but not so often, the reverse of all this,--the vision without the faculty, the soul without the body, great thoughts without the power to embody them in intelligible forms. He, and he alone, is a great painter, and an heir of time, who combines both. He must have observation,--humble, loving, unerring, unwearied; this is the material out of which a painter, like a poet, feeds his genius, and "makes grow his wings." There must be perception and conception, both vigorous, quick, and true: you must have these two primary qualities, the one first, the other last, in every great painter. Give him good sense and a good memory, it will be all the better for him and for us. As for principles of drawing and perspective, they are not essential. A man who paints according to a principle is sure to paint ill; he may apply his principles after his work is done, if he has a philosophic as well as an ideal turn.
$"OH, I'M WAT, WAT."
|The father of the Rev. Mr. Steven of Largs, was the son of a farmer, who lived next farm to Mossgiel. When a boy of eight, he found "Robbie," who was a great friend of his, and of all the children, engaged digging a large trench in a field, Gilbert, his brother, with him. The boy pausing on the edge of the trench, and looking down upon Burns, said, "Robbie, what's that ye' re doin'?"
"How kin' a muckle hole, Tammie."
"What for?"
"To bury the Deil in, Tammie!" (one can fancy how those eyes would glow.) 'A but, Robbie," said the logical Tammie, "hoo' re ye to gel him in?"
"Ay," said Burns, "that's it, hoo are we to get him in!" and went off into shouts of laughter; and every now and then during that summer day shouts would come from that hole, as the idea came over him. If one could only have daguerreotyped his day's fancies!_
"What is love, Mary?" said Seventeen to Thirteen, who was busy with her English lessons.
"Love! what do you mean, John?"
"I mean, what's love?"
"Love's just love, I suppose."
(Yes, Mary, you are right to keep the concrete; analysis kills love as well as other things. I once asked a useful-information young lady what her mother was. "Oh, mamma's a _biped!_" I turned in dismay to her younger sister, and said, "What do you say?" "Oh, my mother's just my mother.")
"But what part of speech is it?"