HAWTHORNE AS ART CRITIC: 1858
Nearly one-third of the Italian Note-book is devoted to the criticisms
or descriptions of paintings, statues, and architecture, for which we
can be only too thankful as coming from such a bright, penetrating, and
ingenious intelligence. It is much in their favor that Hawthorne had not
previously undertaken a course of instruction in art; that he wrote for
his own benefit, and not for publication; and that he was not biased
by preconceived opinions. It cannot be doubted that he was sometimes
influenced by the opinions of Story, Powers, and other artists with
whom he came in contact; but this could have happened only in particular
cases, and more especially in respect to modern works of art. When
Hawthorne visited the galleries he usually went alone, or only
accompanied by his wife.
The only opportunities for the study of aesthetics or art criticism,
fifty years ago, were to be found in German universities. Kugler’s
handbook of painting was the chief authority in use, rather academic,
but correct enough in a general way. Ruskin, a more eloquent and
discriminating writer, had devoted himself chiefly to celebrating the
merits of Turner and Tintoretto, but was never quite just to Florentine
art. Mrs. Jameson followed closely after Kugler, and was the only one of
these that Hawthorne appears to have consulted. Winckelmann’s history
of Greek sculpture, which was not a history in the proper sense of the
word, had been translated by Lodge, but Hawthorne does not mention it,
and it would not have been much assistance to him if he had read it.
Like Winckelmann and Lessing, however, he admired the “Laocoön,”--an
admiration now somewhat out of fashion.
There can be no final authority in art, for the most experienced critics
still continue to differ in their estimates of the same painting or
statue. More than this, it is safe to affirm that any one writer who
makes a statement concerning a certain work of art at a given time,
would have made a somewhat different statement at another time. In fact,
this not unfrequently happens in actual practice; for all that any of
us can do is, to reproduce the impression made on us at the moment, and
this depends as much on our own state of mind, and on our peculiarities,
as on the peculiarities of the picture or statue that we criticise.
It is the same in art itself. If Raphael had not painted the “Sistine
Madonna” at the time he did, he would have produced a different work. It
was the concentration of that particular occasion, and if any accident
had happened to prevent it, that pious and beautiful vision would have
been lost to the world.
It requires years of study and observation of the best masters to become
a trustworthy art critic, and then everything depends of course upon the
genius of the individual. It has happened more than once that a wealthy
American, with a certain kind of enthusiasm for art, has prepared
himself at a German university, has studied the science of
connoisseurship, and has become associate member of a number of foreign
societies, only to discover at length that he had no talent for the
profession. Hawthorne enjoyed no such advantages, nor did he even think
of becoming a connoisseur. His whole experience in the art of design
might be included within twelve months, and his original basis was
nothing better than his wife’s water-color painting and the mediocre
pictures in the Boston Athenaeum; but he brought to his subject an
eye that was trained to the closest observation of Nature and a mind
experienced beyond all others [Footnote: At least at that time.] in the
mysteries of human life. He begins tentatively, and as might be expected
makes a number of errors, but quite as often he hits the nail, where
others have missed it. He learns by his mistakes, and steadily improves
in critical faculty. Hawthorne’s Italian Note-book is a unique record,
in which the development of a highly organized mind has advanced from
small beginnings to exceptional skill in a fresh department of activity.
Hawthorne brought with him to Italy the Yankee preference for newness
and nicety, which our forefathers themselves derived from their
residence in Holland, and there is no city in Europe where this
sentiment could have troubled him so much as in Rome. He disliked the
dingy picture-frames, the uncleanly canvases, the earth-stains and
broken noses of the antique statues, the smoked-up walls of the Sistine
Chapel, and the cracks in Raphael’s frescos. He condemns everything as
rubbish which has not an external perfection; forgetting that, as in
human nature, the most precious treasures are sometimes allied with
an ungainly exterior. Yet in this he only echoes the impressions
of thousands of others who have gone to the Vatican and returned
disconsolate, because amid a perplexing multitude of objects they knew
not where to look for consummate art. One can imagine if an experienced
friend had accompanied Hawthorne to the Raphael stanza, and had pointed
out the figures of the Pope, the cardinal, and the angelic boys in the
“Mass at Bolsena,” he would have admired them without limitation. He
quickly discovered Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” and considered it the
greatest painting that the world contains.
The paintings in the princely collections in Rome are, with the
exception of those in the Borghese gallery, far removed from princely. A
large proportion of their best paintings had long since been sold to the
royal collections of northern Europe, and had been replaced either by
copies or by works of inferior masters. In the Barberini palace there
are not more than three or four paintings such as might reasonably
detain a traveller, and it is about the same in the Ludovisi gallery.
There was not a grain of affectation in Hawthorne; he never pretended
to admire what he did not like, nor did he strain himself into liking
anything that his inner nature rebelled against.
Hawthorne’s taste in art was much in advance of his time. His quick
appreciation of the colossal statues of Castor and Pollux on the
Quirinal is the best proof of this. Ten years later it was the fashion
in Rome to deride those statues, as a late work of the empire and
greatly lacking in artistic style. Brunn, in his history of ancient
sculpture, attributes them to the school of Lysippus, a contemporary of
Alexander, which Brunn certainly would not have done if he had possessed
a good eye for form. Vasari, on the contrary, a surer critic, considered
them worthy to be placed beside Michel Angelo’s “David”; but it remained
for Furtwängler to restore them to their true position as a work of the
Periclean age, although copied by Italian sculptors. They must have been
the product of a single mind, [Footnote: On the base of one is _Opus
Phidiae_, and on that of the other, _Opus Praxitelis._] either Phidias,
Alcameres, or the elder Praxiteles--if there ever was such a person; and
they have the finest figures of any statues in Rome (much finer than the
dandified “Apollo Belvedere”) and also the most spirited action.
Hawthorne went to the Villa Ludovisi to see the much-vaunted bas-relief
of Antinous, which fifty years ago was considered one of the art
treasures of the city; but a more refined taste has since discovered
that in spite of the rare technical skill, its hard glassy finish
gives it a cold and conventional effect. Hawthorne returned from it
disappointed, and wrote in his diary:
“This Antinous is said to be the finest relic of antiquity next to the
Apollo and the Laocoön; but I could not feel it to be so, partly, I
suppose, because the features of Antinous do not seem to me beautiful
in themselves; and that heavy, downward look is repeated till I am more
weary of it than of anything else in sculpture.”
The Greek artist of Adrian’s time attempted to give the face a pensive
expression, but only succeeded in this heavy downward look.
Hawthorne felt the same disappointment after his first visit to the
sculpture-gallery of the Vatican. “I must confess,” he wrote, “taking
such transient glimpses as I did, I was more impressed with the extent
of the Vatican, and the beautiful order in which it is kept and its
great sunny, open courts, with fountains, grass, and shrubs ... than
with the statuary.” The Vatican collection has great archaeological
value, but, with the exception of the “Laocoön,” the “Meleager,” the
“Apollo,” and a few others, little or no artistic value. The vast
majority of the statues there are either late Roman works or cheap Roman
copies of second-rate Hellenic statues. Some of them are positively
bad and others are archaic, and Hawthorne was fully justified in his
disatisfaction with them. He noticed, however, a decided difference
between the original “Apollo” and the casts of it with which he was
familiar. On a subsequent visit he fails to observe the numerous faults
in Canova’s “Perseus,” and afterwards writes this original statement
concerning the “Laocoön”:
“I felt the Laocoön very powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal
agony with a strange calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles
the vast age of the sea, calm on account of its immensity; as the tumult
of Niagara, which does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring
on forever and ever.”
Professor E. A. Gardner and the more fastidious school of critics have
recently decided that the action of the “Laocoön” is too violent to
be contained within the proper boundaries of sculpture; but Hawthorne
controverts this view in a single sentence. The action is violent, it
is true, but the _impression_ which the statue makes on him is not a
violent one; for the greatness of the art sublimates the motive. It is
a tragedy in marble, and Pliny, who had seen the works of Phidias and
Praxiteles, placed Agesander’s “Laocoön” above them all. This, however,
is a Roman view. What Hawthorne wrote in his diary should not always
be taken literally. When he declares that he would like to have every
artist that perpetrates an allegory put to death, he merely expresses
the puzzling effects which such compositions frequently exercise on
the weary-minded traveller; and when he wishes that all the frescos
on Italian walls could be obliterated, he only repeats a sentiment of
similar strain. Perhaps we should class in the same category Hawthorne’s
remark concerning the Elgin marbles in the British Museum, that “it
would be well if they were converted into paving-stones.” There are
no grander monuments of ancient art than those battered and headless
statues from the pediment of the Parthenon (the figures of the so-called
“Three Fates” surpass the “Venus of Melos”), and archaeologists
are still in dispute as to what they may have represented; but the
significance of the subject before him was always the point in which
Hawthorne was interested. Julian Hawthorne says of his father, in regard
to a similar instance:
“Of technicalities,--difficulties overcome, harmony of lines, and so
forth,--he had no explicit knowledge; they produced their effect upon
him of course, but without his recognizing the manner of it. All that
concerned him was the sentiment which the artist had meant to express;
the means and method were comparatively unimportant.” [Footnote: J.
Hawthorne, ii. 193.]
The technicalities of art differ with every clime and every generation.
They belong chiefly to the connoisseur, and have their value, but the
less a critic thinks of them in making a general estimate of a painting
or statue, the more likely he is to render an impartial judgment.
Hawthorne’s analysis of Praxiteles’s “Faun,” in his “Romance of Monte
Beni,” being a subject in which he was particularly interested, is
almost without a rival in the literature of its kind; and this is
the more remarkable since the copy of the “Faun” in the museum of the
Capitol is not one of the best, at least it is inferior to the one in
the Glyptothek at Munich. It seems as if Hawthorne had penetrated to the
first conception of it in the mind of Praxiteles.
The Sistine Chapel, like the Italian scenery, only unfolds its beauties
on a bright day, and Hawthorne happened to go there when the sky was
full of drifting clouds, a time when it is difficult to see any object
as it really is. It may have been on this account that he entirely
mistook the action of the Saviour in Michel Angelo’s “Last Judgment.”
Christ has raised his arm above his head in order to display the mark
where he was nailed to the cross, and Hawthorne presumed this, as many
others have done, to be an angry threatening gesture of condemnation,
which would not accord with his merciful spirit. He appreciated the
symmetrical figure of Adam, and the majestic forms of the prophets
and sibyls encircling the ceiling, and if he had seen the face of the
Saviour in a fair light, he might have recognized that such divine
calmness of expression could not coexist with a vindictive motive. This,
however, can be seen to better advantage in a Braun photograph than in
the painting itself.
Hawthorne goes to the Church of San Pietro in Vincolo to see Michel
Angelo’s “Moses,” but he does not moralize before it, like a certain
Concord artist, on “the weakness of exaggeration;” nor does he consider,
like Ruskin, that its conventional horns are a serious detriment. On the
contrary he finds it “grand and sublime, with a beard flowing down
like a cataract; a truly majestic figure, but not so benign as it
were desirable that such strength should hold.” An Englishman present
remarked that the “Moses” had very fine features,--“a compliment,”
says Hawthorne, “for which the colossal Hebrew ought to have made the
Englishman a bow.”
[Footnote: Italian Note-book, p. 164.]
Perhaps the Englishman really meant that the face had a noble
expression. The somewhat satyr-like features of the “Moses” would seem
to have been unconsciously adopted, together with the horns, from a
statue of the god Pan, which thus serves as an intermediate link between
the “Moses” and the “Faun” of Praxiteles; but he who cannot appreciate
Michel Angelo’s “Moses” in spite of this, knows nothing of the Alpine
heights of human nature.
Of all the paintings that Hawthorne saw in Rome none impressed him so
deeply as Guido’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci, and none more justly.
If the “Laocoön” is the type of an old Greek tragedy, a strong man
strangled in the coils of Fate, the portrait of Beatrice represents the
tragedy of mediaeval Italy, a beautiful woman crushed by the downfall of
a splendid civilization. The fate of Joan of Arc or of Madame Roland was
merciful compared to that of poor Beatrice. Religion is no consolation
to her, for it is the Pope himself who signs her death-warrant. She
is massacred to gratify the avarice of the Holy See. Yet in this last
evening of her tragical life, she does find strength and consolation in
her dignity as a woman. Never was art consecrated to a higher purpose;
Guido rose above himself; and, as Hawthorne says, it seems as if mortal
man could not have wrought such an effect. It has always been the most
popular painting in Rome, but Hawthorne was the first to celebrate its
unique superiority in writing, and his discourse upon it in various
places leaves little for those that follow.
It may have been long since discovered that Hawthorne’s single weakness
was a weakness for his friends; certainly an amiable weakness, but
nevertheless that is the proper name for it. When Phocion was Archon of
Athens, he said that a chief magistrate should know no friends; and the
same should be true of an authoritative writer. Hawthorne has not gone
so far in this direction as many others have who had less reason to
speak with authority than he; but he has indicated his partiality for
Franklin Pierce plainly enough, and his over-praise of Hiram Powers and
William Story, as well as his under-praise of Crawford, will go down to
future generations as something of an injustice to those three artists.
[Illustration: GUIDO RENI’S PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI, PAINTED WHILE
SHE WAS IN PRISON, WHICH SUGGESTED TO HAWTHORNE THE PLOT OF “THE MARBLE
FAUN”]
It is not necessary to repeat here what Hawthorne wrote concerning
Powers’ Webster. The statue stands in front of the State House at
Boston, and serves as a good likeness of the famous orator, but more
than that one cannot say for it. The face has no definable expression,
and those who have looked for a central motive in the figure will be
pleased to learn what it is by reading Hawthorne’s description of it, as
he saw it in Powers’ studio at Florence. A sculptor of the present day
can find no better study for his art than the attitudes and changes of
countenance in an eloquent speaker; but which of them can be said to
have taken advantage of this? Story made an attempt in his statue of
Everett, but even his most indulgent friends did not consider it a
success. His “George Peabody,” opposite the Bank of England, could not
perhaps have been altogether different from what it is.
What chiefly interested Story in his profession seems to have been the
modelling of unhappy women in various attitudes of reflection. He made a
number of these, of which his “Cleopatra” is the only one known to
fame, and in the expression of her face he has certainly achieved a high
degree of excellence. Neither has Hawthorne valued it too highly,--the
expression of worldly splendor incarnated in a beautiful woman on
the tragical verge of an abyss. If she only were beautiful! Here the
limitations of the statue commence. Hawthorne says, “The sculptor had
not shunned to give the full, Nubian lips and other characteristics of
the Egyptian physiognomy.”
Here he follows the sculptor himself, and it is remarkable that a
college graduate like William Story should have made so transparent
a mistake. Cleopatra was not an Egyptian at all. The Ptolemies were
Greeks, and it is simply impossible to believe that they would have
allied themselves with a subject and alien race. This kind of small
pedantry has often led artists astray, and was peculiarly virulent
during the middle of the past century. The whole figure of Story’s
“Cleopatra” suffers from it. Hawthorne says again, “She was draped from
head to foot in a costume minutely and scrupulously studied from that of
ancient Egypt.” In fact, the body and limbs of the statue are so closely
shrouded as to deprive the work of that sense of freedom of action
and royal abandon which greets us in Shakespeare’s and Plutarch’s
“Cleopatra.” Story might have taken a lesson from Titian’s matchless
“Cleopatra” in the Cassel gallery, or from Marc Antonio’s small woodcut
of Raphael’s “Cleopatra.”
Perhaps it is not too much to say of Crawford that he was the finest
plastic genius of the Anglo-Saxon race. His technique may not have
been equal to Flaxman’s or St. Gaudens’, but his designs have more of
grandeur than the former, and he is more original than the latter. There
are faults of modelling in his “Orpheus,” and its attitude resembles
that of the eldest son of Niobe in the Florentine gallery,--although
the Niobe youth looks upward and Orpheus is peering into darkness,--its
features are rather too pretty; but the statue has exactly what
Powers’ “Greek Slave” lacks, a definite motive,--that of an earnest
seeker,--which pervades it from head to foot; and it is no imaginary
pathos that we feel in its presence. There is, at least, no imitation of
the antique in Crawford’s “Beethoven,” for its conception, the listening
to internal harmonies, would never have occurred to a Greek or a Roman.
Even Hawthorne admits Crawford’s skill in the treatment of drapery; and
this is very important, for it is in his drapery quite as much as in the
nude that we recognize the superiority of Michel Angelo to Raphael; and
the folds of Beethoven’s mantle are as rhythmical as his own harmonies.
The features lack something of firmness, but it is altogether a statue
in the grand manner.
Hawthorne is rather too exacting in his requirements of modern
sculptors. Warrington Wood, who commenced life as a marble-worker,
always employed Italian workmen to carve his statues, although he
was perfectly able to do it himself, and always put on the finishing
touches,--as I presume they all do. Bronze statues are finished with a
file, and of course do not require any knowledge of the chisel.
In regard to the imitation of antique attitudes, there has certainly
been too much of it, as Hawthorne supposes; but the Greeks themselves
were given to this form of plagiarism, and even Praxiteles sometimes
adopted the motives of his predecessors; but Hawthorne praises Powers,
Story, and Harriet Hosmer above their merits.
The whole brotherhood of artists and their critical friends might rise
up against me, if I were to support Hawthorne’s condemnation of modern
Venuses, and “the guilty glimpses stolen at hired models.” They are
not necessarily guilty glimpses. To an experienced artist the customary
study from a naked figure, male or female, is little more than what a
low-necked dress at a party would be to many others. Yet the instinct of
the age shrinks from this exposure. We can make pretty good Venuses, but
we cannot look at them through the same mental and moral atmosphere as
the contemporaries of Scopas, or even with the same eyes that Michel
Angelo saw them. We feel the difference between a modern Venus and an
ancient one. There is a statue in the Vatican of a Roman emperor, of
which every one says that it ought to wear clothes; and the reason is
because the face has such a modern look. A raving Bacchante may be a
good acquisition to an art museum, but it is out of place in a public
library. A female statue requires more or less drapery to set off the
outlines of the figure and to give it dignity. We feel this even in the
finest Greek work--like the “Venus of Cnidos.”
In this matter Hawthorne certainly exposes his Puritanic education,
and he also places too high a value on the carving of button-holes
and shoestrings by Italian workmen. Such things are the fag-ends of
statuary.
His judgment, however, is clear and convincing in regard to the tinted
Eves and Venuses of Gibson. Whatever may have been the ancient practice
in this respect, Gibson’s experiment proved a failure. Nobody likes
those statues; and no other sculptor has since followed Gibson’s
example. The tinting of statues by the Greeks did not commence until the
time of Aristotle, and does not seem to have been very general. Their
object evidently was, not so much to imitate flesh as to tone down the
crystalline glare of the new marble. Pausanias speaks of a statue in
Arcadia, the drapery of which was painted with vermilion, “so as to look
very gay.” This was of course the consequence of a late and degraded
taste. That traces of paint should have been discovered on Greek temples
is no evidence that the marble was painted when they were first built.
It may be suspected that Hawthorne was one of the very few who have
seen the “Venus dé Medici” and recognized the true significance of the
statue. The vast majority of visitors to the Uffizi only see in it the
type of a perfectly symmetrical woman bashfully posing for her likeness
in marble, but Hawthorne’s perception in it went much beyond that, and
the fact that he attempts no explanation of its motive is in accordance
with the present theory. He also noticed that statues had sometimes
exercised a potent spell over him, and at others a very slight
influence.
Froude says that a man’s modesty is the best part of him. Notice that,
ye strugglers for preferment, and how beautifully modest Hawthorne is,
when he writes in his Florentine diary:
“In a year’s time, with the advantage of access to this magnificent
gallery, I think I might come to have some little knowledge of pictures.
At present I still know nothing; but am glad to find myself capable,
at least, of loving one picture better than another. I am sensible,
however, that a process is going on, and has been ever since I came to
Italy, that puts me in a state to see pictures with less toil, and more
pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more sensible of beauty
where I saw none before.”
Hawthorne belongs to the same class of amateur critics as Shelley and
Goethe, who, even if their opinions cannot always be accepted as final,
illuminate the subject with the radiance of genius and have an equal
value with the most experienced connoisseurs.
* * * * *
The return of the Hawthornes to Rome through Tuscany was even more
interesting than their journey to Florence in the spring, and they
enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a _vetturino_ who would seem to
have been the Sir Philip Sidney of his profession, a compendium of human
excellences. There are such men, though rarely met with, and we may
trust Hawthorne’s word that Constantino Bacci was one of them; not only
a skilful driver, but a generous provider, honest, courteous, kindly,
and agreeable. They went first to Siena, where they were entertained for
a week or more by the versatile Mr. Story, and where Hawthorne wrote an
eloquent description of the cathedral; then over the mountain pass where
Radicofani nestles among the iron-browed crags above the clouds; past
the malarious Lake of Bolsena, scene of the miracle which Raphael has
commemorated in the Vatican; through Viterbo and _Sette Vene_; and
finally, on October 16, into Rome, through the Porta’ del Popolo,
designed by Michel Angelo in his massive style,--Donati’s comet flaming
before them every night. Thompson, the portrait painter, had already
secured a furnished house, No. 68 Piazza Poli, for the Hawthornes, to
which they went immediately.
Since the death of Julius Cæsar, comets have always been looked upon as
the forerunners of pestilence and war, but wars are sometimes blessings,
and Donati’s discovery proved a harbinger of good to Italy,--but to the
Hawthornes, a prediction of evil. Continually in Hawthorne’s Italian
journal we meet with references to the Roman malaria, as if it were a
subject that occupied his thoughts, and nowhere is this more common than
during the return-journey from Florence. Did it occur to him that the
lightning might strike in his own house? No sensible American now would
take his children to Rome unless for a very brief visit; and yet William
Story brought up his family there with excellent success, so far as
health was concerned.
We can believe that Hawthorne took every possible precaution, so far
as he knew, but in spite of that on November 1 his eldest daughter was
seized with Roman fever, and for six weeks thereafter lay trembling
between life and death, so that it seemed as if a feather might turn the
balance.
She does not appear to have been imprudent. Her father believed that
the “old hag” breathed upon her while she was with her mother, who was
sketching in the Palace of the Cæsars; but the Palatine Hill is on high
ground, with a foundation of solid masonry, and was guarded by French
soldiers, and it would have been difficult to find a more cleanly spot
in the city. A German count, who lived in a villa on the Cælian Hill,
close by, considered his residence one of the most healthful in Rome.
Miss Una had a passionate attachment for the capital of the ancient
world; and it seems as if the evil spirit of the place had seized upon
her, as the Ice Maiden is supposed to entrap chamois hunters in the
Alps.
One of the evils attendant on sickness in a foreign country is, the
uncertainty in regard to a doctor, and this naturally leads to a
distrust and suspicion of the one that is employed. Even so shrewd a
man as Bismarck fell into the hands of a charlatan at St. Petersburg
and suffered severely in consequence. Hawthorne either had a similar
experience, or, what came to the same thing, believed that he did. He
considered himself obliged to change doctors for his daughter, and this
added to his care and anxiety. During the next four months he wrote not
a word in his journal (or elsewhere, so far as we know), and he visibly
aged before his wife’s eyes. He went to walk on occasion with Story or
Thompson, but it was merely for the preservation of his own health. His
thoughts were always in his daughter’s chamber, and this was so strongly
marked upon his face that any one could read it. Toward the Ides of
March, Miss Una was sufficiently improved to take a short look at the
carnival, but it was two months later before she was in a condition to
travel, and neither she nor her father ever wholly recovered from the
effects of this sad experience.