A quality like that of Tuscan art is, as I have once before remarked,
in some measure, abstract; a general character, like that of a
composite photograph, selected and compounded by the repetition of the
more general and the exclusion of more individual features. In so far,
therefore, it is something rather tended towards in reality than
thoroughly accomplished; and its accomplishment, to whatever extent,
is naturally due to a tradition, a certain habit among artists and
public, which neutralises the refractory tendencies of individuals
(the personal morbidness evident, for instance, in Botticelli) and
makes the most of what the majority may have in common--that dominant
interest, let us say, in line and mass. Such being the case, this
Tuscan quality comes to an end with the local art of the middle ages,
and can no longer be found, or only imperfect, after the breaking up
and fusion of the various schools, and the arising of eclectic
personalities in the earliest sixteenth century. After the painters
born between 1450 and 1460, there are no more genuine Tuscans.
Leonardo, once independent of Verrocchio and settled in Lombardy, is
barely one of them; and Michel Angelo never at all--Michel Angelo with
his moods all of Rome or the great mountains, full of trouble, always,
and tragedy. These great personalities, and the other eclectics,
Raphael foremost, bring qualities to art which it had lacked before,
and are required to make its appeal legitimately universal. I should
shrink from judging their importance, compared with the older and more
local and traditional men. Still further from me is it to prefer this
Tuscan art to that, as local and traditional in its way, of Umbria or
Venetia, which stands to this as the most poignant lyric or the
richest romance stands, let us say, to the characteristic quality,
sober yet subtle, of Dante's greatest passages. There is, thank
heaven, wholesome art various enough to appeal to many various healthy
temperaments; and perhaps for each single temperament more than one
kind of art is needful. My object in the foregoing pages has not been
to put forward reasons for preferring the art of the Tuscans any more
than the climate and landscape of Tuscany; but merely to bring home
what the especial charm and power of Tuscan art and Tuscan nature seem
to me to be. More can be gained by knowing any art lovingly in itself
than by knowing twenty arts from each other through dry comparison.
I have tried to suggest rather than to explain in what way the art of
a country may answer to its natural character, by inducing recurrent
moods of a given kind. I would not have it thought, however, that such
moods need be dominant, or even exist at all, in all the inhabitants
of that country. Art, wide as its appeal may be, is no more a product
of the great mass of persons than is abstract thought or special
invention, however largely these may be put to profit by the
generality. The bulk of the inhabitants help to make the art by
furnishing the occasional exceptionally endowed creature called an
artist, by determining his education and surroundings, in so far as he
is a mere citizen; and finally by bringing to bear on him the
stored-up habit of acquiescence in whatever art has been accepted by
that public from the artists of the immediate past. In fact, the
majority affects the artist mainly as itself has been affected by his
predecessors. If, therefore, the scenery and climate call forth moods
in a whole people definite enough to influence the art, this will be
due, I think, to some especially gifted individual having, at one time
or another, brought home those moods to them.
Therefore we need feel no surprise if any individual, peasant or man
of business or abstract thinker, reveal a lack, even a total lack, of
such impressions as I am speaking of; nor even if among those who love
art a great proportion be still incapable of identifying those vague
contemplative emotions from which all art is sprung. It is not merely
the special endowment of eye, ear, hand, not merely what we call
artistic talent, which is exceptional and vested in individuals only.
It takes a surplus of sensitiveness and energy to be determined in
one's moods by natural surroundings instead of solely by one's own
wants or circumstances or business. Now art is born of just this
surplus sensitiveness and energy; it is the response not to the
impressions made by our private ways and means, but to the impressions
made by the ways and means of the visible, sensible universe.
But once produced, art is received, and more or less assimilated, by
the rest of mankind, to whom it gives, in greater or less degree, more
of such sensitiveness and energy than it could otherwise have had. Art
thus calls forth contemplative emotions, otherwise dormant, and
creates in the routine and scramble of individual wants and habits a
sanctuary where the soul stops elbowing and trampling, and being
elbowed and trampled; nay, rather, a holy hill, neither ploughed nor
hunted over, a free high place, in which we can see clearly, breathe
widely, and, for awhile, live harmlessly, serenely, fully.