THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES
Hilda descended, day by day, from her dove-cote, and went to one or
another of the great old palaces,--the Pamfili Doria, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, the Borghese, the Colonna,--where the doorkeepers knew her
well, and offered her a kindly greeting. But they shook their heads and
sighed, on observing the languid step with which the poor girl toiled up
the grand marble staircases. There was no more of that cheery alacrity
with which she used to flit upward, as if her doves had lent her their
wings, nor of that glow of happy spirits which had been wont to set the
tarnished gilding of the picture frames and the shabby splendor of the
furniture all a-glimmer, as she hastened to her congenial and delightful
toil.
An old German artist, whom she often met in the galleries, once laid a
paternal hand on Hilda’s head, and bade her go back to her own country.
“Go back soon,” he said, with kindly freedom and directness, “or you
will go never more. And, if you go not, why, at least, do you spend the
whole summer-time in Rome? The air has been breathed too often, in so
many thousand years, and is not wholesome for a little foreign
flower like you, my child, a delicate wood-anemone from the western
forest-land.”
“I have no task nor duty anywhere but here,” replied Hilda. “The old
masters will not set me free!”
“Ah, those old masters!” cried the veteran artist, shaking his head.
“They are a tyrannous race! You will find them of too mighty a spirit to
be dealt with, for long together, by the slender hand, the fragile mind,
and the delicate heart, of a young girl. Remember that Raphael’s genius
wore out that divinest painter before half his life was lived. Since you
feel his influence powerfully enough to reproduce his miracles so well,
it will assuredly consume you like a flame.”
“That might have been my peril once,” answered Hilda. “It is not so
now.”
“Yes, fair maiden, you stand in that peril now!” insisted the kind old
man; and he added, smiling, yet in a melancholy vein, and with a
German grotesqueness of idea, “Some fine morning, I shall come to the
Pinacotheca of the Vatican, with my palette and my brushes, and shall
look for my little American artist that sees into the very heart of the
grand pictures! And what shall I behold? A heap of white ashes on the
marble floor, just in front of the divine Raphael’s picture of the
Madonna da Foligno! Nothing more, upon my word! The fire, which the poor
child feels so fervently, will have gone into her innermost, and burnt
her quite up!”
“It would be a happy martyrdom!” said Hilda, faintly smiling. “But I
am far from being worthy of it. What troubles me much, among other
troubles, is quite the reverse of what you think. The old masters hold
me here, it is true, but they no longer warm me with their influence.
It is not flame consuming, but torpor chilling me, that helps to make me
wretched.”
“Perchance, then,” said the German, looking keenly at her, “Raphael has
a rival in your heart? He was your first love; but young maidens are not
always constant, and one flame is sometimes extinguished by another!”
Hilda shook her head, and turned away. She had spoken the truth,
however, in alleging that torpor, rather than fire, was what she had
to dread. In those gloomy days that had befallen her, it was a great
additional calamity that she felt conscious of the present dimness of an
insight which she once possessed in more than ordinary measure. She had
lost--and she trembled lest it should have departed forever--the faculty
of appreciating those great works of art, which heretofore had made so
large a portion of her happiness. It was no wonder.
A picture, however admirable the painter’s art, and wonderful his power,
requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with
the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you
must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you.
There is always the necessity of helping out the painter’s art with your
own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities
shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must
be put so entirely under his control, and work along with him to such
an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical,
instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits
of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating.
Like all revelations of the better life, the adequate perception of a
great work of art demands a gifted simplicity of vision. In this, and
in her self-surrender, and the depth and tenderness of her sympathy, had
lain Hilda’s remarkable power as a copyist of the old masters. And now
that her capacity of emotion was choked up with a horrible experience,
it inevitably followed that she should seek in vain, among those friends
so venerated and beloved, for the marvels which they had heretofore
shown her. In spite of a reverence that lingered longer than her
recognition, their poor worshipper became almost an infidel, and
sometimes doubted whether the pictorial art be not altogether a
delusion.
For the first time in her life, Hilda now grew acquainted with that
icy demon of weariness, who haunts great picture galleries. He is
a plausible Mephistopheles, and possesses the magic that is the
destruction of all other magic. He annihilates color, warmth, and, more
especially, sentiment and passion, at a touch. If he spare anything, it
will be some such matter as an earthen pipkin, or a bunch of herrings by
Teniers; a brass kettle, in which you can see your rice, by Gerard Douw;
a furred robe, or the silken texture of a mantle, or a straw hat, by Van
Mieris; or a long-stalked wineglass, transparent and full of shifting
reflection, or a bit of bread and cheese, or an over-ripe peach with
a fly upon it, truer than reality itself, by the school of Dutch
conjurers. These men, and a few Flemings, whispers the wicked demon,
were the only painters. The mighty Italian masters, as you deem them,
were not human, nor addressed their work to human sympathies, but to
a false intellectual taste, which they themselves were the first to
create. Well might they call their doings “art,” for they substituted
art instead of nature. Their fashion is past, and ought, indeed, to have
died and been buried along with them.
Then there is such a terrible lack of variety in their subjects. The
churchmen, their great patrons, suggested most of their themes, and
a dead mythology the rest. A quarter part, probably, of any large
collection of pictures consists of Virgins and infant Christs, repeated
over and over again in pretty much an identical spirit, and generally
with no more mixture of the Divine than just enough to spoil them as
representations of maternity and childhood, with which everybody’s heart
might have something to do. Half of the other pictures are Magdalens,
Flights into Egypt, Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, Pietas,
Noli-me-tangeres, or the Sacrifice of Abraham, or martyrdoms of saints,
originally painted as altar-pieces, or for the shrines of chapels, and
woefully lacking the accompaniments which the artist haft in view.
The remainder of the gallery comprises mythological subjects, such as
nude Venuses, Ledas, Graces, and, in short, a general apotheosis of
nudity, once fresh and rosy perhaps, but yellow and dingy in our day,
and retaining only a traditionary charm. These impure pictures are from
the same illustrious and impious hands that adventured to call before
us the august forms of Apostles and Saints, the Blessed Mother of the
Redeemer, and her Son, at his death, and in his glory, and even the
awfulness of Him, to whom the martyrs, dead a thousand years ago, have
not yet dared to raise their eyes. They seem to take up one task or the
other w the disrobed woman whom they call Venus, or the type of highest
and tenderest womanhood in the mother of their Saviour with equal
readiness, but to achieve the former with far more satisfactory success.
If an artist sometimes produced a picture of the Virgin, possessing
warmth enough to excite devotional feelings, it was probably the object
of his earthly love to whom he thus paid the stupendous and fearful
homage of setting up her portrait to be worshipped, not figuratively as
a mortal, but by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards
Divinity. And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or
receive any of his Virgins as heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing,
for example, the Fornarina of the Barberini Palace, and feeling how
sensual the artist must have been to paint such a brazen trollop of his
own accord, and lovingly? Would the Blessed Mary reveal herself to his
spiritual vision, and favor him with sittings alternately with that type
of glowing earthliness, the Fornarina?
But no sooner have we given expression to this irreverent criticism,
than a throng of spiritual faces look reproachfully upon us. We see
cherubs by Raphael, whose baby innocence could only have been nursed
in paradise; angels by Raphael as innocent as they, but whose serene
intelligence embraces both earthly and celestial things; madonnas by
Raphael, on whose lips he has impressed a holy and delicate reserve,
implying sanctity on earth, and into whose soft eyes he has thrown a
light which he never could have imagined except by raising his own
eyes with a pure aspiration heavenward. We remember, too, that divinest
countenance in the Transfiguration, and withdraw all that we have said.
Poor Hilda, however, in her gloomiest moments, was never guilty of the
high treason suggested in the above remarks against her beloved and
honored Raphael. She had a faculty (which, fortunately for themselves,
pure women often have) of ignoring all moral blotches in a character
that won her admiration. She purified the objects; of her regard by the
mere act of turning such spotless eyes upon them.
Hilda’s despondency, nevertheless, while it dulled her perceptions in
one respect, had deepened them in another; she saw beauty less vividly,
but felt truth, or the lack of it, more profoundly. She began to suspect
that some, at least, of her venerated painters, had left an inevitable
hollowness in their works, because, in the most renowned of them, they
essayed to express to the world what they had not in their own souls.
They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually
playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering the
features of some venal beauty to be enshrined in the holiest places. A
deficiency of earnestness and absolute truth is generally discoverable
in Italian pictures, after the art had become consummate. When you
demand what is deepest, these painters have not wherewithal to respond.
They substituted a keen intellectual perception, and a marvellous knack
of external arrangement, instead of the live sympathy and sentiment
which should have been their inspiration. And hence it happens, that
shallow and worldly men are among the best critics of their works; a
taste for pictorial art is often no more than a polish upon the hard
enamel of an artificial character. Hilda had lavished her whole heart
upon it, and found (just as if she had lavished it upon a human idol)
that the greater part was thrown away.
For some of the earlier painters, however, she still retained much
of her former reverence. Fra Angelico, she felt, must have breathed a
humble aspiration between every two touches of his brush, in order to
have made the finished picture such a visible prayer as we behold it, in
the guise of a prim angel, or a saint without the human nature. Through
all these dusky centuries, his works may still help a struggling heart
to pray. Perugino was evidently a devout man; and the Virgin, therefore,
revealed herself to him in loftier and sweeter faces of celestial
womanhood, and yet with a kind of homeliness in their human mould, than
even the genius of Raphael could imagine. Sodoma, beyond a question,
both prayed and wept, while painting his fresco, at Siena, of Christ
bound to a pillar.
In her present need and hunger for a spiritual revelation, Hilda felt a
vast and weary longing to see this last-mentioned picture once again. It
is inexpressibly touching. So weary is the Saviour and utterly worn out
with agony, that his lips have fallen apart from mere exhaustion; his
eyes seem to be set; he tries to lean his head against the pillar, but
is kept from sinking down upon the ground only by the cords that
bind him. One of the most striking effects produced is the sense of
loneliness. You behold Christ deserted both in heaven and earth; that
despair is in him which wrung forth the saddest utterance man ever made,
“Why hast Thou forsaken me?” Even in this extremity, however, he is
still divine. The great and reverent painter has not suffered the Son of
God to be merely an object of pity, though depicting him in a state so
profoundly pitiful. He is rescued from it, we know not how,--by nothing
less than miracle,--by a celestial majesty and beauty, and some quality
of which these are the outward garniture. He is as much, and as visibly,
our Redeemer, there bound, there fainting, and bleeding from the
scourge, with the cross in view, as if he sat on his throne of glory in
the heavens! Sodoma, in this matchless picture, has done more towards
reconciling the incongruity of Divine Omnipotence and outraged,
suffering Humanity, combined in one person, than the theologians ever
did.
This hallowed work of genius shows what pictorial art, devoutly
exercised, might effect in behalf of religious truth; involving, as it
does, deeper mysteries of revelation, and bringing them closer to man’s
heart, and making him tenderer to be impressed by them, than the most
eloquent words of preacher or prophet.
It is not of pictures like the above that galleries, in Rome or
elsewhere, are made up, but of productions immeasurably below them,
and requiring to be appreciated by a very different frame of mind. Few
amateurs are endowed with a tender susceptibility to the sentiment of
a picture; they are not won from an evil life, nor anywise morally
improved by it. The love of art, therefore, differs widely in its
influence from the love of nature; whereas, if art had not strayed away
from its legitimate paths and aims, it ought to soften and sweeten
the lives of its worshippers, in even a more exquisite degree than the
contemplation of natural objects. But, of its own potency, it has no
such effect; and it fails, likewise, in that other test of its moral
value which poor Hilda was now involuntarily trying upon it. It cannot
comfort the heart in affliction; it grows dim when the shadow is upon
us.
So the melancholy girl wandered through those long galleries, and over
the mosaic pavements of vast, solitary saloons, wondering what had
become of the splendor that used to beam upon her from the walls. She
grew sadly critical, and condemned almost everything that she was wont
to admire. Heretofore, her sympathy went deeply into a picture, yet
seemed to leave a depth which it was inadequate to sound; now, on the
contrary, her perceptive faculty penetrated the canvas like a steel
probe, and found but a crust of paint over an emptiness. Not that she
gave up all art as worthless; only it had lost its consecration. One
picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of
mankind, from generation to generation, until the colors fade and
blacken out of sight, or the canvas rot entirely away. For the rest, let
them be piled in garrets, just as the tolerable poets are shelved, when
their little day is over. Is a painter more sacred than a poet?
And as for these galleries of Roman palaces, they were to Hilda,
--though she still trod them with the forlorn hope of getting back her
sympathies,--they were drearier than the whitewashed walls of a prison
corridor. If a magnificent palace were founded, as was generally the
case, on hardened guilt and a stony conscience,--if the prince or
cardinal who stole the marble of his vast mansion from the Coliseum, or
some Roman temple, had perpetrated still deadlier crimes, as probably he
did,--there could be no fitter punishment for his ghost than to wander,
perpetually through these long suites of rooms, over the cold marble or
mosaic of the floors, growing chiller at every eternal footstep. Fancy
the progenitor of the Dorias thus haunting those heavy halls where
his posterity reside! Nor would it assuage his monotonous misery, but
increase it manifold, to be compelled to scrutinize those masterpieces
of art, which he collected with so much cost and care, and gazing at
them unintelligently, still leave a further portion of his vital warmth
at every one.
Such, or of a similar kind, is the torment of those who seek to enjoy
pictures in an uncongenial mood. Every haunter of picture galleries,
we should imagine, must have experienced it, in greater or less degree;
Hilda never till now, but now most bitterly.
And now, for the first time in her lengthened absence, comprising
so many years of her young life, she began to be acquainted with the
exile’s pain. Her pictorial imagination brought up vivid scenes of her
native village, with its great old elm-trees; and the neat, comfortable
houses, scattered along the wide, grassy margin of its street, and the
white meeting-house, and her mother’s very door, and the stream of gold
brown water, which her taste for color had kept flowing, all this
while, through her remembrance. O dreary streets, palaces, churches, and
imperial sepulchres of hot and dusty Rome, with the muddy Tiber eddying
through the midst, instead of the gold-brown rivulet! How she pined
under this crumbly magnificence, as if it were piled all upon her
human heart! How she yearned for that native homeliness, those familiar
sights, those faces which she had known always, those days that never
brought any strange event; that life of sober week-days, and a solemn
sabbath at the close! The peculiar fragrance of a flower-bed, which
Hilda used to cultivate, came freshly to her memory, across the windy
sea, and through the long years since the flowers had withered. Her
heart grew faint at the hundred reminiscences that were awakened by that
remembered smell of dead blossoms; it was like opening a drawer, where
many things were laid away, and every one of them scented with lavender
and dried rose-leaves.
We ought not to betray Hilda’s secret; but it is the truth, that being
so sad, and so utterly alone, and in such great need of sympathy, her
thoughts sometimes recurred to the sculptor. Had she met him now, her
heart, indeed, might not have been won, but her confidence would have
flown to him like a bird to its nest. One summer afternoon, especially,
Hilda leaned upon the battlements of her tower, and looked over Rome
towards the distant mountains, whither Kenyon had told her that he was
going.
“O that he were here!” she sighed; “I perish under this terrible secret;
and he might help me to endure it. O that he were here!”
That very afternoon, as the reader may remember, Kenyon felt
Hilda’s hand pulling at the silken cord that was connected with his
heart-strings, as he stood looking towards Rome from the battlements of
Monte Beni.