Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter within the last fifty
years, or since the humour of exhibiting began, that has treated a
story _imaginatively_? By this we mean, upon whom his subject has
so acted, that it has seemed to direct _him_--not to be arranged by
him? Any upon whom its leading or collateral points have impressed
themselves so tyrannically, that he dared not treat it otherwise,
lest he should falsify a revelation? Any that has imparted to his
compositions, not merely so much truth as is enough to convey a story
with clearness, but that individualising property, which should keep
the subject so treated distinct in feature from every other subject,
however similar, and to common apprehensions almost identical; so as
that we might say, this and this part could have found an appropriate
place in no other picture in the world but this? Is there anything in
modern art--we will not demand that it should be equal--but in any
way analogous to what Titian has effected, in that wonderful bringing
together of two times in the "Ariadne," in the National Gallery?
Precipitous, with his reeling Satyr rout about him, re-peopling and
re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury beyond
the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at the
Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the story an
artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud. Guido, in
his harmonious version of it, saw no further. But from the depths of
the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it
contributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. With the
desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his followers, made lucid
with the presence and new offers of a god,--as if unconscious of
Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcerning
pageant--her soul undistracted from Theseus--Ariadne is still pacing
the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence, and in almost the same
local solitude, with which she awoke at day-break to catch the forlorn
last glances of the sail that bore away the Athenian.
Here are two points miraculously co-uniting; fierce society, with
the feeling of solitude still absolute; noon-day revelations, with
the accidents of the dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering; the
_present_ Bacchus, with the _past_ Ariadne; two stories, with double
Time; separate, and harmonising. Had the artist made the woman one
shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had she expressed a
rapture at his advent, where would have been the story of the mighty
desolation of the heart previous? merged in the insipid accident of a
flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance. The broken heart for
Theseus was not lightly to be pieced up by a God.
We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Raphael in
the Vatican. It is the Presentation of the newborn Eve to Adam by the
Almighty. A fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a goodlier
sire perhaps of men since born. But these are matters subordinate to
the conception of the _situation_, displayed in this extraordinary
production. A tolerably modern artist would have been satisfied with
tempering certain raptures of connubial anticipation, with a suitable
acknowledgment to the Giver of the blessing, in the countenance of the
first bridegroom; something like the divided attention of the child
(Adam was here a child man) between the given toy, and the mother
who had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the
first-sight view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade,
considering the awful presence they were in, would have taken care
to subtract something from the expression of the more human passion,
and to heighten the more spiritual one. This would be as much as an
exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset House to last year's
show, has been encouraged to look for. It is obvious to hint at a
lower expression, yet in a picture, that for respects of drawing
and colouring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible within these
art-fostering walls, in which the raptures should be as ninety-nine,
the gratitude as one, or perhaps Zero! By neither the one passion nor
the other has Raphael expounded the situation of Adam. Singly upon his
brow sits the absorbing sense of wonder at the created miracle. The
_moment_ is seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self-conscious
of his art, in which neither of the conflicting emotions--a moment how
abstracted--have had time to spring up, or to battle for indecorous
mastery.--We have seen a landscape of a justly admired neoteric, in
which he aimed at delineating a fiction, one of the most severely
beautiful in antiquity--the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr. ----
justice, he had painted a laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion,
and a veritable dragon (of which a Polypheme by Poussin is somehow a
fac-simile for the situation), looking over into the world shut out
backwards, so that none but a "still-climbing Hercules" could hope to
catch a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses. No conventual porter
could keep his keys better than this custos with the "lidless eyes."
He not only sees that none _do_ intrude into that privacy, but, as
clear as daylight, that none but _Hercules aut Diabolus_ by any manner
of means _can_. So far all is well. We have absolute solitude here
or nowhere. _Ab extra_ the damsels are snug enough. But here the
artist's courage seems to have failed him. He began to pity his pretty
charge, and, to comfort the irksomeness, has peopled their solitude
with a bevy of fair attendants, maids of honour, or ladies of the
bed-chamber, according to the approved etiquette at a court of the
nineteenth century; giving to the whole scene the air of a _fête
champêtre_, if we will but excuse the absence of the gentlemen.
This is well, and Watteauish. But what is become of the solitary
mystery--the
Daughters three,
That sing around the golden tree?
This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated this subject.
The paintings, or rather the stupendous architectural designs, of a
modern artist, have been urged as objections to the theory of our
motto. They are of a character, we confess, to stagger it. His towered
structures are of the highest order of the material sublime. Whether
they were dreams, or transcripts of some elder workmanship--Assyrian
ruins old--restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy our most
stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of the antique
world. It is a pity that they were ever peopled. On that side, the
imagination of the artist halts, and appears defective. Let us examine
the point of the story in the "Belshazzar's Feast." We will introduce
it by an apposite anecdote.
The court historians of the day record, that at the first dinner given
by the late King (then Prince Regent) at the Pavilion, the following
characteristic frolic was played off. The guests were select and
admiring; the banquet profuse and admirable; the lights lustrous and
oriental; the eye was perfectly dazzled with the display of plate,
among which the great gold salt-cellar, brought from the regalia in
the Tower for this especial purpose, itself a tower! stood conspicuous
for its magnitude. And now the Rev. **** the then admired court
Chaplain, was proceeding with the grace, when, at a signal given, the
lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge transparency was discovered,
in which glittered in golden letters--
"BRIGHTON-EARTHQUAKE-SWALLOW-UP-ALIVE!"
Imagine the confusion of the guests; the Georges and garters, jewels,
bracelets, moulted upon the occasion! The fans dropt, and picked up
the next morning by the sly court pages! Mrs. Fitz-what's-her-name
fainting, and the Countess of **** holding the smelling bottle,
till the good-humoured Prince caused harmony to be restored by calling
in fresh candles, and declaring that the whole was nothing but a
pantomime _hoax_, got up by the ingenious Mr. Farley, of Covent
Garden, from hints which his Royal Highness himself had furnished!
Then imagine the infinite applause that followed, the mutual
rallyings, the declarations that "they were not much frightened," of
the assembled galaxy.
The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the appearance of
the transparency in the anecdote. The huddle, the flutter, the bustle,
the escape, the alarm, and the mock alarm; the prettinesses heightened
by consternation; the courtier's fear which was flattery, and the
lady's which was affectation; all that we may conceive to have taken
place in a mob of Brighton courtiers, sympathising with the well-acted
surprise of their sovereign; all this, and no more, is exhibited by
the well-dressed lords and ladies in the Hall of Belus. Just this sort
of consternation we have seen among a flock of disquieted wild geese
at the report only of a gun having gone off!
But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for the
preservation of their persons,--such as we have witnessed at a
theatre, when a slight alarm of fire has been given--an adequate
exponent of a supernatural terror? the way in which the finger of God,
writing judgments, would have been met by the withered conscience?
There is a human fear, and a divine fear. The one is disturbed,
restless, and bent upon escape. The other is bowed down, effortless,
passive. When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz in the visions of the
night, and the hair of his flesh stood up, was it in the thoughts
of the Temanite to ring the bell of his chamber, or to call up the
servants? But let us see in the text what there is to justify all this
huddle of vulgar consternation.
From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar had made a great
feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand.
The golden and silver vessels are gorgeously enumerated, with the
princes, the king's concubines, and his wives. Then follows--
"In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over
against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's
palace; and the _king_ saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the
_king's_ countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so
that the joints of his loins were loosened, and his knees smote one
against another."
This is the plain text. By no hint can it be otherwise inferred, but
that the appearance was solely confined to the fancy of Belshazzar,
that his single brain was troubled. Not a word is spoken of its being
seen by any else there present, not even by the queen herself, who
merely undertakes for the interpretation of the phenomenon, as related
to her, doubtless, by her husband. The lords are simply said to be
astonished; _i.e._ at the trouble and the change of countenance in
their sovereign. Even the prophet does not appear to have seen the
scroll, which the king saw. He recals it only, as Joseph did the Dream
to the King of Egypt. "Then was the part of the hand sent from him
[the Lord], and this writing was written." He speaks of the phantasm
as past.
Then what becomes of this needless multiplication of the miracle? this
message to a royal conscience, singly expressed--for it was said,
"thy kingdom is divided,"--simultaneously impressed upon the fancies
of a thousand courtiers, who were implied in it neither directly nor
grammatically? But admitting the artist's own version of the story,
and that the sight was seen also by the thousand courtiers--let it
have been visible to all Babylon--as the knees of Belshazzar were
shaken, and his countenance troubled, even so would the knees of every
man in Babylon, and their countenances, as of an individual man, been
troubled; bowed, bent down, so would they have remained, stupor-fixed,
with no thought of struggling with that inevitable judgment.
Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to be shown in every
picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brilliant individualities
in a "Marriage at Cana," by Veronese, or Titian, to the very texture
and colour of the wedding garments, the ring glittering upon the
bride's fingers, the metal and fashion of the wine pots; for at such
seasons there is leisure and luxury to be curious. But in a "day of
judgment," or in a "day of lesser horrors, yet divine," as at the
impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the actual eye of
an agent or patient in the immediate scene would see, only in masses
and indistinction. Not only the female attire and jewelry exposed
to the critical eye of the fashion, as minutely as the dresses in
a lady's magazine, in the criticised picture,--but perhaps the
curiosities of anatomical science, and studied diversities of posture
in the falling angels and sinners of Michael Angelo,--have no business
in their great subjects. There was no leisure of them.
By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at their
true conclusions; by not showing the actual appearances, that is, all
that was to be seen at any given moment by an indifferent eye, but
only what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing or suffering
of some portentous action. Suppose the moment of the swallowing up of
Pompeii. There they were to be seen--houses, columns, architectural
proportions, differences of public and private buildings, men and
women at their standing occupations, the diversified thousand
postures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion truly, but physically
they were visible. But what eye saw them at that eclipsing moment,
which reduces confusion to a kind of unity, and when the senses
are upturned from their proprieties, when sight and hearing are a
feeling only? A thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure to
contemplate the weaver fixed standing at his shuttle, the baker at his
oven, and to turn over with antiquarian coolness the pots and pans of
Pompeii.
"Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeah, and thou, Moon, in the valley of
Ajalon." Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism, in his conception,
sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with the out-stretched arm,
and the greater and lesser light obsequious? Doubtless there were to
be seen hill and dale, and chariots and horsemen, on open plain, or
winding by secret defiles, and all the circumstances and stratagems
of war. But whose eyes would have been conscious of this array at the
interposition of the synchronic miracle? Yet in the picture of this
subject by the artist of the "Belshazzar's Feast"--no ignoble work
either--the marshalling and landscape of the war is everything, the
miracle sinks into an anecdote of the day; and the eye may "dart
through rank and file traverse" for some minutes, before it shall
discover, among his armed followers, _which is Joshua_! Not modern art
alone, but ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, can be
detected erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The world
has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, transcending the
figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes, in the great picture at
Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly horror
at itself struggles with newly-apprehending gratitude at second life
bestowed. It cannot forget that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt
that it is a body. It has to tell of the world of spirits.--Was it
from a feeling, that the crowd of half-impassioned by-standers, and
the still more irrelevant herd of passers-by at a distance, who have
not heard or but faintly have been told of the passing miracle,
admirable as they are in design and hue--for it is a glorified
work--do not respond adequately to the action--that the single figure
of the Lazarus has been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty
Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater half of the
interest? Now that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual
scope of the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound
of it had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood
to deny; but would they see them? or can the mind in the conception of
it admit of such unconcerning objects? can it think of them at all? or
what associating league to the imagination can there be between the
seers, and the seers not, of a presential miracle?
Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we will ask
whether, in the present low state of expectation, the patron would
not, or ought not to be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure
recumbent under wide-stretched oaks? Disseat those woods, and place
the same figure among fountains, and falls of pellucid water, and
you have a--Naiad! Not so in a rough print we have seen after Julio
Romano, we think--for it is long since--_there_, by no process, with
mere change of scene, could the figure have reciprocated characters.
Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful in
convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural tree, co-twisting
with its limbs her own, till both seemed either--these, animated
branches; those, disanimated members--yet the animal and vegetable
lives sufficiently kept distinct--_his_ Dryad lay--an approximation of
two natures, which to conceive, it must be seen; analogous to, not the
same with, the delicacies of Ovidian transformations.
To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial comprehension, the
most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness. The
large eye of genius saw in the meanness of present objects their
capabilities of treatment from their relations to some grand
Past or Future. How has Raphael--we must still linger about the
Vatican--treated the humble craft of the ship-builder, in _his_
"Building of the Ark?" It is in that scriptural series, to which we
have referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old graphic
sketches of them which we possess, seem to be of a higher and more
poetic grade than even the Cartoons. The dim of sight are the
timid and the shrinking. There is a cowardice in modern art. As
the Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge's friend made the prophetic guess
at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael Angelo
collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and a Cornuto; so
from this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it would instinctively
turn away, as from one incapable of investiture with any grandeur. The
dock-yards at Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The depôt
at Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye. But
not to the nautical preparations in the ship-yards of Civita Vecchia
did Raphael look for instructions, when he imagined the Building of
the Vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks of the species of
drowned mankind. In the intensity of the action, he keeps ever out of
sight the meanness of the operation. There is the Patriarch, in calm
forethought, and with holy prescience, giving directions. And there
are his agents--the solitary but sufficient Three--hewing, sawing,
every one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus; under some
instinctive rather than technical guidance; giant-muscled; every one a
Hercules, or liker to those Vulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns
under Mongibello wrought in fire--Brontes, and black Steropes, and
Pyracmon. So work the workmen that should repair a world!
Artists again err in the confounding of _poetic_ with _pictorial
subjects_. In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly
everything, the unseen qualities as nothing. Othello's colour--the
infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff--do they haunt us
perpetually in the reading? or are they obtruded upon our conceptions
one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration at the
respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character? But in
a picture Othello is _always_ a Blackamoor; and the other only Plump
Jack. Deeply corporealised, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling
fetters of externality, must be the mind, to which, in its better
moments, the image of the high-souled, high-intelligenced Quixote--the
errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse--has never
presented itself, divested from the unhallowed accompaniment of a
Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Rosinante. That man has read
his book by halves; he has laughed, mistaking his author's purport,
which was--tears. The artist that pictures Quixote (and it is in this
degrading point that he is every season held up at our Exhibitions)
in the shallow hope of exciting mirth, would have joined the rabble
at the heels of his starved steed. We wish not to see _that_
counterfeited, which we would not have wished to see in the reality.
Conscious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on hearing
that his withered person was passing, would have stepped over his
threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and the "strange
bed-fellows which misery brings a man acquainted with?" Shade of
Cervantes! who in thy Second Part could put into the mouth of thy
Quixote those high aspirations of a super-chivalrous gallantry, where
he replies to one of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would
spoil their pretty networks, and inviting him to be a guest with them,
in accents like these: "Truly, fairest Lady, Actæon was not more
astonished when he saw Diana bathing herself at the fountain, than
I have been in beholding your beauty: I commend the manner of your
pastime, and thank you for your kind offers; and, if I may serve
you, so I may be sure you will be obeyed, you may command me: for my
profession is this, To shew myself thankful, and a doer of good to all
sorts of people, especially of the rank that your person shows you to
be; and if those nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground,
should take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass
through, rather than break them: and (he adds,) that you may give
credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that promiseth you
this, is Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath come to
your hearing." Illustrious Romancer! were the "fine frenzies," which
possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this
Second Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving Men? to
be monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men? Was
that pitiable infirmity, which in thy First Part misleads him, _always
from within_, into half-ludicrous, but more than half-compassionable
and admirable errors, not infliction enough from heaven, that men by
studied artifices must devise and practise upon the humour, to inflame
where they should soothe it? Why, Goneril would have blushed to
practise upon the abdicated king at this rate, and the she-wolf Regan
not have endured to play the pranks upon his fled wits, which thou
hast made thy Quixote suffer in Duchesses' halls, and at the hands of
that unworthy nobleman.[1]
In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most
consummate artist in the Book way that the world hath yet seen,
to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the
character without relaxing; so as absolutely that they shall suffer no
alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever obtrudes
itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh; or not, rather,
to indulge a contrary emotion?--Cervantes, stung, perchance, by the
relish with which _his_ Reading Public had received the fooleries of
the man, more to their palates than the generosities of the master, in
the sequel let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, and
sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his contemporaries. We know
that in the present day the Knight has fewer admirers than the Squire.
Anticipating, what did actually happen to him--as afterwards it did
to his scarce inferior follower, the Author of "Guzman de
Alfarache"--that some less knowing hand would prevent him by a
spurious Second Part: and judging, that it would be easier for his
competitor to out-bid him in the comicalities, than in the _romance_,
of his work, he abandoned his Knight, and has fairly set up the Squire
for his Hero. For what else has he unsealed the eyes of Sancho; and
instead of that twilight state of semi-insanity--the madness at
second-hand--the contagion, caught from a stronger mind infected--that
war between native cunning, and hereditary deference, with which he
has hitherto accompanied his master--two for a pair almost--does he
substitute a downright Knave, with open eyes, for his own ends only
following a confessed Madman; and offering at one time to lay, if not
actually laying, hands upon him! From the moment that Sancho loses his
reverence, Don Quixote is become a--treatable lunatic. Our artists
handle him accordingly.
[Footnote 1: Yet from this Second Part, our cried-up pictures are
mostly selected; the waiting-women with beards, &c.]