Wollt ihr hoch auf ihren Flugeln schweben,
Werft die Angst des Irdischen von euch!
Fliehet aus dem engen dumpfen Leben
In des Ideales Reich!
“Das Ideal und das Leben.”
Wouldst thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?
Cast off the earthly burden of the Real;
High from this cramped and dungeoned being, spring
Into the realm of the Ideal.
As some injudicious master lowers and vitiates the taste of the student
by fixing his attention to what he falsely calls the Natural, but which,
in reality, is the Commonplace, and understands not that beauty in
art is created by what Raphael so well describes,--namely, THE IDEA OF
BEAUTY IN THE PAINTER’S OWN MIND; and that in every art, whether its
plastic expression be found in words or marble, colours or sounds, the
servile imitation of Nature is the work of journeymen and tyros,--so in
conduct the man of the world vitiates and lowers the bold enthusiasm of
loftier natures by the perpetual reduction of whatever is generous and
trustful to all that is trite and coarse. A great German poet has well
defined the distinction between discretion and the larger wisdom. In the
last there is a certain rashness which the first disdains,--
“The purblind see but the receding shore, Not that to which the bold
wave wafts them o’er.”
Yet in this logic of the prudent and the worldly there is often a
reasoning unanswerable of its kind.
You must have a feeling,--a faith in whatever is self-sacrificing
and divine, whether in religion or in art, in glory or in love; or
Common-sense will reason you out of the sacrifice, and a syllogism will
debase the Divine to an article in the market.
Every true critic in art, from Aristotle and Pliny, from Winkelman and
Vasari to Reynolds and Fuseli, has sought to instruct the painter that
Nature is not to be copied, but EXALTED; that the loftiest order of art,
selecting only the loftiest combinations, is the perpetual struggle of
Humanity to approach the gods. The great painter, as the great author,
embodies what is POSSIBLE to MAN, it is true, but what is not COMMON
to MANKIND. There is truth in Hamlet; in Macbeth, and his witches; in
Desdemona; in Othello; in Prospero, and in Caliban; there is truth in
the cartoons of Raphael; there is truth in the Apollo, the Antinous,
and the Laocoon. But you do not meet the originals of the words, the
cartoons, or the marble, in Oxford Street or St. James’s. All these, to
return to Raphael, are the creatures of the idea in the artist’s mind.
This idea is not inborn, it has come from an intense study. But that
study has been of the ideal that can be raised from the positive and
the actual into grandeur and beauty. The commonest model becomes full of
exquisite suggestions to him who has formed this idea; a Venus of flesh
and blood would be vulgarised by the imitation of him who has not.
When asked where he got his models, Guido summoned a common porter from
his calling, and drew from a mean original a head of surpassing beauty.
It resembled the porter, but idealised the porter to the hero. It was
true, but it was not real. There are critics who will tell you that the
Boor of Teniers is more true to Nature than the Porter of Guido! The
commonplace public scarcely understand the idealising principle, even in
art; for high art is an acquired taste.
But to come to my comparison. Still less is the kindred principle
comprehended in conduct. And the advice of worldly prudence would as
often deter from the risks of virtue as from the punishments of vice;
yet in conduct, as in art, there is an idea of the great and beautiful,
by which men should exalt the hackneyed and the trite of life. Now
Glyndon felt the sober prudence of Mervale’s reasonings; he recoiled
from the probable picture placed before him, in his devotion to the one
master-talent he possessed, and the one master-passion that, rightly
directed, might purify his whole being as a strong wind purifies the
air.
But though he could not bring himself to decide in the teeth of so
rational a judgment, neither could he resolve at once to abandon the
pursuit of Viola. Fearful of being influenced by Zanoni’s counsels and
his own heart, he had for the last two days shunned an interview with
the young actress. But after a night following his last conversation
with Zanoni, and that we have just recorded with Mervale,--a night
coloured by dreams so distinct as to seem prophetic, dreams that
appeared so to shape his future according to the hints of Zanoni that he
could have fancied Zanoni himself had sent them from the house of sleep
to haunt his pillow,--he resolved once more to seek Viola; and though
without a definite or distinct object, he yielded himself up to the
impulse of his heart.