It is a legend, one of the finest of Semitic legends; and between legend
and myth there is as great a gulf as between Jew and Greek. I believe
there are no myths proper to Israel--I do not see how such magnificent
egoists could contract to the necessary state of awe--and I do not know
that there are any legends proper to Greece which are divorced from real
myths. For where a myth is the incarnation of the spirit of natural fact,
a legend is the embellishment of an historical event: a very different
thing. A natural fact is permanent and elemental, an historical event is
transient and superficial. Take one instance out of a score. The rainbow
links heaven and earth. Iris then, to the myth-making Greek, was Jove's
messenger, intermediary between God and Man. That is to incarnate a
constant, natural fact. Plato afterwards, making her daughter of Thaumas,
incarnated a fact, psychological, but none the less constant, none the
less natural. But to say, as the legend-loving Jew said, that Noah floated
his ark over a drowning world and secured for his posterity a standing
covenant with God, Who then and once for all set His bow in the heavens;
that is to indicate, somewhere, in the dim backward and abysm of time, an
historical event. The rainbow is suffered as the skirt of the robe of
Noah, who was an ancestor of Israel. So the Judith poem may be a decorated
event, or it may be the barest history in a splendid epical setting: the
point to remember is that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative
art. The artist, in the language of Neo-Platonism, is a demiurge; he only
of men can convert dead things into life. And now we will go into the
Uffizi.
Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of
amaze most people have who look for the first time at Botticelli's
_Judith_ tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, her
steadfast maid dogging with intent patient eyes every step she takes. You
say it is flippant, affected, pedantic. For answer, I refer you to the
sage himself, who, from his point of view--that painting may fairly deal
with a chapter of history--is perfectly right. The prevailing strain of
the story is the strength of weakness--_ex dulci fortitude_, to
invert the old enigma. "O God, O my God, hear me also, a widow. Break down
their stateliness by the hand of a woman!" It is the refrain that runs
through the whole history of Israel, that reasonable complacency of a
little people in their God-fraught destiny. And, withal, a streak of
savage spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to
death. There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too. So "she smote twice
upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him, and
tumbled his body down from the bed." Ho! what a fate for the emissary of
the Great King. Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox, "The Lord hath
smitten him by the hand of a woman!" That is it: the amazing, thrilling
antithesis insisted on over and over again by the old Hebrew bard. "Her
sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind prisoner, and the
fauchion passed through his neck." That is the _leit-motif_: Sandro
the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it, to the no small comfort of
Mr. Ruskin and his men. Giuditta, dainty, blue-eyed, a girl still and
three years a widow, flits homeward through a spring landscape of grey and
green and the smile of a milky sky, being herself the dominant of the
chord, with her bough of slipt olive and her jagged scimitar, with her
pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed, and her yellow curls floating
over her shoulders. On her slim feet are the sandals that ravished his
eyes; all her maiden bravery is dancing and fluttering like harebells in
the wind. Behind her plods the slave-girl folded in an orange scarf,
bearing that shapeless, nameless burden of hers, the head of the grim Lord
Holofernes. Oh, for that, it is the legend itself! For look at the girl's
eyes. What does their dreamy solemnity mean if not, "the Lord hath smitten
him by the hand of a woman"? One other delicate bit of symbolising he has
allowed himself, which I may not omit. You are to see by whom this deed
was done: by a woman who has unsexed herself. Judith is absorbed in her
awful service; her robe trails on the ground and clings about her knees;
she is unconscious of the hindrance. The gates of Bethulia are in sight,
the Chaldean horsemen are abroad, but she has no anxiety to escape. She is
swift because her life just now courses swiftly; but there is no haste.
The maid, you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, and steps
out the more lustily for it.
So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr. Ruskin, reader of
pictures. What says Botticelli the painter? Had he no instincts to tell
him that his art could have little to say to a legend? Or that a legend
might be the subject of an epic (here, indeed, was an epic ready made),
might, under conditions, be the subject of a drama; but could not, under
any conditions, be alone the subject of a picture? I don't for a moment
suggest that he had, or that any artist ever goes to work in this double-
entry, methodical way; but are we entitled to say that he was not
influenced by his predilections, his determinations as a draughtsman, when
he squared himself to illustrate the Bible? We say that the subject of a
picture is the spirit of natural fact. If Botticelli was a painter,
_that_ is what he must have looked for, and must have found, in every
picture he painted. Where, then, was he to get his natural facts in the
story of Judith? What is, in that story, the natural, essential (as
opposed to the historical, fleeting) fact? It is murder. Judith's deed was
what the old Scots law incisively calls _slauchter_. It may be
glossed over as assassination or even execution--in fact, in Florence,
where Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so called:
it remains, however, just murder. Botticelli, not shirking the position at
all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or essence
swiftness and stealth. Chaucer, let us note, had been of the same mind:
"The smyler with the kayf under his cloke,"
and so on, in lines not to be matched for hasty and dreadful suggestion.
Swiftness and stealth, the ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab,
are the standing elements of murder: pare off all the rest, you come down
to that. Your staring looks, your blood, your "chirking," are accidentals.
They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), but the horror of
sudden death is above them: a man may strangle with his thoughts cleaner
than with his pair of hands. And as "matter" is but the stuff wherewith
Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, when we flout or
mangle it, so it is against the high dignity of Art to insist upon the
carrion she must use. She will press, here the terror, there the radiance,
of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it in her face, to add
mentally the poor stage properties we have grown to trust. No blood, if
you please. Therefore, in Botticelli's _Judith_, nothing but the
essentials are insisted on; the rest we instantly imagine, but it is not
there to be sensed. The panel is in a tremor. So swift and secret is
Judith, so furtive the maid, we need no hurrying horsemen to remind us of
her oath,--"Hear me, and I will do a thing which shall go throughout all
generations to the children of our nation." Sudden death is in the air;
nature has been outraged. But there is no drop of blood--the thin scarlet
line along the sword-edge is a symbol if you will--the pale head in the
cloth is a mere "thing": yet we all know what has been done. Mr. Ruskin is
wrong to dwell here upon the heroism of the heroine, the beneficence of
the crime, the exhilaration of the patriot; he is traducing the painter by
so praising the poet All those things may be there; and why should they
not? But it is a pity to insist upon them until you have no space for the
pictorial something which is there too, and makes the picture.
Other _Judiths_ there are; two here, one next door in the Pitti, any
number scattered over the galleries of Europe. There are Jacopo Palma of
Venice and Allori of Florence who used the old story, the one to
perpetuate a fat blonde, the other a handsome actress in a "strong"
situation; there is Sodoma; there are Horace Vernet and the moderns, the
Wests and Haydons of our grandfathers. It is a pet subject of the Salon.
These men have vulgarised an epic, and smirched poetry and painting alike
for the sake of a tawdry sensation. But enough: let us look at one more.
Mantegna's is worth looking at. It is a pen drawing, often repeated, best
known by the fine engraving he finally made of it. I think it Is the best
murder picture in the world. To begin with, the literary interest of the
story is practically gone. This wild, terrible, beautiful woman may be
Judith if you choose: she might be Medea or Agave, or Salome, or the
Lucrezia Borgia of popular fancy and Donizetti. The fact is she is part of
a scheme whose object is the æsthetic aspect of murder--murder considered
by one of the fine arts. Andrea was able, and I know not that anybody else
of his day could have been able, to contemplate murder purely objectively,
with no thought of its ethical relations. Botticelli had been fired by the
heroism and the moral grandeur of the special circumstances of a given
case: down they went into his picture with what rightly belonged to it.
There is none of that here. And Mantegna makes other distinctions in the
field common to both of them. Murder, for him, did not essentially subsist
in its shocking suddenness; it held something more specific, a witchery of
its own, a _macabre_ fascination, a mystery. Lionardo felt it when he
drew his _Medusa_; Shelley wrote it down "the tempestuous loveliness
of terror." Thus it had, for Mantegna, an unique emotional habit which set
it off from other vice and gave it a positive, appreciable, æsthetic value
of its own. With even more unerrancy than Botticelli, he gripped the
adjectival and qualifying function of his art. He saw that crime, too, had
its pictorial side. When Keats, writing of the Lamia sloughing her snake-
folds, tells us how--
"She writhed about, convulsed--with scarlet pain";
or when, of organ music, he says--
"Up aloft
The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide,"
he is simply, in his own art and with his proper methods, getting
precisely the same kind of effect; he is incarnating the soul of a fact.
And so Mantegna, with his Roman kindness for whatever had breath and
vigour and boldness of design, carved his _Judith_ on the lines of a
Vestal Virgin, and gave her the rapt, dæmonic features of the Tragic Muse.
And, with his full share of that unhealthy craving for the mere nastiness
of crime, that Aminatrait which distinguished the later Empire and its
correlate the Renaissance, he drew together the elements of his picture to
express an eminently characteristic conception of curious murder. What
amplitude of outline; what severe grace of drapery! And what mad
affectation of attention to the ghastly baggage she is preparing for her
flight! I can only instance for a parallel the pitiful case of the young
Ophelia, decked with flowers and weeds, and faltering in her pretty treble
songs about lechery and dead bodies. It needs strong men to do these
things; men who have lived out all that the world can offer them of heaven
and hell, and, with the tolerance of maturity, are in the mind to see
something worth a thought in either. There is in murder something more
horrible than blood,--the spirit that breeds blood and plays with it. M.
Jan van Beers and his kindred of the dissecting-room and accidents'-ward
are passed by Mantegna, who gives no vulgar illusion of gaping wounds and
jetting blood; but, instead, holds up to us a beautiful woman daintily
fingering a corpse.
VII
QUATTROCENTISTERIA
_(How Sandro Botticelli saw Simonetta in the Spring)_
Up at Fiesole, among the olives and chestnuts which cloud the steeps, the
magnificent Lorenzo was entertaining his guests on a morning in April. The
olives were just whitening to silver; they stretched in a trembling sea
down the slope. Beyond lay Florence, misty and golden; and round about
were the mossy hills, cut sharp and definite against a grey-blue sky,
printed with starry buildings and sober ranks of cypress. The sun catching
the mosaics of San Miniato and the brazen cross on the fagade, made them
shine like sword-blades in the quiver of the heat between. For the valley
was just a lake of hot air, hot and murky--"fever weather," said the
people in the streets--with a glaring summer sun let in between two long
spells of fog. 'Twas unnatural at that season, _via_; but the blessed
Saints sent the weather and one could only be careful what one was about
at sundown.
Up at the villa, with brisk morning airs rustling overhead, in the cool
shades of trees and lawns, it was pleasant to lie still, watching these
things, while a silky young exquisite sang to his lute a not too audacious
ballad about Selvaggia, or Becchina and the saucy Prior of Sant' Onofrio.
He sang well too, that dark-eyed boy; the girl at whose feet he was
crouched was laughing and blushing at once; and, being very fair, she
blushed hotly. She dared not raise her eyes to look into his, and he knew
it and was quietly measuring his strength--it was quite a comedy! At each
wanton _refrain_ he lowered his voice to a whisper and bent a little
forward. And the girl's laughter became hysterical; she was shaking with
the effort to control herself. At last she looked up with a sort of sob in
her breath and saw his mocking smile and the gleam of the wild beast in
his eyes. She grew white, rose hastily and turned away to join a group of
ladies sitting apart. A man with a heavy, rather sullen face and a bush of
yellow hair falling over his forehead in a wave, was standing aside
watching all this. He folded his arms and scowled under his big brows; and
when the girl moved away his eyes followed her.
The lad ended his song in a broad sarcasm amid bursts of laughter and
applause. The Magnificent, sitting in his carved chair, nursed his sallow
face and smiled approval, "My brother boasts his invulnerability," he
said, turning to his neighbour, "let him look to it, Messer Cupido will
have him yet. Already, we can see, he has been let into some of the
secrets of the bower," The man bowed and smiled deferentially, "Signer
Giuliano has all the qualities to win the love of ladies, and to retain
it. Doubtless he awaits his destiny. The Wise Man has said that Beauty..."
The young poet enlarged on his text with some fire in his thin
cheeks, while the company kept very silent. It was much to their liking;
even Giuliano was absorbed; he sat on the ground clasping one knee between
his hands, smiling upwards into vacancy, as a man does whose imagination
is touched. Lorenzo nursed his sallow face and beat time to the orator's
cadences with his foot; he, too, was abstracted and smiling. At the end he
spoke: "Our Marsilio himself had never said nobler words, my Agnolo. The
mantle of the Attic prophet has descended indeed upon this Florence. And
Beauty, as thon sayest, is from heaven. But where shall it be found here
below, and how discerned?" The man of the heavy jowl was standing with
folded arms, looking from under his brows at the group of girls. Lorenzo
saw everything; he noticed him. "Our Sandro will tell us it is yonder. The
Star of Genoa shines over Florence and our poor little constellations are
gone out. _Ecco_, my Sandro, gravest and hardiest of painters, go
summon Madonna Simonetta and her handmaidens to our Symposium. Agnolo will
speak further to us of this sovereignty of Beauty."
The painter bowed his head and moved away.
A green alley vaulted with thick ilex and myrtle formed a tapering vista
where the shadows lay misty blue and pale shafts of light pierced through
fitfully. At the far end it ran out into an open space and a splash of
sunshine. A marble Ganymede with lifted arms rose in the middle like a
white flame. The girls were there, intent upon some commerce of their own,
flashing hither and thither over the grass in a flutter of saffron and
green and crimson. Simonetta--Sandro could see--was a little apart, a very
tall, isolated figure, clear and cold in a recess of shade, standing
easily, resting on one hip with her hands behind her. A soft, straight
robe of white clipped her close from shoulder to heel; the lines of her
figure were thrust forward by her poise. His eye followed the swell of her
bosom, very gentle and girlish, and the long folds of her dress falling
thence to her knee. While she stood there, proud and remote, a chance beam
of the sun shone on her head so that it seemed to burn. "Heaven salutes
the Queen of Heaven,--Venus Urania!" With an odd impulse he stopped,
crossed himself, and then hurried on.
He told his errand to her, having no eyes for the others.
"Signorina--I am to acquaint her Serenity that the divine poet Messer
Agnolo is to speak of the sovereign power of beauty; of the Heavenly
Beauty whereof Plato taught, as it is believed."
Simonetta arched a slim neck and looked down at the obsequious speaker, or
at least he thought so. And he saw how fair she was, a creature how
delicate and gracious, with grey eyes frank and wide, and full red lips
where a smile (nervous and a little wistful, he judged, rather than
defiant) seemed always to hover. Such clear-cut, high beauty made him
ashamed; but her colouring (for he was a painter) made his heart beat. She
was no ice-bound shadow of deity then! but flesh and blood; a girl--a
child, of timid, soft contours, of warm roses and blue veins laced in a
pearly skin. And she was crowned with a heavy wealth of red-gold hair,
twisted in great coils, bound about with pearls, and smouldering like
molten metal where it fell rippling along her neck. She dazzled him, so
that he could not face her or look further. His eyes dropped. He stood
before her moody, disconcerted.
The girls, who had dissolved their company at his approach, listened to
what he had to say linked in knots of twos and threes. They needed no
excuses to return; some were philosophers in their way, philosophers and
poetesses; some had left their lovers in the ring round Lorenzo. So they
went down the green alley still locked by the arms, by the waist or
shoulders. They did not wait for Simonetta. She was a Genoese, and proud
as the snow. Why did Giuliano love her? _Did_ he love her, indeed? He
was bewitched then, for she was cold, and a brazen creature in spite of
it. How dare she bare her neck so! Oh! 'twas Genoese. "Uomini senza fede e
donne senza vergogna," they quoted as they ran.
And Simonetta walked alone down the way with her head high; but Sandro
stepped behind, at the edge of her trailing white robe....
... The poet was leaning against an ancient alabaster vase, soil-stained,
yellow with age and its long sojourn in the loam, but with traces of its
carved garlands clinging to it still. He fingered it lovingly as he
talked. His oration was concluding, and his voice rose high and tremulous;
there were sparks in his hollow eyes.... "And as this sovereign Beauty is
queen of herself, so she is subject to none other, owns to no constraining
custom, fears no reproach of man. What she wills, that has the force of a
law. Being Beauty, her deeds are lovely and worshipful. Therefore Phryne,
whom men, groping in darkness and the dull ways of earth, dubbed
courtesan, shone in a Court of Law before the assembled nobles of Athens,
naked and undismayed in the blaze of her fairness. And Athens discerned
the goddess and trembled. Yes, and more; even as Aphrodite, whose darling
she was, arose pure from the foam, so she too came up out of the sea in
the presence of a host, and the Athenians, seeing no shame, thought none,
but, rather, reverenced her the more. For what shame is it that the body
of one so radiant in clear perfections should be revealed? Is then the
garment of the soul, her very mould and image, so shameful? Shall we seek
to know her essence by the garment of a garment, or hope to behold that
which really is in the shadows we cast upon shadows? Shame is of the brute
dullard who thinks shame. The evil ever sees Evil glaring at him, Plato,
the golden-moutheds with the soul of pure fire, has said the truth of this
matter in his _De Republicâ_ the fifth book, where he speaks of young
maids sharing the exercise of the Palæstra, yea, and the Olympic contests
even! For he says, 'Let the wives of our wardens bare themselves, for
their virtue will be a robe; and let them share the toils of war and
defend their country. And for the man who laughs at naked women exercising
their bodies for high reasons, his laughter is a fruit of unripe wisdom,
and he himself knows not what he is about; for that is ever the best of
sayings that the useful is the noble and the hurtful the base'...."
There was a pause. The name of Plato had had a strange effect upon the
company. You would have said they had suddenly entered a church and had
felt all lighter interests sink under the weight of the dim, echoing nave.
After a few moments the poet spoke again in a quieter tone, but his voice
had lost none of the unction which had enriched it.... "Beauty is queen:
by the virtue of Deity, whose image she is, she reigns, lifts up, fires.
Let us beware how we tempt Deity lest we perish ourselves. Actseon died
when he gazed unbidden upon the pure body of Artemis; but Artemis herself
rayed her splendour upon Endymion, and Endymion is among the immortals. We
fall when we rashly confront Beauty, but that Beauty who comes unawares
may nerve our souls to wing to heaven." He ended on a resonant note, and
then, still looking out over the valley, sank into his seat. Lorenzo, with
a fine humility, got up and kissed his thin hand. Giuliano looked at
Simonetta, trying to recall her gaze, but she remained standing in her
place, seeing nothing of her companions. She was thinking of something,
frowning a little and biting her lip, her hands were before her; her slim
fingers twisted and locked themselves nervously, like a tangle of snakes.
Then she tossed her head, as a young horse might, and looked at Giuliano
suddenly, full in the eyes. He rose to meet her with a deprecating smile,
cap in hand--but she walked past him, almost brushing him with her gown,
but never flinching her full gaze, threaded her way through the group to
the back, behind the poet, where Sandro was. He had seen her coming,
indeed he had watched her furtively throughout the oration, but her near
presence disconcerted him again--and he looked down. She was strongly
excited with her quick resolution; her colour had risen and her voice
faltered when she began to speak. She spoke eagerly, running her words
together.
"_Ecco_, Messer Sandro," she whispered blushing. "You have heard
these sayings.... Who is there in Florence like me?"
"There is no one," said Sandro simply.
"I will be your Lady Venus," she went on breathlessly. "You shall paint
me, rising from the sea-foam.... The Genoese love the sea." She was still
eager and defiant; her bosom rose and fell unchecked.
"The Signorina is mocking me; it is impossible; the Signorina knows it."
"Eh, _Madonna!_ is it so shameful to be fair--Star of the Sea as your
poets sing at evening? Do you mean that I dare not do it? Listen then,
Signer Pittore; to-morrow morning at mass-time you will come to the Villa
Vespucci with your brushes and pans and you will ask for Monna Simonetta.
Then you will see. Leave it now; it is settled." And she walked away with
her head high and the same superb smile on her red lips. Mockery! She was
in dead earnest; all her child's feelings were in hot revolt. These women
who had whispered to each other, sniggered at her dress, her white neck
and her free carriage; Giuliano who had presumed so upon her candour--
these prying, censorious Florentines---she would strike them dumb with her
amazing loveliness. They sang her a goddess that she might be flattered
and suffer their company: she would show herself a goddess indeed--the
star of her shining Genoa, where men were brave and silent and maidens
frank like the sea. Yes, and then she would withdraw herself suddenly and
leave them forlorn and dismayed.
As for Sandro, he stood where she had left him, peering after her with a
mist in his eyes. He seemed to be looking over the hill-side, over the
city glowing afar off gold and purple in the hot air, to Mont' Oliveto and
the heights, where a line of black cypresses stood about a low white
building. At one angle of the building was a little turret with a
belvedere of round arches. The tallest cypress just topped the windows,
There his eyes seemed to rest.
II