And blind Orion hungry for the morn.
Orion, the subject of this landscape, was the classical Nimrod; and is
called by Homer, 'a hunter of shadows, himself a shade.' He was the son
of Neptune; and having lost an eye in some affray between the Gods
and men, was told that if he would go to meet the rising sun he would
recover his sight. He is represented setting out on his journey, with
men on his shoulders to guide him, a bow in his hand, and Diana in the
clouds greeting him. He stalks along, a giant upon earth, and reels and
falters in his gait, as if just awakened out of sleep, or uncertain of
his way;--you see his blindness, though his back is turned. Mists rise
around him, and veil the sides of the green forests; earth is dank and
fresh with dews, the 'gray dawn and the Pleiades before him dance,' and
in the distance are seen the blue hills and sullen ocean. Nothing
was ever more finely conceived or done. It breathes the spirit of the
morning; its moisture, its repose, its obscurity, waiting the miracle of
light to kindle it into smiles; the whole is, like the principal figure
in it, 'a forerunner of the dawn.' The same atmosphere tinges and imbues
every object, the same dull light 'shadowy sets off' the face of nature:
one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades
the painter's canvas, and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of
things. This great and learned man might be said to see nature through
the glass of time; he alone has a right to be considered as the painter
of classical antiquity. Sir Joshua has done him justice in this respect.
He could give to the scenery of his heroic fables that unimpaired look
of original nature, full, solid, large, luxuriant, teeming with life and
power; or deck it with all the pomp of art, with tempyles and towers,
and mythologic groves. His pictures 'denote a foregone conclusion.' He
applies Nature to his purposes, works out her images according to
the standard of his thoughts, embodies high fictions; and the first
conception being given, all the rest seems to grow out of and be
assimilated to it, by the unfailing process of a studious imagination.
Like his own Orion, he overlooks the surrounding scene, appears to 'take
up the isles as a very little thing, and to lay the earth in a balance.'
With a laborious and mighty grasp, he puts nature into the mould of the
ideal and antique; and was among painters (more than any one else) what
Milton was among poets. There is in both something of the same pedantry,
the same stiffness, the same elevation, the same grandeur, the same
mixture of art and nature, the same richness of borrowed materials, the
same unity of character. Neither the poet nor the painter lowered the
subjects they treated, but filled up the outline in the fancy, and added
strength and reality to it; and thus not only satisfied, but surpassed
the expectations of the spectator and the reader. This is held for the
triumph and the perfection of works of art. To give us nature, such as
we see it, is well and deserving of praise; to give us nature, such
as we have never seen, but have often wished to see it, is better, and
deserving of higher praise. He who can show the world in its first naked
glory, with the hues of fancy spread over it, or in its high and palmy
state, with the gravity of history stamped on the proud monuments of
vanished empire,--who, by his 'so potent art,' can recall time past,
transport us to distant places, and join the regions of imagination (a
new conquest) to those of reality,--who shows us not only what Nature
is, but what she has been, and is capable of,--he who does this, and
does it with simplicity, with truth, and grandeur, is lord of Nature and
her powers; and his mind is universal, and his art the master-art!
There is nothing in this 'more than natural,' if criticism could
be persuaded to think so. The historic painter does not neglect or
contravene Nature, but follows her more closely up into her fantastic
heights or hidden recesses. He demonstrates what she would be in
conceivable circumstances and under implied conditions. He 'gives to
airy nothing a local habitation,' not 'a name.' At his touch, words
start up into images, thoughts become things. He clothes a dream, a
phantom, with form and colour, and the wholesome attributes of reality.
_His_ art is a second nature; not a different one. There are those,
indeed, who think that not to copy nature is the rule for attaining
perfection. Because they cannot paint the objects which they have they
have, they fancy themselves qualified to paint the ideas which they have
not seen. But it is possible to fail in this latter and more difficult
style of imitation, as well as in the former humbler one. The detection,
it is true, is not so easy, because the objects are not so nigh at hand
to compare, and therefore there is more room both for false pretension
and for self-deceit. They take an epic motto or subject, and conclude
that the spirit is implied as a thing of course. They paint inferior
portraits, maudlin lifeless faces, without ordinary expression, or one
look, feature, or particle of nature in them, and think that this is
to rise to the truth of history. They vulgarise and degrade whatever is
interesting or sacred to the mind, and suppose that they thus add to the
dignity of their profession. They represent a face that seems as if no
thought or feeling of any kind had ever passed through it, and would
have you believe that this is the very sublime of expression, such as
it would appear in heroes, or demigods of old, when rapture or agony was
raised to its height. They show you a landscape that looks as if the sun
never shone upon it, and tell you that it is not modern--that so earth
looked when Titan first kissed it with his rays. This is not the true
ideal. It is not to fill the moulds of the imagination, but to deface
and injure them; it is not to come up to, but to fall short of the
poorest conception in the public mind. Such pictures should not be hung
in the same room with that of Orion.(1)
Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical. He was the painter of
ideas. No one ever told a story half so well, nor so well knew what was
capable of being told by the pencil. He seized on, and struck off with
grace and precision, just that point of view which would be likely to
catch the reader's fancy. There is a significance, a consciousness in
whatever he does (sometimes a vice, but oftener a virtue) beyond any
other painter. His Giants sitting on the tops of craggy mountains, as
huge themselves, and playing idly on their Pan's-pipes, seem to have
been seated there these three thousand years, and to know the beginning
and the end of their own story. An infant Bacchus or Jupiter is big with
his future destiny. Even inanimate and dumb things speak a language of
their own. His snakes, the messengers of fate, are inspired with human
intellect. His trees grow and expand their leaves in the air, glad of
the rain, proud of the sun, awake to the winds of heaven. In his Plague
of Athens, the very buildings seem stiff with horror. His picture of the
Deluge is, perhaps, the finest historical landscape in the world. You
see a waste of waters, wide, interminable the sun is labouring, wan and
weary, up the sky the clouds, dull and leaden, lie like a load upon the
eye, and heaven and earth seem commingling into one confused mass! His
human figures are sometimes 'o'erinformed' with this kind of feeling.
Their actions have too much gesticulation, and the set expression of the
features borders too much on the mechanical and caricatured style. In
this respect they form a contrast to Raphael's, whose figures never
appear to be sitting for their pictures, or to be conscious of a
spectator, or to have come from the painter's hand. In Nicolas Poussin,
on the contrary, everything seems to have a distinct understanding with
the artist; 'the very stones prate of their whereabout'; each object has
its part and place assigned, and is in a sort of compact with the
rest of the picture. It is this conscious keeping, and, as it were,
_internal_ design, that gives their peculiar character to the works of
this artist. There was a picture of Aurora in the British Gallery a year
or two ago. It was a suffusion of golden light. The Goddess wore her
saffron-coloured robes, and appeared just risen from the gloomy bed of
old Tithonus. Her very steeds, milk-white, were tinged with the yellow
dawn. It was a personification of the morning. Poussin succeeded better
in classic than in sacred subjects. The latter are comparatively heavy,
forced, full of violent contrasts of colour, of red, blue, and black,
and without the true prophetic inspiration of the characters. But in his
pagan allegories and fables he was quite at home. The native gravity and
native levity of the Frenchman were combined with Italian scenery and
an antique gusto, and gave even to his colouring an air of learned
indifference. He wants, in one respect, grace, form, expression; but
he has everywhere sense and meaning, perfect costume and propriety.
His personages always belong to the class and time represented, and are
strictly versed in the business in hand. His grotesque compositions
in particular, his Nymphs and Fauns, are superior (at least, as far
as style is concerned) even to those of Rubens. They are taken more
immediately out of fabulous history. Rubens' Satyrs and Bacchantes have
a more jovial and voluptuous aspect, are more drunk with pleasure,
more full of animal spirits and riotous impulses; they laugh and bound
along--
Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring:
but those of Poussin have more of the intellectual part of the
character, and seem vicious on reflection, and of set purpose. Rubens'
are noble specimens of a class; Poussin's are allegorical abstractions
of the same class, with bodies less pampered, but with minds more
secretly depraved. The Bacchanalian groups of the Flemish painter were,
however, his masterpieces in composition. Witness those prodigies of
colour, character, and expression at Blenheim. In the more chaste and
refined delineation of classic fable, Poussin was without a rival.
Rubens, who was a match for him in the wild and picturesque, could not
pretend to vie with the elegance and purity of thought in his picture of
Apollo giving a poet a cup of water to drink, nor with the gracefulness
of design in the figure of a nymph squeezing the juice of a bunch of
grapes from her fingers (a rosy wine-press) which falls into the mouth
of a chubby infant below. But, above all, who shall celebrate, in terms
of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going
out in a fine morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this
inscription: ET EGO IN ARCADIA VIXI! The eager curiosity of some, the
expression of others who start back with fear and surprise, the clear
breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, 'the valleys
low, where the mild zephyrs use,' the distant, uninterrupted, sunny
prospect speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to
come!(2)
Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts
passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms
hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind,
to con over the relies of ancient art bound up 'within the book and
volume of the brain, unmixed (if it were possible) with baser matter!' A
life passed among pictures, in the study and the love of art, is a happy
noiseless dream: or rather, it is to dream and to be awake at the same
time; for it has all 'the sober certainty of waking bliss,' with the
romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being. They are
the bright consummate essences of things, and 'he who knows of these
delights to taste and interpose them oft, is not unwise!'--The Orion,
which I have here taken occasion to descant upon, is one of a collection
of excellent pictures, as this collection is itself one of a series from
the old masters, which have for some years back embrowned the walls of
the British Gallery, and enriched the public eye. What hues (those of
nature mellowed by time) breathe around as we enter! What forms are
there, woven into the memory! What looks, which only the answering looks
of the spectator can express! What intellectual stores have been yearly
poured forth from the shrine of ancient art! The works are various,
but the names the same--heaps of Rembrandts frowning from the darkened
walls, Rubens' glad gorgeous groups, Titians more rich and rare, Claudes
always exquisite, sometimes beyond compare, Guido's endless cloying
sweetness, the learning of Poussin and the Caracci, and Raphael's
princely magnificence crowning all. We read certain letters and
syllables in the Catalogue, and at the well-known magic sound a miracle
of skill and beauty starts to view. One might think that one year's
prodigal display of such perfection would exhaust the labours of one
man's life; but the next year, and the next to that, we find another
harvest reaped and gathered in to the great garner of art, by the same
immortal hands--
Old GENIUS the porter of them was;
He letteth in, he letteth out to wend.--
Their works seem endless as their reputation--to be many as they are
complete--to multiply with the desire of the mind to see more and more
of them; as if there were a living power in the breath of Fame, and in
the very names of the great heirs of glory 'there were propagation to
year; to have one last, lingering look yet to come. Pictures are
scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain,
earth has yet a little gilding left, not quite rubbed off, dishonoured,
and defaced. There are plenty of standard works still to be found in
this country, in the collections at Blenheim, at Burleigh, and in those
belonging to Mr. Angerstein, Lord Grosvenor, the Marquis of Stafford,
and others, to keep up this treat to the lovers of art for many years;
and it is the more desirable to reserve a privileged sanctuary of
this sort, where the eye may dote, and the heart take its fill of
such pictures as Poussin's Orion, since the Louvre is stripped of its
triumphant spoils, and since he who collected it, and wore it as a
rich jewel in his Iron Crown, the hunter of greatness and of glory, is
himself a shade!