(A Fragment)
The natural in visible objects is whatever is ordinarily presented to
the senses: the picturesque is that which stands out and catches the
attention by some striking peculiarity: the _ideal_ is that which
answers to the preconceived imagination and appetite in the mind for
love and beauty. The picturesque depends chiefly on the principle of
discrimination or contrast; the _ideal_ on harmony and continuity of
effect: the one surprises, the other satisfies the mind; the one
starts off from a given point, the other reposes on itself; the one
is determined by an excess of form, the other by a concentration of
feeling.
The picturesque may be considered as something like an excrescence
on the face of nature. It runs imperceptibly into the fantastical and
grotesque. Fairies and satyrs are picturesque; but they are scarcely
_ideal._ They are an extreme and unique conception of a certain thing,
but not of what the mind delights in or broods fondly over. The image
created by the artist's hand is not moulded and fashioned by the love of
good and yearning after grace and beauty, but rather the contrary: that
is they are ideal deformity, not ideal beauty. Rubens was perhaps the
most picturesque of painters; but he was almost the least _ideal._ So
Rembrandt was (out of sight) the most picturesque of colourists; as
Correggio was the most _ideal._ In other words, his composition of light
and shade is more a whole, more in unison, more blended into the same
harmonious feeling than Rembrandt's, who staggers by contrast, but does
not soothe by gradation. Correggio's forms, indeed, had a picturesque
air; for they often incline (even when most beautiful) to the quaintness
of caricature. Vandyke, I think, was at once the least picturesque and
least _ideal_ of all the great painters. He was purely natural, and
neither selected from outward forms nor added anything from his own
mind. He owes everything to perfect truth, clearness, and transparency;
and though his productions certainly arrest the eye, and strike in a
room full of pictures, it is from the contrast they present to other
pictures, and from being stripped quite naked of all artificial
advantages. They strike almost as a piece of white paper would, hung up
in the same situation--I began with saying that whatever stands out from
a given line, and as it were projects upon the eye, is picturesque; and
this holds true (comparatively) in form and colour. A rough terrier dog,
with the hair bristled and matted together, is picturesque. As we say,
there is a decided character in it, a marked determination to an
extreme point. A shock-dog is odd and disagreeable, but there is nothing
picturesque in its appearance; it is a mere mass of flimsy confusion. A
goat with projecting horns and pendent beard is a picturesque animal; a
sheep is not. A horse is only picturesque from opposition of colour;
as in Mr. Northcote's study of Gadshill, where the white horse's head
coming against the dark, scowling face of the man makes as fine a
contrast as can be imagined. An old stump of a tree with rugged bark,
and one or two straggling branches, a little stunted hedge-row line,
marking the boundary of the horizon, a stubble-field, a winding path,
a rock seen against the sky, are picturesque, because they have all of
them prominence and a distinctive character of their own. They are not
objects (to borrow Shakespear's phrase) 'of no mark or likelihood.'
A country may be beautiful, romantic, or sublime, without being
picturesque. The Lakes in the North of England are not picturesque,
though certainly the most interesting sight in this country. To be a
subject for painting, a prospect must present sharp, striking points of
view or singular forms, or one object must relieve and set off another.
There must be distinct stages and salient points for the eye to rest
upon or start from in its progress over the expanse before it. The
distance of a landscape will oftentimes look flat or heavy, that the
trunk of a tree or a ruin in the foreground would immediately throw
into perspective and turn to air. Rembrandt's landscapes are the least
picturesque in the world, except from the straight lines and sharp
angles, the deep incision and dragging of his pencil, like a harrow
over the ground, and the broad contrast of earth and sky. Earth, in his
copies, is rough and hairy; and Pan has struck his hoof against it!--A
camel is a picturesque ornament in a landscape or history-piece. This is
not merely from its romantic and oriental character; for an elephant has
not the same effect, and if introduced as a necessary appendage, is also
an unwieldy incumbrance. A negro's head in a group is picturesque from
contrast; so are the spots on a panther's hide. This was the principle
that Paul Veronese went upon, who said the rule for composition was
_black upon white, and while upon black._ He was a pretty good judge.
His celebrated picture of the Marriage of Cana is in all likelihood the
completest piece of workmanship extant in the art. When I saw it, it
nearly covered one side of a large room in the Louvre (being itself
forty feet by twenty)--and it seemed as if that side of the apartment
was thrown open, and you looked out at the open sky, at buildings,
marble pillars, galleries with people in them, emperors, female slaves,
Turks, negroes, musicians, all the famous painters of the time, the
tables loaded with viands, goblets, and dogs under them--a sparkling,
overwhelming confusion, a bright, unexpected reality--the only fault
you could find was that no miracle was going on in the faces of the
spectators: the only miracle there was the picture itself! A French
gentleman, who showed me this 'triumph of painting' (as it has been
called), perceiving I was struck with it, observed, 'My wife admires
it exceedingly for the facility of the execution.' I took this proof of
sympathy for a compliment. It is said that when Humboldt, the celebrated
traveller and naturalist, was introduced to Buonaparte, the Emperor
addressed him in these words--_'Vous aimez la botanique, Monsieur'_;
and on the other's replying in the affirmative, added, _'Et ma femme
aussi!'_ This has been found fault with as a piece of brutality and
insolence in the great man by bigoted critics, who do not know what a
thing it is to get a Frenchwoman to agree with them in any point. For my
part, I took the observation as it was meant, and it did not put me out
of conceit with myself or the picture that Madame M----liked it as well
as _Monsieur l'Anglois._ Certainly, there could be no harm in that. By
the side of it happened to be hung two allegorical pictures of Rubens
(and in such matters he too was 'no baby'(1))--I don't remember what the
figures were, but the texture seemed of wool or cotton. The texture
of the Paul Veronese was not wool or cotton, but stuff, jewels, flesh,
marble, air, whatever composed the essence of the varied subjects, in
endless relief and truth of handling. If the Fleming had seen his two
allegories hanging where they did, he would, without a question, have
wished them far enough.
I imagine that Rubens's landscapes are picturesque: Claude's are
_ideal._ Rubens is always in extremes; Claude in the middle. Rubens
carries some one peculiar quality or feature of nature to the utmost
verge of probability: Claude balances and harmonises different forms and
masses with laboured delicacy, so that nothing falls short, no one
thing overpowers another. Rainbows, showers, partial gleams of sunshine,
moonlight, are the means with which Rubens produces his most gorgeous
and enchanting effects: there are neither rainbows, nor showers, nor
sudden bursts of sunshine, nor glittering moonbeams in Claude. He is all
softness and proportion: the other is all spirit and brilliant excess.
The two sides (for example) of one of Claude's landscapes balance one
another, as in a scale of beauty: in Rubens the several objects are
grouped and thrown together with capricious wantonness. Claude has more
repose: Rubens more gaiety and extravagance. And here it might be asked,
Is a rainbow a picturesque or an _ideal_ object? It seems to me to be
both. It is an accident in nature; but it is an inmate of the fancy. It
startles and surprises the sense, but it soothes and tranquillises the
spirit. It makes the eye glisten to behold it, but the mind turns to
it long after it has faded from its place in the sky. It has both
properties, then, of giving an extraordinary impulse to the mind by the
singularity of its appearance, and of riveting the imagination by its
intense beauty. I may just notice here in passing, that I think the
effect of moonlight is treated in an _ideal_ manner in the well-known
line in Shakespear--
See how the moonlight _sleeps_ upon yon bank.
The image is heightened by the exquisiteness of the expression beyond
its natural beauty, and it seems as if there could be no end to the
delight taken in it.--A number of sheep coming to a pool of water
to drink, with shady trees in the background, the rest of the flock
following them, and the shepherd and his dog left carelessly behind,
is surely the _ideal_ in landscape-composition, if the _ideal_ has its
source in the interest excited by a subject, in its power of drawing the
affections after it linked in a golden chain, and in the desire of the
mind to dwell on it for ever. The _ideal_, in a word, is the height of
the pleasing, that which satisfies and accords with the inmost longing
of the soul: the picturesque is merely a sharper and bolder impression
of reality. A morning mist drawing a slender veil over all objects is
at once picturesque and _ideal_; for it in the first place excites
immediate surprise and admiration, and in the next a wish for it to
continue, and a fear lest it should be too soon dissipated. Is the Cupid
riding on a lion in the ceiling at Whitehall, and urging him with
a spear over a precipice, with only clouds and sky beyond, most
picturesque or _ideal?_ It has every effect of startling contrast and
situation, and yet inspires breathless expectation and wonder for the
event. Rembrandt's Jacob's Dream, again, is both fearful to the eye, but
realising that loftiest vision of the soul. Take two faces in Leonardo
da Vinci's Last Supper, the Judas and the St John: the one is all
strength, repulsive character; the other is all divine grace and mild
sensibility. The individual, the characteristic in painting, is that
_which is_ in a marked manner--the _ideal_ is that which we wish
anything to be, and to contemplate without measure and without end.
The first is truth, the last is good. The one appeals to the sense
and understanding, the other to the will and the affections. The truly
beautiful and grand attracts the mind to it by instinctive harmony, is
absorbed in it, and nothing can ever part them afterwards. Look at
a Madonna of Raphael's: what gives the _ideal_ character to the
expression,--the insatiable purpose of the soul, or its measureless
content in the object of its contemplation? A portrait of Vandyke's is
mere indifference and still-life in the comparison: it has not in it the
principle of growing and still unsatisfied desire. In the _ideal_ there
is no fixed stint or limit but the limit of possibility: it is the
infinite with respect to human capacities and wishes. Love is for this
reason an _ideal_ passion. We give to it our all of hope, of fear, of
present enjoyment, and stake our last chance of happiness wilfully and
desperately upon it. A good authority puts into the mouth of one of his
heroines--
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep!
How many fair catechumens will there be found in all ages to repeat as
much after Shakespear's Juliet!