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PRINCIPLE IN ART
ETC.
PRINCIPLE IN ART
ETC.
BY
COVENTRY PATMORE
LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YORK STREET,
COVENT GARDEN
1889
PREFACE
With one exception, namely the last Paper in the Collection, which
appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_, all these Essays were printed in
the _St. James’s Gazette_ during the editorship of Mr. Greenwood. The
Essay on “Architectural Styles” contains a summary of principles which I
stated, some thirty years ago, in various Articles, chiefly in the
_Edinburgh Review_. As this Essay now stands, I hope that readers, who
have knowledge enough to enable them to judge, will find in it an
example of the kind of criticism which I have advocated earlier in the
volume.
COVENTRY PATMORE.
CONTENTS
ESSAY PAGE
I. PRINCIPLE IN ART 1
II. REAL APPREHENSION 6
III. SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS 14
IV. POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES 25
V. CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART 31
VI. THE POINT OF REST IN ART 37
VII. IMAGINATION 43
VIII. PATHOS 49
IX. POETICAL INTEGRITY 56
X. THE POETRY OF NEGATION 62
XI. THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS 67
XII. LOVE AND POETRY 72
XIII. KEATS 80
XIV. WHAT SHELLEY WAS 87
XV. BLAKE 97
XVI. ROSSETTI AS A POET 103
XVII. MR. SWINBURNE’S SELECTIONS 112
XVIII. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 118
XIX. EMERSON 125
XX. CRABBE AND SHELLEY 134
XXI. SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE? 141
XXII. IDEAL AND MATERIAL GREATNESS IN ARCHITECTURE 146
XXIII. “OLD ENGLISH” ARCHITECTURE, ANCIENT AND MODERN 154
XXIV. ARCHITECTURAL STYLES 160
XXV. THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, OPINION, AND INEQUALITY 202
I
PRINCIPLE IN ART
It is not true, though it has so often been asserted, that criticism is
of no use or of little use to art. This notion prevails so widely only
because--among us at least--criticism has not been criticism. To
criticise is to judge; to judge requires judicial qualification; and
this is quite a different thing from a natural sensitiveness to beauty,
however much that sensitiveness may have become heightened by converse
with refined and beautiful objects of nature and works of art.
“Criticism,” which has been the outcome only of such sensitiveness and
such converse, may be, and often is,--delightful reading, and is
naturally far more popular than criticism which is truly judicial. The
pseudo-criticism, of which we have had such floods during the past
half-century, delights by sympathy with, and perhaps expansion of, our
own sensations; true criticism appeals to the intellect, and rebukes
the reader as often as it does the artist for his ignorance and his
mistakes. Such criticism may not be able to produce good art; but bad
art collapses at the contact of its breath, as the steam in the cylinder
of an engine collapses on each admission of the spray of cold water; and
thus, although good criticism cannot produce art, it removes endless
hindrances to its production, and tends to provide art with its chief
motive-power, a public prepared to acknowledge it. The enunciation of a
single principle has sometimes, almost at a blow, revolutionised not
only the technical practice of an art, but the popular taste with regard
to it. Strawberry Hill Gothic vanished like a nightmare when Pugin for
the first time authoritatively asserted and proved that architectural
decoration could never properly be an addition to constructive features,
but only a fashioning of them. The truth was manifest at once to amateur
as well as to architect; and this one principle proves to have contained
a power even of popular culture far greater than all the splendid
“sympathetic” criticism which followed during the next fifty years. And
it has done nothing but good, whereas the latter kind of writing,
together with much good, has done much harm. Pugin’s insight did not
enable him to discover the almost equally clear and simple principle
which governs the special form of decoration that properly characterises
each of the great styles of architecture. Therefore, while his law of
constructional decoration compelled all succeeding “critics” to keep
within its bounds, they were still free to give the rein to mere fancy
as to the nature of the decoration itself; and this has been becoming
worse and worse in proportion as critics and architects of genius, but
of no principle, have departed from the dry tradition of decorative form
which prevailed in Pugin’s day, and which finds its orthodox expression
in Parker’s _Glossary_ and the elementary works of Bloxam and Rickman.
Sensitiveness or natural “taste,” apart from principle, is, in art, what
love is apart from truth in morals. The stronger it is, the further it
is likely to go wrong. Nothing can be more tenderly “felt” than a school
of painting which is now much in favour; but, for want of knowledge and
masculine principle, it has come to delight in representing ugliness and
corruption in place of health and beauty. Venus or Hebe becomes, in its
hands, nothing but a _Dame aux Camélias_ in the last stage of moral and
physical deterioration. A few infallible and, when once uttered,
self-evident principles would at once put a stop to this sort of
representation among artists; and the public would soon learn to be
repelled by what now most attracts them, being thenceforward guided by a
critical conscience, which is the condition of “_good_ taste.”
There is little that is conclusive or fruitful in any of the criticism
of the present day. The very name that it has chosen, “Æsthetics,”
contains an implied admission of its lack of virility or principle. We
do not think of Lessing’s _Laocoön_, which is one of the finest pieces
of critical writing in the world, as belonging to “Æsthetics”; and, like
it, the critical sayings of Goethe and Coleridge seem to appertain to a
science deserving a nobler name--a science in which truth stands first
and feeling second, and of which the conclusions are demonstrable and
irreversible. A critic of the present day, in attempting to describe the
difference between the usual construction of a passage by Fletcher and
one by Shakespeare, would beat helplessly about the bush, telling us
many things about the different sorts of feelings awakened by the one
and by the other, and concluding, and desiring to conclude, nothing.
Coleridge in a single sentence defines the difference, and establishes
Shakespeare’s immeasurable superiority with the clearness and finality
of a mathematical statement; and the delight of the reader of
Shakespeare is for ever heightened because it is less than before a
zeal without knowledge.
There already exists, in the writings and sayings of Aristotle, Hegel,
Lessing, Goethe, and others, the greater part of the materials necessary
for the formation of a body of Institutes of Art which would supersede
and extinguish nearly all the desultory chatter which now passes for
criticism, and which would go far to form a true and abiding popular
taste--one which could render some reason for its likings and
dislikings. The man, however, who could put such materials together and
add such as are wanting does not live; or at any rate he is not known.
Hegel might have done it, had his artistic perception been as fine and
strong as his intellect; which would then have expressed its conclusions
without the mist of obscurity in which, for nearly all readers, they are
at present shrouded. In the meantime it would be well if the professed
critic would remember that criticism is not the expression, however
picturesque and glowing, of the faith that is in him, but the rendering
of sound and intelligible reasons for that faith.
II
REAL APPREHENSION
“Man,” says Dr. Newman, “is not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing,
feeling, contemplating, acting animal.” To see rightly is the first of
human qualities; right feeling and right acting are usually its
consequences. There are two ways of seeing: one is to comprehend, which
is to see all round a thing, or to embrace it; one is to apprehend,
which is to see it in part, or to take hold of it. A thing may be really
taken hold of which is much too big for embracing. Real apprehension
implies reality in that which is apprehended. You cannot “take hold” of
that which is nothing. The notional grasp which some people seem to have
of clouds and mares’ nests is a totally different thing from real
apprehension; though what this difference is could scarcely be made
clear to those who have no experience of the latter. A man may not be
able to convey to another his real apprehension of a thing; but there
will be something in his general character and way of discoursing which
will convince you, if you too are a man acquainted with realities, that
he has truly got hold of what he professes to have got hold of, and you
will be wary of denying what he affirms. The man of real apprehensions,
or the truly sensible man, has no opinions. Many things may be dubious
to him; but if he is compelled to act without knowledge, he does so
promptly, being prompt to discern which of the doubtful ways before him
is the least questionable, on the ground of such evidence as he has. As
to what he sees to be true or right, he does not argue with the person
who differs from him upon a vital point, but only avoids his company,
or, if he be of an irascible temperament, feels inclined to knock him
down. Of course there are some people who see things which do not exist;
but this is lunacy, and beyond the scope of these remarks. Real
apprehension is emphatically the quality which constitutes “good sense.”
Common good sense has a real apprehension of innumerable things which
those who add to good sense learning and reflection may comprehend; but
there is much that must for ever remain matter only of real apprehension
to the best seers; that is to say, everything in which the infinite has
a part, _i.e._ all religion, all virtue as distinguished from temporary
expediency, the grounds of all true art, etc. A man may have an immense
acquaintance with facts; he may have all history and the whole circle of
the sciences on the tip of his tongue; he may be the author of a
classical system of logic, or may have so cunningly elaborated a false
theory of nature as to puzzle and infuriate the wisest of men: and yet
may not really apprehend any part of the truth of life which is properly
human knowledge. At the present time it is by politics chiefly that the
difference between the two great classes of men is made apparent. For
the first time in English history, party limitations coincide almost
exactly with the limitations which separate silly from sensible men. If
you talk with a sincere Gladstonian--and, wonderful to say, there are
still many such--you will soon find that he has no real apprehension of
anything. He only feebly and foolishly opines.
It is not to be concluded from what has been said that the possession of
the apprehending faculty in any way supersedes the good of learning. The
power of really apprehending is nothing in the absence of realities to
be apprehended. In the great field of ordinary social relationships and
duties the subject-matter of such apprehension is largely supplied by
individual experience, and the exercise by most men of that faculty is
in the main limited to these; so that the praise of “good sense” has
acquired a much narrower signification than it ought to bear. Genius is
nothing but great good sense, or real apprehension, exercised upon
objects more or less out of common sight; and the chief ingredient of
even the highest and most heroic sanctity is the same apprehension
taking hold upon spiritual truths and applying them to the conduct of
the interior as well as the exterior life. Men with great strength of
real apprehension are easily capable of things which inferior characters
regard as great self-sacrifices; though to them such things are no more
sacrifice than in an ordinary man it would be to exchange a ton of lead
for a pound of gold. “Their hearts do not forget the things their eyes
have seen;” and persons like General Gordon or Sir Thomas More would
stare if you called anything they did or suffered by the name of
sacrifice.
You cannot read the writings of Newman, Hooker, Pascal, and St.
Augustine, without being strongly impressed with the presumption that
they have a real apprehension of the things they profess to believe;
and, since they do not justify in any other way the theory that they are
lunatics, a right-minded reader is likewise disposed to think that what
they have thus seen exists, and that his not having seen such things
does not materially diminish that probability.
And here it may be well to recur to the text of these remarks: “Man is
not a reasoning animal; he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting
animal.” All men properly so called--but a good many who walk upright on
two legs cannot properly be so called--are seeing, feeling, and acting
animals; but very few men, indeed, have as yet attained to be
contemplating animals, though the act of contemplation exercised upon
the highest objects is, according to all great philosophers, even pagan,
the act for which he is created and in which his final perfection and
felicity are attained. The act of real apprehension, as it is exerted by
ordinary men, and even for the most part by men of extraordinary vigour
of intellectual vision, is momentary, however permanent may be its
effect upon their principles and lives. Men of vigorous apprehension
look at the heavens of truth, as it were, through a powerful telescope,
and see instantly as realities many living lights which are quite
invisible to the common eye. But contemplation--a faculty rare in all
times, but wellnigh unheard of in ours--is like the photographic plate
which finds stars that no telescope can discover, by simply setting its
passively expectant gaze in certain indicated directions so long and
steadily that telescopically invisible bodies become apparent by
accumulation of impression. Such men are prophets and apostles, whether
canonical or not. It is by the instrumentality of such men that
religions are established and upheld; and the term “verifiable religion”
is a piece of mere nineteenth-century slang, when applied to the
examination of dogma by such as have probably never had the remotest
apprehension of any spiritual reality. Certain facts of history relating
to religion may or may not be capable of “verification” to the
multitude; but the dogmas which are the substance of a religion, can
only be really apprehended--assuming them to be real and
apprehensible--by the exceedingly few to whom the highest powers of
contemplation, which are usually the accompaniments of equally
extraordinary virtues, are accorded. The mass of mankind must receive
and hold these things as they daily receive and hold a thousand other
things--laws, customs, traditions, the grounds of common moralities,
etc.--by faith; their real apprehension in such matters extending for
the most part only to the discernment of the reasonableness of so
receiving and holding them.
Now this faculty and habit of really apprehending things, even in its
lower and not uncommon degree, is an immeasurable advantage; but it has
its drawback. Those who possess it are singularly capable of committing
the unpardonable sin, the sin against knowledge. “Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do” is a petition which He who spoke these
words could not have offered for deeds or denials in clear opposition to
what a man knows to be true and good. “My name is in him and He will not
pardon.” All men agree in calling the spirit of truth--which is the
spirit by which truth is really apprehended--holy; and to deny this
spirit in deliberate action may, without any appeal to Christian
doctrine, be proved to be unpardonable by the way such action is known
to influence a man’s character. A single act of such denial, if it be in
some great and vital matter, often seems to destroy the soul. History
affords more than one example of a statesman who has begun life with an
eagle eye for truth, a strong and tender love of honour, and everything
that makes a man among men. At some crisis of temptation he chooses
personal ambition before some clearly apprehended duty of patriotism;
and his whole nature seems thenceforward changed: he drops like a
scorched fly from the flame--
Then takes his doom, to limp and crawl,
Blind and despised, from fall to fall.
But the least practical denial of real apprehension of the truth is, to
such as have ever had a conscience and have observed themselves,
demonstrably unpardonable, inasmuch as it destroys a portion of the
capacity of the soul. “The remnant” may, indeed, “become a great
nation,” but it will be still and for ever a remnant of what it would
have been, had it preserved the integrity of its fidelity.
If we knew the secrets of the lives of those--alas! innumerable--who
seem to have no real apprehension of anything, none of the light which
it is said lighteth every man that cometh into the world, it would
probably be found that they have not been born without, but have
forfeited their noblest human heritage, by repeated practical denials of
the things which they have seen.
III
SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS
I
The intellect, the understanding or discursive reason, and the memory,
it need scarcely be said, are three distinct faculties; yet in their
exercise and the character they acquire for their possessors, they are
apt to be confused, and that not without damage to the public and
private interests of those who make the mistake. Intellect, though it is
constantly spoken of as synonymous with understanding, is really an
incomparably rarer quality, the difference being that which subsists
between “genius” and “talent”; and to ignorant persons a ready and
well-stored memory, which is consistent with the almost total defect of
either of the nobler faculties, is often regarded as a combination of
both.
The intellect is the faculty of the “seer.” It discerns truth as a
living thing; and, according as it is in less or greater power, it
discerns with a more or less far-seeing glance the relationships of
principles to each other, and of facts, circumstances, and the realities
of nature to principles, without anything that can be properly called
ratiocination. It cannot be cultivated, as the understanding and memory
can be and need to be; and it cannot in the ordinary course of things be
injured, except by one means--namely, dishonesty, that is, habitual
denial by the will, for the sake of interested or vicious motives, of
its own perceptions. Genius and high moral--not necessarily
physical--courage are therefore found to be constant companions. Indeed,
it is difficult to say how far an absolute moral courage in
acknowledging intuitions may not be of the very nature of genius: and
whether it might not be described as a sort of interior sanctity which
dares to see and confess to itself that it sees, though its vision
should place it in a minority of one. Everybody feels that genius is, in
a sort, infallible. That it is so, is indeed an “identical proposition.”
So far as a man is not infallible in what he professes to see, he is not
a man of genius--that is, he is not a seer. It is by no figure of speech
that genius is called inspiration. Dr. Newman somewhere observes that
St. Augustine and some of the primitive teachers of the Church wandered
at will through all the mazes of theology with an intuitive orthodoxy of
genius.
Although this faculty of direct vision is very rare in comparison with
those of ordinary ratiocination and memory, it is not nearly so rare as
is supposed by such as measure genius by its manifestations in
philosophy, science, art, or statesmanship. For one seer who has the
accomplishments and opportunities whereby his faculty can be turned to
public account, there are scores and hundreds who possess and exercise
for their private use their extraordinary perceptive powers. To whom has
it not happened, at one time or other, to witness the instantaneous
shattering of some splendid edifice of reasoning and memory by the brief
Socratic interrogation of some ignoramus who could see?
No mortal intellect or genius is other than very partial, and, even in
that partial character, imperfect. Absolute genius would be nothing more
nor less than the sight of all things at once in their relationship and
origin; but the most imperfect genius has an infinite value--not only
because it is actual sight of truth, but also and still more because it
is a peculiar mode of seeing, a reflection of truth coloured but not
obscured by the individual character, which in each man of genius is
entirely unique. This unique character is, in its expression, what is
called “style”--the sure mark of genius, though the world at large is
unable to distinguish “style” from manner, or even from mannerism.
Incomparably the highest and fortunately the least uncommon form of
genius is wisdom in the conduct of life; for this form involves in a far
greater degree than any other the constant exercise of that courage
which is inseparable from genius. The saint is simply a person who has
so strong and clear a sight of the truth which concerns him
individually, and such courage to confess his vision, that he is always
ready to become a “confessor” under any extremity of persecution.
True statesmanship is another form of wisdom in the conduct of life; and
this is perhaps the rarest of all forms in which genius manifests
itself, because it requires a combination of inferior faculties and
opportunities which is almost as rare as genius. Poetry is the only near
rival of true statesmanship in this respect. The immensely wider and
more various range of vision which the great poet exercises when
compared with other artists, together with the necessity for the
combined working of many lesser faculties and laboriously acquired
accomplishments, has always made of the poet the ideal “genius” in the
world’s esteem. The separate insights into the significance of form,
colour, and sound, upon which the arts of the sculptor, painter, and
musician are founded, must be included in the vision of the poet of the
first rank.
What is called “common sense” is much more nearly allied to genius, or
true intellect, than either talent, which is the outcome of the
discursive reason, or learning, which is that of memory. Compared with
the sunlight by which the purer intellect sees, common sense is the
light of a foggy day, which is good enough to see near objects and to
avoid mischief by. Science is generally considered to be the outcome
solely of the observation of facts and the discursive reason; but in men
like Kepler, Newton, and Faraday there is no lack of “the vision and the
faculty divine.” The discovery of gravitation by the fall of an apple
was pure vision; and it is doubtful whether there was ever a Smith’s
Prizeman who had not a touch of a higher faculty than that which gropes
step by step from premisses to conclusions.
A ghastly semblance of genius is often retained by such persons as once
had it, but have ruined it by denying it in action, and by endeavouring
to prostitute it to selfish or vicious interests. Their judicial
blindness is the reverse of that which was inflicted upon Tiresias for
daring to gaze upon unveiled wisdom. He could no longer see the world;
they can no longer see the heavens. But their original genius takes the
perverted form of an intuitive craft in pursuing their ends which is no
less amazing, and which, in statesmen especially, is commonly mistaken
by the people for the holy faculty which has been quenched.
To be a man of talent a man must be able to think; to be a man of genius
he must be able not to think, and especially to abstain from the crazy
wool-gathering which is ordinarily regarded as thought. “The harvest of
a quiet eye,” and the learning of the ear which listens in a silence
even of thought, are the wealth of the pure intellect. And the fainter
and the more remote the whispers which are heard in such silence, the
more precious and potential are they likely to be. It is no condemnation
of the thought of Hegel that he is reported to have replied to some
question as to the meaning of a passage in his writings, that “he knew
what it meant when he wrote it.” This thought, too subtle or too simple
for expression and memory, might, if held down and compelled to manifest
itself more explicitly, have moved mankind.
Genius is a great disturber. It is always a new thing, and demands of
old things that they should make a place for it, which cannot be done
without more or less inconvenient rearrangements; and as it seems to
threaten even worse trouble than it is finally found to give, it is
generally hated and resisted on its first appearance. Moreover, to the
eye which is not congenial the fresh manifestation of genius in almost
any kind has something in it alarming and revolting; and it is welcomed
with an “Ugh, ugh! the horrid thing! It’s alive!” A man of genius who is
also a man of sense will never complain of such a reception from his
fellows. Their opposition is even respectable from their point of view
and with their faculties of beholding.
II
Genius, like sanctity, is commonly more or less foolish in the eyes of
the world. Its riches are “the riches of secret places”; and they so
much exceed, in its esteem, those that are considered riches by the
common sense of men, that its neglect of the ordinary goods of life
often amounts to real imprudence--imprudence even from its own point of
view, whereby it is bound to avoid hindrances to its free life and
exercise. The follies, however, of a Blake or a Hartley Coleridge are
venial when compared with those of the thoughtful and prudent fool--the
fool in respect of great things, as the other is in respect of small.
Who can measure the harm that may be done to the world by a thoughtful
and earnest fool--one who starts from data which he is too dull to
verify, and who multiplies his mistakes in proportion to the
perspicuity and extent of his deductions? The man of “talent” who is
merely such, is not a very common phenomenon--for “talent” is in great
part the product of culture; which “genius,” or the power of seeing, is
not. Most persons of talent still possess a share of that obscure kind
of genius called common sense, which keeps them from taking up with
false principles and following them into wild conclusions. We need,
however, only recall some famous figures in the present and past
generation in order to be assured that immense talent is consistent with
an almost complete deficiency of real insight. When the discursive
understanding is in great force, and has at its command abundant stores
of external information, we behold a power that may work the ruin of
empires amid applauding peoples, though it can never build them up. The
natural and exact sciences are the proper fields for the exertions of
such a faculty.
Stupid persons fancy they derogate from the supremacy of the pure
intellect or genius by observing that it is always associated with a
vivid imagination, which they regard as a faculty for seeing things as
they are not. Shelley made a mistake in a totally different direction
when he declared that the imagination is the power by which spiritual
things are discerned; whereas the truth is that intellect is the power
by which such things are discerned, and imagination is that by which
they are expressed. Sensible things alone can be expressed fully and
directly by sensible terms. Symbols and parables, and metaphors--which
are parables on a small scale--are the only means of adequately
conveying, or rather hinting, supersensual knowledge. “He spake not
without a parable.” Hebrew, Greek, Indian, and Egyptian religions all
spoke in parables; and poets deal in images and parables simply because
there is no other vehicle for what they have to say. “The things which
are unseen may be known by the things which are seen,” but only by way
of symbol and parable. Imagination, though it is not, as Shelley says it
is, the power of spiritual insight, is its invariable concomitant; and
even that dull kinsman of genius, common sense, would feel sadly
hampered in its endeavours to convey its perceptions to the minds of
others, were it wholly without the faculty of speaking in parables.
It has often been noted that men of genius have bad memories, and that
persons having extraordinary memories, like Cardinal Mezzofanti, have
little else. The truth is that there are two quite distinct kinds of
memory: the memory for external facts and words, apart from their
significance; and the memory for spiritual facts and principles. The
man of genius, who may have no special reason for cultivating the lower
kind of memory, may even find it rather a hindrance than a help. His
prayer is, “Let not my heart forget the things mine eyes have seen.” So
long as his heart retains the significance of the facts he has seen and
the words he has heard, he is willing to let the words and the facts go,
as a man casts away the shells after he has eaten the oysters. The
“well-informed” person commonly differs from the man of genius in this:
that he carries about with him all the shells of all the oysters he has
ever eaten, and that his soul has grown thin under the burthen.
A commonplace about men of genius is that they usually have religious
dispositions. It would be strange were it otherwise, seeing that genius
is nothing but the power of discerning the things of the spirit. The
first principle of the most recent form of “psychology” is, indeed, that
there is no soul; but that man must have little genius who would not say
“Amen” to St. Bernard’s epigram, “He must have little spirit who thinks
that a spirit is nothing.”
After what has just been said, it seems paradoxical to be obliged to
admit that the sins to which men of genius are usually most subject are
those of sense. From pride, and its offspring envy, hatred, and malice,
which play so terrible a part in the affairs of most men, they are
comparatively exempt. That they should often be more subject than others
to be misled by the ease and pleasure of the senses may be because the
senses of men of genius are more subtly permeated by the spirit, of
which they are the ultimate life, than are those of the world at large,
and are thereby rendered more acute and less sordidly wicked. This may
be said, I hope, without in any way condoning error.
Men of genius, who are therewithal men of cultivated talents and great
stores of appropriate information, are the only safe legislators and
governors of empires; not only because theirs alone is the sufficiency
of sound and far-seeing wisdom, but because they are far less likely
than other men to be misled by personal motives and weak fears. But such
men, unhappily, are the last to come to the front in states of
ultra-popular government; and in such states they have accordingly to
suffer that last misery (as by one of the greatest philosophers it has
been called), the misery of being governed by worse men than
themselves.
IV
POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES
If we take stock of the world’s actual achievements--intellectual,
moral, and artistic--in the six thousand years during which we know
anything about it, it is impossible not to be struck with the extreme
smallness of the sum of the acquisitions and attainments of the human
race which can bear any comparison with its desires and apparent
possibilities. If those desires and possibilities had in no instances
been fulfilled, the entire absence of attainment would have been less
startling than is its actual paucity. It would not have been nearly so
wonderful if none had reached the high table-lands of excellence in any
department of human activity, as it is that those heights have been
reached by some and by so few. And the marvel of this paucity becomes
yet further increased when it is considered that not only is it all that
mankind has done, but in all likelihood nearly as much as it could have
done had it tried ever so hard. For it is a peculiarity of the very
highest work in every kind, that it is not the result of painful labour,
but that it is easier to do it than not to do it, when it can be done at
all. So that humanity must not be allowed to cover its enormous
shortcomings with an “I could an’ I would.” How many philosophers has
philosophy produced? If Aristotle be the type, where is the other
specimen of the species? How many statesmen have there been whose
faculties and characters, nearly inspected, do not provoke the
exclamation, “With how little wisdom the world is governed!” In how many
Christians has Christianity flowered, as in the souls of St. John and
St. Francis? Greek architecture and Greek sculpture mean little more
than the Parthenon and its friezes. What survives of Greek poetry will
scarcely fill one bookshelf, and English poetry, which forms the greater
part of the rest of the poetry of the human race, would rest easily on
three. The building of the Middle Ages is nothing but the repetition of
one inspiration, which would remain transmitted to us almost in its
entirety were the Cathedral of Freiburg the only specimen left to us. A
single gallery of the Vatican would provide wall-room sufficient for all
the paintings of the world that are able to fill with satisfying peace
the eye which has been educated by Botticelli, Luini, and Raphael. An
ordinary life affords abundant leisure to take in all that two hundred
generations of mankind have so done as to fill the craving for what all
men feel to be alone satisfyingly human. That is to say, one man in
twenty millions or so has been able, during some--often very
small--proportion of his life, to be and to do that which all men, when
they behold such being and doing, feel to be their natural though
utterly unattainable prerogative. Thousands and thousands climb, with
praiseworthy struggles and integrity of purpose and with shouts of
“Excelsior!” the minor peaks of life; while two or three in a generation
are seen walking with easy breath about those great and tranquil
table-lands for which all of us, on beholding them, feel that we were
born. It is not that, in a world of inequalities, some two or three in a
generation must naturally stand higher than all the rest, as only one
among many competitors can be Senior Wrangler. That fuller excellence is
a region, and not a pinnacle; and those who reach it are all upon a
great and facile equality, their altitude being simply that of right and
unhindered human faculty.
Every individual of the human race is, in this regard, an image of the
race itself. Only for a few hours, perhaps, of the million which is
about the sum of the longest lifetime, has each one easily and
unaccountably found himself to be living indeed. Some accident, some
passing occasion which has called upon him to be more than himself, some
glimpse of grace in nature or in woman, some lucky disaster even, or
some mere wayward tide of existence, has caused the black walls of his
prison-house to vanish; and he has breathed in a realm of vision,
generosity, and gracious peace, “too transient for delight and too
divine.” These prophetic moments--one in a million--pass; but, unless he
has despised and denied them, they leave him capable, more or less, of
understanding prophecy; and he knows that in him also there is a
potentiality, realisable perhaps under other than present conditions, of
becoming one in that great society in which such states of life appear
to be not momentary crises but habits. The wider and the deeper his
personal experience of beauty and felicity, the more readily will a man
confess that life contains scarcely anything for fruition but abundance
for hope; and the better he is acquainted with that which has been best
done and said in all ages, the less he will be inclined to believe that
the world is making any advances towards the realisation of the promise
which every age repeats. An enigma for which science has no key is the
certain fact, that if the world be not a prophecy of good things which
it shows no likelihood of providing, then it is all nothing but a
purposeless and badly conceived tragedy, upon which the sooner the black
curtain drops the better. For if the world be not such a prophecy, then
the best of men are of all men the most miserable; to these is given
beyond others the “transitory gleam” which shows the dulness of their
ordinary life for the lingering death it really is; but, knowing little
or nothing of life as it is known to such, the stupid and “the wicked
have no bonds in their death,” and can only feel the comparatively
tolerable evils of external and accidental adversity.
There never was a time in which the “higher life,” “high art,” etc.,
were less known than in the present, when every goose is gabbling about
them. The proof is in the way these names are constantly associated with
that of “progress”; whereas progress, as respects the realities, is, if
it exists at all, most certainly a progress backwards. The rejoicings of
Lord Macaulay and his like over the recent advances of mankind are
exactly those of a prosperous shopman over the increase of his business;
and the hallelujahs of science are mainly over the elaboration of mighty
means for petty ends and of theories which explain away God and exhibit
all that past ages have called wisdom as folly. It is too absurd! Yet we
must not allow the present eclipse of the electric lights of true
learning by the flaring tar-barrels of jubilant ignorance to discourage
us in the belief that there is, on the whole, no cessation of the work
for which the world goes on. The conscience of mankind, though
occasionally confused and obscured, will always cry “Amen” to the great
word of St. Augustine, “What ought to be must be;” and the rare
achievements of genius and sanctity and the few and far-between glimpses
of the life that is indeed life, which are accorded to all, will
continue to be accepted as “the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen.”
V
CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART
“Rejoice always: and again I say, Rejoice,” says one of the highest
authorities; and a poet who is scarcely less infallible in psychological
science writes--
A cheerful heart is what the Muses love.
Dante makes Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; though his own
interior gaiety--of which a word by and by--is so interior, and its
outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to have
himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a
representation of life; and that the good are gay is a commonplace, and
one which, strange to say, is as generally disbelieved as it is, when
rightly understood, undeniably true. The good and brave heart is always
gay in this sense: that, although it may be afflicted and oppressed by
its own misfortunes and those of others, it refuses in the darkest
moment to consent to despondency; and thus a habit of mind is formed
which can discern in most of its own afflictions some cause for grave
rejoicing, and can thence infer at least a probability of such cause in
cases where it cannot be discerned. Regarding thus cheerfully and
hopefully its own sorrows, it is not over-troubled by those of others,
however tender and helpful its sympathies may be. It is impossible to
weep much for that in others which we should smile at in ourselves; and
when we see a soul writhing like a worm under what seems to us a small
misfortune, our pity for its misery is much mitigated by contempt for
its cowardice.
A couple of generations ago most people would have opened their eyes
wide at any one who should have thought remarks like these worth making.
Such truth formed part of the universal tradition of civilisation and
moral culture. But a wilful melancholy, and, the twin sign of
corruption, a levity which acutely fears and sympathises with pains
which are literally only skin-deep, have been increasing upon us of late
in a most portentous way. The much-vaunted growth of “humanity” has been
due rather to a softening of the brain than of the heart. Huge moral
ill, the fact of national degradation, the prospect of national
disaster, arouses less pain in the sympathetic hearts of humanitarians
than the yelp of a poodle which has had its ear pinched. Men and times
do not talk about the virtues they possess. Which is more inhuman: to
punish with rack and wheel the treason which voluntarily sacrifices or
jeopardises the welfare of millions, or to condone or ignore it for the
sake of momentary ease? The England in which melancholy and levity are
becoming prevalent habits is merry England no more. “The nation thou
hast multiplied, but not increased the joy.” And we are not the only
nation which deserves this lamentation of the prophet. The growths of
melancholy and levity have been still more marked in France. In America,
some traveller has remarked, “there is comfort everywhere, but no joy.”
America is accordingly the only country which has no art.
It is, as we have said, a vulgar error to consider Dante a melancholy
poet. In the whole range of art, joy is nowhere expressed so often and
with such piercing sweetness as in the _Paradiso_; and it flashes
occasionally through the dun atmosphere of the other parts of the poem.
The _Inferno_ is pervaded by the vigorous joy of the poet at beholding
thoroughly bad people getting their deserts; and the penances of
purgatory are contemplated by him with the grave pleasure which is often
felt by the saner sort of persons, even in this world, under the
sufferings they acknowledge to be the appropriate punishment of and
purification from the sins they have fallen into. Shakespeare is the
most cheerful of poets. We read his deepest tragedies without
contracting even a momentary stain of melancholy, however many tears
they may have drawn from us. Calderon flies among horrors and disasters
on the wings of a bird of Paradise, without any resulting incongruity;
and like things may be said of the greatest painters and musicians,
until quite recent times. But since about the beginning of this century
how many of our geniuses have mingled their songs with tears and sighs
over “insoluble problems” and “mysteries of life” which have no
existence for a man who is in his right senses and who minds his own
business; while the “scrannel pipes” of the smaller wits have been
playing to the sorry Yankee tune of “There’s nothing new, and there’s
nothing true, and it doesn’t signify.” Music has taken to imitate the
wailing of lost spirits or the liveliness of the casino; and the highest
ambition of several of our best painters seems to have been to evoke a
pathos from eternal gloom.
This is false art, and represents a false life, or rather that which is
not life at all; for life is not only joyful, it is joy itself. Life,
unhindered by the internal obstruction of vice or the outward
obscurations of pain, sorrow, and anxiety, is pure and simple joy; as we
have most of us experienced during the few hours of our lives in which,
the conscience being free, all bodily and external evils have been
removed or at least quiescent. And, though these glimpses of perfect
sunshine are few and far between, the joy of life will not be wholly
obscured to us by any external evil--provided the breast is clear of
remorse, envy, discontent, or any other habitually cherished sin. The
opportunities and hindrances of joyful life are pretty fairly
distributed among all classes and persons. God is just, and His mercy is
over all His works. If gardens and parks are denied to the inhabitant of
a city lane, his eye is so sharpened by its fasts that it can drink in
its full share of the sweetness of nature from a flowering geranium or a
pot of crocuses on his window-sill. There are really very few persons
who have not enough to eat. Marriage is open almost equally to all,
except, perhaps, the less wealthy members of the upper orders. None are
without opportunities of joy and abundant reasons for gratitude: and the
hindrances of joy are, if justly considered, only opportunities of
acquiring new capacities for delight. In proportion as life becomes high
and pure it becomes gay. The profound spiritualities of the Greek and
Indian myths laugh for joy; and there are, perhaps, no passages of
Scripture more fondly dwelt upon in the Roman Breviary than those which
paint the gladness of the Uncreated Wisdom: “When he balanced the
foundations of the earth, I was with him, forming all things: and was
delighted every day, playing before him at all times, playing in the
world: and my delight is to be with the children of men.”
VI
THE POINT OF REST IN ART
Coleridge, who had little technical knowledge of any art but that in
which, when he was himself, he supremely excelled--poetry--had
nevertheless a deeper insight into the fundamental principles of art
than any modern writer, with the sole exception of Goethe. And this is
one of his many fruitful sayings: “All harmony is founded on a relation
to rest--on relative rest. Take a metallic plate and strew sand on it,
sound an harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about
in circles and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on
some point of sand relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain
will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no
point of rest.”
Without pretending to be able to trace this principle of rest to more
than a very limited distance, and in a very few examples, I think it is
worth notice in a time when art generally is characterised by a want of
that repose which until recent times has especially “marked the manners
of the great.” Look through the National Gallery, and few pictures will
be found which would not add a grace of peace to the house they were
hung in, no matter how wild the subject or passionate the motive. Step
into an Academy Exhibition, and there will scarcely be discovered a
dozen canvases in a thousand which, however skilful and in many respects
admirable they may be, would not constitute points of _un_rest, if they
were in daily and hourly sight. It is the same with nearly all modern
poetry, sculpture, and architecture; and if it is not true of music, it
is because music absolutely cannot exist without some reference to a
point or points of rest, in keynote, fundamental strain, or reiterated
refrain.
It might at first be supposed that, in a picture, this point should be
that on which the eye should repose in order to bring the remainder into
focal proportion; and this is true with regard to those painters who
paint on the theory that the eye is fixed, and not roving in its regard.
But this theory has never been that of the greatest times of art. Crome,
Constable, and Gainsborough’s landscapes do not fade off from a certain
point on which the eye is supposed to be fixed; yet there will usually
be found some point, generally quite insignificant in matter, on which,
indeed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it
involuntarily returns for repose.
The most noteworthy remark to be made about this point of rest is, that
it is not in itself the most but the least interesting point in the
whole work. It is the _punctum indifferens_ to which all that is
interesting is more or less unconsciously referred. In an elaborate
landscape it may be--as it is in one of Constable’s--the sawn-off end of
a branch of a tree: or a piece of its root, as it is in one of Michael
Angelo’s pieces in the Sistine Chapel. In the Dresden “Madonna” of
Raphael it is the heel of the Infant. No one who has not given some
thought to the subject can have any idea of the value of these
apparently insignificant points in the pictures in which they occur,
unless he tries the experiment of doing away with them. Cover them from
sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole life
of the picture will be found to have been lowered.