The repulsive ugliness of the early Christian paintings was not the
consequence of any break in the tradition. There was no reason why the
graceful drawing of the human figure should not have been transmitted,
as well as the technical procedures and the pigments. Nor was effort
wanting: these pictures were often very elaborate and splendid in
execution. But it is clear that grace and resemblance to anything
existing, so far from being aimed at, were intentionally avoided. Even
as late as the thirteenth century we find figures with blue legs and red
bodies,--the horses in a procession blue, red, and yellow. Any whim of
association, or fanciful color-pattern, was preferred to beauty or
correctness. Likeness to actual things seemed to be regarded, indeed, as
an unavoidable evil, to be restricted as far as possible. The problem
was, to show God's omnipresence in the world, especially His appearance
on the earth as man, and His abiding presence in holy men and women as
an inspiration obliterating their humanity. But so long as the divine
and the human are looked upon as essentially opposed, their union can be
by miracle only, and the first thought must be to keep prominent this
miraculousness, and guard against confusion of this angelic existence
with every-day reality. The result is this realm of ghosts, at home
neither in heaven nor on earth, neither presuming to be spirit nor
condescending to be body, but hovering intermediate. But the more
strongly the antithesis is felt, the nearer the thought to end this
remaining tenderness for the gross and unspiritual,--to drop this
ballast of earth, and rise into the region of heavenly realities. Upon a
window of Canterbury Cathedral, beneath a representation of the miracle
of Cana, is the legend,--_"Lympha dat historiam, vinum notat
allegoriam."_ But if the earthly is there only for the sake of this
heavenly transmutation,--if the miracle, and the miracle alone, shows
God's purpose accomplished,--then all things must be miraculous, for all
else may be safely ignored. Henceforth, nothing is of itself profane,
for the profane is only that wherein the higher and truer sense has not
yet been recognized. What is demanded is not an exceptional
transmutation, but a translation,--that all Nature should be interpreted
of the spirit.
The result is, on the one hand, a greater license in dealing with actual
forms, since Art sees all things on one level of dignity,--respects one
no more than another, but only its own purpose,--is careless of material
qualities, and of moral qualities, too, as far as they are bound to
particular shapes. Why dwell tediously upon one particle, when the value
of it consists not in its particularity, but in its harmony with the
rest of the universe? Giotto seems to make short work with the human
form divine by wrapping all his figures from head to foot in flowing
draperies. But these figures have more humanity in them, stand closer to
us, because the meaning is no longer petrified in the shape, but speaks
to us freely and directly, in a look, a gesture, a sweep of the garment.
The Greek said,--"With these superhuman lineaments you are to conceive
the presence of Jove; these are the appropriate forms of the immortals."
Giotto said,--"See what divine meanings in every-day faces and actions;
with these eyes you are to look upon the people in the street." The one
is a remote and incredible perfection,--the other, the intimate reality
of the actual and present. It is, in truth, therefore, a closer approach
to Nature than was before possible. The artist no longer shuns full
actuality for his conception, for he fears no confusion with the actual.
For instance, from the earliest times the celestial nature of angels had
been naïvely intimated by appending wings to them. There was no attempt
to carry out the suggestion, or to show the mechanical possibility of
it, for that would be only to make winged men. The painters of the
sixteenth century, on the other hand, from a nervous dread lest wings
should prove insufficient, establish a sure basis of clouds for their
angels, with more and more emphasis of buoyancy and extent, until at
last, no longer trusting their own statement, they settle the question
by showing them from below, already risen, and so choke off the doubt
whether they can rise. But Orcagna's angels float without assistance or
effort, by their own inherent lightness, as naturally as we walk. They
are not out of their element, but bring their element with them. These
are not men caught up into the skies, and do not need to be sustained
there. The world they inhabit is not earth in heaven, but heaven on
earth,--the earth seen in accordance with the purpose of its existence.
Giotto's fellow-citizens were struck with the new interest which the
language of attitude and gesture and all the familiar details of life
acquired in his representation of them. Looking around them, they saw
what they had been taught to see, and concluded it was only an
unexampled closeness of copying. No doubt Giotto thought so, too,--but
had that been all, we should not have heard of it. It is this new
interest that has to be accounted for. The charm did not lie in the
fact, nor in the reproduction of it in the picture, but in a sudden
sense of its value as expression, resting on a still obscurer feeling
that herein lay its whole value,--that the actual _is_ not what it
seems, still less a pure delusion, but that it is pure _seeming_, so
that its phenomenal character is no reproach, but the bond that connects
it with reality. Just because it is only "the outward show," and does
not pretend to be anything more, what it shows is not "the things that
only seem," but the things that are. The attractiveness of beauty is due
to the sense of higher affinities in the object; it is finality felt,
but not comprehended, so that the form shines with the splendor of a
purpose that belongs not to it, but to the whole whereof it is a part.
Aristotle makes wonder the forerunner of science. So our admiration of
beauty is a tribute paid in advance to the fresh insight it promises.
Whether it be called miracle or inspiration, the artist must see his
theme as something excellent and singular. This is perhaps that
"strangeness" which Lord Bacon requires in all "excellent beauty," the
new significance coming direct, and not through reflection, and
therefore ineffable and incomparable. That Giotto and his successors
went on for two hundred years painting saints and miracles was not
because the Church so ordained, nor from any extraordinary devoutness of
the artists, but because they still needed an outward assurance that
what they did was not the petty triviality it seemed. There must always
remain the sense of an ulterior, undeveloped meaning; when that is laid
bare, Art has become superfluous, and makes haste to withdraw into
obscure regions. For it is only as language that the picture or the
statue avails anything, and this circumstantiality of expression is
tolerable only so long as it is the only expression. Beauty is an honor
to matter; but spirit, the source of beauty, is impatient of such
measure of it as Art can give. As, in the legend, Eurydice, the dawn,
sinks back into night at the look of the arisen sun, so this lovely
flush of the dawning intelligence wanes before the eye of the intellect.
The picture is a help so long as it transcends previous conception; but
when the mind comes up with these sallies, and the picture is compared
with the idea, it sinks back into a thing. Thenceforth it takes rank
with Nature, and falls victim to the natural laws. It is only an aspect
and an instant,--not eternal, but a petty persistence,--not God, but an
idol,--not the saint, but his flesh and integuments.
Shall we say, then, that beauty is an illusion? Certainly it is no
falsity; we may call it provisional truth,--truth at a certain stage, as
appearance, not yet as idea. It is _appearance_ seen as final, as the
highest the mind has reached. Hence its miraculousness. It is in advance
of consciousness; we cannot account for it any more than the savage
could account for his fetich,--why this bunch of rags and feathers
should be more venerable to him than other rags and feathers. But to
deny that the impressiveness it adds to matter comes from a deeper sense
of the truth would be as unwise as for him to deny his fetich. The
fetich is false, not as compared with other rags and feathers, but as
compared with a higher conception of God. The falsity is not that he
sees God in this rubbish, but that he does not see Him elsewhere.
Coleridge said that a picture is something between a thought and a
thing. It must keep the mean; either extreme is fatal. Plato makes Eros
intermediate between wisdom and ignorance, born of unequal parentage,
neither mortal nor immortal, forever needy, forever seeking the Psyche
whom he can never meet face to face.
The history of Art has a certain analogy to the growth of the corals.
Like them, it seeks the light which it cannot endure. A certain depth
beneath the surface is most favorable to it,--a dim, midway region of
twilight and calm, remote alike from the stagnant obscurity of mere
sensation and from the agitated surface of day, the dry light of the
intellect. When it is laid bare, it dies,--its substance, indeed,
enduring as the basis of new continents, but the life gone, and only the
traces of its action left in the stony relics of the past. Greek Art
perished when its secret was translated into clearer language by Plato
and Aristotle; and Duccio and Cimabue and Giotto must go the same way as
soon as St. Francis of Assisi or Luther or Calvin puts into words what
they meant. It is its own success that is fatal to Art; for just in
proportion as the expressiveness it insists upon is shown to be
pervading, universal, and not the property of this or that shape, the
particular manifestation is degraded. Color and form are due to partial
opacity; the light must penetrate to a certain depth, but not
throughout.
The name of Giotto has come to stand for Devotional Art, for an
earnestness that subordinates all display to the sacredness of the
theme. But his fellow-citizens knew him for a man of quick worldly wit,
who despised asceticism, and was ready with the most audacious jokes,
even at sacred things. Ghiberti and Cennini do not praise him for piety,
but for having "brought Art back to Nature" and "translated it from
Greek into Latin,"--that is, from the language of clerks into the
vernacular. It is not anything special in the intention that gives
Giotto his fame, but the freedom, directness, and variety of the
language with which it is expressed. The effort to escape from
traditional formulas and conventional shapes often makes itself felt at
the expense even of beauty. Instead of the statuesque forms of the
earlier time, it is the dramatic interest that is now prominent,--the
composition, the convergent action of numerous figures, separately,
perhaps, insignificant, but pervaded by a common emotion that
subordinates all distinctions and leaves itself alone visible. Even in
the traditional groups, as, for instance, the Holy Families, etc., the
aim is more complete realization, in draperies, gestures, postures,
rather than beauty of form. We miss in Giotto much that had been
attained before him. What Madonna of his can rank with Giovanni
Pisano's? The Northern cathedral-sculptures, even some of the Byzantine
carvings, have a dignity that is at least uncommon in his pictures.
Especially the faces are generally wooden,--destitute alike of
individuality and of the loveliness of Duccio's and even of some of
Cimabue's. On the other hand, in the picture wherein the school
attained, perhaps, its highest success as to beauty of the faces,
Orcagna's "Paradise" at Santa Maria Novella, the blessed are ranged in
row above row, with mostly no relation to each other but juxtaposition.
We see here two directions,--one in continuation of the antique, seeking
beauty as the property of certain privileged forms, the other as the
hidden possibility that pervades all things. One or the other must abate
something: either the image must become less sacred, or the meaning
narrower; for the language of painting is not figurative, like the
language of poetry, but figure, and unless the form bear on its face
that it is not all that is meant, its inherent limitations are
transferred to the thought itself. When Dante tells us that Brunetto
Latini and his companions looked at him,--
"Come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna,"
it is the intensity of the gaze that is present with us, not the old
tailor and his needle. But in Painting the image is usurping and
exclusive.
Of these divergent tendencies it is easy to see which must conquer. The
gifts of the spirit are more truly honored as the birthright of humanity
than as the property of this or that saint. The worship of the Madonna
is better than the worship of Athene just so far as the homage is paid
to a sentiment and not to a person. Now the Madonna, too, must come down
from her throne. The painters grew tired of painting saints and angels.
Giotto already had diverged from the traditional heads and draperies,
and begun to put his figures into the Florentine dress. Masaccio and
Filippino Lippi brought their fellow-citizens into their pictures. Soon
the Holy Family is only a Florentine matron with her baby. The sacred
histories are no longer the end, but only the excuse; everything else is
insisted on rather than the pretended theme. The second Nicene Council
had declared that "the designing of the holy images was not to be left
to the invention of artists, but to the approved legislation and
tradition of the Catholic Church." But now the Church had to take a
great deal that it had not bargained for. Perspective, chiaroscuro,
picturesque contrast and variety, and all that belongs to the show of
things, without regard to what they are,--this is now the religion of
Art.
These things may seem to us rather superficial, and Art to have declined
from its ancient dignity. But see how they took hold of men, and what
men they took hold of. In the midst of that bloody and shameless
fifteenth century, when only force seems sacred, men hunted these
shadows as if they were wealth and power. Paolo Uccello could not be got
away from his drawing to his meals or his rest, and only replied to his
wife's remonstrances, "Ah, this perspective is so delightful!" With what
ardor Mantegna and Luca Signorelli seized upon a new trait or action!
Leonardo da Vinci, "the first name of the fifteenth century," a man to
whom any career was open, and who seemed almost equally fit for any,
never walked the streets without a sketch-book in his hand, and was all
his life long immersed in the study of Appearance, with a persistent
scrutiny that is revealed by his endless caricatures and studies, but
perhaps by nothing more clearly than by his incidental discovery of the
principle of the stereoscope, which he describes in his treatise on
Painting. This was no learned curiosity, nor the whim of seeing the
universe under drill, but only a clearer instinct of what the purpose of
Art is, namely, to see the reality of the actual world in and as the
appearance, instead of groping for some ulterior reality hidden behind
it. Leonardo has been called the precursor of Bacon. Certainly the
conviction that underlies this passion for the outside of things is the
same in both,--the firm belief that the truth is not to be sought in
some remote seventh heaven, but in a truer view of the universe about
us.
Donatello told Paolo Uccello that he was leaving the substance for the
show. But the painter doubtless felt that the show was more real than
any such "substance." For it is the finite taken as what it truly is,
nothing in itself, but only the show of the infinite. If it seem shadowy
and abstract, it is to be considered with what it is compared. What an
abstraction is depends on what is taken away and what left behind. For
instance, the Slavery question in our politics is sometimes termed an
abstraction. Yes, surely, if the dollar _is_ almighty, is the final
reality,--if peace and comfort are alone worth living for,--then the
Slavery question and several other things are abstractions. So in the
world of matter, if the chemical results are the reality of it, the
appearance may well be considered as an abstraction. But this is not the
view of Art; Art has never magnified the materiality of the finite; on
the contrary, its history is only the record of successive attempts to
dispose of matter, the failure always lying in the hasty effort to
abolish it altogether in favor of an immaterial principle outside of it,
something behind the phenomena, like Kant's _noumenon_,--too fine to
exist, yet unable to dispense with existence, and so, after all, not
spirit, but only a superfine kind of matter; or as in a picture in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, where the world is figured as a series of
concentric circles, held up like a shield by God standing behind it.
It may be asked, Was not the appearance, and this alone, from all time,
the object of Art? But so long as the figment of a separate reality of
the finite is kept up, an antagonism subsists between this and truth,
and the appearance cannot be frankly made the end, but has only an
indirect, derivative value. In the classic it was the human form in
superhuman perfection; in the early Christian Art, God condescending to
inhabit human shape; in each case, what is given is felt to be negative
to the reality,--a fiction, not the truth.
But now the antagonism falls away, and the truth of Art is felt to be a
higher power of the truth of Nature. Perspective puts the mind in the
place of gravitation as the centre, thus naïvely declaring mind and not
matter to be the substance of the universe. It will see only this,
feeling well that there is no other reality. It may be said that
Perspective is as much an outward material fact as any other. So it is,
as soon as the point of sight is fixed. The mind alters nothing, but
gives to the objects that coherency that makes them into a world. The
universe has no existence for the idiot, not because it is not _there_,
but because he makes no image of it, or, as we say, does not _mind_ it.
The point of sight is the mark of a foregone action of the mind; what is
embraced in it is seen together, because it belongs to one conception.
The effect can be simulated to a certain extent by mechanical
contrivance; but before the rules of perspective were systematized, the
perspective of a picture betrays its history, tells how much of it was
seen together, and what was added. Even late in the fifteenth century
pictures are still more or less mosaics,--their piecemeal origin
confessed by slight indications in the midst even of very advanced
technical skill. Thus, in Antonio Pollaiuolo's "Three Archangels," in
the Florence Academy,--three admirably drawn figures, abreast, and about
equally distant from the frame, the line of the right wing touches the
head at the same point in each, with no allowance for their different
relations to the centre of the picture.
But there is a deeper kind of perspective, not so easily manufactured,
though the manufacture of this, too, is often attempted, namely,
Composition. The true ground of perspective in a picture is not a
mechanical arrangement of lines, but a definite vision,--an affection of
the painter by the subject, the net result of it in his mind,
instantaneous and complete. It is a mistake to suppose that Composition
is anything arbitrary,--that in the landscape out-of-doors we see the
world as God made it, but in the picture as the painter makes it.
Composition is nothing but the logic of vision; an uncomposed view is
no more possible than an unlogical sentence. The eyes convey in each
case what the mind is able to grasp,--no less, no more. As to any
particular work, it is always a question of fact what it amounts to; the
composition may be shallow, it may be bad,--the work of the
understanding, not of the imagination,--put together, instead of seen
together. But a picture _without_ composition would be the mathematical
point. Mr. Ruskin thinks any sensible person would exchange his
pictures, however good, for windows through which he could see the
scenes themselves. This does not quite meet the point, for it may be
only a preference of quantity to quality. The window gives an infinitude
of pictures; the painter, whatever his merit, but one. A fair comparison
would be to place by the side of the Turner drawing a photograph of the
scene, which we will suppose taken at the most favorable moment, and
complete in color as well as light and shade. Whoever should then prefer
the photograph must be either more of a naturalist than an artist, or
else a better artist than Turner. The photograph, supposing it to be
perfect in its way, gives what is seen at a first glance, only with the
optical part of the process expanded over the whole field, instead of
being confined to one point, as the eye is. The picture in it is the
first glance of the operator, as he selected it; whatever delicacy of
detail told in the impression on his mind tells in the impression on the
plate; whatever is more than that does not go to increase the richness
of the result, _as picture_, but belongs to another sphere. The
landscape-photographs that we have lately had in such admirable
perfection, however they may overpower our judgment at first sight,
will, I believe, be found not to _wear_ well; they have really less in
them than even second-rate drawings, and therefore are sooner exhausted.
The most satisfactory results of the photograph are where the subject is
professedly a fragment, as in near foliage, tree-trunks, stone-texture;
or where the mind's work is already done, and needs only to be
reflected, as in buildings, sculpture, and, to a certain extent,
portrait,--as far as the character has wrought itself into the clothes,
habitual attitude, etc. Is not the popularity of the small full-length
portrait-photographs owing to the predominance they give to this passive
imprint of the mind's past action upon externals over its momentary and
elusive presence? It is to the fillip received from the startling
likeness of trivial details, exciting us to supply what is deficient in
more important points, that is to be ascribed the leniency to the
photograph on the part of near relatives and friends, who are usually
hard to please with a painted likeness.
But all comparisons between the photograph and the hand-drawn picture
are apt to be vitiated by the confusion of various extraneous interests
with a purely artistic satisfaction resting in the thing itself. It is
the old fallacy, involved in all the comparisons of Art with Nature. Of
course, at bottom the interest is always that of the indwelling idea.
But the question is, whether we stop at the outside, the material
texture, or pass at once to the other extreme, the thought conveyed, or
whether the two sides remain undistinguished. In the latter case only is
our enjoyment strictly æsthetic, that is, attached to the bare
perception of this particular thing; in the others, it is not this thing
that prevails, but the physical or moral qualities, the class to which
it belongs. It is true all these qualities play in and influence or even
constitute the impression that particular works of Art make upon us. One
man admires a picture for its _handling_, its surface, the way in which
the paint is laid on; another, for its illustration of the laws of
physiognomy; another, because it reminds him of the spring he spent in
Rome, the pleasant people he met there, etc. We do not always care to
distinguish the sources of the pleasure we feel; but for any _criticism_
we must quit these accidents and personalities, and attend solely to
that in the work which is unique, peculiar to it, that in which it
suggests nothing, and associates itself with nothing, but refuses to be
classed or distributed. This may not be the most important aspect of the
thing represented, nor the deepest interest that a picture can have; but
here, strictly speaking, lies all the _beauty_ of it. The photograph has
or may have a certain value of this kind, but a little time is needful
before we discriminate what is general and what is special. Its
extraneous interest, as specimen, as _instance_ only, tends at once to
abate from the first view, as the mind classifies and disposes of it.
What remains, not thus to be disposed of, is its value as picture. Under
this test, the photograph, compared with works of Art of a high order,
will prove wanting in substance, thin and spotty, faulty in both ways,
too full and too empty. For the result in each case must be
proportionate to the impression that it echoes; but this, in the work of
the artist, is reinforced by all his previous study and experience, as
well as by the force and delicacy which his perception has over that of
other men. It is thus really more concrete, has more in it, than the
actual scene.
But when Composition is decried as _artificial_, what is meant is that
it is _artifice_. It must be artificial, in the sense that all is there
for the sake of the picture. But it is not to be the _contrivance_ of
the painter; the purpose must be in the work, not in his head. Diotima,
in Plato's "Banquet," tells Socrates that Eros desires not the
beautiful, but to bring forth in the beautiful; the creative impulse
itself must be the motive, not anything ulterior. We require of the
artist that he shall build better than he knows,--that his work shall
not be the statement of his opinions, however correct or respectable,
but an infinity, inexhaustible like Nature. He is to paint, as Turner
said, only his impressions, and this precisely because they are not
_his_, but stand outside of his will. To further this, to get the direct
action of the artist's instinct, clear of the meddling and patching of
forethought and afterthought, is no doubt the aim of the seemingly
careless, formless handling now in vogue,--the dash which Harding says
makes all the difference between what is good and what is intolerable in
water-colors,--and the palette-knife-and-finger procedure of the French
painters.
The sin of premeditated composition is that it is premeditated; the why
and wherefore is of less consequence. If the motive be extraneous to the
work, a theory, not an instinct, it does not matter much how _high_ it
is. It is fatal to beauty to see in the thing only its uses,--in the
tree only the planks, in Niagara only the water-power; but a reverence
for the facts themselves, or even for the moral meaning of them, so far
as it is consciously present in the artist's mind, is just so far from
the true intent of Art. This is the bane of the modern German school,
both in landscape and history. They are laborious, learned, accurate,
elevated in sentiment; Kaulbach's pictures, for instance, are complete
treatises upon the theme, both as to the conception and the drawing,
grouping, etc.; but it is mostly as treatises that they have interest.
So the allegories in Albert Dürer's "Melancholia" are obstructive to it
as a work of Art, and just in proportion to their value as thoughts.
The moral meaning in a picture, and its fidelity to fact, may each serve
as measure of its merit _after it is done_. They must each be there, for
its aim is to express after its own fashion the reality that lurks in
every particle of matter. But it is for the spectator to see them, not
the artist, and it is talking at cross-purposes to make either the
motive,--to preach morality to Art, or to require from the artist an
inventory of the landscape. That five or ten million pines grow in a
Swiss valley is no reason why every one of them should be drawn. No
doubt every one of them has its reason for being there, and it is
conceivable that an exhaustive final statement might require them all
to be shown. But there are no final statements in this world, least of
all in Art. There are many things besides pines in the valley, and more
important, and they can be drawn meanwhile. Besides, if all the pines,
why not every pebble and blade of grass?
The earnestness that attracts us in mediæval Art, the devout fervor of
the earlier time and the veracity of the later, the deference of the
painter to his theme, is profoundly interesting as _history_, but it was
conditioned also by the limitations of that age. The mediæval mind was
oppressed by a sense of the foreignness and profaneness of Nature. The
world is God's work, and ruled by Him; but it is not His dwelling-place,
but only His foot-stool. The Divine spirit penetrates into the world of
matter at certain points and to a certain depth, does not possess and
inhabit it now and here, but only elsewhere and at a future time, in
heaven, and at the final Judgment; and meantime the Church and the State
are to maintain His jurisdiction over this outlying province as well as
they can. The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him
down into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express
warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart.
Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an
extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a
world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection
of fragments from various worlds. The figures in their landscapes do not
tread the earth as if they belonged there, but like actors upon a stage,
tricked up for the occasion. The earth is a desert upon which stones
have been laid and herbs stuck into the crevices. The trees are put
together out of separate leaves and twigs, and the rocks and mountains
inserted like posts. In the earliest specimens the figures themselves
have the same piecemeal look: their members are not born together, but
put together. We see just how far the soul extends into them,--sometimes
only to the eyes, then to the rest of the features, afterwards to the
limbs and extremities. Evidently the artist's conception left much
outside of it, to be added by way of label or explanation. In the trees,
the care is to give the well-known fruit, the acorn or the apple, not
the character of the tree; for what is wanted is only an indication what
tree is meant. The only tie between man and the material world is the
_use_ he makes of it, elaborating and turning it into something it was
not. Hence the trim _orderliness_ of the mediæval landscape. Dante shows
no love of the woods or the mountains, but only dread and dislike, and
draws his tropes from engineering, from shipyards, moats, embankments.
The mediæval conception is higher than the antique; it recognizes a
reality beyond the immediate, but not yet that it is the reality of the
immediate and present also. But Art must dislodge this phantom of a
lower, profane reality, and accept its own visions as authentic and
sufficient. The modern mind is in this sense less religious than the
mediæval, that the antithesis of phenomenal and real is less present to
it. But the pungency of this antithesis comes from an imperfect
realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite
remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into
effect,--its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but
accepted,--just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present
seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,--the
fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it
becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines of the ideal.
The complaints of want of earnestness, devoutness, in modern Art, are as
short-sighted as Schiller's lament over the prosaic present, as a world
bereft of the gods. It is a loss to which we can well resign ourselves,
that we no longer see God throned on Olympus, or anywhere else outside
of the world. It is no misfortune that the mind has recognized under
these alien forms a spirit akin to itself, and therefore no longer
gives bribes to Fate by setting up images to it. The deity it worships
is thenceforth no longer powerless to exist, nor is there any existence
out of him; it needs not, then, to provide a limbo for him in some
sphere of abstraction. What has fled is not the divinity, but its false
isolation, its delegation to a corner of the universe. Instead of the
god with his whims, we have law universal, the rule of mind, to which
matter is not hostile, but allied and affirmative. That the sun is no
longer the chariot of Helios, but a gravitating fireball, is only the
other side of the perception that it is mind embodied, not some
unrelated entity for which a charioteer must be deputed.
We no longer worship groves and fountains, nor Madonnas and saints, and
our Art accordingly can no longer have the fervency, since its objects
have not the concreteness, that belonged to former times. But it is to
be noticed that Art can be devout only in proportion as Religion is
artistic,--that is, as matter, and not spirit, is the immediate object
of worship. Art and Religion spring from the same root, but coincide
only at the outset, as in fetichism, the worship of the Black Stone of
the Caaba, or the wonder-working Madonnas of Italy. The fetich is at
once image and god; the interest in the appearance is not distinct from
the interest in the meaning. It needs neither to be beautiful nor to be
understood. But as the sense springs up of a related _mind_ in the idol,
the two sides are separated. It is no longer _this thing_ merely, but,
on the one hand, spirit, above and beyond matter, and, on the other, the
appearance, equally self-sufficing and supreme among earthly things,
just because its reality is not here, but elsewhere,--appearance,
therefore, as transcendent, or Beauty.
To every age the religion of the foregoing seems artificial, incumbered
with forms, and its Art superstitious, over-scrupulous, biased by
considerations that have nothing to do with Art. Hence religious
reformers are mystics, enthusiasts: this is the look of Luther, even of
the hard-headed Calvin, as seen from the Roman-Catholic side. Hence,
also, every epoch of revolution in Art seems to the preceding like an
irruption of frivolity and profanity. Christian Art would have seemed so
to the ancients; the Realism of the fourteenth century must have seemed
so to the Giotteschi and the Renaissance, to both. The term
Pre-Raphaelitism, though it seems an odd collocation to bring together
such men as Frà Angelico, Filippo Lippi, and Luca Signorelli, has so far
an intelligible basis, that all this period, from Giotto to Raphael,
amidst all diversities, is characterized throughout by a deference of
Art to something extraneous. It is not beauty that Frà Angelico looks
for, but holiness, or beauty as expressing this; it is not beauty that
draws Filippo Lippi, but homely actuality. It is from this point of view
that the Renaissance has been attacked as wanting in faith, earnestness,
humility. The Renaissance had swallowed all formulas. Nothing was in
itself sacred, but all other considerations were sacrificed to the
appeal to the eye. But this, so far from proving any "faithlessness,"
shows, on the contrary, an entire faith in their Art, that it was able
to accomplish what was required of it, and needed not to be bolstered up
by anything external. Mr. Ruskin wants language to express his contempt
for Claude, because, in a picture entitled "Moses at the Burning Bush,"
he paints only a graceful landscape, in which the Bush is rather
inconspicuous. But Claude might well reply, that what he intended was
not a history, nor a homily, but a picture; that the name was added for
convenience' sake, as he might name his son, John, without meaning any
comparisons with the Evangelist. It is no defect, but a merit, that it
requires nothing else than itself to explain it.
Claude depicts "an unutilized earth," whence all traces of care, labor,
sorrow, rapine, and want,--all that can suggest the perils and trials of
life,--is removed. The buildings are palaces or picturesque ruins; the
personages promenade at leisure, or only pretend to be doing something.
All action and story, all individuality of persons, objects, and events,
is merged in a pervading atmosphere of tranquil, sunny repose,--as of a
holiday-afternoon. It may seem to us an idle lubberland, a paradise of
do-nothings;--Mr. Ruskin sees in it only a "dim, stupid, serene,
leguminous enjoyment." But whoever knows Rome will at least recognize in
Claude's pictures some reflex of that enchantment that still hangs over
the wondrous city, and draws to it generation after generation of
pilgrims. In what does the mysterious charm consist? Is it not that the
place seems set apart from the working-day world of selfish and warring
interests? that here all manner of men, for once, lay aside their sordid
occupations and their vulgar standards, to come together on the ground
of a common humanity? It is easy to sneer at the Renaissance, but to
understand it we must take it in its connection. The matters that
interested that age seem now superfluous, the recreations of a holiday
rather than the business of life. But coming from the dust and din of
the fifteenth century, it looks differently. It was, in whatever dim or
fantastic shape, a recognition of universal brotherhood,--of a common
ground whereon all mankind could meet in peace and even sympathy, were
it only for a picnic. In this _villeggiatura_ of the human race the
immediate aim is no very lofty one,--not truth, not duty, but to please
or be pleased. But who is it that is to be pleased? Not the great of the
earth, not the consecrated of the Church, not the men merely of this
guild or this nation, but Man. It is the festival of the new saint,
Humanus,--a joyful announcement that the ancient antagonism is not
fundamental, but destined to be overcome.
This dreamy, half-sad, but friendly and soothing influence, that
breathes from Claude's landscapes, is not the highest that Nature can
inspire, but it is far better than to see in the earth only food,
lodging, and a place to fight in, or even mere background and
filling-in.
The builders of the Rhine-castles looked down the reaches of the river
only to spy out their prey or their enemy; the monks in their quiet
valleys looked out for their trout-stream and kitchen-garden, but any
interest beyond that would have been heathenish and dangerous. Whilst to
the ancients the earth had value only as enjoyable, inhabitable, the
earlier Christian ages valued it only as uninhabitable, as a wilderness
repelling society. In the earliest mediæval landscapes, the effort to
represent a wilderness that is there only for the sake of the hermits
leads to the curious contradiction of a populous hermitage, every part
of it occupied by figures resolutely bent on being alone, and sedulously
ignoring the others. Humboldt quotes from the early Fathers some glowing
descriptions of natural scenery, but they turn always upon the seclusion
from mankind, and upon the contrast between the grandeur of God's works
and the littleness of ours. But in Claude we have the hint, however
crude, of a relation as unsordid as this, but positive and direct,--the
soul of the landscape speaking at once to the soul of man,--showing
itself cognate, already friendly, and needing only to throw off the husk
of opposition. The defect is not that he defers too much to the purely
pictorial, that he postpones the facts or the story to beauty, but that
he does not defer enough, that he does not sufficiently trust his own
eyes, but by way of further assurance drags in architecture, ships,
mythological or Scripture stories, not caring for them himself, but
supposing the spectator cares, so that they remain unassimilated, a scum
floating on the surface and obscuring the work. Here is the "want of
faith" with which, if any, he is justly chargeable,--that beauty is not
enough for him, but he must make it pleasing. Pleasingness implies a
languid acceptance, in which the mind is spared the shock of fresh
suggestion or incitement. We call the Venus de' Medici, for instance, a
pleasing statue, but the Venus of Milo beautiful; because in the one we
find in fuller measure only what was already accepted and agreeable,
whilst in the other we feel the presence of an unexplored and formidable
personality, provoking the endeavor to follow it out and guess at its
range and extent.
This deference to the spectator marks the decline of Art from the
supremacy of its position as the interpreter of religion to mankind. The
work is no longer a revelation devoutly received by the artist and
piously transmitted to a believing world; but he is a cultivated man,
who gives what is agreeable to a cultivated society, where the Bible is
treated with decorum, but all enthusiasm is reserved for Plato and
Cicero. The earlier and greater men brought much of what they were from
the fifteenth century, but even Raphael is too academic. It is not a
Chinese deference to tradition, nor conformity to a fixed national
taste, such as ruled Greek Art as by an organic necessity. One knows not
whether to wonder most at the fancied need to attach to the work the
stamp of classic authority, or at the levity with which the venerable
forms of antiquity are treated. Nothing can be more superficial than
this varnish of classicality. The names of Cicero, Brutus, Augustus were
in all mouths; but the real character of these men, or of any others, or
of the times they lived in, was very slightly realized. The classic
architecture, with its cogent adaptation and sequence of parts, is cut
up into theatre-scenery: its "members" are members no longer, but scraps
to be stuck about at will. The gods and heroes of the ancient world have
become the pageant of a holiday; even the sacred legends of the Church
receive only an outward respect, and at last not even that. Claude wants
a foreground-figure and puts in Æneas, Diana, or Moses, he cares little
which, and he would hear, unmoved, Mr. Ruskin's eloquent denunciation of
their utter unfitness for the assumed character, and the absurdity of
the whole action of the piece.
But the Renaissance had its religion, too,--namely, Culture. The one
"virtue," acknowledged on all hands, alike by busy merchants, soldiers,
despots, women, the acquaintance with Greek and Roman literature and
art, was not quite the idle dilettanteism it seems. Lorenzo de' Medici
said, that, without the knowledge of the Platonic philosophy, it was
hard to be a good citizen and Christian. Leo X. thought, "Nothing more
excellent or more useful has been given by the Creator to mankind, if we
except only the knowledge and true worship of Himself, than these
studies, which not only lead to the ornament and guidance of human life,
but are applicable and useful to every particular situation." That this
culture was superficial, that it regarded only show and outside, is no
reproach, but means only that it was not a mere galvanizing of dead
bones, that a new spirit was masquerading in these garments. Had it been
in earnest in its revival of the past, it would have been insignificant;
its disregard of the substance, and care for the form alone, showed that
the form was used only as a protest against the old forms. A provincial
narrowness, even a slight air of vulgarity, was felt to attach to the
teachings of the Church. Gentility had come to imply not only
heathendom, ("_gentilis est qui in Christum non credit_,") but liberal
breeding. The attraction of the classic culture, "the humanities," as it
was well called, was just this cosmopolitan largeness, that it had no
prejudices and prescribed no test, but was open to all kinds of merit
and every manner of man. Goethe, who belongs in good part to the
Renaissance, frequently exemplifies this feeling, perhaps nowhere more
strikingly than in the account of his pilgrimage to the temple of
Minerva at Assisi, which he lovingly describes, remarking, at the same
time, that he passed with only aversion the Church of St. Francis, with
its frescos by Cimabue, Giotto, and their followers, which no traveller
of our day willingly misses or soon forgets, though the temple may
probably occupy but a small space in his memory. "I made no doubt,"
says Goethe, "that all the heads there bore the same stamp as my
Captain's,"--an Italian officer, more orthodox than enlightened, with
whom he had been travelling.
In truth, however diverse in its first appearance, the Italian
Renaissance was the counterpart of the German Reformation, and, like
that, a declaration that God is not shut up in a corner of the universe,
nor His revelation restricted in regard of time, place, or persons. The
day was long past when the Church was synonymous with civilization. The
Church-ideal of holiness had long since been laid aside; a new world had
grown up, in which other aims and another spirit prevailed. Macchiavelli
thought the Church had nothing to do with worldly affairs, could do
nothing for the State or for freedom. And the Church thought so, too. If
it was left out of the new order of things, it was because it had left
itself out. "The world" was godless, _pompa Diaboli_; devotion to God
implied devotion (of the world) to the Devil. But the world, thus cut
adrift, found itself yet alive and vigorous, and began thenceforth to
live its own life, leaving the "other world" to take care of itself.
Salvation, whether for the State or the individual, it was felt must
come from individual effort, and not be conferred as a stamp or _visa_
from the Pope and the College of Cardinals. It was not Religion that was
dead, but only the Church. The Church being petrified into a negation,
Culture, the religion of the world, was necessarily negative to that,
and for a time absorbed in the mere getting rid of obstructions.
Sainthood had never been proposed even as an ideal for all mankind, but
only as _fuga sæculi_, the avoidance of all connection with human
affairs. Logically, it must lead to the completest isolation, and find
its best exponent in Simeon Stylites. The new ideal of Culture must
involve first of all the getting rid of isolation, natural and
artificial. Its representatives are such men as Leonardo da Vinci and
Leon-Battista Alberti, masters of all arts and sciences, travelled,
well-bred, at home in the universe,--thoroughly accomplished men of the
world, with senses and faculties in complete harmonious development. It
is an age full of splendid figures; whatever growth there was in any
country came now to its flowering-time.
The drawback is want of purpose. This splendor looks only to show; there
is no universal aim, no motive except whim,--the whims of men of talent,
or the whim of the crowd. For the approbation of the Church is
substituted the applause of cultivated society, a wider convention, but
conventional still. This is the frivolous side of the Renaissance, not
its holding light the old traditions, but that for the traditions it
rejected it had nothing but tradition to substitute. But if this
declaration of independence was at first only a claim for license, not
for liberty, this is only what was natural, and may be said of
Protestantism as well. Protestantism, too, had its orthodoxy, and has
not even yet quite realized that the _private judgment_ whose rights it
vindicated does not mean personal whim, and therefore is not fortified
by the assent of any man or body of men, nor weakened by their dissent,
but belongs alone to thought, which is necessarily individual, and at
the same time of universal validity; whereas, personality is partial,
belongs to the crowd, and to that part of the man which confounds him
with the crowd. Were the private judgment indeed private, it would have
no rights. Of what consequence the private judgments of a tribe of apes,
or of Bushmen? This reference to the bystanders means only an appeal
from the Church; it is at bottom a declaration that the truth is not a
miraculous exception, a falsehood which for this particular occasion is
called truth, but the substance of the universe, apparent everywhere,
and to all that seek it. The perception must be its own evidence, it
must be true for us, now and here. We have no right to blame the
Renaissance painters for their love of show, for Art exists for show,
and the due fulfilment of its purpose, bringing to the surface what was
dimly indicated, must engage it the more thoroughly in the superficial
aspect, and make all reference to a hidden ulterior meaning more and
more a mere pretence. What was once Thought has now become form, color,
surface; to make a mystery of it would be thoughtlessness or hypocrisy.
The shortcoming is not in the artists, but in Art. Painting shares the
same fate as Sculpture: not only is the soul not a thing, it is not
wholly an appearance, but combines with its appearing a constant protest
against the finality of it. Not only is the body an inadequate
manifestation, but what it manifests is itself progressive, and any
conception of it restrictive and partial. Henceforth any representation
of the human form must either pretend a mystery that is not felt, or, if
inspired by a genuine interest, it must be of a lower kind, and must
avoid of set purpose any undue exaltation of one part over another, as
of the face over the limbs, and dwell rather upon harmony of lines and
colors, wherein nothing shall be prominent at the expense of the rest,
seeking to make up what is wanting in intensity, in inward meaning, by
allusion, by an interest reflected from without, instead of the
immediate and intuitive. We often feel, even in Raphael's pictures, that
the aim is lower than, for instance, Frà Angelico's. But it is at least
genuine, and what that saves us from we may see in some of Perugino's
and Pinturicchio's altar-pieces, where spirituality means kicking heels,
hollow cheeks, and a deadly-sweet smile. That Raphael, among all his
Holy Families, painted only one Madonna di San Sisto, and that hastily,
on trifling occasion, shows that it was a chance-hit rather than the
normal fruit of his genius. The beauty that shines like celestial flame
from the face of the divine child, and the transfigured humanity of the
mother, are no denizens of earth, but fugitive radiances that tinge it
for a moment and are gone. For once, the impossible is achieved; the
figures hover, dreamlike, disconnected from all around, as if the canvas
opened and showed, not what is upon it, but beyond it. But it is a
casual success, not to be sought or expected. A wise instinct made the
painter in general shun such direct, explicit statement, and rather
treat the subject somewhat cavalierly than allow it to confront and
confound him. The greater he is, and the more complete his development,
the more he must dread whatever makes his Art secondary or superfluous.
Whatever force we give to the reproach of want of elevation, etc., the
only impossible theme is the unartistic.
But before we give heed to any such reproach we must beware of
confounding the personality of the artist or the fashion of the time
with the moving spirit in both. He works always--as Michel Angelo
complained that he was painting the ceiling of the Sistine--over his own
head, and blinded by his own paint. The _purpose_ that we speak of is
not his petty doings and intentions, but what he unintentionally
accomplishes. It is the spiritual alone that interests; and if later Art
seem, by comparison, wanting in spirituality, this is partly the effect
of its juster appreciation, that rendered direct expression hopeless,
but at the same time superfluous, by discovering the same import more
accessible elsewhere, as the higher indirect meaning of all material
things. Critics tell us that the charm of landscape is incomplete
without the presence of man,--that there must always be some hint, at
least, of human habitation or influence. Certainly it is always a human
interest, it is not the timber and the water, that moves us, but the
echo of a kindred mind. But in the "landscape and figures" it is hardly
a human interest that we take in the figures. The "dull victims of pipe
and mug" serve our turn perhaps better than the noblest mountaineers. It
is not to them that we look for the spirit of the landscape,--rather
anywhere else. It is the security of the perception that allows it to
dispense with pointed demonstration, and to delight rather in obscurer
intimations of its meaning.
The modern ideal is the Picturesque,--a beauty not detachable, belonging
to the picture, to the composition, not to the component parts. It has
no favorites; it is violated alike by the systematic glorification and
the systematic depreciation of particular forms. The Apollo Belvedere
would make as poor a figure in the foreground of a modern landscape as a
fisherman in jack-boots and red nightcap on a pedestal in the Vatican.
Claude's or Turner's figures may be absurd, when taken by themselves;
but the absurdity consists in taking them by themselves. Turner, it is
said, could draw figures well; Claude probably could not; (he is more
likely to have tried;) but each must have felt that anything that should
call attention to the figures would be worse than any bad drawing.
Nicolas Poussin was well called "the learned"; for it is his learning,
his study of the antique, of Raphael, of drapery and anatomy, that most
appears in his landscapes and gives his figures their plastic emphasis.
But this is no praise for a painter.
Of course the boundary-lines cannot be very exactly drawn; the genius of
a Delaroche or a Millais will give interest to a figure-piece at
whatever epoch. But such pictures as Etty's, or Page's Venus, where the
beauty of the human body is the point of attraction, are flat
anachronisms, and for this reason, not from any prudishness of the
public, can never excite a hearty enthusiasm. From the sixteenth century
downwards all pictures become more and more _tableaux de genre_,--the
piece is not described by the nominal subject, but only the class to
which it belongs, leaving its special character wholly undetermined. And
in proportion as the action and the detail are dwelt upon, the more
evident is it that the theme is only a pretence. Martyrdoms, when there
was any fervency of faith in the martyrs, were very abstract. A hint of
sword or wheel sufficed. The saints and the angels, as long as men
believed in them, carried their witness in their faces, with only some
conventional indication of their history. As soon as direct
representation is aimed at and the event portrayed as an historical
fact, it is proof enough that all direct interest is gone and nothing
left but the technical problem. The martyrdoms are vulgar
execution-scenes,--the angels, men sprawling upon clouds. Michel Angelo
was a noble, devout man, but it is clear that the God he prayed to was
not the God he painted.
This essential disparity between idea and representation is the weak
side of Art, plastic and pictorial; but because it is essential it is
not felt by the artist as defect. His genius urges him to all advance
that is possible within the limits of his Art, but not to transcend it.
It will be in vain to exhort him to unite the ancient piety to the
modern knowledge. If he listen to the exhortation, he may be a good
critic, but he is no painter. He must be absorbed in what he sees to the
exclusion of everything else; impartiality is a virtue to all the world
except him. There will always be a onesidedness; either the conception
or the embodying of it halts, is only partially realized; some
incompleteness, some mystery, some apparent want of coincidence between
form and meaning is a necessity to the artist, and if he does not find
it, he will invent it. Hence the embarrassment of some of the English
Pre-Raphaelitists, particularly in dealing with the human form. They
have no hesitation in pursuing into still further minuteness the literal
delineation of inanimate objects, draperies, etc.; but they shrink from
giving full life to their figures, not from a slavish adherence to their
exemplars, but from a dread lest it should seem that what is shown is
all that is meant. The early painters were thus _naïve_ and distinct
because of their limitations; they knew very well what they meant,--as,
that the event took place out-of-doors, with the sun shining, the grass
under-foot, an oak-tree here, a strawberry-vine there,--mere adjunct and
by-play, not to be questioned as to the import of the piece: _that_ the
Church took care of. But who can say what a modern landscape means? The
significance that in the older picture was as it were outside of it,
presupposed, assured elsewhere, has now to be incorporated, verily
present in every atom of soil and film of vapor. The realism of the
modern picture must be infinitely more extended, for the meaning of it
is that _nothing_ is superfluous or insignificant. But with the reality
that it lends to every particle of matter, it must introduce, at the
same time, the protest that spirit makes against matter,--most distinct,
indeed, in the human form and countenance, but nowhere absent. In its
utmost explication there must be felt that there is yet more behind; its
utmost distinctness must be everywhere indefinable, evanescent,--must
proclaim that this parade of surface-appearance is not there for its own
sake. This is what Mr. Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy": but there is
nothing fallacious in it; it is solid truth, only under the guise of
mystery. Turner said that Mr. Ruskin had put all sorts of meanings into
his pictures that he knew nothing about. Of course, else they would
never have got into the pictures. But this does not affect their
validity, but means only that it is the imagination, not the intellect,
that must apprehend them.
It is not an outward, arbitrary incompleteness that is demanded, but a
visible dependence of each part, by its partiality declaring the
completeness of the whole. It is often said that the picture must "leave
room for the imagination." Yes, and for nothing else; but this does not
imply that it should be unfinished, but that, when the painter has set
down what the imagination grasped in one view, he shall stop, no matter
where, and not attempt to eke out the deficiency by formula or by knack
of fingers. Wherever the inspiration leaves him, there is an end of the
picture. Beyond that we get only his personalities; no skill, no
earnestness of intention, etc., can avail him; he is only mystifying
himself or us. At these points we sooner or later come up with him, are
as good as he, and the work forthwith begins to tire. What is tiresome
is to have thrust upon us the dead surface of matter: this is the prose
of the world, which we come to Art to escape. It is prosaic, because it
is seen as the understanding sees it, as an aggregate only, apart from
its vital connection; it matters little whose the understanding is. The
artist must be alive only to the totality of the impression, blind and
deaf to all outside of that. He must believe that the idyl he sees in
the landscape is there because he sees it, and will appear in the
picture without the help of demonstration. The danger is, that from
weakness of faith he will fancy or pretend that he sees something else,
which may be there, but formed no part of the impression. It is simply a
question of natural attraction, magnetism, how much he can take up and
carry; all beyond that is hindrance, and any conscious endeavor of his
cannot help, but can only thwart.
The picturesque has its root in the mind's craving for totality. It is
Nature seen as a whole; all the characteristics and prerequisites of it
come back to this,--such as roughness, wildness, ruin, obscurity, the
gloom of night or of storm; whatever the outward discrepancy, wherever
the effect is produced, it is because in some way there is a gain in
completeness. On this condition everything is welcome,--without it,
nothing. Thus, a broken, weedy bank is more picturesque than the velvet
slope,--the decayed oak than the symmetry of the sapling,--the squalid
shanty by the railroad, with its base of dirt, its windows stuffed with
old hats, and the red shirts dependent from its eaves, than the neatest
brick cottage. They strike a richer accord, while the others drone on a
single note. Moonlight is always picturesque, because it substitutes
mass and breadth for the obtrusiveness of petty particulars. It is not
the pettiness, but the particularity, that makes them unpicturesque. No
impressiveness in the object can atone for exclusiveness. Niagara cannot
be painted, not because it is too difficult, but because it is no
landscape, but like a vast illuminated capital letter filling the whole
page, or the sublime monotony of the mosque-inscriptions, declaring in
thousandfold repetition that God is great. The soaring sublimity of the
Moslem monotheism comes partly from its narrowness and abstractness. Is
it because we are a little hard of hearing that it takes such
reiteration to move us?
The wholeness which the imagination demands is not quantitative, but
qualitative; it has nothing to do with size or with number, except so
far as, by confusing the sense, they obscurely intimate infinity, with
which all quantities are incommensurable. Mr. Ruskin's encyclopedic
anatomizing of the landscape, to the end of showing the closeness of
Turner's perception, has great interest, but not the interest merely of
a longer list, for it is to be remembered that the longest list would be
no nearer to an exhaustive analysis than the shortest. It is not a
specious completeness, but a sense of infinity that can never be
completed,--greater intensity, not greater extension,--that
distinguishes modern landscape-art. Hence there is no incongruity in the
seeming license that it takes with the firm order of Nature. It is in no
spirit of levity or profanity that the substantial distinctions of
things are thus disregarded,--that all absolute rank is denied, and the
value of each made contingent and floating. It is only that the mind is
somewhat nearer apprehending the sense, and dwells less on the
characters.
If Art suffers in its relative rank among human interests by this
democratic levelling, it is to the gain of what Art intends. It is true,
no picture can henceforth move us as men were once moved by pictures. No
Borgo Allegro will ever turn out again in triumph for a Madonna of
Cimabue or of any one else; whatever feeling Turner or another may
excite comes far short of that. But the splendor that clothed the poor,
pale, formal image belonged very little to it, but expressed rather the
previous need of utterance, and could reach that pitch only when the age
had not yet learned to think and to write, but must put up with these
hieroglyphics. Art has no more grown un-religious than Religion has, but
only less idolatrous. As fast as religion passes into life,--as the
spiritual nature of man begins to be recognized as the ground of
legislation and society, and not merely in the miracle of
sainthood,--the apparatus and imagery of the Church, its dogmas and
ceremonies, grow superfluous, as what they stand for is itself present.
It is the dawn that makes these stars grow pale. So in Art, as fast as
the dream of the imagination becomes the common sense of mankind, and
only so fast, the awe that surrounded the earlier glimpses is lost. Its
influence is not lessened, but diffused and domesticated as Culture.
Art is the truly popular philosophy. Our picture-gazing and view-hunting
only express the feeling that our science is too abstract, that it does
not attach us, but isolates us in the universe. What we are thus
inwardly drawn to explore is not the chaff and _exuviæ_ of things, not
their differences only, but their central connection, in spite of
apparent diversity. This, stated, is the Ideal, the abrupt contradiction
of the actual, and the creation of a world extraordinary, in which all
defect is removed. But the defect cannot be cured by correction, for
that admits its right to exist; it is not by exclusion that limitation
is overcome,--this is only to establish a new limitation,--but by
inclusion, by reaching the point where the superficial antagonism
vanishes. Then the ideal is seen no longer in opposition, but everywhere
and alone existent. As this point is approached, the impulse to
reconstruct the actual--as if the triumph of truth were staked on that
venture--dies out. The elaborate contradiction loses interest, earliest
where it is most elaborate and circumstantial, and latest where the
image has least materiality and fixity, where it is only a reminder of
what the actual is securely felt to be, in spite of its stubborn
exterior.
The modern mind is therefore less demonstrative; our civilization seeks
less to declare and typify itself outwardly in works of Art, manners,
dress, etc. Hence it is, perhaps, that the beauty of the race has not
kept pace with its culture. It is less beautiful, because it cares less
for beauty, since this is no longer the only reconcilement of the actual
with the inward demands. The vice of the imagination is its inevitable
exaggeration. It is our own weakness and dulness that we try to hide
from ourselves by this partiality. Therefore it was said that the images
were the Bible of the laity. Bishop Durandus already in the thirteenth
century declared that it is only where the truth is not yet revealed
that this "Judaizing" is permissible.
The highest of all arts is the art of life. In this the superficial
antagonisms of use and beauty, of fact and reality, disappear. A little
gain here, or the hint of it, richly repays all the lost magnificence.
We need not concern ourselves lest these latter ages should be left
bankrupt of the sense of beauty, for that is but a phase of a force that
is never absent; nothing can supersede it but itself in a higher power.
What we lament as decay only shows its demands fulfilled, and the arts
it has left behind are but the landmarks of its accomplished purpose.