this School of Giorgione, as we may call it, which, for most of us,
notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the "new Vasari,"
will still identify itself with those famous pictures at Florence, at
Dresden and Paris. A certain artistic ideal is there defined for us-
-the conception of a peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we
may understand as the Giorgionesque, [149] wherever we find it,
whether in Venetian work generally, or in work of our own time.
Of this the Concert, that undoubted work of Giorgione in the Pitti
Palace, is the typical instance, and a pledge authenticating the
connexion of the school, and the spirit of the school, with the
master.
I have spoken of a certain interpenetration of the matter or
subject of a work of art with the form of it, a condition realised
absolutely only in music, as the condition to which every form of
art is perpetually aspiring. In the art of painting, the attainment
of this ideal condition, this perfect interpenetration of the subject
with the elements of colour and design, depends, of course, in
great measure, on dexterous choice of that subject, or phase of
subject; and such choice is one of the secrets of Giorgione's
school. It is the school of genre, and employs itself mainly with
"painted idylls," but, in the production of this pictorial poetry,
exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting of such matter as lends
itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form, to complete
expression by drawing and colour. For although its productions
are painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells
itself without an articulated story. The master is pre-eminent for
the resolution, the ease and quickness, with which he reproduces
instantaneous motion--the lacing-on of armour, with the head
bent back so stately--the fainting lady--the embrace, rapid as the
kiss, caught with death itself from dying [150] lips--some
momentary conjunction of mirrors and polished armour and still
water, by which all the sides of a solid image are exhibited at
once, solving that casuistical question whether painting can
present an object as completely as sculpture. The sudden act, the
rapid transition of thought, the passing expression--this he arrests
with that vivacity which Vasari has attributed to him, il fuoco
Giorgionesco, as he terms it. Now it is part of the ideality of the
highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of
profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a
look, a smile, perhaps--some brief and wholly concrete moment--
into which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects
of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to
absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present.
Such ideal instants the school of Giorgione selects, with its
admirable tact, from that feverish, tumultuously coloured world
of the old citizens of Venice--exquisite pauses in time, in which,
arrested thus, we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of
existence, and which are like some consummate extract or
quintessence of life.
It is to the law or condition of music, as I said, that all art like this
is really aspiring; and, in the school of Giorgione, the perfect
moments of music itself, the making or hearing of music, song or
its accompaniment, are themselves prominent as subjects. On
that background [151] of the silence of Venice, so impressive to
the modern visitor, the world of Italian music was then forming.
In choice of subject, as in all besides, the Concert of the Pitti
Palace is typical of everything that Giorgione, himself an
admirable musician, touched with his influence. In sketch or
finished picture, in various collections, we may follow it through
many intricate variations--men fainting at music; music at the
pool-side while people fish, or mingled with the sound of the
pitcher in the well, or heard across running water, or among the
flocks; the tuning of instruments; people with intent faces, as if
listening, like those described by Plato in an ingenious passage of
the Republic, to detect the smallest interval of musical sound, the
smallest undulation in the air, or feeling for music in thought on a
stringless instrument, ear and finger refining themselves
infinitely, in the appetite for sweet sound; a momentary touch of
an instrument in the twilight, as one passes through some
unfamiliar room, in a chance company.
In these then, the favourite incidents of Giorgione's school,
music or the musical intervals in our existence, life itself is
conceived as a sort of listening--listening to music, to the reading
of Bandello's novels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies.
Often such moments are really our moments of play, and we are
surprised at the unexpected blessedness of what may seem our
[152] least important part of time; not merely because play is in
many instances that to which people really apply their own best
powers, but also because at such times, the stress of our servile,
everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers in
things without are permitted free passage, and have their way
with us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passes
often to the play which is like music; to those masques in which
men avowedly do but play at real life, like children "dressing
up," disguised in the strange old Italian dresses, parti-coloured, or
fantastic with embroidery and furs, of which the master was so
curious a designer, and which, above all the spotless white linen
at wrist and throat, he painted so dexterously.
But when people are happy in this thirsty land water will not be
far off; and in the school of Giorgione, the presence of water--the
well, or marble-rimmed pool, the drawing or pouring of water, as
the woman pours it from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the
Fête Champêtre, listening, perhaps, to the cool sound as it falls,
blent with the music of the pipes--is as characteristic, and almost
as suggestive, as that of music itself. And the landscape feels,
and is glad of it also--a landscape full of clearness, of the effects
of water, of fresh rain newly passed through the air, and collected
into the grassy channels. The air, moreover, in the school of
Giorgione, seems as vivid as the people who breathe [153] it, and
literally empyrean, all impurities being burnt out of it, and no
taint, no floating particle of anything but its own proper elements
allowed to subsist within it.
Its scenery is such as in England we call "park scenery," with
some elusive refinement felt about the rustic buildings, the choice
grass, the grouped trees, the undulations deftly economised for
graceful effect. Only, in Italy all natural things are as it were
woven through and through with gold thread, even the cypress
revealing it among the folds of its blackness. And it is with gold
dust, or gold thread, that these Venetian painters seem to work,
spinning its fine filaments, through the solemn human flesh,
away into the white plastered walls of the thatched huts. The
harsher details of the mountains recede to a harmonious distance,
the one peak of rich blue above the horizon remaining but as the
sensible warrant of that due coolness which is all we need ask
here of the Alps, with their dark rains and streams. Yet what real,
airy space, as the eye passes from level to level, through the long-
drawn valley in which Jacob embraces Rachel among the flocks!
Nowhere is there a truer instance of that balance, that modulated
unison of landscape and persons--of the human image and its
accessories--already noticed as characteristic of the Venetian
school, so that, in it, neither personage nor scenery is ever a mere
pretext for the other.
[154] Something like this seems to me to be the vraie vérité about
Giorgione, if I may adopt a serviceable expression, by which the
French recognise those more liberal and durable impressions
which, in respect of any really considerable person or subject,
anything that has at all intricately occupied men's attention, lie
beyond, and must supplement, the narrower range of the strictly
ascertained facts about it. In this, Giorgione is but an illustration
of a valuable general caution we may abide by in all criticism.
As regards Giorgione himself, we have indeed to take note of all
those negations and exceptions, by which, at first sight, a "new
Vasari" seems merely to have confused our apprehension of a
delightful object, to have explained away in our inheritance from
past time what seemed of high value there. Yet it is not with a
full understanding even of those exceptions that one can leave off
just at this point. Properly qualified, such exceptions are but a
salt of genuineness in our knowledge; and beyond all those
strictly ascertained facts, we must take note of that indirect
influence by which one like Giorgione, for instance, enlarges his
permanent efficacy and really makes himself felt in our culture.
In a just impression of that, is the essential truth, the vraie vérité,
concerning him.
1877.
NOTES
144. *Crowe and Cavalcaselle; History of Painting in North Italy.
145. *Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
JOACHIM DU BELLAY
[155] IN the middle of the sixteenth century, when the spirit of
the Renaissance was everywhere, and people had begun to look
back with distaste on the works of the middle age, the old Gothic
manner had still one chance more, in borrowing something from
the rival which was about to supplant it. In this way there was
produced, chiefly in France, a new and peculiar phase of taste
with qualities and a charm of its own, blending the somewhat
attenuated grace of Italian ornament with the general outlines of
Northern design. It created the Château de Gaillon, as you may
still see it in the delicate engravings of Isräel Silvestre--a Gothic
donjon veiled faintly by a surface of dainty Italian traceries--
Chenonceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the church of Brou. In
painting, there came from Italy workmen like Maître Roux and
the masters of the school of Fontainebleau, to have their later
Italian voluptuousness attempered by the naïve and silvery
qualities of the native style; and it was characteristic of these
painters that they were most successful in painting on glass, an
art so [156] essentially medieval. Taking it up where the middle
age had left it, they found their whole work among the last
subtleties of colour and line; and keeping within the true limits of
their material, they got quite a new order of effects from it, and
felt their way to refinements on colour never dreamed of by those
older workmen, the glass-painters of Chartres or Le Mans. What
is called the Renaissance in France is thus not so much the
introduction of a wholly new taste ready-made from Italy, but
rather the finest and subtlest phase of the middle age itself, its last
fleeting splendour and temperate Saint Martin's summer. In
poetry, the Gothic spirit in France had produced a thousand
songs; so in the Renaissance, French poetry too did but borrow
something to blend with a native growth, and the poems of
Ronsard, with their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces,
their slightness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are the
correlative of the traceries of the house of Jacques Coeur at
Bourges, or the Maison de Justice at Rouen.
There was indeed something in the native French taste naturally
akin to that Italian finesse. The characteristic of French work had
always been a certain nicety, a remarkable daintiness of hand,
une netteté remarquable d'exécution. In the paintings of
François Clouet, for example, or rather of the Clouets--for there
was a whole family of them--painters remarkable for [157] their
resistance to Italian influences, there is a silveriness of colour and
a clearness of expression which distinguish them very definitely
from their Flemish neighbours, Hemling or the Van Eycks. And
this nicety is not less characteristic of old French poetry. A light,
aërial delicacy, a simple elegance--une netteté remarquable
d'exécution: these are essential characteristics alike of Villon's
poetry, and of the Hours of Anne of Brittany. They are
characteristic too of a hundred French Gothic carvings and
traceries. Alike in the old Gothic cathedrals, and in their
counterpart, the old Gothic chansons de geste, the rough and
ponderous mass becomes, as if by passing for a moment into
happier conditions, or through a more gracious stratum of air,
graceful and refined, like the carved ferneries on the granite
church at Folgoat, or the lines which describe the fair priestly
hands of Archbishop Turpin, in the song of Roland; although
below both alike there is a fund of mere Gothic strength, or
heaviness.*
Now Villon's songs and Clouet's painting are like these. It is the
higher touch making itself felt here and there, betraying itself,
like nobler blood in a lower stock, by a fine line or gesture or
expression, the turn of a wrist, the tapering of a finger. In
Ronsard's time that rougher [158] element seemed likely to
predominate. No one can turn over the pages of Rabelais without
feeling how much need there was of softening, of castigation. To
effect this softening is the object of the revolution in poetry
which is connected with Ronsard's name. Casting about for the
means of thus refining upon and saving the character of French
literature, he accepted that influx of Renaissance taste, which,
leaving the buildings, the language, the art, the poetry of France,
at bottom, what they were, old French Gothic still, gilds their
surfaces with a strange, delightful, foreign aspect passing over all
that Northern land, in itself neither deeper nor more permanent
than a chance effect of light. He reinforces, he doubles the
French daintiness by Italian finesse. Thereupon, nearly all the
force and all the seriousness of French work disappear; only the
elegance, the aërial touch, the perfect manner remain. But this
elegance, this manner, this daintiness of execution are
consummate, and have an unmistakable aesthetic value.
So the old French chanson, which, like the old northern Gothic
ornament, though it sometimes refined itself into a sort of weird
elegance, was often, in its essence, something rude and formless,
became in the hands of Ronsard a Pindaric ode. He gave it
structure, a sustained system, strophe and antistrophe, and taught
it a changefulness and variety of metre which keep the curiosity
always excited, so that the very aspect of it, as it [159] lies
written on the page, carries the eye lightly onwards, and of which
this is a good instance:--
Avril, le grace, et le ris
De Cypris,
Le flair et la douce haleine;
Avril, le parfum des dieux,
Qui, des cieux,
Sentent l’odeur de la plaine;
C’est toy, courtois et gentil,
Qui, d’exil
Retire ces passagères,
Ces arondelles qui vont,
Et qui sont
Du printemps les messagères.
That is not by Ronsard, but by Remy Belleau, for Ronsard soon
came to have a school. Six other poets threw in their lot with him
in his literary revolution,--this Remy Belleau, Antoine de Baif,
Pontus de Tyard, Étienne Jodelle, Jean Daurat, and lastly Joachim
du Bellay; and with that strange love of emblems which is
characteristic of the time, which covered all the works of Francis
the First with the salamander, and all the works of Henry the
Second with the double crescent, and all the works of Anne of
Brittany with the knotted cord, they called themselves the Pleiad;
seven in all, although, as happens with the celestial Pleiad, if you
scrutinise this constellation of poets more carefully you may find
there a great number of minor stars.
The first note of this literary revolution was [160] struck by
Joachim du Bellay in a little tract written at the early age of
twenty-four, which coming to us through three centuries seems of
yesterday, so full is it of those delicate critical distinctions which
are sometimes supposed peculiar to modern writers. The piece
has for its title La Deffense et Illustration de la langue
Françoyse; and its problem is how to illustrate or ennoble the
French language, to give it lustre.
We are accustomed to speak of the varied critical and creative
movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the
Renaissance, and because we have a single name for it we may
sometimes fancy that there was more unity in the thing itself than
there really was. Even the Reformation, that other great
movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had far less
unity, far less of combined action, than is at first sight supposed;
and the Renaissance was infinitely less united, less conscious of
combined action, than the Reformation. But if anywhere the
Renaissance became conscious, as a German philosopher might
say, if ever it was understood as a systematic movement by those
who took part in it, it is in this little book of Joachim du Bellay's,
which it is impossible to read without feeling the excitement, the
animation, of change, of discovery. "It is a remarkable fact,"
says M. Sainte-Beuve, "and an inversion of what is true of other
languages, that, in French, prose has always had the precedence
over poetry." Du Bellay's prose [161] is perfectly transparent,
flexible, and chaste. In many ways it is a more characteristic
example of the culture of the Pleiad than any of its verse; and
those who love the whole movement of which the Pleiad is a
part, for a weird foreign grace in it, and may be looking about for
a true specimen of it, cannot have a better than Joachim du Bellay
and this little treatise of his.
Du Bellay's object is to adjust the existing French culture to the
rediscovered classical culture; and in discussing this problem,
and developing the theories of the Pleiad, he has lighted upon
many principles of permanent truth and applicability. There were
some who despaired of the French language altogether, who
thought it naturally incapable of the fulness and elegance of
Greek and Latin--cette élégance et copie qui est en la langue
Greque et Romaine--that science could be adequately discussed,
and poetry nobly written, only in the dead languages. "Those
who speak thus," says Du Bellay, "make me think of the relics
which one may only see through a little pane of glass, and must
not touch with one's hands. That is what these people do with all
branches of culture, which they keep shut up in Greek and Latin
books, not permitting one to see them otherwise, or transport
them out of dead words into those which are alive, and wing their
way daily through the mouths of men." "Languages," he says
again, "are not born like plants and trees, some naturally feeble
and sickly, [162] others healthy and strong and apter to bear the
weight of men's conceptions, but all their virtue is generated in
the world of choice and men's freewill concerning them.
Therefore, I cannot blame too strongly the rashness of some of
our countrymen, who being anything rather than Greeks or
Latins, depreciate and reject with more than stoical disdain
everything written in French; nor can I express my surprise at the
odd opinion of some learned men who think that our vulgar
tongue is wholly incapable of erudition and good literature."
It was an age of translations. Du Bellay himself translated two
books of the Aeneid, and other poetry, old and new, and there
were some who thought that the translation of the classical
literature was the true means of ennobling the French language:--
strangers are ever favourites with us--nous favorisons toujours les
étrangers. Du Bellay moderates their expectations. "I do not
believe that one can learn the right use of them"--he is speaking
of figures and ornament in language--"from translations, because
it is impossible to reproduce them with the same grace with
which the original author used them. For each language has I
know not what peculiarity of its own; and if you force yourself to
express the naturalness (le naïf) of this in another language,
observing the law of translation,--not to expatiate beyond the
limits of the author himself, your words will be constrained,
[163] cold and ungraceful." Then he fixes the test of all good
translation:--"To prove this, read me Demosthenes and Homer in
Latin, Cicero and Virgil in French, and see whether they produce
in you the same affections which you experience in reading those
authors in the original."
In this effort to ennoble the French language, to give it grace,
number, perfection, and as painters do to their pictures, that last,
so desirable, touch--cette dernière main que nous désirons-what
Du Bellay is really pleading for is his mother-tongue, the
language, that is, in which one will have the utmost degree of
what is moving and passionate. He recognised of what force the
music and dignity of languages are, how they enter into the
inmost part of things; and in pleading for the cultivation of the
French language, he is pleading for no merely scholastic interest,
but for freedom, impulse, reality, not in literature only, but in
daily communion of speech. After all, it was impossible to have
this impulse in Greek and Latin, dead languages shut up in books
as in reliquaries--péris et mises en reliquaires de livres. By aid
of this starveling stock--pauvre plante et vergette--of the French
language, he must speak delicately, movingly, if he is ever to
speak so at all: that, or none, must be for him the medium of what
he calls, in one of his great phrases, le discours fatal des choses
mondaines--that discourse about affairs which decides men's
fates. And it is his patriotism [164] not to despair of it; he sees it
already perfect in all elegance and beauty of words--parfait en
toute élégance et vénusté de paroles.
Du Bellay was born in the disastrous year 1525, the year of the
battle of Pavia, and the captivity of Francis the First. His parents
died early, and to him, as the younger son, his mother's little
estate, ce petit Liré, the beloved place of his birth, descended. He
was brought up by a brother only a little older than himself; and
left to themselves, the two boys passed their lives in day-dreams
of military glory. Their education was neglected; "The time of
my youth," says Du Bellay, "was lost, like the flower which no
shower waters, and no hand cultivates." He was just twenty
years old when the elder brother died, leaving Joachim to be the
guardian of his child. It was with regret, with a shrinking sense
of incapacity, that he took upon him the burden of this
responsibility. Hitherto he had looked forward to the profession
of a soldier, hereditary in his family. But at this time a sickness
attacked him which brought him cruel sufferings, and seemed
likely to be mortal. It was then for the first time that he read the
Greek and Latin poets. These studies came too late to make him
what he so much desired to be, a trifler in Greek and Latin verse,
like so many others of his time now forgotten; instead, they made
him a lover of his own homely native tongue, that poor starveling
stock of the French [165] language. It was through this fortunate
short-coming in his education that he became national and
modern; and he learned afterwards to look back on that wild
garden of his youth with only a half regret. A certain Cardinal du
Bellay was the successful member of the family, a man often
employed in high official business. To him the thoughts of
Joachim turned when it became necessary to choose a profession,
and in 1552 he accompanied the Cardinal to Rome. He remained
there nearly five years, burdened with the weight of affairs, and
languishing with home-sickness. Yet it was under these
circumstances that his genius yielded its best fruits. From Rome,
so full of pleasurable sensation for men of an imaginative
temperament such as his, with all the curiosities of the
Renaissance still fresh in it, his thoughts went back painfully,
longingly, to the country of the Loire, with its wide expanse of
waving corn, its homely pointed roofs of grey slate, and its far-
off scent of the sea. He reached home at last, but only to die
there, quite suddenly, one wintry day, at the early age of thirty-
five.