OF VITAL BEAUTY.--THIRDLY, IN MAN.
Sec. 1. Condition of the human creature entirely different from that of the
lower animals.
Having thus passed gradually through all the orders and fields of
creation, and traversed that goodly line of God's happy creatures who
"leap not, but express a feast, where all the guests sit close, and
nothing wants," without finding any deficiency which human invention
might supply, nor any harm which human interference might mend, we come
at last to set ourselves face to face with ourselves, expecting that in
creatures made after the image of God we are to find comeliness and
completion more exquisite than in the fowls of the air and the things
that pass through the paths of the sea.
But behold now a sudden change from all former experience. No longer
among the individuals of the race is there equality or likeness, a
distributed fairness and fixed type visible in each, but evil diversity,
and terrible stamp of various degradation; features seamed with
sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by
poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded with remorse; bodies consumed with
sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease, dishonored in foul
uses; intellects without power, hearts without hope, minds earthly and
devilish; our bones full of the sin of our youth, the heaven revealing
our iniquity, the earth rising up against us, the roots dried up
beneath, and the branch cut off above; well for us only, if, after
beholding this our natural face in a glass, we desire not straightway to
forget what manner of men we be.
Sec. 2. What room here for idealization.
Herein there is at last something, and too much, for that short stopping
intelligence and dull perception of ours to accomplish, whether in
earnest fact, or in the seeking for the outward image of beauty:--to
undo the devil's work, to restore to the body the grace and the power
which inherited disease has destroyed, to return to the spirit the
purity, and to the intellect the grasp that they had in Paradise. Now,
first of all, this work, be it observed is in no respect a work of
imagination. Wrecked we are, and nearly all to pieces; but that little
good by which we are to redeem ourselves is to be got out of the old
wreck, beaten about and full of sand though it be; and not out of that
desert island of pride on which the devils split first, and we after
them: and so the only restoration of the body that we can reach is not
to be coined out of our fancies, but to be collected out of such
uninjured and bright vestiges of the old seal as we can find and set
together, and so the ideal of the features, as the good and perfect soul
is seen in them, is not to be reached by imagination, but by the seeing
and reaching forth of the better part of the soul to that of which it
must first know the sweetness and goodness in itself, before it can much
desire, or rightly find, the signs of it in others.
I say much desire and rightly find, because there is not any soul so
sunk but that it shall in some measure feel the impression of mental
beauty in the human features, and detest in others its own likeness, and
in itself despise that which of itself it has made.
Sec. 3. How the conception of the bodily ideal is reached.
Now, of the ordinary process by which the realization of ideal bodily
form is reached, there is explanation enough in all treatises on art,
and it is so far well comprehended that I need not stay long to consider
it. So far as the sight and knowledge of the human form, of the purest
race, exercised from infancy constantly, but not excessively in all
exercises of dignity, not in twists and straining dexterities, but in
natural exercises of running, casting, or riding; practised in
endurance, not of extraordinary hardship, for that hardens and degrades
the body, but of natural hardship, vicissitudes of winter and summer,
and cold and heat, yet in a climate where none of these are severe;
surrounded also by a certain degree of right luxury, so as to soften and
refine the forms of strength; so far as the sight of all this could
render the mental intelligence of what is right in human form so acute
as to be able to abstract and combine from the best examples so
produced, that which was most perfect in each, so far the Greek
conceived and attained the ideal of bodily form: and on the Greek modes
of attaining it, as well as on what he produced, as a perfect example of
it, chiefly dwell those writers whose opinions on this subject I have
collected; wholly losing sight of what seems to me the most important
branch of the inquiry, namely, the influence for good or evil of the
mind upon the bodily shape, the wreck of the mind itself, and the modes
by which we may conceive of its restoration.
Sec. 4. Modifications of the bodily ideal owing to influence of mind.
First, of intellect.
Now, the operation of the mind upon the body, and evidence of it
thereon, may be considered under the following three general heads.
First, the operation of the intellectual powers upon the features, in
the fine cutting and chiselling of them, and removal from them of signs
of sensuality and sloth, by which they are blunted and deadened, and
substitution of energy and intensity for vacancy and insipidity, (by
which wants alone the faces of many fair women are utterly spoiled and
rendered valueless,) and by the keenness given to the eye and fine
moulding and development to the brow, of which effects Sir Charles Bell
has well noted the desirableness and opposition to brutal types, (p. 59,
third edition;) only this he has not sufficiently observed, that there
are certain virtues of the intellect in measure inconsistent with each
other, as perhaps great subtlety with great comprehensiveness, and high
analytical with high imaginative power, or that at least, if consistent
and compatible, their signs upon the features are not the same, so that
the outward form cannot express both, without in a measure expressing
neither; and so there are certain separate virtues of the outward form
correspondent with the more constant employment or more prevailing
capacity of the brain, as the piercing keenness, or open and reflective
comprehensiveness of the eye and forehead, and that all these virtues of
form are ideal, only those the most so which are the signs of the
worthiest powers of intellect, though which these be, we will not at
present stay to inquire.
Sec. 5. Secondly, of the moral feelings.
Sec. 6. What beauty is bestowed by them
The second point to be considered in the influence of mind upon body, is
the mode of operation and conjunction of the moral feelings on and with
the intellectual powers, and then their conjoint influence on the bodily
form. Now, the operation of the right moral feelings on the intellect is
always for the good of the latter, for it is not possible that
selfishness should reason rightly in any respect, but must be blind in
its estimation of the worthiness of all things, neither anger, for that
overpowers the reason or outcries it, neither sensuality, for that
overgrows and chokes it, neither agitation, for that has no time to
compare things together, neither enmity, for that must be unjust,
neither fear, for that exaggerates all things, neither cunning and
deceit, for that which is voluntarily untrue will soon be unwittingly
so: but the great reasoners are self-command, and trust unagitated, and
deep-looking Love, and Faith, which as she is above Reason, so she best
holds the reins of it from her high seat: so that they err grossly who
think of the right development even of the intellectual type as
possible, unless we look to higher sources of beauty first.
Nevertheless, though in their operation _upon_ them the moral feelings
are thus elevatory of the mental faculties, yet in their conjunction
_with_ them they seem to occupy, in their own fulness, such room as to
absorb and overshadow all else, so that the simultaneous exercise of
both is in a sort impossible; for which cause we occasionally find the
moral part in full development and action, without corresponding
expanding of the intellect (though never without healthy condition of
it,) as in that of Wordsworth,
"In such high hour
Of visitation from the Living God,
Thought was not;"
only I think that if we look far enough, we shall find that it is not
intelligence itself, but the immediate act and effort of a laborious,
struggling, and imperfect intellectual faculty, with which high moral
emotion is inconsistent; and that though we cannot, while we feel
deeply, reason shrewdly, yet I doubt if, _except_ when we feel deeply,
we can ever comprehend fully; so that it is only the climbing and
mole-like piercing, and not the sitting upon their central throne, nor
emergence into light, of the intellectual faculties which the full heart
feeling allows not. Hence, therefore, in the indications of the
countenance, they are only the hard cut lines, and rigid settings, and
wasted hollows, that speak of past effort and painfulness of mental
application, which are inconsistent with expression of moral feeling,
for all these are of infelicitous augury; but not the full and serene
development of habitual command in the look, and solemn thought in the
brow, only these, in their unison with the signs of emotion, become
softened and gradually confounded with a serenity and authority of
nobler origin. But of the sweetness which that higher serenity (of
happiness,) and the dignity which that higher authority (of Divine law,
and not human reason,) can and must stamp on the features, it would be
futile to speak here at length, for I suppose that both are acknowledged
on all hands, and that there is not any beauty but theirs to which men
pay long obedience: at all events, if not by sympathy discovered, it is
not in words explicable with what divine lines and lights the exercise
of godliness and charity will mould and gild the hardest and coldest
countenance, neither to what darkness their departure will consign the
loveliest. For there is not any virtue the exercise of which, even
momentarily, will not impress a new fairness upon the features, neither
on them only, but on the whole body, both the intelligence and the moral
faculties have operation, for even all the movement and gestures,
however slight, are different in their modes according to the mind that
governs them, and on the gentleness and decision of just feeling there
follows a grace of action, and through continuance of this a grace of
form, which by no discipline may be taught or attained.
Sec. 7. How the soul culture interferes harmfully with the bodily ideal.
The third point to be considered with respect to the corporeal
expression of mental character is, that there is a certain period of the
soul culture when it begins to interfere with some of the characters of
typical beauty belonging to the bodily frame, the stirring of the
intellect wearing down the flesh, and the moral enthusiasm burning its
way out to heaven, through the emaciation of the earthen vessel; and
that there is, in this indication of subduing of the mortal by the
immortal part, an ideal glory of perhaps a purer and higher range than
that of the more perfect material form. We conceive, I think, more nobly
of the weak presence of Paul, than of the fair and ruddy countenance of
Daniel.
Sec. 8. The inconsistency among the effects of the mental virtues on the
form.
Sec. 9. Is a sign of God's kind purpose towards the race.
Sec. 10. Consequent separation and difference of ideals.
Now, be it observed that in our consideration of these three directions
of mental influence, we have several times been compelled to stop short
of definite conclusions owing to the apparent inconsistency of certain
excellences and beauties to which they tend, as, first, of different
kinds of intellect with each other; and secondly, of the moral faculties
with the intellectual, (and if we had separately examined the moral
emotions, we should have found certain inconsistencies among them also,)
and again of the soul culture generally with the bodily perfections.
Such inconsistencies we should find in the perfections of no other
animal. The strength or swiftness of the dog are not inconsistent with
his sagacity, nor is bodily labor in the ant or bee destructive of their
acuteness of instinct. And this peculiarity of relation among the
perfections of man is no result of his fall or sinfulness, but an
evidence of his greater nobility, and of the goodness of God towards
him. For the individuals of each race of lower animals, being not
intended to hold among each other those relations of charity which are
the privilege of humanity, are not adapted to each other's assistance,
admiration, or support, by differences of power and function. But the
love of the human race is increased by their individual differences, and
the unity of the creature, as before we saw of all unity, made perfect
by each having something to bestow and to receive, bound to the rest by
a thousand various necessities and various gratitudes, humility in each
rejoicing to admire in his fellow that which he finds not in himself,
and each being in some respect the complement of his race. Therefore, in
investigating the signs of the ideal or perfect type of humanity, we
must not presume on the singleness of that type, and yet, on the other
hand, we must cautiously distinguish between differences conceivably
existing in a perfect state, and differences resulting from immediate
and present operation of the Adamite curse. Of which the former are
differences that bind, and the latter that separate. For although we can
suppose the ideal or perfect human heart, and the perfect human
intelligence, equally adapted to receive every right sensation and
pursue every order of truth, yet as it is appointed for some to be in
authority and others in obedience, some in solitary functions and others
in relative ones, some to receive and others to give, some to teach and
some to discover; and as all these varieties of office are not only
conceivable as existing in a perfect state of man, but seem almost to be
implied by it, and at any rate cannot be done away with but by a total
change of his constitution and dependencies, of which the imagination
can take no hold; so there are habits and capacities of expression
induced by these various offices, which admit of many separate ideals of
equal perfection, according to the functions of the creatures, so that
there is an ideal of authority, of judgment, of affection, of reason,
and of faith; neither can any combination of these ideals be attained,
not that the just judge is to be supposed incapable of affection, nor
the king incapable of obedience, but as it is impossible that any
essence short of the Divine should at the same instant be equally
receptive of all emotions, those emotions which, by right and order,
have the most usual victory, both leave the stamp of their habitual
presence on the body, and render the individual more and more
susceptible of them in proportion to the frequency of their prevalent
recurrence; added to which causes of distinctive character are to be
taken into account the differences of age and sex, which, though
seemingly of more finite influence, cannot be banished from any human
conception. David, ruddy and of a fair countenance, with the brook stone
of deliverance in his hand, is not more ideal than David leaning on the
old age of Barzillai, returning chastened to his kingly home. And they
who are as the angels of God in heaven, yet cannot be conceived as so
assimilated that their different experiences and affections upon earth
shall then be forgotten and effectless: the child taken early to his
place cannot be imagined to wear there such a body, nor to have such
thoughts, as the glorified apostle who has finished his course and kept
the faith on earth. And so whatever perfections and likeness of love we
may attribute to either the tried or the crowned creatures, there is the
difference of the stars in glory among them yet; differences of original
gifts, though not of occupying till their Lord come, different
dispensations of trial and of trust, of sorrow and support, both in
their own inward, variable hearts, and in their positions of exposure or
of peace, of the gourd shadow and the smiting sun, of calling at heat of
day or eleventh hour, of the house unroofed by faith, and the clouds
opened by revelation: differences in warning, in mercies, in sicknesses,
in signs, in time of calling to account; like only they all are by that
which is not of them, but the gift of God's unchangeable mercy. "I will
give unto this last even as unto thee."
Sec. 11. The _effects_ of the Adamite curse are to be distinguished from
signs of its immediate activity.
Sec. 12. Which latter only are to be banished from ideal form.
Hence, then, be it observed, that what we must determinedly banish from
the human form and countenance in our seeking of its ideal, is not
everything which can be ultimately traced to the Adamite fall for its
cause, but only the immediate operation and presence of the degrading
power or sin. For there is not any part of our feeling of nature, nor
can there be through eternity, which shall not be in some way influenced
and affected by the fall, and that not in any way of degradation, for
the renewing in the divinity of Christ is a nobler condition than ever
that of Paradise, and yet throughout eternity it must imply and refer to
the disobedience, and the corrupt state of sin and death, and the
suffering of Christ himself, which can we conceive of any redeemed soul
as for an instant forgetting, or as remembering without sorrow? Neither
are the alternations of joy and such sorrow as by us is inconceivable,
being only as it were a softness and silence in the pulse of an infinite
felicity, inconsistent with the state even of the unfallen, for the
angels who rejoice over repentance cannot but feel an uncomprehended
pain as they try and try again in vain, whether they may not warm hard
hearts with the brooding of their kind wings. So that we have not to
banish from the ideal countenance the evidences of sorrow, nor of past
suffering, nor even of past and conquered sin, but only the immediate
operation of any evil, or the immediate coldness and hollowness of any
good emotion. And hence in that contest before noted, between the body
and the soul, we may often have to indicate the body as far conquered
and outworn, and with signs of hard struggle and bitter pain upon it,
and yet without ever diminishing the purity of its ideal; and because it
is not in the power of any human imagination to reason out or conceive
the countless modifications of experience, suffering, and separated
feeling, which have modelled and written their indelible images in
various order upon every human countenance, so no right ideal can be
reached by any combination of feature nor by any moulding and melting of
individual beauties together, and still less without model or example
conceived; but there is a perfect ideal to be wrought out of _every_
face around us that has on its forehead the writing and the seal of the
angel ascending from the East,[38] by the earnest study and penetration
of the written history thereupon, and the banishing of the blots and
stains, wherein we still see in all that is human, the visible and
instant operation of unconquered sin.
Sec. 13. Ideal form is only to be obtained by portraiture.
Now I see not how any of the steps of the argument by which we have
arrived at this conclusion can be evaded, and yet it would be difficult
to state anything more directly opposite to the usual teaching and
practice of artists. It is usual to hear portraiture opposed to the
pursuit of ideality, and yet we find that no face can be ideal which is
not a portrait. Of this general principle, however, there are certain
modifications which we must presently state; let us first, however,
pursue it a little farther, and deduce its practical consequences.
Sec. 14. Instances among the greater of the ideal Masters.
These are, first, that the pursuit of idealism in humanity, as of
idealism in lower nature, can be successful only when followed through
the most constant, patient, and humble rendering of actual models,
accompanied with that earnest mental as well as ocular study of each,
which can interpret all that is written upon it, disentangle the
hieroglyphics of its sacred history, rend the veil of the bodily temple,
and rightly measure the relations of good and evil contending within it
for mastery,[39] that everything done without such study must be shallow
and contemptible, that generalization or combination of individual
character will end less in the mending than the losing of it, and,
except in certain instances of which we shall presently take note, is
valueless and vapid, even if it escape being painful from its want of
truth, which in these days it often in some measure does, for we indeed
find faces about us with want enough of life or wholesome character in
them to justify anything. And that habit of the old and great painters
of introducing portrait into all their highest works, I look to, not as
error in them, but as the very source and root of their superiority in
all things, for they were too great and too humble not to see in every
face about them that which was above them, and which no fancies of
theirs could match nor take place of, wherefore we find the custom of
portraiture constant with them, both portraiture of study and for
purposes of analysis, as with Leonardo; and actual, professed,
serviceable, hardworking portraiture of the men of their time, as with
Raffaelle, and Titian, and Tintoret; and portraiture of Love, as with
Fra Bartolomeo of Savonarola, and Simon Memmi of Petrarch, and Giotto of
Dante, and Gentile Bellini of a beloved imagination of Dandolo, and with
Raffaelle constantly; and portraiture in real downright necessity of
models, even in their noblest works, as was the practice of Ghirlandajo
perpetually, and Masaccio and Raffaelle, and manifestly of the men of
highest and purest ideal purpose, as again, Giotto, and in his
characteristic monkish heads, Angelico, and John Bellini, (note
especially the St. Christopher at the side of that mighty picture of St.
Jerome, at Venice,) and so of all: which practice had indeed a perilous
tendency for men of debased mind, who used models such as and where they
ought not, as Lippi and the corrupted Raffaelle; and is found often at
exceeding disadvantage among men who looked not at their models with
intellectual or loving penetration, but took the outside of them, or
perhaps took the evil and left the good, as Titian in that Academy study
at Venice which is called a St. John, and all workers whatsoever that I
know of, after Raffaelle's time, as Guido and the Caracci, and such
others: but it is nevertheless the necessary and sterling basis of all
ideal art, neither has any great man ever been able to do without it,
nor dreamed of doing without it even to the close of his days.
Sec. 15. Evil results of opposite practice in modern times.
And therefore there is not any greater sign of the utter want of
vitality and hopefulness in the schools of the present day than that
unhappy prettiness and sameness under which they mask, or rather for
which they barter, in their lentile thirst, all the birthright and power
of nature, which prettiness, wrought out and spun fine in the study, out
of empty heads, till it hardly betters the blocks on which dresses and
hair are tried in barbers' windows and milliners' books, cannot but be
revolting to any man who has his eyes, even in a measure, open to the
divinity of the immortal seal on the common features that he meets in
the highways and hedges hourly and momentarily, outreaching all efforts
of conception as all power of realization, were it Raffaelle's three
times over, even when the glory of the wedding garment is not there.
Sec. 16. The right use of the model.
So far, then, of the use of the model and the preciousness of it in all
art, from the highest to the lowest. But the use of the model is not
all. It must be used in a certain way, and on this choice of right or
wrong way all our ends are at stake, for the art, which is of no power
without the model, is of pernicious and evil power if the model be
wrongly used. What the right use is, has been at least established, if
not fully explained, in the argument by which we arrived at the general
principle.
The right ideal is to be reached, we have asserted, only by the
banishment of the immediate signs of sin upon the countenance and body.
How, therefore, are the signs of sin to be known and separated?
Sec. 17. Ideal form to be reached only by love.
No intellectual operation is here of any avail. There is not any
reasoning by which the evidences of depravity are to be traced in
movements of muscle or forms of feature; there is not any knowledge, nor
experience, nor diligence of comparison that can be of avail. Here, as
throughout the operation of the theoretic faculty, the perception is
altogether moral, an instinctive love and clinging to the lines of
light. Nothing but love can read the letters, nothing but sympathy catch
the sound, there is no pure passion that can be understood or painted
except by pureness of heart; the foul or blunt feeling will see itself
in everything, and set down blasphemies; it will see Beelzebub in the
casting out of devils, it will find its god of flies in every alabaster
box of precious ointment. The indignation of zeal towards God (nemesis)
it will take for anger against man, faith and veneration it will miss
of, as not comprehending, charity it will turn into lust, compassion
into pride, every virtue it will go over against, like Shimei, casting
dust. But the right Christian mind will in like manner find its own
image wherever it exists, it will seek for what it loves, and draw it
out of all dens and caves, and it will believe in its being, often when
it cannot see it, and always turn away its eyes from beholding vanity;
and so it will lie lovingly over all the faults and rough places of the
human heart, as the snow from heaven does over the hard, and black, and
broken mountain rocks, following their forms truly, and yet catching
light for them to make them fair, and that must be a steep and unkindly
crag indeed which it cannot cover.
Sec. 18. Practical principles deducible.
Now of this spirit there will always be little enough in the world, and
it cannot be given nor taught by men, and so it is of little use to
insist on it farther, only I may note some practical points respecting
the ideal treatment of human form, which may be of use in these
thoughtless days. There is not the face, I have said, which the painter
may not make ideal if he choose, but that subtile feeling which shall
find out all of good that there is in any given countenance is not,
except by concern for other things than art, to be acquired. But certain
broad indications of evil there are which the bluntest feeling may
perceive, and which the habit of distinguishing and casting out would
both ennoble the schools of art, and lead in time to greater acuteness
of perception with respect to the less explicable characters of soul
beauty.
Sec. 19. Expressions chiefly destructive of ideal character. 1st. Pride.
Those signs of evil which are commonly most manifest on the human
features are roughly divisible into these four kinds, the signs of
pride, of sensuality, of fear, and of cruelty. Any one of which will
destroy the ideal character of the countenance and body.
Sec. 20. Portraiture ancient and modern.
Now of these, the first, pride, is perhaps the most destructive of all
the four, seeing it is the undermost and original story of all sin; and
it is base also from the necessary foolishness of it, because at its
best, that is when grounded on a just estimation of our own elevation
or superiority above certain others, it cannot but imply that our eyes
look downward only, and have never been raised above our own measure,
for there is not the man so lofty in his standing nor capacity but he
must be humble in thinking of the cloud habitation and far sight of the
angelic intelligences above him, and in perceiving what infinity there
is of things he cannot know nor even reach unto, as it stands compared
with that little body of things he can reach, and of which nevertheless
he can altogether understand not one; not to speak of that wicked and
fond attributing of such excellency as he may have to himself, and
thinking of it as his own getting, which is the real essence and
criminality of pride, nor of those viler forms of it, founded on false
estimation of things beneath us and irrational contemning of them: but
taken at its best, it is still base to that degree that there is no
grandeur of feature which it cannot destroy and make despicable, so that
the first step towards the ennobling of any face is the ridding it of
its vanity; to which aim there cannot be anything more contrary than
that principle of portraiture which prevails with us in these days,
whose end seems to be the expression of vanity throughout, in face and
in all circumstances of accompaniment, tending constantly to insolence
of attitude, and levity and haughtiness of expression, and worked out
farther in mean accompaniments of worldly splendor and possession,
together with hints or proclamations of what the person has done or
supposes himself to have done, which, if known, it is gratuitous in the
portrait to exhibit, and if unknown, it is insolent in the portrait to
proclaim; whence has arisen such a school of portraiture as must make
the people of the nineteenth century the shame of their descendants, and
the butt of all time. To which practices are to be opposed both the
glorious severity of Holbein, and the mighty and simple modesty of
Raffaelle, Titian, Giorgione, and Tintoret, with whom armor does not
constitute the warrior, neither silk the dame. And from what feeling the
dignity of that portraiture arose is best traceable at Venice, where we
find their victorious doges painted neither in the toil of battle nor
the triumph of return, nor set forth with thrones and curtains of state,
but kneeling always crownless, and returning thanks to God for his help,
or as priests, interceding for the nation in its affliction. Which
feeling and its results have been so well traced out by Rio,[40] that I
need not speak of it farther.
Sec. 21. Secondly, Sensuality.
Sec. 22. How connected with impurity of color.
Sec. 23. And prevented by its splendor.
Sec. 24. Or by severity of drawing.
That second destroyer of ideal form, the appearance of sensual
character, though not less fatal in its operation on modern art, is more
difficult to trace, owing to its peculiar subtlety. For it is not
possible to say by what minute differences the right conception of the
human form is separated from that which is luscious and foul: for the
root of all is in the love and seeking of the painter, who, if of impure
and feeble mind, will cover all that he touches with clay staining, as
Bandinelli puts a foul scent of human flesh about his marble Christ, and
as many whom I will not here name, among moderns; but if of mighty mind
or pure, may pass through all places of foulness, and none will stay
upon him, as Michael Angelo, or he will baptize all things and wash them
with pure water, as our own Stothard. Now, so far as this power is
dependent on the seeking of the artist, and is only to be seen in the
work of good and spiritually-minded men, it is vain to attempt to teach
or illustrate it, neither is it here the place to take note of the way
in which it belongs to the representation of the mental image of things,
instead of things themselves, of which we are to speak in treating of
the imagination; but thus much may here be noted of broad, practical
principle, that the purity of flesh painting depends in very
considerable measure on the intensity and warmth of its color. For if it
be opaque, and clay cold, and colorless, and devoid of all the radiance
and value of flesh, the lines of its true beauty, being severe and firm,
will become so hard in the loss of the glow and gradation by which
nature illustrates them, that the painter will be compelled to sacrifice
them for a luscious fulness and roundness, in order to give the
conception of flesh; which, being done, destroys ideality of form as of
color, and gives all over to lasciviousness of surface; showing also
that the painter sought for this, and this only, since otherwise he had
not taken a subject in which he knew himself compelled to surrender all
sources of dignity. Whereas, right splendor of color both bears out a
nobler severity of form, and is in itself purifying and cleansing, like
fire, furnishing also to the painter an excuse for the choice of his
subject, seeing that he may be supposed as not having painted it but in
the admiration of its abstract glory of color and form, and with no
unworthy seeking. But the mere power of perfect and glowing color will
in some sort redeem even a debased tendency of mind itself, as eminently
the case with Titian, who, though of little feeling, and often treating
base subjects, or elevated subjects basely, as in the disgusting
Magdalen of the Pitti palace, and that of the Barberigo at Venice, yet
redeems all by his glory of hue, so that he cannot paint altogether
coarsely; and with Giorgione, who had nobler and more serious intellect,
the sense of nudity is utterly lost, and there is no need nor desire of
concealment any more, but his naked figures move among the trees like
fiery pillars, and lie on the grass like flakes of sunshine.[41] With
the religious painters on the other hand, such nudity as they were
compelled to treat is redeemed as much by severity of form and hardness
of line as by color, so that generally their draped figures are
preferable, as in the Francia of our own gallery. But these, with
Michael Angelo and the Venetians, except Titian, form a great group,
pure in sight and aim, between which and all other schools by which the
nude has been treated, there is a gulf fixed, and all the rest, compared
with them, seem striving how best to illustrate that of Spenser.
"Of all God's works, which doe this worlde adorn,
There is no one more faire, and excellent
Than is man's body both for power and forme
Whiles it is kept in sober government.
But none than it more foul and indecent
Distempered through misrule and passions bace."
Sec. 25. Degrees of descent in this respect: Rubens, Correggio, and Guido.
Sec. 26. And modern art.
Of these last, however, with whom ideality is lost, there are some
worthier than others, according to that measure of color they reach, and
power they possess, whence much may be forgiven to Rubens, (as to our
own Etty,) less, as I think, to Correggio, who with less apparent and
evident coarseness has more of inherent sensuality, wrought out with
attractive and luscious refinement, and that alike in all subjects, as
in the Madonna of the Incoronazione, over the high altar of San Giovanni
at Parma, of which the head and upper portion of the figure, now
preserved in the library, might serve as a model of attitude and
expression to a ballet figurante:[42] and again in the lascivious St.
Catherine of the Giorno, and in the Charioted Diana, (both at Parma,)
not to name any of his works of aim more definitely evil. Beneath which
again will fall the works devoid alike of art and decency, as that
Susannah of Guido, in our own gallery, and so we may descend to the
absolute clay of the moderns, only noticing in all how much of what is
evil and base in subject or tendency, is redeemed by what is pure and
right in hue, so that I do not assert that the purpose and object of
many of the grander painters of the nude, as Titian for instance, was
always elevated, but only that we, who cannot paint the lamp of fire
within the earthen pitcher, must take other weapons in our left hands.
And it is to be noted, also, that in climates where the body can be more
openly and frequently visited by sun and weather, the nude both comes to
be regarded in a way more grand and pure, as necessarily awakening no
ideas of base kind, (as pre-eminently with the Greeks,) and also from
that exposure receives a firmness and sunny elasticity very different
from the silky softness of the clothed nations of the north, where every
model necessarily looks as if accidentally undressed; and hence from the
very fear and doubt with which we approach the nude, it becomes
expressive of evil, and for that daring frankness of the old men, which
seldom missed of human grandeur, even when it failed of holy feeling, we
have substituted a mean, carpeted, gauze-veiled, mincing sensuality of
curls and crisping pins, out of which I believe nothing can come but
moral enervation and mental paralysis.
Sec. 27. Thirdly, ferocity and fear. The latter how to be distinguished
from awe.
Sec. 28. Holy fear, how distinct from human terror.
Sec. 29. Ferocity is joined always with fear. Its unpardonableness.
Respecting those two other vices of the human face, the expressions of
fear and ferocity, there is less to be noted, as they only occasionally
enter into the conception of character; only it is most necessary to
make careful distinction between the conception of power,
destructiveness, or majesty, in matter, influence, or agent, and the
actual fear of any of these, for it is possible to conceive of
terribleness, without being in a position obnoxious to the danger of it,
and so without fear, and the feeling arising from this contemplation of
dreadfulness, ourselves being in safety, as of a stormy sea from the
shore, is properly termed awe, and is a most noble passion; whereas fear
mortal and extreme, may be felt respecting things ignoble, as the
falling from a window, and without any conception of terribleness or
majesty in the thing, or the accident dreaded; and even when fear is
felt respecting things sublime, as thunder, or storm of battle, yet the
tendency of it is to destroy all power of contemplation of their
majesty, and to freeze and shrink all the intellect into a shaking heap
of clay, for absolute acute fear is of the same unworthiness and
contempt from whatever source it arise, and degrades the mind and the
outward bearing of the body alike, even though it be among hail of
heaven and fire running along the ground. And so among the children of
God, while there is always that fearful and bowed apprehension of his
majesty, and that sacred dread of all offence to him, which is called
the fear of God, yet of real and essential fear there is not any but
clinging of confidence to him, as their Rock, Fortress, and Deliverer,
and perfect love, and casting out of fear, so that it is not possible
that while the mind is rightly bent on him, there should be dread of
anything either earthly or supernatural, and the more dreadful seems the
height of his majesty, the less fear they feel that dwell in the shadow
of it, ("Of whom shall I be afraid?") so that they are as David was,
devoted to his fear; whereas, on the other hand, those who, if they may
help it, never conceive of God, but thrust away all thought and memory
of him, and in his real terribleness and omnipresence fear him not nor
know him, yet are of real, acute, piercing, and ignoble fear, haunted
for evermore; fear inconceiving and desperate that calls to the rocks,
and hides in the dust; and hence the peculiar baseness of the expression
of terror, a baseness attributed to it in all times, and among all
nations, as of a passion atheistical, brutal, and profane. So also, it
is always joined with ferocity, which is of all passions the least
human; for of sensual desires there is license to men, as necessity; and
of vanity there is intellectual cause, so that when seen in a brute it
is pleasant and a sign of good wit; and of fear there is at times
necessity and excuse, as being allowed for prevention of harm; but of
ferocity there is no excuse nor palliation, but it is pure essence of
tiger and demon, and it casts on the human face the paleness alike of
the horse of Death, and the ashes of hell.
Sec. 30. Such expressions how sought by painters powerless and impious.
Wherefore, of all subjects that can be admitted to sight, the
expressions of fear and ferocity are the most foul and detestable, and
so there is in them I know not what sympathetic attractiveness for minds
cowardly and base, as the vulgar of most nations, and forasmuch as they
are easily rendered by men who can render nothing else, they are often
trusted in by the herd of painters incapable and profane, as in that
monstrous abortion of the first room of the Louvre, called the Deluge,
whose subject is pure, acute, mortal fear; and so generally the
senseless horrors of the modern French schools, spawn of the guillotine:
also there is not a greater test of grandeur or meanness of mind than
the expressions it will seek for and develop in the features and forms
of men in fierce strife, whether determination and devotion, and all the
other attributes of that unselfishness which constitutes heroism, as in
the warrior of Agasias; and distress not agitated nor unworthy, though
mortal, as in the Dying Gladiator, or brutal ferocity and butchered
agony, of which the lowest and least palliated examples are those
battles of Salvator Rosa, which none but a man, base-born and
thief-bred, could have dwelt upon for an instant without sickening, of
which I will only name that example in the Pitti palace, wherein the
chief figure in the foreground is a man with his arm cut off at the
shoulder, run through the other hand into the breast with a lance.[43]
And manifold instances of the same feeling are to be found in the
repainting of the various representations of the Inferno, so common
through Italy, more especially that of Orcagna's in the Campo Santo,
wherein the few figures near the top that yet remain untouched are grand
in their severe drawing and expressions of enduring despair, while those
below, repainted by Solazzino, depend for their expressiveness upon
torrents of blood; so in the Inferno of Santa Maria Novella, and of the
Arena chapel, not to speak of the horrible images of the Passion, by
which vulgar Romanism has always striven to excite the languid
sympathies of its untaught flocks. Of which foulness let us reason no
farther, the very image and memory of them being pollution, only
noticing this, that there has always been a morbid tendency in Romanism
towards the contemplation of bodily pain, owing to the attribution of
saving power to it, which, like every other moral error, has been of
fatal effect in art, leaving not altogether without the stain and blame
of it, even the highest of the pure Romanist painters; as Fra Angelico,
for instance, who, in his Passion subjects, always insists weakly on the
bodily torture, and is unsparing of blood; and Giotto, though his
treatment is usually grander, as in that Crucifixion over the door of
the Convent of St. Mark's, where the blood is hardly actual, but issues
from the feet in a typical and conventional form, and becomes a crimson
cord which is twined strangely beneath about a skull; only that which
these holy men did to enhance, even though in their means mistaken, the
impression and power of the sufferings of Christ, or of his saints, is
always in a measure noble, and to be distinguished with all reverence
from the abominations of the irreligious painters following, as of
Camillo Procaccini, in one of his martyrdoms in the Gallery of the
Brera, at Milan, and other such, whose names may be well spared to the
reader.
Sec. 31. Of passion generally.
Sec. 32. It is never to be for itself exhibited--at least on the face.
These, then, are the four passions whose presence in any degree on the
human face is degradation. But of all passion it is to be generally
observed, that it becomes ignoble either when entertained respecting
unworthy objects, and therefore shallow or unjustifiable, or when of
impious violence, and so destructive of human dignity. Thus grief is
noble or the reverse, according to the dignity and worthiness of the
object lamented, and the grandeur of the mind enduring it. The sorrow of
mortified vanity or avarice is simply disgusting, even that of bereaved
affection may be base if selfish and unrestrained. All grief that
convulses the features is ignoble, because it is commonly shallow and
certainly temporary, as in children, though in the shock and shiver of a
strong man's features under sudden and violent grief there may be
something of sublime. The grief of Guercino's Hagar, in the Brera
gallery at Milan, is partly despicable, partly disgusting, partly
ridiculous; it is not the grief of the injured Egyptian, driven forth
into the desert with the destiny of a nation in her heart, but of a
servant of all work, turned away for stealing tea and sugar. Common
painters forget that passion is not absolutely and in itself great or
violent, but only in proportion to the weakness of the mind it has to
deal with; and that in exaggerating its outward signs, they are not
exalting the passion, but evaporating the hero.[44] They think too much
of passions as always the same in their nature, forgetting that the love
of Achilles is different from the love of Paris, and of Alcestis from
that of Laodamia. The use and value of passion is not as a subject in
contemplation in itself, but as it breaks up the fountains of the great
deep of the human mind, or displays its mightiness and ribbed majesty,
as mountains are seen in their stability best among the coil of clouds;
whence, in fine, I think it is to be held that all passion which attains
overwhelming power, so that it is not as resisting, but as conquered,
that the creature is contemplated, is unfit for high art, and
destructive of the ideal character of the countenance: and in this
respect, I cannot but hold Raffaelle to have erred in his endeavor to
express passion of such acuteness in the human face; as in the fragment
of the Massacre of the Innocents in our own gallery, (wherein, repainted
though it be, I suppose the purpose of the master is yet to be
understood,) for if such subjects are to be represented at all, their
entire expression may be given without degrading the face, as we shall
presently see done with unspeakable power by Tintoret,[45] and I think
that all subjects of the kind, all human misery, slaughter, famine,
plague, peril, and crime, are better in the main avoided, as of
unprofitable and hardening influence, unless so far as out of the
suffering, hinted rather than expressed, we may raise into nobler relief
the eternal enduring of fortitude and affection, of mercy and
self-devotion, or when, as by the threshing-floor of Ornan, and by the
cave of Lazarus, the angel of the Lord is to be seen in the
chastisement, and his love to be manifested to the despair of men.
Sec. 33. Recapitulation
Thus, then, we have in some sort enumerated those evil signs which are
most necessary to be shunned in the seeking of ideal beauty,[46] though
it is not the knowledge of them, but the dread and hatred of them, which
will effectually aid the painter; as on the other hand it is not by mere
admission of the loveliness of good and holy expression that its subtile
characters are to be traced. Raffaelle himself, questioned on this
subject, made doubtful answer; he probably could not trace through what
early teaching, or by what dies of emotion the image had been sealed
upon his heart. Our own Bacon, who well saw the impossibility of
reaching it by the combination of many separate beauties, yet explains
not the nature of that "kind of felicity" to which he attributes
success. I suppose those who have conceived and wrought the loveliest
things, have done so by no theorizing, but in simple labor of love, and
could not, if put to a bar of rationalism, defend all points of what
they had done, but painted it in their own delight, and to the delight
of all besides, only always with that respect of conscience and "fear of
swerving from that which is right, which maketh diligent observers of
circumstances the loose regard whereof is the nurse of vulgar folly, no
less than Solomon's attention thereunto was of natural furtherances the
most effectual to make him eminent above others, for he gave good heed,
and pierced everything to the very ground."[47]
With which good heed, and watching of the instants when men feel warmly
and rightly, as the Indians do for the diamond in their washing of sand,
and that with the desire and hope of finding true good in men, and not
with the ready vanity that sets itself to fiction instantly, and carries
its potter's wheel about with it always, (off which there will come only
clay vessels of regular shape after all,) instead of the pure
mirror that can show the seraph standing by the human body--standing as
signal to the heavenly land:[48] with this heed and this charity, there
are none of us that may not bring down that lamp upon his path of which
Spenser sang:--
"That beauty is not, as fond men misdeem
An outward show of things, that only seem;
But that fair lamp, from whose celestial ray
That light proceeds, which kindleth lover's fire,
Shall never be extinguished nor decay.
But when the vital spirits do expire,
Unto her native planet shall retire,
For it is heavenly born and cannot die,
Being a parcel of the purest sky."
FOOTNOTES
[38] Rev. vii. 2.
[39] Compare Part II. Sec. I. Chap. III Sec. 6.
[40] De la Poesie Chretienne. Forme de l'Art. Chap. VIII.
[41] As in the noble Louvre picture.
[42] The Madonna turns her back to Christ, and bends her head over
her shoulder to receive the crown, the arms being folded with
studied grace over the bosom.
[43] Compare Michelet, (Du Pretre, de la Femme, de la Famille,)
Chap. III. note. He uses language too violent to be quoted; but
excuses Salvator by reference to the savage character of the Thirty
Years' War. That this excuse has no validity may be proved by
comparing the painter's treatment of other subjects. See Sec. II.
Chap. III. Sec. 19, note.
[44] "The fire, that mounts the liquor, till it run o'er
In seeming to augment it, wastes it."
HENRY VIII.
[45] Sect. II. Chap. III. Sec. 22.
[46] Let it be observed that it is always of beauty, not of human
character in its lower and criminal modifications, that we have been
speaking. That variety of character, therefore, which we have
affirmed to be necessary, is the variety of Giotto and Angelico, not
of Hogarth. Works concerned with the exhibition of general
character, are to be spoken of in the consideration of Ideas of
Relation.
[47] Hooker, Book V. Chap. I. Sec. 2.
[48] "Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And by the holy rood,
A man all light, a seraph man
By every corse there stood.
This seraph band, each waved his hand,
It was a heavenly sight;
They stood as signals to the land,
Each one a lovely light."
ANCIENT MARINER