The making of images was, in an earlier world, so well understood to be
for the sake of honour, that it was the act of homage which must needs
be, by law, restrained. The picture, the statue, the doll are likenesses
of things admired, and although a strange concourse of unchildlike
children face us as we look at the pictures of the Masters, we are
constrained to confess—seeing how his image is repeated—that these
Masters admired a child, and that the populace of their centuries must
have had popular admiration for a child.
It has been left chiefly for our day, and for our populace, to make an
image in irony, to clothe it in burlesque, to carry it in the procession
of insult. There is but one day in the year on which the people, in
London, make an image, and they set it up for the sake of derision, draw
it through a November fog, hoot it at the pauses of procession, and, at
the end of a day of contempt, give it to the flames. It is an act of
idolatry _à rebours_, an inversion of the admiring motive of human art,
an act of delight in disrespect not only towards something unworshipful
on earth, but towards the work of the maker’s own hands, to which the
old and general art of caricature has no real likeness. For there is no
ritual about the comic paper; nor is its illustration the work of the
people, leaving for a day their labour of making or carrying merchandise
to make and carry a work of art. Whereas they do deride the November
image with a kind of song, and it is the thing of their invention, their
burden, their own, thought out and put together and prepared to its
unhandsome end.
Thus the townspeople of to-day intend to tell us that they contemn—if
contempt is the word—the notorious man, national enemy, or what not, and
their own image of him. They do not express by means of an image what
the makers love, like, or admire. But the images carried by the people
of Europe in the thirteenth-century and onward had no other end.
The Italian schools of painting throughout that long evolution in which
they travelled a great way in mind, a great way in time, but in place
shifted only from Pisa first to Bologna last, dealt less with children
than with one Child. An infantine figure was the very centre of their
attention; and this fact has certainly had an incalculably wide and
persistent influence upon character, and therefore upon the course of
history; but it was not less an effect than a cause of gentleness and
civilization. Art was a matter of importance in Europe for four or five
hundred years, and during those centuries the centre of art was the
portraiture of a child in a woman’s arms. Our own day would not suffer
such a thing. Misplaced irony, and the love and fear, at once, of a
quite inappropriate burlesque would forbid it. There was, then, a
straightforward, a natural sentiment, now vanished, in the ages that
chose this young and helpless group for endless repetition; albeit we
call those ages violent. They had the whole Bible to choose from. The
Madonna and Child look so merely a matter of course in the eyes of
everyone who so much as knows the “Old Masters” by their generic name,
that these modern eyes miss the impulse that once set the making of the
Madonna and Child afoot. A manufacture it became, but it had a fresh
beginning and a continuous sanction. The Byzantine who brought the first
Virgin and Child into Italy represented what we should call in our
modern way a public. In order to serve it he made these figures, in
their simplicity and sentiment, the one chief preoccupation of the art
of the new—the second—civilization of Europe. Yet the Crucifixion, the
Descent from the Cross, the great masculine actions and compositions,
were not entirely postponed by this early art. There was no hesitation,
for example, as to their difficulty, inasmuch as the first mediaeval
sculptor was unaware of what modern art calls difficulty; he knew that
his materials must serve him, roughly, in his approach to drama, and in
his use of mere symbols, alike. Assuredly he had no misgivings as to the
representation of the action of a Resurrection, to be indicated in
unpractised and startled stone. It was not, therefore, for the sake of
material simplicity that he and the painter alike chose the Madonna and
Child as the first and the permanent group. We have to ascribe their
choice to the inclination of the mind of the time, first in the country
through which Greek art entered central Europe, and next in the
countries that followed, while they altered, the fashion of foremost
Italy.
Let us grant that this love for children was less conscious, less
deliberate, less meditative, and less articulate than the feeling which,
apart from the arts, we cherish now, but we may well insist that it was
more serious. It was eager to confess the Divinity of a Child; and it is
well worthy of remark that art put out its hand to stay the passing of
the Divine childhood. It took Goethe’s word and cried to the passing
moment: “Stay, thou art so fair!” And that moment was the moment of the
Infancy of Christ. We are inclined, and with justice, to accuse our
fathers—say our fathers of the seventeenth-century and onwards—of
considering childhood too hurriedly, too inconsiderately, as a passage.
Had they known, we aver, of the law of unresting change, of the passage
through which everything living, and even the inorganic creature,
journeys alike; had they known that the very crystals have to grow old,
they would not have been urgent, impatient, and in haste with childhood,
as they certainly were, because it is but a state of transition; they
would not have seen the character of transitoriness, which is
everywhere, exclusively in human childhood, and would not have
reproached the innocent child with what is the universal lot. They
thought great things of their own maturity, and hurried their children
on to that state which is, after all, so brief that it hardly stays long
enough to be known. It is wonderful that they should have been thus
hasty with childhood, and so pushing to get it done, so ill-content with
the state of the infancy of their children, in the age in which Reynolds
painted the “Strawberry Girl,” and later when Blake was writing. For the
genius of the painter and the poet had an incomparable apprehension of
childhood.
[Illustration:
_Alinari_