An introduction to _Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf_ by Rennell Rodd, published
by J. M. Stoddart and Co., Philadelphia, 1882.
AMONGST the many young men in England who are seeking along with me to
continue and to perfect the English Renaissance—_jeunes guerriers du
drapeau romantique_, as Gautier would have called us—there is none whose
love of art is more flawless and fervent, whose artistic sense of beauty
is more subtle and more delicate—none, indeed, who is dearer to
myself—than the young poet whose verses I have brought with me to
America; verses full of sweet sadness, and yet full of joy; for the most
joyous poet is not he who sows the desolate highways of this world with
the barren seed of laughter, but he who makes his sorrow most musical,
this indeed being the meaning of joy in art—that incommunicable element
of artistic delight which, in poetry, for instance, comes from what Keats
called “sensuous life of verse,” the element of song in the singing, made
so pleasurable to us by that wonder of motion which often has its origin
in mere musical impulse, and in painting is to be sought for, from the
subject never, but from the pictorial charm only—the scheme and symphony
of the colour, the satisfying beauty of the design: so that the ultimate
expression of our artistic movement in painting has been, not in the
spiritual vision of the Pre-Raphaelites, for all their marvel of Greek
legend and their mystery of Italian song, but in the work of such men as
Whistler and Albert Moore, who have raised design and colour to the ideal
level of poetry and music. For the quality of their exquisite painting
comes from the mere inventive and creative handling of line and colour,
from a certain form and choice of beautiful workmanship, which, rejecting
all literary reminiscence and all metaphysical idea, is in itself
entirely satisfying to the æsthetic sense—is, as the Greeks would say, an
end in itself; the effect of their work being like the effect given to us
by music; for music is the art in which form and matter are always
one—the art whose subject cannot be separated from the method of its
expression; the art which most completely realizes for us the artistic
ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly
aspiring.
Now, this increased sense of the absolutely satisfying value of beautiful
workmanship, this recognition of the primary importance of the sensuous
element in art, this love of art for art’s sake, is the point in which we
of the younger school have made a departure from the teaching of Mr.
Ruskin,—a departure definite and different and decisive.
Master indeed of the knowledge of all noble living and of the wisdom of
all spiritual things will he be to us ever, seeing that it was he who by
the magic of his presence and the music of his lips taught us at Oxford
that enthusiasm for beauty which is the secret of Hellenism, and that
desire for creation which is the secret of life, and filled some of us,
at least, with the lofty and passionate ambition to go forth into far and
fair lands with some message for the nations and some mission for the
world, and yet in his art criticism, his estimate of the joyous element
of art, his whole method of approaching art, we are no longer with him;
for the keystone to his æsthetic system is ethical always. He would
judge of a picture by the amount of noble moral ideas it expresses; but
to us the channels by which all noble work in painting can touch, and
does touch, the soul are not those of truths of life or metaphysical
truths. To him perfection of workmanship seems but the symbol of pride,
and incompleteness of technical resource the image of an imagination too
limitless to find within the limits of form its complete expression, or
of love too simple not to stammer in its tale. But to us the rule of art
is not the rule of morals. In an ethical system, indeed, of any gentle
mercy good intentions will, one is fain to fancy, have their recognition;
but of those that would enter the serene House of Beauty the question
that we ask is not what they had ever meant to do, but what they have
done. Their pathetic intentions are of no value to us, but their
realized creations only. _Pour moi je préfère les poètes qui font des
vers_, _les médecins qui sachent guérir_, _les peintres qui sanchent
peindre_.
Nor, in looking at a work of art, should we be dreaming of what it
symbolises, but rather loving it for what it is. Indeed, the
transcendental spirit is alien to the spirit of art. The metaphysical
mind of Asia may create for itself the monstrous and many-breasted idol,
but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual
life which conforms most closely to the perfect facts of physical life
also. Nor, in its primary aspect, has a painting, for instance, any more
spiritual message or meaning for us than a blue tile from the wall of
Damascus, or a Hitzen vase. It is a beautifully coloured surface,
nothing more, and affects us by no suggestion stolen from philosophy, no
pathos pilfered from literature, no feeling filched from a poet, but by
its own incommunicable artistic essence—by that selection of truth which
we call style, and that relation of values which is the draughtsmanship
of painting, by the whole quality of the workmanship, the arabesque of
the design, the splendour of the colour, for these things are enough to
stir the most divine and remote of the chords which make music in our
soul, and colour, indeed, is of itself a mystical presence on things, and
tone a kind of sentiment . . . all these poems aim, as I said, at
producing a purely artistic effect, and have the rare and exquisite
quality that belongs to work of that kind; and I feel that the entire
subordination in our æsthetic movement of all merely emotional and
intellectual motives to the vital informing poetic principle is the
surest sign of our strength.
But it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the æsthetic
demands of the age: there should be also about it, if it is to give us
any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality. Whatever
work we have in the nineteenth century must rest on the two poles of
personality and perfection. And so in this little volume, by separating
the earlier and more simple work from the work that is later and stronger
and possesses increased technical power and more artistic vision, one
might weave these disconnected poems, these stray and scattered threads,
into one fiery-coloured strand of life, noting first a boy’s mere
gladness of being young, with all its simple joy in field and flower, in
sunlight and in song, and then the bitterness of sudden sorrow at the
ending by Death of one of the brief and beautiful friendships of one’s
youth, with all those unanswered lodgings and questionings unsatisfied by
which we vex, so uselessly, the marble face of death; the artistic
contrast between the discontented incompleteness of the spirit and the
complete perfection of the style that expresses it forming the chief
element of the æsthetic charm of these particular poems;—and then the
birth of Love, and all the wonder and the fear and the perilous delight
of one on whose boyish brows the little wings of love have beaten for the
first time; and the love-songs, so dainty and delicate, little
swallow-flights of music, and full of such fragrance and freedom that
they might all be sung in the open air and across moving water; and then
autumn, coming with its choirless woods and odorous decay and ruined
loveliness, Love lying dead; and the sense of the mere pity of it.
One might stop there, for from a young poet one should ask for no deeper
chords of life than those that love and friendship make eternal for us;
and the best poems in the volume belong clearly to a later time, a time
when these real experiences become absorbed and gathered up into a form
which seems from such real experiences to be the most alien and the most
remote; when the simple expression of joy or sorrow suffices no longer,
and lives rather in the stateliness of the cadenced metre, in the music
and colour of the linked words, than in any direct utterance; lives, one
might say, in the perfection of the form more than in the pathos of the
feeling. And yet, after the broken music of love and the burial of love
in the autumn woods, we can trace that wandering among strange people,
and in lands unknown to us, by which we try so pathetically to heal the
hurts of the life we know, and that pure and passionate devotion to Art
which one gets when the harsh reality of life has too suddenly wounded
one, and is with discontent or sorrow marring one’s youth, just as often,
I think, as one gets it from any natural joy of living; and that curious
intensity of vision by which, in moments of overmastering sadness and
despair ungovernable, artistic things will live in one’s memory with a
vivid realism caught from the life which they help one to forget—an old
grey tomb in Flanders with a strange legend on it, making one think how,
perhaps, passion does live on after death; a necklace of blue and amber
beads and a broken mirror found in a girl’s grave at Rome, a marble image
of a boy habited like Erôs, and with the pathetic tradition of a great
king’s sorrow lingering about it like a purple shadow,—over all these the
tired spirit broods with that calm and certain joy that one gets when one
has found something that the ages never dull and the world cannot harm;
and with it comes that desire of Greek things which is often an artistic
method of expressing one’s desire for perfection; and that longing for
the old dead days which is so modern, so incomplete, so touching, being,
in a way, the inverted torch of Hope, which burns the hand it should
guide; and for many things a little sadness, and for all things a great
love; and lastly, in the pinewood by the sea, once more the quick and
vital pulse of joyous youth leaping and laughing in every line, the frank
and fearless freedom of wave and wind waking into fire life’s burnt-out
ashes and into song the silent lips of pain,—how clearly one seems to see
it all, the long colonnade of pines with sea and sky peeping in here and
there like a flitting of silver; the open place in the green, deep heart
of the wood with the little moss-grown altar to the old Italian god in
it; and the flowers all about, cyclamen in the shadowy places, and the
stars of the white narcissus lying like snow-flakes over the grass, where
the quick, bright-eyed lizard starts by the stone, and the snake lies
coiled lazily in the sun on the hot sand, and overhead the gossamer
floats from the branches like thin, tremulous threads of gold,—the scene
is so perfect for its motive, for surely here, if anywhere, the real
gladness of life might be revealed to one’s youth—the gladness that
comes, not from the rejection, but from the absorption, of all passion,
and is like that serene calm that dwells in the faces of the Greek
statues, and which despair and sorrow cannot touch, but intensify only.
In some such way as this we could gather up these strewn and scattered
petals of song into one perfect rose of life, and yet, perhaps, in so
doing, we might be missing the true quality of the poems; one’s real life
is so often the life that one does not lead; and beautiful poems, like
threads of beautiful silks, may be woven into many patterns and to suit
many designs, all wonderful and all different: and romantic poetry, too,
is essentially the poetry of impressions, being like that latest school
of painting, the school of Whistler and Albert Moore, in its choice of
situation as opposed to subject; in its dealing with the exceptions
rather than with the types of life; in its brief intensity; in what one
might call its fiery-coloured momentariness, it being indeed the
momentary situations of life, the momentary aspects of nature, which
poetry and painting new seek to render for us. Sincerity and constancy
will the artist, indeed, have always; but sincerity in art is merely that
plastic perfection of execution without which a poem or a painting,
however noble its sentiment or human its origin, is but wasted and unreal
work, and the constancy of the artist cannot be to any definite rule or
system of living, but to that principle of beauty only through which the
inconstant shadows of his life are in their most fleeting moment arrested
and made permanent. He will not, for instance, in intellectual matters
acquiesce in that facile orthodoxy of our day which is so reasonable and
so artistically uninteresting, nor yet will he desire that fiery faith of
the antique time which, while it intensified, yet limited the vision;
still less will he allow the calm of his culture to be marred by the
discordant despair of doubt or the sadness of a sterile scepticism; for
the Valley Perilous, where ignorant armies clash by night, is no
resting-place meet for her to whom the gods have assigned the clear
upland, the serene height, and the sunlit air,—rather will he be always
curiously testing new forms of belief, tinging his nature with the
sentiment that still lingers about some beautiful creeds, and searching
for experience itself, and not for the fruits of experience; when he has
got its secret, he will leave without regret much that was once very
precious to him. “I am always insincere,” says Emerson somewhere, “as
knowing that there are other moods”: “_Les émotions_,” wrote Théophile
Gautier once in a review of Arsène Houssaye, “_Les émotions_, _ne se
ressemblent pas_, _mais être ému_—_voilà l’important_.”
Now, this is the secret of the art of the modern romantic school, and
gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but the real quality of
all work which, like Mr. Rodd’s, aims, as I said, at a purely artistic
effect, cannot be described in terms of intellectual criticism; it is too
intangible for that. One can perhaps convey it best in terms of the
other arts, and by reference to them; and, indeed, some of these poems
are as iridescent and as exquisite as a lovely fragment of Venetian
glass; others as delicate in perfect workmanship and as single in natural
motive as an etching by Whistler is, or one of those beautiful little
Greek figures which in the olive woods round Tanagra men can still find,
with the faint gilding and the fading crimson not yet fled from hair and
lips and raiment; and many of them seem like one of Corot’s twilights
just passing into music; for not merely in visible colour, but in
sentiment also—which is the colour of poetry—may there be a kind of tone.
But I think that the best likeness to the quality of this young poet’s
work I ever saw was in the landscape by the Loire. We were staying once,
he and I, at Amboise, that little village with its grey slate roofs and
steep streets and gaunt, grim gateway, where the quiet cottages nestle
like white pigeons into the sombre clefts of the great bastioned rock,
and the stately Renaissance houses stand silent and apart—very desolate
now, but with some memory of the old days still lingering about the
delicately-twisted pillars, and the carved doorways, with their grotesque
animals, and laughing masks, and quaint heraldic devices, all reminding
one of a people who could not think life real till they had made it
fantastic. And above the village, and beyond the bend of the river, we
used to go in the afternoon, and sketch from one of the big barges that
bring the wine in autumn and the wood in winter down to the sea, or lie
in the long grass and make plans _pour la gloire_, _et pour ennuyer les
Philistins_, or wander along the low, sedgy banks, “matching our reeds in
sportive rivalry,” as comrades used in the old Sicilian days; and the
land was an ordinary land enough, and bare, too, when one thought of
Italy, and how the oleanders were robing the hillsides by Genoa in
scarlet, and the cyclamen filling with its purple every valley from
Florence to Rome; for there was not much real beauty, perhaps, in it,
only long, white dusty roads and straight rows of formal poplars; but,
now and then, some little breaking gleam of broken light would lend to
the grey field and the silent barn a secret and a mystery that were
hardly their own, would transfigure for one exquisite moment the peasants
passing down through the vineyard, or the shepherd watching on the hill,
would tip the willows with silver and touch the river into gold; and the
wonder of the effect, with the strange simplicity of the material, always
seemed to me to be a little like the quality of these the verses of my
friend.