village on the Hudson; a violent thunder-storm just before dawn had laid
the dust, freshened the leaves, and purified as well as cooled the sultry
air. Attracted by the sweet breath and vivid tints of the landscape, I
determined to walk to a steamboat-landing four miles off, and on my way
make a long-meditated visit to Sunnyside. Taking an umbrageous path that
wound through a shady lane, I sauntered along, sometimes in view of the
crystal expanse of Tappan Zee, sometimes catching a glimpse of the hoary
and tufted Palisades, and again pausing under a majestic elm on whose
pendent spray a yellow-bird chirped and swung, or from whose dense green
canopy a locust trilled its drowsy note. The breeze was scented with
clover and woodbine; sleek cattle grazed in the meadows; amber clouds
flecked a heaven of azure; fields of grain waved like a shoreless lake of
plumes; the maize stood thick and tasselled; the lofty chestnuts shook
their feathery bloom; now and then a solitary crow hovered above, or a
brown robin hopped cheerily by the wayside. It was one of those clear,
serene, luxurious days of early summer which, in our capricious climate,
occasionally unite the gorgeous hues of the Orient with the balm and the
softness of Italy; pearly outlines stretched along the hills, the broad
river gleamed in sunshine, and every shade of emerald flashed or deepened
over the wide groves and teeming farms. As I drew near to Irving's
cottage, the bees were contentedly humming round the locusts, and the
ivy-leaves that clustered thickly about the old gables were dripping with
the tears of night; every bugle of the honeysuckle was a delicate censer,
and the turf and hedge wore their brightest colours; even the old
weathercock, trophy of an ancient colonial Stadt-house, dazzled the eye as
it caught the lateral rays of the sun; the fowls strutted about with
unwonted complacency, and the house-dog bounded through the beaded grass
as if exhilarated by the scene. On the veranda that overlooks the river,
from which it is divided by a little grove, sat our favourite author, with
a book on his knee, the embodiment of thoughtful content. His home looked
the symbol of his genius, and his expression the reflex of his life. They
harmonized with a rare completeness, and fulfilled to the heart the
picture which imagination had drawn. Here was no castle in the air, but a
realized daydream. Sleepy Hollow was at hand; an English cottage, like
that to which poor Leslie brought his angel wife; a Dutch roof such as
covered Van Tassell's memorable feast; the stream up which floated the
incorrigible Dolph; the mountain range whose echoes resounded with the
mysterious bowls, and where Rip took his long nap--all identified with the
author's virgin fame,--gave the vital interest of charming association to
the silent grace of nature; and, above all, the originator of the spell
was there, as genial, humorous, and imaginative, as if he had never
wandered from the primal haunts of his childhood and his fame. That he had
done so, and to good purpose, however, was evident in his conversation.
News had just arrived of a new French _émeute_, and that led us to speak
of the first Revolution; and Irving gave some impressive reminiscences of
his visits to the localities of Paris which are identified with those
scenes of violence and blood. He recurred to them with keen sensibility
and in graphic details. It was delightful thus to commune with a man whose
name was associated with my first conscious relish of native authorship,
and detect the same moral zest and picturesque insight in his talk which
so long ago had endeared his writings. I felt anew the conservative power
of a love of nature and an artistic organization; they had kept thus fresh
the sympathies, and thus enjoyable the mind. Retirement was as grateful
now as when he sought it as a juvenile dreamer; the noble river won as
fond a glance as when first explored as a truant urchin; and the kindly
spirit beamed as truly in his smile as when he mused in the Alhambra, or
walked to Melrose with Scott for a _cicerone_. My authormania revived in
all its original fervour; here were the mellow hues on the picture that
beguiled my boyhood; and the man, the scene, and the author blended in a
graceful unity of effect, without a single incongruity.
PICTURES.
'Look on this picture, and on this.'--HAMLET.
It is not surprising that pictures, with all their attraction for eye and
mind, are, to many honest and intelligent people, too much of a riddle to
be altogether pleasant. What with the oracular dicta of self-constituted
arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers on art, the jargon
of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the endless theories about
colour, style, chiaro-oscuro composition, design, imitation, nature,
schools, painting has become rather a subject for the gratification of
vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism, than a genuine source of
enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and satisfaction,--like music,
literature, scenery, and other recognized intellectual recreations. In
these latter spheres it is not thought presumptuous to assert and enjoy
individual taste; the least independent talkers will bravely advocate
their favourite composer, describe the landscape which has charmed or the
book which has interested them; but when a picture is the subject of
discussion, few have the moral courage to say what they think; there is a
self-distrust of one's own impressions, and even convictions, in regard to
what is represented on canvas, that never intervenes between thought and
expression where ideas or sentiments are embodied in writing or in melody.
Nor is this to be ascribed wholly to the technicalities of pictorial art,
in which so few are deeply versed, but in a great measure to the
incongruous and irrelevant associations which have gradually overlaid and
mystified a subject in itself as open to the perception of a candid mind
and healthy senses as any other department of human knowledge. Half the
want of appreciation of pictures arises from ignorance, not of the
principles of art, but of the elements of nature. Good observers are rare.
The peasant's criticism upon Moreland's 'Farmyard'--that three pigs never
eat together without one foot at least in the trough--was a strict
inference from personal knowledge of the habits of the animal; so the
surgeon found a head of the Baptist untrue, because the skin was not
withdrawn somewhat from the line of decollation. These and similar
instances show that some knowledge of or interest in the thing represented
is essential to the appreciation of pictures. Soldiers and their wives
crowded around Wilkie's 'Chelsea Pensioners,'[9] when first exhibited;
French soldiers enjoy the minutiæ of Vernet's battle-pieces; a lover can
judge of his betrothed's miniature; and the most unrefined sportsman will
point out the niceties of breed in one of Landseer's dogs. To the want of
correspondence so frequent between the subject of a picture and the
observer's experience may, therefore, be attributed no small degree of the
prevalent want of sympathy and confident judgment. 'Gang into an
exhibition,' says the Ettrick Shepherd, 'and only look at a crowd o'
Cockneys, some with specs and some wi' quizzing-glasses, and faces without
ae grain o' meaning in them o' ony kind whatsomever, a' glowering,
perhaps, at a picture o' one o' nature's maist fearfu' or magnificent
warks! What, I ask, could a Prince's Street maister or missy ken o' sic a
wark mair than a red deer wad ken o' the inside o' George's Street
Assembly-rooms?'
The incidental associations of pictures link them to history, tradition,
and human character, in a manner which indefinitely enhances their
suggestiveness. Horace Walpole wove a standard collection of anecdotes
from the lives and works of painters. The frescoes of St. Mark's, at
Florence, have a peculiar significance to the spectator familiar with Fra
Angelico's life. One of the most pathetic and beautiful tragedies in
modern literature is that which a Danish poet elaborated from Correggio's
artist career. Lamb's great treasure was a print from Da Vinci, which he
called 'My Beauty,' and its exhibition to a literal Scotchman gave rise to
one of the richest jokes in Elia's record. The pen-drawing Andre made of
himself, the night before his execution--the curtain painted in the space
where Faliero's portrait should have been, in the ducal palace at Venice,
and the head of Dante, discovered by Mr. Kirkup, on the wall of the
Bargello, at Florence--convey impressions far beyond the mere lines and
hues they exhibit; each is a drama, a destiny. And the hard but true
lineaments of Holbein, the aërial grace of Malbone's 'Hours,' Albert
Durer's mediæval sanctities, Overbeck's conservative self-devotion, a
market-place by Ostade, Reynolds's 'Strawberry Girl,' one of Copley's
colonial grandees in a New England farmer's parlour, a cabinet gem by
Greuze, a dog or sheep of Landseer's, the misty depths of Turner's
'Carthage,' Domenichino's 'Sibyl,' Claude's 'Sunset,' or Allston's
'Rosalie'--how much of eras in art, events in history, national tastes,
and varieties of genius, do they each foreshadow and embalm! Even when no
special beauty or skill is manifest, the character of features transmitted
by pictorial art, their antiquity or historical significance, often lends
a mystery and meaning to the effigies of humanity. In the carved faces of
old German church choirs and altars, the existent facial peculiarities of
race are curiously evident; a Grecian life breathes from many a profile
in the Elgin marbles, and a sacred marvel invests the exhumed giants of
Nineveh; in the cartoons of Raphael, and the old Gobelin tapestries, are
hints of what is essential in the progress and the triumphs of painting.
Considered as a language, how definitely is the style of painters
associated with special forms of character and spheres of life! 'There
certainly never was a painter,' says a traveller in Spain of Murillo,
'who, without much imagination, and telling no story, could yet vision his
eyes with such pure love, and make lips so parting with prayer, as
Murillo; himself a father, he loved to paint the child-Saviour in
conjunction with thin-faced saints.' It is this variety of human
experience, typified and illustrated on canvas, that forms our chief
obligations to the artist; through him our perception of and acquaintance
with our race--its individuality and career, its phases and aspects--are
indefinitely enlarged. 'The greatest benefit,' says a late writer, 'we owe
to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the _extension of
our sympathies_. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of
amplifying our experience and extending our contact with our
fellow-creatures beyond the bounds of our personal lot.'
'A room with pictures in it, and a room without pictures,' says an
æsthetic essayist, 'differ by nearly as much as a room with windows and a
room without windows. Nothing, we think, is more melancholy, particularly
to a person who has to pass much time in his room, than blank walls with
nothing on them; for pictures are loopholes of escape to the soul, leading
it to other spheres. It is such an inexpressible relief to the person
engaged in writing, or even reading, on looking up, not to have his line
of vision chopped square off by an odious white wall, but to find his soul
escaping, as it were, through the frame of an exquisite picture, to other
beautiful and perhaps idyllic scenes, where the fancy for a moment may
revel, refreshed and delighted. Is it winter in your world? Perhaps it is
summer in the picture; what a charming momentary change and contrast! And
thus pictures are consolers of loneliness; they are a sweet flattery to
the soul; they are a relief to the jaded mind; they are windows to the
imprisoned thought; they are books; they are histories and sermons--which
we can read without the trouble of turning over the leaves.'
The effect of a picture is increased by isolation and surprise. I never
realized the physiognomical traits of Madame de Maintenon until her
portrait was encountered in a solitary country-house, of whose
drawing-room it was the sole ornament; and the romance of a miniature by
Malbone first came home to me when an ancient dame, in the costume of the
last century, with trembling fingers drew one of her husband from an
antique cabinet, and descanted on the manly beauty of the deceased
original, and the graceful genius of the young and lamented artist.
Hazlitt wrote an ingenious essay on _A Portrait by Vandyke_, which gives
us an adequate idea of what such a masterpiece is to the eye and mind of
genuine artistic perception and sympathy. Few sensations, or rather
sentiments, are more inextricably made up of pleasure and sadness than
that with which we contemplate (as is not infrequent in some old gallery
of Europe) a portrait which deeply interests or powerfully attracts us,
and whose history is irrevocably lost. A better homily on the evanescence
of human love and fame can scarcely be imagined: a face alive with moral
personality and human charms, such as win and warm our stranger eyes; yet
the name, subject, artist, owner, all lost in oblivion! To pause before an
interesting but 'unknown portrait' is to read an elegy as pathetic as
Gray's.
The mechanical processes by which nature is so closely imitated, and the
increase of which during the last few years is one of the most remarkable
facts in science, may, at the first glance, appear to have lessened the
marvellous in art, by making available to all the exact representation of
still-life. But, when duly considered, the effect is precisely the
reverse; for exactly in proportion as we become familiar with the
mechanical production of the similitudes of natural and artificial
objects, do we instinctively demand higher powers of conception, greater
spiritual expression in the artist. The discovery of Daguerre and its
numerous improvements, and the unrivalled precision attained by
photography, render exact imitation no longer a miracle of crayon or
palette; these must now create as well as reflect, invent and harmonize as
well as copy, bring out the soul of the individual and of the landscape,
or their achievements will be neglected in favour of the fac-similes
obtainable through sunshine and chemistry. The best photographs of
architecture, statuary, ruins, and, in some cases, of celebrated pictures,
are satisfactory to a degree which has banished mediocre sketches, and
even minutely-finished but literal pictures. Specimens of what is called
'Nature-printing,' which gives an impression directly from the veined
stone, the branching fern, or the sea-moss, are so true to the details as
to answer a scientific purpose; natural objects are thus lithographed
without the intervention of pencil or ink. And these several discoveries
have placed the results of mere imitative art within reach of the mass; in
other words, her prose language--that which mechanical science can
utter--is so universal, that her poetry--that which must be conceived and
expressed through individual genius, the emanation of the soul--is more
distinctly recognized and absolutely demanded from the artist, in order to
vindicate his claim to that title, than ever before.
Perhaps, indeed, the scope which painting offers to experimental,
individual, and prescriptive taste, the loyalty it invokes from the
conservative, the 'infinite possibilities' it offers to the imaginative,
the intimacy it promotes with nature and character, are the cause of so
much originality and attractiveness in its votaries. The lives of
painters abound in the characteristic, the adventurous, and the romantic.
Open Vasari, Walpole, or Cunningham, at random, and one is sure to light
upon something odd, genial, or exciting. One of the most popular novelists
of our day assured me that, in his opinion, the richest unworked vein for
his craft, available in these days of civilized uniformity, is artist-life
at Rome, to one thoroughly cognizant of its humours and aspirations, its
interiors and vagrancies, its self-denials and its resources. I have
sometimes imagined what a story the old white dog, who so long frequented
the 'Lepri' and the 'Caffé Greco,' and attached himself so capriciously to
the brother artists of his deceased master, could have told, if blessed
with memory and language. He had tasted the freedom and the zest of
artist-life in Rome, and scorned to follow trader or king. He preferred
the odour of canvas and oil to that of conservatories, and had more frolic
and dainty morsels at an _al fresco_ of the painters, in the Campagna,
than the kitchen of an Italian prince could furnish. His very name
betokened good cheer, and was pronounced after the manner of the pert
waiters who complacently enunciate a few words of English. _Bif-steck_ was
a privileged dog; and though occasionally made the subject of a practical
joke, taught absurd tricks, sent on fools' errands, and his white coat
painted like a zebra, these were but casual troubles; he was a sensible
dog to despise them, when he could enjoy such quaint companionship, behold
such experiments in colour and drawing, serve as a model himself, and go
on delicious sketching excursions to Albano and Tivoli, besides inhaling
tobacco-smoke and hearing stale jests and love soliloquies _ad infinitum_.
I am of _Bif-steck's_ opinion. There is no such true, earnest, humorous,
and individual life, in these days of high civilization, as that of your
genuine painter; impoverished as it often is, baffled in its aspirations,
unregarded by the material and the worldly, it often rears and keeps pure
bright, genial natures whose contact brings back the dreams of youth. It
is pleasant, too, to realize, in a great commercial city, that man 'does
not live by bread alone,' that fun is better than furniture, and a private
resource of nature more prolific of enjoyment than financial investments.
It is rare comfort here, in the land of bustle and sunshine, to sit in a
tempered light and hear a man sing or improvise stories over his work; to
behold once more vagaries of costume; to let the eye rest upon pictorial
fragments of Italy--the 'old familiar faces' of Roman models, the endeared
outlines of Apennine hills, the _contadina_ bodice and the brigand hat,
until these objects revive to the heart all the romance of travel.
Vernet's sympathies were excited by the misfortunes of a worthy tradesman
of Marseilles, and he attended the sheriff's auction at the bankrupt's
house, where, among the crowd, he recognized a would-be _connoisseur_ in
art, of ample wealth. The painter fixed his eyes upon a dim and mediocre
picture on the wall, and bid fifteen francs; immediately the rich amateur
scented a prize; a long contest ensued, and at length the picture was
knocked off to Vernet's antagonist for so large a sum that the honest
bankrupt was enabled to pay his creditors in full, and recommence business
with a handsome capital. With the progress of civilization pictures have
grown in permanent market value. A Quaker who incurred the reproach of his
brethren for securing a Wouverman for a large sum, was excused for this
'vanity' by his shrewd friends, when he demonstrated to them that he had
made an excellent investment. Literature affords many illustrations of the
romance of the pictorial art, of which, among our own authors, Allston and
Hawthorne have given memorable examples in _Monaldi_ and _Twice-told
Tales_. Unknown portraits have inspired the most attractive conjectures,
and about the best known and most fascinating hover an atmosphere of
intensely personal interest or historical association. Vasari, Mrs.
Jameson, Hazlitt, and other art-writers have elaborated the most
delectable facts and fancies from this vast individual sphere of the
picturesque.
The technicalities of art, its refinements of style, its absolute
significance, are, indeed, as dependent for appreciation on a special
endowment as are mathematics; but the general and incidental associations,
in which is involved a world of poetry, may be enjoyed to the full extent
by those whose perception of form, sense of colour, and knowledge of the
principles of sculpture, painting, music, and architecture are notably
deficient. It is a law of life and nature, that truth and beauty,
adequately represented, create and diffuse a limitless element of wisdom
and pleasure. Such memorials are talismanic, and their influence is felt
in all the higher and more permanent spheres of thought and emotion; they
are the gracious landmarks that guide humanity above the commonplace and
the material, along the 'line of infinite desires.' Art, in its broad and
permanent meaning, is a language--the language of sentiment, of character,
of national impulse, of individual genius; and for this reason it bears a
lesson, a charm, or a sanction to all--even to those least versed in its
rules, and least alive to its special triumphs. Sir Walter Scott was no
amateur, yet, through his reverence for ancestry and his local
attachments, portraiture and architecture had for him a romantic interest.
Sydney Smith was impatient of galleries when he could talk with men and
women, and made a practical joke of buying pictures; yet Newton and Leslie
elicited his best humour. Talfourd cared little and knew less of the
treasures of the Louvre, but lingered there because it had been his friend
Hazlitt's Elysium. Indeed, there are constantly blended associations in
the history of English authors and artists; Reynolds is identified with
Johnson and Goldsmith, Smibert with Berkeley, Barry with Burke, Constable
and Wilkie with Sir George Beaumont, Haydon with Wordsworth, and Leslie
with Irving. The painters depict their friends of the pen, the latter
celebrate in verse or prose the artist's triumphs, and both intermingle
thought and sympathy; and from this contact of select intelligences, of
diverse vocation, has resulted the choicest wit and the most genial
companionship. If from special we turn to general associations, from
biography to history, the same prolific affinities are evident, whereby
the artist becomes an interpreter of life, and casts the halo of romance
over the stern features of reality. Hampton Court is the almost breathing
society of Charles the Second's reign; the Bodleian Gallery is vivid with
Britain's past intellectual life; the history of France is pictured on the
walls of Versailles; the luxury of colour bred by the sunsets of the
Euganean hills, the waters of the Adriatic, the marbles of San Marco, and
the skies and atmosphere of Venice, are radiant on the canvas of Titian,
Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese; Michael Angelo has embodied the soul of his
era, and the loftiest spirit of his country; Salvator typified the
half-savage picturesqueness, Claude the atmospheric enchantments, Carlo
Dolce the effeminate grace, Titian the voluptuous energy, Guido the placid
self-possession, and Raphael and Correggio the religious sentiment of
Italy; Watteau put on canvas the _fête champêtre_; the peasant life of
Spain is pictured by Murillo, her asceticism by the old religious limners;
what English rustics were before steam and railroads, Gainsborough and
Moreland reveal; Wilkie has permanently symbolized Scotch shrewdness and
domesticity, and Lawrence framed and fixed the elegant shapes of a London
drawing-room; and each of these is a normal type and suggestive exemplar
to the imagination, a chapter of romance, a sequestration and initial
token of the characteristic and the historical, either of what has become
traditional or what is for ever true.