... grande, austera, verde,
Da le montagne digradanti in cerchio,
L'Umbria guarda.--CARDUCCI.
The autumn sun is declining over the fields and oak-woods and vineyards
of Umbria, where--in the wide undulating valley, inclosed by high
rounded hills, bleak or dark with ilex, each with its strange terraced
white city, Assisi, Spello, Spoleto, Todi--the Tiber winds lazily along,
pale green, limpid, scarce rippled over its yellow pebbles, screened by
long rows of reeds, and thinned, yellowing poplars, reflecting dimly the
sky and trees, the pointed mediaeval bridges and the crenelated towers
on its banks; so clear and placid that you can scarcely bring home to
yourself that this can really be the Tiber of Rome, the turbid mass of
yellow water which eddies sullen and mournful round the ship-shaped
island, along by Vesta's temple, beneath the cypressed Aventine, and
away into the desolate Campagna. Gradually, as the sun sinks, the valley
of the Tiber fills with golden light moving along, little by little,
travelling slowly up the wooded hillocks; covering the bluish mountains
of Somma and Subasio with a purple flush, making the white towns rosy
on their flanks, and then dying away into the pale amber horizon,
rosy where it touches the hill, pearly, then bluish where it merges
imperceptibly into the upper sky. Bluer and bluer become the hills,
deeper and deeper the at first faint amber; the valley is filled with
grey-blue mist; the hills stand out dark blue, cold, and massive; the
sky above becomes a livid rose colour; there is scarcely a filament of
cloud, and only a streak of golden orange where the sun has disappeared.
There is a sudden stillness, as when the last chords of a great symphony
have died out. All the way up the hill on which stands Perugia we
meet the teams of huge oxen, not merely white, but milky, with great,
deep, long-lashed eyes, swaying from side to side with their load of
wine-vats; and the peasants returning home from ploughing up the last
corn stubble. All is peaceful and very solemn, more so than after sunset
in other places, in this sweet and austere Umbria, the fit home of the
Christian revival of the early Middle Ages. And it makes us think, this
beautiful and solemn evening, of the little book which epitomises all
the emotions of this new birth, of this charming new childhood of
humanity, when the feelings of men seem to have somewhat of the dewy
freshness of dawn. The book is the "Fioretti di San Francesco," a
collection of legends and examples relating to the cycle of St. Francis
of Assisi by some monk or monks of the end of the thirteenth century.
Flowerets they may well be called--flowers such as might grow, green
and white-starred and delicately pearled with gold, in the thick grass
across which dance Angelico's groups of the Blessed. Yet with a certain
humanness, a certain reality and naturalness of sweetness, such as
the great paradise painter, with his fleshless madonnas, his glory
of radiant, unearthly draperies and golden skies, never could have
conceived. A singular charm of simplicity and lucidness in this little
book; no fever visions or unhealthy glories; an earnestness not without
humour: there is nothing grim or absurd in the credulity and asceticism
of these Umbrian saints. The asceticism is so gentle and tender, the
credulity so childish and poetical, that the ridiculous itself ceases to
be so. These monks, so far from being engrossed with the care of their
own souls, or weighed down by the dread of hell, seemed to have awakened
with perfect hope and faith in celestial goodness, with perfect desire
to love all around them in the most literal sense: religion for them is
love and reliance on love. The gentleness with which they admonish the
sinning and back-sliding, the confidence in the inner goodness of man,
from whose soiled surface all evil may be washed, extends in these men
to the whole of creation, and makes them fraternise with beasts and
birds, as is shown, with a delicate, slightly humorous grace, in the
stories of St. Francis and the turtle doves, and of the ferocious wolf
"Frate Lupo" of Gubbio, whom rather than kill, it pleased the saint
to bring round to harmlessness by fair words, expostulations, and
faithfully kept promises, expecting from the wolf fidelity to his word
as much as from a human being. There is in this little book a vague,
floating, permeating life of affection, of love unbounded by difference
of species. Communion with all men, with Christ, with angels, with
doves, and with wolves; the force of love bringing down God and raising
up brutes to the level of these saints. And as we think over the little
book we feel in a way as if we, to whom Francis and his companions
are mere mortal men, and the tales of the "Fioretti" mere beautiful
fancies, hollow and sad for their very sweetness, were looking down upon
a sort of holy land, as we look down in the white twilight upon the
misty undulations of this solemn and beautiful Umbria.
A serene country, neither rugged and barren, nor flat and fertile, not
the grey, sharp Florentine valley, whose thin soil must be irrigated
and ploughed, and on whose hillsides the carefully nurtured olives are
stunted with winter wind and summer scorchings, where every outline is
clear and bone-like in that same hard, light atmosphere which, as Vasari
says, makes all appear hard and clear and logical to the minds of the
Florentines. Not the endless flatness and fruitfulness of Lombardy,
where the mists steam up in the evening golden round the great misty
golden descending sun-ball, and the buildings flush like the cheeks of
Correggio's joy-drunken seraphs, and the thin, clear outline of the rows
of poplars looks against the sky like the outshaken golden hair combed
into minute filaments of one of Lionardo's women. Nor the dreary wastes
of sere oakwoods and livid sand-hills of Orvieto; nor the sea of lush
vegetation gilded by the sun, merging into the vaporous damp blue sky
of the plain of Lucca. None of these things is the Tiber valley, not
harsh nor poor nor luxuriant; sober and restrained, without excess or
scantness, an undulating country of pale and modest tints, and, save in
the distant Apennine tops, of simple outline, with what glory of colours
it may have, due mainly to sky and sunset of cloud, and even in that
more chaste than other parts of Italy; neither poor nor rich; without
the commerce of Lombardy or the industry of Tuscany, wholly without
any intellectual movement, rural, believing, with but little of the
imported influence of reviving Paganism, and still much of the clinging
moral atmosphere of Christian contemplation and ecstacy of the days of
St. Francis. Such is this isolated Tiber valley, whose skies and whose
legends are so perfectly in harmony, and in it was born, of the country
and of the traditions, a special, isolated school of art.
Is it a school or a man?--A school concentrated in one man, or a man
radiating into a school. There are a great many men all about the one
man Perugino, masters or pupils; the first seem so many bungled attempts
to be what he is, the second so many disintegrations of him. Even the
more powerful individualities are lost in his presence; at Perugia we
know nothing of the real Pinturicchio, the bright, vain, thoughtless
painters of the pageant scenes, brilliant like pages of Boiardo's fairy
tales, on the walls of the Sienese Library. Raphael is no separate
individual, has no personal qualities before he leaves Perugia.
Everything is Perugino, in more or less degree. The whole town, nay, the
surrounding country, is one vast studio in which his themes are being
developed, his works being copied, his tricks being imitated. A score of
artists of talent, one or two like Lo Spagna and the young Raphael, of
first-rate powers, and a host of mere mechanical drudges, give us, in
all Perugia, nothing new, nothing individual, no impression which we can
disentangle from the general, all-pervading impression given by the one
man Perugino. The country, physical and moral, has exhausted itself
in this one artistic manifestation. One not merely, but unique and
one-sided. What Perugino has done has been done by no other master; and
what Perugino has done is only one thing, and that to all eternity. The
sense of complete absence of variety, of difference; the impression of
all being reduced to the minimum of everything, the vague consciousness
that all here is one, isolated and indivisible, which haunts us all
through the churches and galleries of Perugia, pursues us likewise
through all the works of the school, that is to say, of Perugino
himself. This unique school, consisting in reality of a single man,
possesses only one theme, one type, one idea, one feeling; it does,
it attempts but one thing, and that one thing means isolation,
concentration, elimination of all but one single mood.
It is the painting of solitude; of the isolated soul, alone, unaffected
by any other, unlinked in any work, or feeling, or suffering, with any
other soul, nay even with any physical thing. The men and women of
Perugino are the most completely alone that any artist ever painted,
alone though in fours, or fives, or in crowds. Their relations to each
other are purely architectural: it is a matter of mere symmetry, even as
it is with the mouldings or carvings of the frame which surrounds them.
Superficially, taken merely as so many columns, or half-arches of the
pinnacled whole of the composition, they are, in his larger works, more
rigorously related to each other than are the figures of any other
painter of severely architectural groups; compared with Perugino,
the figures in Bellini's or Mantegna's most solemn altarpieces are
irrelevant to each other: one saint is turning too much aside, another
looking too much on his neighbour. Not so with Perugino: his figures
are all in relation to one another. The scarf floating in strange
snakelike convolutions, from the shoulder of the one angel flying,
cutting across the pale blue air as a skater cuts across the ice, floats
and curls in distinct reference to the ribbons which twist, like lilac
or yellow scrolls, about the head and neck of the other angel; the lute,
with down-turned bulb, of the one seraph, his shimmering purple or
ultramarine robe clinging in tight creases round his feet in the breeze
of heaven, is rigorously balanced by the viol, upturned against the
stooping head, of his fellow-seraph; the white-bearded anchorite
stretches forth his right foot in harmony with the outstretched left
foot of the scarlet-robed cardinal; the dainty arch-angelic warrior
drolly designated as Scipio, or Cincinnatus on the wall of the Money
Changer's Hall turns his delicate, quaintly-crested head, and raises
his vague-looking eyes to match the upturned plumed head of the other
celestial knight. All the figures are distinctly connected with each
other; but they are connected as are the pillarets, various, but
different, which balance each other in length and thickness and
character, a twisted with a twisted one, a twin, strangely linked pair
with another such, on the symmetrically sloping front of some Lombard
cathedral; the connection is purely outer, purely architectural; and the
solitude of each figure as a human being, as a body and a mind, is only
the more complete. There is no grouping in these cunningly balanced
altarpieces; there is no common employment or movement, no action or
reaction. Angels and warriors and saints and sibyls stand separate,
the one never touching the other, apart, each alone against the pale
greenish background. They may look, the one towards the other, but
they never see each other. They exist quite single and isolated, each
unconscious that there is any other. Another--indeed, there is no other;
in reality, every one is in complete solitude; it is only the canvas
which makes them appear in the same place. They are not in the same
place, or rather there is no place; the soft green field, the blue
hills, darkening against the greenish evening sky, the spare, thinly
leaved little trees, the white tower in the distance, this little piece
of Umbrian country has nothing to do with any of them. They are nowhere;
or rather each taken singly is nowhere. Place, like subject and action,
has been eliminated; everything has, which possibly could. The very
bodies seem reduced to the least possible: there is no interest in them:
all is concentrated upon the delicate nervous hands, on the faces; in
the faces, upon eyes and mouth, till the whole face seems scarcely more
than tremulous lips, half parted, raised vividly to kiss, to suck in the
impalpable; than dilating pupils, straining vaguely to seize, to absorb,
to burn into themselves the invisible. It is the embodiment, with only
as little body as is absolutely required, of a soul; and that soul
simplified, rarefied into only one condition of being: beatitude of
contemplation. As place and action have been eliminated, so also has
time: they will for ever remain, alone, in the same attitude; they will
never move, never change, never cease; there exists for them no other
occupation or possibility. And as the bodies are separate, isolated from
all physical objects, so is the soul: it touches no other human soul,
touches no earthly interest: it is alone, motionless, space and time and
change have ceased for it: contemplating, absorbing for all eternity
that which the eye cannot see, nor the hand touch nor the will
influence, the mysterious, the ineffable.
Are they really saints and angels, and prophets and sibyls? Surely
not--for all such act or suffer; for each of these there is a local
habitation, and a definite duty. These strange creatures of Perugino's
are not supernatural beings in the same sense as are those robed in
iridescent, impalpable glory of Angelico; or those others, clothed in
more than human muscle and sinew, of the vault of the Sixtine. What are
they? Not visions become concrete, but the act of vision personified.
They are not the objects of religious feeling; they are its most
abstract, intense reality. Yes, they are reality. They are no
far-fetched fancies of the artist. They are souls and soul-saturated,
soul-moulded bodies which he saw around him. For in that Umbria of the
dying fifteenth century--where the old cities, their old freedom and
industry and commerce well-nigh dwindled to nothing, had shrunk each
on its mountain-side into mere huge barracks of mercenary troopers or
strongholds of military bandit nobles, continually besieged and sacked
and heaped with massacre by rival families and rival factions; where
in the open country, the villagers, pent-up in fortified farms and
barns, were burnt, women and children, with the stored-up fodder, or
slaughtered and cast in heaps into the Tiber, and every year the tangled
brushwood of ilex and oak and briars encroached further upon the
devastated cornfields and oliveyards, and the wolves and foxes roamed
nearer and nearer to the cities--in this terrible barbarous Umbria of
the days of Caesar Borgia, the soul developed to strange unearthly
perfection. It developed by the force of antagonism and isolation.
This city of Perugia, which was governed by the most ferocious and
treacherous little mercenary captains; whose dark precipitous streets
were full of broil and bloodshed, and whose palaces full of evil,
forbidden lust and family conspiracy, was one of the most pious in all
Italy. Wondrous miraculous preachers, inspired and wild, were for ever
preaching in the midst of the iniquity; holy monks and nuns were for
ever seeing visions and curing the incurable; churches and hospitals
were being erected throughout town and country; novices crowded
the ever-increasing convents. Sensitive souls were sickened by the
surrounding wickedness, and terrified lest it should triumph over them;
resist it, bravely expose themselves to it, prevent or mitigate the evil
of others they dared not: a moral plague was thick in the air, and
those who would escape infection must needs fly, take refuge in strange
spiritual solitude, in isolated heights where the moral air was rarefied
and icy. Of the perfectly human, sociable devotion of the days of St.
Francis, of the active benevolence and righteousness, there was now no
question: the wolves had become too frightfully numerous and ravenous to
be preached to like that Brother Wolf of the _Flowerets of St. Francis_.
Active good there could now no longer be: the pure soul became inactive,
passive, powerless over the evil around, contemplating for ever a
distant, ineffable excellence; aspiring, sterile, and meagre, at being
absorbed into that glory of perfect virtue at which it was for ever
gazing. This solitary and inactive devotion, raised far above this
world, is the feeling out of which are moulded those scarce embodied
souls of Perugino's. Those emaciated hectic young faces, absorbed in
one ineffable passion, which in their weakness and intensity are so
infinitely feminine, are indeed mainly the faces of women--of those
noble and holy ladies like Atalanta Baglioni, living in moral solitude
among their turbulent clan of evil fathers and brothers and husbands:
the victims, or worse, the passive spectators, the passive accomplices,
of iniquity of all sorts, whom the grand old chronicler, Matarazzo,
shows by glimpses, walking through the blood and lust-soiled houses of
the brilliant and horrible Gianpavolos and Semonettos and Griffones of
Perugia, pure and patient like nuns, and as secluded in mind as in any
cloister. Theirs are these faces, and at the same time the faces which
vaguely, confusedly looked down upon them, glorified reflections of
their own, from above. These creatures of Perugino's are what every
great artist's works must be--at once the portrait of those for whom he
paints, and the portrait of their ideals, that is, of their intenser
selves. He is the painter of the city where, in the Italian Renaissance,
the unmixed devotional feeling, innate in the country of St. Francis,
untroubled by Florentine scepticism or Lombard worldly sense, thrust
back and concentrated upon itself by surrounding brutal wickedness,
existed most intense; he is the painter of this kind of devotion. The
very daintiness of accessory, the delicate embroidered robes, the long
fringed scarves, the embossed armour, light and pliable like silk, which
cannot wound the tender young archangels, the carefully waved and curled
hair--all this is the religious luxuriousness of nuns and novices, the
one vent for all love of beauty and ease and costliness of the poor
delicate creatures, worn and galled by their shapeless hair cloth,
living and sleeping in the dreary whitewashed cell. This is unmixed
devotion, religious contemplation and aspiration absolutely separated
from any other sort of moral feeling; there is the destructive wrath of
righteousness in the prophets of Michael Angelo, and the gentleness of
candour and charity in the Florentine virgins of Raphael; there is the
serenity and solemnity of moral wisdom in Bellini, and the sweetness and
cordiality of domestic love in Titian; there is even the half-animal
motherly love in Correggio; there is, in almost all the schools of
Italian painting, some character of human goodness; but in Perugino
there is none of these things. Nothing but the one all-absorbing,
abstract, devotional feeling--intense passive contemplation of the
unattainable good; souls purged of every human desire or will, isolated
from all human affection and action, raised above the limits of time and
space; souls which have long ceased to be human beings and can never
become angels, hovering, half pained, half joyful, in a limbo of endless
spiritual desire.
Such is the work. Let us seek the master. Pietro Vannucci, of Citta
della Pieve, surnamed Perugino, Petrus de Castro Plebis, as he signed
himself, lived, as tradition has it, in a very good house in Via
Deliziosa. Via Deliziosa is one of the many quiet little paved lanes of
Perugia, steep and tortuous, looking up at whose rough scarred houses
you forever see overgrown plants of white starred basil or grey marjoram
bursting out of broken ewers and pipkins on the boards before the
high windows, or trails of mottled red and green tomatos, or long
crimson-tasselled sprays of carnation dangling along the broken,
blackened masonry, crevassed and held together by iron clamps; where,
at every sudden turn, you get, through some black and oozy archway, a
glimpse of green sun-gilded vineyard and distant hills, hazy and blue
through the yellow summer air. Here, in the best part of the town,
Perugino had his house and his workshop. In the house, full of precious
stuffs and fine linen and plate and everything which a wealthy burgher
could desire, lived the handsome wife of the master, for whom he was for
ever designing and ordering new clothes, and whose beautiful hair he
loved himself to dress in strange fantastic diadems and helmets of
minute plaits and waves and curls, that she might go through the town as
magnificent and quaintly attired as any noble lady of the Baglionis or
Antinoris or Della Staffas. In the workshop was the master and a host
of pupils: Giannicola Manni, Doni, the Alfani, Tiberio d'Assisi; the
exquisite anonymous stranger, of whom we know only as John the Spaniard,
and perhaps that gentle fair feminine boy from Urbino, whom, in
half-womanish gear and with wonderful delicate feathers and jewels in
his hair, Perugino painted among the prophets in the Money Changer's
Hall. A workshop indeed. Not merely the studio of a master and his
pupils, but an enormous manufactory of works of devotional art; the
themes of Perugino, the same saints, the same madonnas, the same angels,
in the same groups, for ever repeated in large and small, some mere
copies, others slightly varied or composed of various incoherent
portions, by the pupil; some half by the master, half by the pupil, some
possibly touched up by him, one or two wholly from his own exquisite
hand. Things of all degrees of merit and execrableness, to suit the
richest and the poorest; all could be had at that workshop, for Master
Pietro had the monopoly of the art, good bad, or indifferent, of the
country. You could order designs for wood carvings or silver ware;
you could hire church banners, of which store was kept to be let out
for processions at so much the hour. You could obtain men to set
up triumphal arches of cardboard, and invent moulds for ornamental
sweetmeats, like those of Astorre Baglioni's wedding; patterns,
doubtless also for embroidery and armour embossing; you could have a
young Raphael Santi set to repeating some Marriage of the Virgin for a
Sforza or a Baglioni, or some tattered smearer to copy a copy of some
madonna for a village church; or you could commission the master himself
to go to Rome and paint a wall of Pope Sixtus's Chapel. For there never
was a manufactory of art carried on more methodically or satisfactorily
than this one. There never was a commercial speculator who knew so well
how much good and bad he could afford and venture to give; who knew
his public so thoroughly. He had, in his youth and poverty, invented,
discovered (which shall we call it?) the perfection of devotional
painting, that which perfectly satisfied his whole pious Umbria, and
every pious man or woman of more distant parts: a certain number of
types, a certain expression, a certain mode of grouping, a certain
manner of colouring which constituted a perfect whole; a conception to
embody which most completely he had in his youth worked like a slave,
seeking, perfecting all that which belonged to the style: the clear,
delicate colour, the exquisite, never excessive finish, the infinitely
delicate modelling of finger and wrist, of eyelid and lip, the
diaphanous sheen of light, soft, scarcely coloured hair on brow and
temple and cheek; he had coolly turned away from everything else.
The problems of anatomy, of perspective, of light and shade, and
of grouping, at which in Florence he had seen men like Pollaiolo,
Ghirlandaio, Filippino, Lionardo wasting their youth, he never even
glanced at. No real bodies were required for his saints as long as he
could give them the right, wistful faces; no tangible background, no
well-defined composition. All this was unnecessary; and he wanted only
the necessary. When he had got the amount and sort of skill required for
this narrow style, he stopped; when he had invented the three or four
types of faces, attitude, and composition, he ceased inventing. He had
the means of making a fortune. All that remained was to organise his
mechanism, to arrange that splendid system of repeating, arranging,
altering, copying, on the part of himself and his scholars, by which he
could, without further enlarging style or ideas, furnish Umbria and
Italy with the pure devotional painting it required, in whatever amount
and of whatever degree of excellence it might wish. He succeeded. True,
other artists sneered at him, like that young Buonarroti, who had called
him a blunderer; true, the Florentines complained that when he painted
their fresco for them at S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, he had cheated
them, giving mere copies of works they had had from him twenty years
before. About the judgment of other painters he cared not a fig; success
was the only test; to the Florentines he calmly answered that as those
figures had pleased them twenty years before, they ought to please them
now; that he at least was not going to seek anything new as long as
the old sufficed. For men who grew old in constant attempts after new
styles, new muscles, new draperies, like Signorelli yonder labouring
solitary on the rock of Orvieto, spending years in cramming new figures
into spaces which he, Perugino, would have finished in a month with six
isolated saints and a bit of blue sky; or frittered away time in endless
sketches, endless cooking of new paints and trying of new washes, like
Lionardo da Vinci: or who ruined themselves buying bits of old marble to
copy, like crazy Mantegna at Mantua; for all such men as these Perugino
must have had a supreme contempt. As long as money came in, all was
right; new ideas, improvements, all such things were mere rubbish. Thus
he probably preached to his pupils, and kept them carefully to their
task of multiplying his own works, till his school became sterile and
imbecile; and the young Raphael, in disgust, left him and begged the
Lady Giovanna della Rovere for a letter to the Gonfaloniere Soderini,
which should open to him the doors of the Florentine schools. With what
contempt must not Master Perugino have looked after this departing young
Raphael; with what cynical amusement he must have heard how the young
fool, once successful, kept for ever altering his style, wearing his
frail life out, meditating and working himself into the hectic broken
creature whom Marc-Antonio has etched, seated, fagged and emaciated on
the steps before his work. We can imagine how Perugino descanted on all
this folly to the other young men in his workshop. For he was a cynical
man as well as a grasping: he saw no wisdom beyond the desire for money
and comfort. He had begun life almost a beggar, sleeping on a chest,
going without food, in tatters, giving himself no respite from drudgery,
sustained by one idea, one wish!--to be rich. And rich he had become; he
had built houses on speculation at Florence, to let them out; and had
farms at Citta della Pieve, and land near Perugia. He had obtained all
he had ever desired or could conceive desirable: safety from poverty.
In other things he did not believe: not in an after life, nor in God,
nor in good; all these ideas, says Vasari, could never enter into his
porphyry hard brain, "This Peter placed all his hopes in the good things
of fortune, and for money would have made any evil bargain."
This is how Vasari has shown us Perugino. The unique painter of
archangels and seraphs appears a base commercial speculator, a cynic,
an atheist: the sort of man whom you could imagine transfigured into a
shabby pettifogging Faustus, triumphing over the fiend by making over to
him, in return for solid ducats, a bond mortgaging a soul which he knew
himself never to have possessed. Some people may say, as learned folk
are forever saying now-a-days, that all this is pure slander on the part
of Vasari; and indeed, what satisfactory historical villain shall we
soon possess, at the rate of present learned rehabilitations? Be this as
it may, there remains for the present the typical contrast between this
man and his works; and looking at it, other contrasts between noble art
and grovelling artists vaguely occur to us, and we ask ourselves, Can it
be? Can a pure and exquisite work be produced by a base nature? Can such
anomaly exist--must the mental product not be stained by the vileness of
the mind which has conceived it? Must we, together with a precious and
noble gift taken from a hand we should shrink from touching, accept the
disheartening, the debasing conclusion, that in art purity may spring
from foulness, and the excellent be born of the base? It is a conclusion
from which we instinctively shrink, feeling, rather than absolutely
understanding, that it seems to strip the holiness from art, the
worthiness, nay, almost the innocence, from our enjoyment. We feel
towards any beautiful work of art something akin to love: a sort of
desire to absorb it into our soul, to raise ourselves to it, to be with
it in some manner united; and thus the mere thought that all this may
be sprung from out of unworthiness, that this noble century-enduring
work may be the sister of who knows how many long dead base thoughts
and desires and resolves born together with it in the nature of its
maker--this idea of contamination of origin, makes us shudder and
suspect.... Alas, how many of us, of the better and nobler of us, have
not often sickened for a moment as the thought quivered across their
mind of the foulness out of which the noblest of our art has arisen. But
instinctively we have struck down the half-formulated idea as we dash
away any suspicion against that which we love, and which our love tells
us must be good. And thus, as a rule, we have persuaded ourselves that,
though by a horrible fatality our greatest art--in sculpture, and
painting, and music, and poetry, has oftenest belonged not to a simple
and austere state of society, to the strong manly days of Greece or
Rome, to the first times of Christian abnegation and martyrdom, to
the childlike angelic revival of mediaeval Christianity, to the solemn
self-concentration of Huguenot France or Puritan England, that it
has not sprung out of the straightforward purity of periods of moral
regeneration, but rather from out of the ferment, nay, the putrescence,
of many-sided, perplexed, anomalous times of social dissolution. That
although our greatest art seems thus undeniably to have arisen in
corrupt times, yet the individuals to whom we proximately owe have been
the nobler and purer of their day. Nay, we almost persuade ourselves
that in those dubious times of doubt and dissolution, the spotless, the
unshaken were in a way divinely selected, like so many vestal virgins,
to cherish in isolation the holy fire of art. And we call up to our
minds men noble and pure, like Michael Angelo and Beethoven: we eagerly
treasure up like relics anecdotes showing the gentleness and generosity
of men like Lionardo and Mozart: trifling tales of caged-birds let
loose, or of poor fellow-workers assisted, which, in our desire to
trace art back to a noble origin, seem to shed so much light upon the
production of a great picture or great symphony. And yet, even as the
words leave our lips, words so sincerely consoling, we seem to catch in
our voice an unintentional inflexion of deriding scepticism. So much
light! these tales of mere ordinary goodness, such as we might hear (did
we care) of so many a dull and blundering artisan, or vacant idler,
these tales shed so much light upon the production of great works of
art! A sort of reasoning devil seems to possess us, to twitch our
little morsels of unreasoned consolation, of sanctifying, mystical
half-reasoning away from our peace-hungry souls. And he says: "What of
Perugino? What of so many undeniable realities which this Perugino of
ours, even if the purest myth, so completely typifies? How did this
cynic, this atheist, come to paint these saints? You say that he was no
cynic, no atheist, that it is all vile slander." Well, I won't dispute
that: perhaps he _was_ a saint after all. I will even grant that he
was. But in return for the concession, let us examine whether the
saints could not have been equally well painted by the traditional,
unrehabilitated Perugino, Vasari's Perugino--not the real one, oh no,
I will admit not the real one--by the typical Perugino; the man "of
exceeding little religion, who could never be got to believe in
the soul's immortality; nay, with arguments suited to his porphyry
intellect, obstinately refused all good paths; who placed all his hopes
in the goods of fortune and for money would have consented to any evil
compact." Nay, even by a Perugino a good deal worse.
An ugly, impertinent little reasoning fiend within us; but now-a-days we
have lost the formula of exorcism for this kind of devil, and listen we
must; indignantly, and with mind well made up to find all his arguments
completely false. Think over the matter, now that idea is once started,
we can no longer help. So let us discuss it with ourselves, within
ourselves, the place where most discussion must ever go on. Let us sit
here on the low-broken brick parapet, which seems to prevent all this
rough, black Perugia from precipitating itself, a mass of huddled,
strangled lanes, into the ravine below; sit with the grey, berry-laden
olives, and twisted sere-leaved fig-trees with their little brown
bursting fruit, pushing their branches up from the orchard on the steep
below, where the women dawdle under the low evening sun, sickle in hand,
mowing up the long juicy grass, tearing out wreath after wreath, of vine
and clematis, spray after spray of feathery bluish fennel, till their
wheel-shaped crammed baskets look as if destined for some sylvan god's
altar, rather than to be emptied out into the sweltering darkness before
the cows mewed up in the thatched hut yonder by the straw-stack and the
lavender and rose-hedged tank.
The question which, we scarcely know how, has thus been started within
us, and which, (like all similar questions) develops itself almost
automatically in our mind, without much volition and merely a vague
feeling of discomfort, until it have finally taken shape and left our
consciousness for the limbo of decided points, this question is simply:
What are the relations between the character of the work of art and the
character of the artist who creates it? To what extent may we infer from
the peculiar nature of the one the peculiar nature of the other? Such,
if we formulate it, is the question, and the answer thereunto seems
obvious: that as the peculiarity of the fruit depends, _caeteris
paribus_, upon the peculiarity of the tree (itself due in part to soil
and temperature and similar external circumstances), so also must the
peculiarity of the spiritual product be due to the peculiarities of the
spiritual whole of which it is born. And thus, in inverted order of
ideas, the definite character of the fruit proves the character of
the tree, the result argues the origin: there must exist a necessary
relation between the product and that which has produced. If then we
find a definite quality in the works of an artist, we have a right to
suppose that corresponding qualities existed in the artist himself: if
the picture, or symphony, or poem be noble, and noble moreover with a
special sort of nobility, then noble also, and noble with that special
sort of nobility must be the artistic organism, the artist, by whom
it was painted, or composed or written. And this once granted (which
we cannot help granting), we must inevitably conclude that the man
Perugino, who painted those wonderful intense types of complete
renunciation of the world, could not in reality have been the worldly,
unconscientious atheist described by Vasari. So, at least, it would
seem. But tarry awhile. We have decided on analogy, and by a sort of
instinct of cause and effect, that the work must correspond in its main
qualities with the main qualities of the artist, of the artistic
organism by which it is produced. Mark what we have said: of the artist,
or artistic organism. Now what is this artistic organism, this artist?
An individual, a man, surely? Yes, and no. The artist and the man are
not the same: the artist is only part of the man; how much of him,
depends upon the art in which he is a worker. The work is produced by
the man, but not by the whole of him; only by that portion which we call
the artist; and how much that portion is, what relation it bears to the
whole man, we can ascertain by asking ourselves what faculties are
required for the production of a work of art. And thus we soon get to a
new question. The faculties required for the production of a work of art
may be divided into two classes; those which directly and absolutely
produce it, and those which are required to enable the production to
take place without interference from contrary parts of the individual
nature. These secondary qualities, merely protective as it were, are
the moral qualities common, in greater or less degree, to all workers:
concentration, patience, determination, desire of improvement; they are
not artistic in themselves, and are not more requisite to the artist
than to the thinker, or statesman, or merchant, or soldier, to preserve
his very different mental powers from the disturbing influence of
laziness, or fickleness, or any more positive tendencies, vices or
virtues, which might interfere with the development of his talents.
And of these purely protective qualities only so much need exist as the
relative strength of the artistic faculty and of the unartistic
tendencies of the individual require in order that the former be
protected from the latter; and thus it comes that where the artistic
endowment has been out of all proportion large, as in the case of such
a man as Rossini, it has been able to produce the most excellent work
without much of what we should call moral fibre: the man was lazy and
voluptuous, but he was, above all, musical; it was easier for him to be
musically active than to be merely dissipated and inactive: the artistic
instincts were the strongest, and were passively followed. When these
moral qualities, merely protective and secondary in art, are developed
beyond the degree requisite for mere protection of the artistic
faculties (a degree small in proportion to the magnitude of the artistic
instinct), they become ruling characteristics of the whole individual
nature, and influence all the actions of the man as distinguished from
the artist: they make him as inflexible in the pursuit of the
non-artistic aims of life as in that of mere excellence in his own art.
The timorous and slothful Andrea del Sarto is quite as complete an
artist as the eager and inquisitive Lionardo da Vinci; but, whereas
Andrea's activity stops short at the limits of his powers of painting,
the increasing laboriousness and never satisfied curiosity of Lionardo
extend, on the contrary, to all manner of subjects quite disconnected
with his real art. When once the glorious fresco of the Virgin, seated
like a happier Niobe, by the mealsack, has been properly finished in the
cloister of the Servites, Andrea goes home and crouches beneath the
violence of his wife, or to the tavern to seek feeble consolation. But
when, after never-ending alterations and additional touches, Lionardo at
length permits Paolo Giocondo to carry home the portrait of his dubious,
fascinating wife, he sets about mathematical problems or chemical
experiments, offers to build fortresses for Caesar Borgia, manufactures
a wondrous musical instrument like the fleshless skull of a horse and
learns to play thereon, or writes treatises on anatomy: there is in
him a desire, a capacity for work greater than even his subtle and
fantasticating style of art can ever fully employ. Such are the
non-artistic qualities required, merely as protectors from interference,
for the production of a work of art: the same these, whatever the art,
as they are the same if, instead of art, we consider science, or
commerce, or any other employment. The artistic, the really directly
productive qualities, differ of course according to the art to which the
work belongs, differ not only in nature but also in number. For there
are some arts in which the work is produced by a very small number of
faculties; others where it requires a very complex machine, which we
call a whole individuality: and here we find ourselves back again before
our original question, to what extent the personality of an artist
influences the character of his work. We have got back to the anomaly
typified by Perugino; back to it, and as completely without an answer to
the problem as we were on starting. We have been losing our time, going
round and round a question merely to find ourselves at our original
starting-point. Not so: going round the question indeed, but in
constantly narrowing circles, which will dwindle, let us hope, till we
find ourselves on the only indivisible centre, which is the solution of
the problem. For there are many questions which are like the towns of
this same Umbria of Perugino: built upon the brink of a precipice,
walled round with a wall of unhewn rock, seeming so near if we look up
at them from the ravine below, and see every roof, and cypress-tree,
and pillared balcony; but which we cannot approach by scaling the
unscalable, sheer precipice, but must slowly wind round from below,
circling up and down endless undulations of vineyard and oakwood, coming
for ever upon a tantalising glimpse of towers and walls, for ever
seemingly close above us, and yet forever equally distant; till at last,
by a sharp turn of the gradually ascending road, we find ourselves
before the unexpected gates of the city. And thus we have approached
a little nearer to the solution of the question. We have, in our
wanderings, left behind one part of the ground. We have admitted that
the work of art is produced not by the man, but merely by that portion
of him which we call the artist; we have even dimly foreseen that
the case may be that in one art the artist, that is to say, the
art-producing organism, comprises nearly the whole of the mere
individual: that the artistic part is very nearly the complete human
whole. Now, in order to approach nearer our final conclusion, namely,
whether the man Perugino could have painted those saints and those
angels had he really been the mercenary atheist of Vasari, we must set
afresh to examine what, in the various arts, are the portions of an
individual necessary to constitute the mere artist, that is to say, the
producer of a work of art.
But stop again. Are we quite sure that we know what we mean when we say
"a work of art?" Are we quite sure that we may not, without knowing it,
be talking of two things under one name? Surely not: when we apply the
word to one of Perugino's archangels, we certainly refer to one whole
object. So far, certainly, we mean (let us put it in the crudest way) a
certain amount of colour laid on to a canvas in such a manner, and with
such arrangements of tints and shadows, that it presents to our eyes and
mind a certain form, a form which we define, from its resemblance to
other forms made out of flesh and bone, the face and body of a young
man; a form which, owing to certain constitutional peculiarities
and engrained habits of our mind, we also declare to a given extent
beautiful. This form, moreover, distinctly recalls to our mind real
forms which experience has taught us to associate with the idea of moral
purity, self-forgetfulness, piety; simply because we have noticed or
been told since our infancy that persons with such bodily aspects are
usually pure, self-forgetful and pious; because, without our knowing
it, thousands of painters have accustomed us by giving us such forms as
the portraits of saints to consider this physical type as distinctly
saintly. This perception, that the form into which the colours on
Perugino's canvas have been combined is such as we are accustomed to
think of in connection with saintliness, immediately awakens in our mind
a whole train of associations: we not merely see with our physical eyes
the combination of colours and lines constituting the form, but with
our mental eyes we rapidly and half unconsciously glance over all the
occupations, aspirations, habits of such a creature as we conceive this
form to belong to. We not merely see the delicate, thin, pale lips,
thrown back head and neck, and the wide-opened, dilated, greyish eyes;
we imagine in our mind the vague delights after which those lips are
thirsting as the half-closed pale flowers thirst for the rain-drops, the
ecstasy of fulfilled hope which makes the veins of the neck pulse and
the head fall back in weariness of inner quivering; the confused glory
of heaven after which those wide-opened eyes are straining; while our
bodily sight is resting on the mere coloured surface of Perugino's
picture, our mental sight is wandering across all the past and future of
this strange being whose bodily semblance the artist has suddenly thrust
upon us. All this is what we vaguely think of when we speak of a work
of art. Perhaps we can so little disentangle our impressions and our
fancies that their combination may thus be treated as a unity. But
this unity is a dualism: the mere colour arrangement constituting the
form which we see with our bodily eyes, and with our bodily eyes find
beautiful, is one half; and the whole moral apparition, conjured up by
association and imagination, is the other. And, as far as so infinitely
interwoven a dualism can be divided, coarsely, and leaving or taking too
much on one side or the other, we can divide this dual existence into
that which has been given to us by the artist, the visible, material
form; and that which association, recollection, fancy, has been added
by ourselves to the artist's work. Of this dualism, therefore, of
impression and fancy, only that portion of the work of art which is
absolutely visible and concrete; the form, whether it exist in combined
colour and shadow, or marble mass, as in the plastic arts, or in
partially combined and partially successive sounds, as in music, only
this form is really given by the artist, is that which, with reference
to his productive power, we can call the work of art. He may, it is
true, have deliberately chosen that form which should lead us to such
associations of ideas, but in so far he has been acting not as the
artist, but as a sort of foreshadowed spectator or listener; he has,
before taking up his own work with the mere material, visible, tangible,
audible realities of the art, stepped into the place to be occupied by
ourselves, and foreseen, by his knowledge of the effects which he can
produce, by his experience of what associations are awakened by each of
his various forms, the imaginative activities which his yet unfinished
work will call for in those who see or hear it. But he will, in so
doing, be deliberately or unconsciously leaving his own work,
forestalling ours: nay, the artist who says to himself, "Now I will
paint a soul in a condition of ecstasy," is in reality transforming
himself into the customer who would enter his workshop and say, "Paint
me a figure such as your experience tells you suggests to beholders
the idea of religious enthusiasm; copy the features of any religious
enthusiast of your acquaintance, or put together such dispersed features
as seem to you indicative of that temper of mind." All this, while
the real artistic work has not begun; for that begins when the artist
first places before his easel the model for his archangel: either the
delicate, hectic, little girlish novice-boy, or the distinct outline
of the armed young angel existing in his mind and requiring only to be
printed off into concrete existence. Thus, in our examination of the
amount of an artist's personality which can go into his work, we must
remember that this work is merely the externally existing, definite,
finite form, and not the ideas of emotions which, by the power of
association, that form may awaken in ourselves. What the artist gives
is merely the arrangement of lines and colours in a given manner, which
may, as in painting, resemble an already existing natural object; or, as
in architecture and pattern decoration, resemble no already existing
natural object; the arrangement of sounds which may, as in a dramatic
air, recall the inflexions proper to a given emotion, or, as in a formal
fugue, recall no emotional inflexions whatever. This, and not any train
of thoughts awakened by this possibly but not necessarily existing
resemblance to an already known natural object, or to an already known
sort of emotional voice inflexion, is what is given by the artist, and
this is artistic form, the absolutely, objectively existing work of art.
And now we may examine what mental faculties, in the various arts, are
required for the production of this work: what portions of the whole
individual man are included or excluded in that smaller, more limited
individual whom we call the artist. Let us investigate the point by a
sort of experiment: by stripping away, one by one, those qualities of an
ideal individual which are not necessary for the production of the
various kinds of artistic work; let us separate and afterwards, if need
be, select and reunite the qualities which are required and those which
are not required to make up a poet, a painter, a sculptor, or a
musician.
And first we must create our ideal man, who contains within him the
stuff of every kind of artist, the faculties of producing every kind of
artistic work. First, a word about this ideal man, and about the manner
in which he differs from other men. He differs in completeness, in
balance, in intensity. For almost every one of us has some mental
faculty so imperfectly developed that we may say that it does not
exist: it exists indeed, and perhaps not without a certain necessary
effect, but as with a single solitary instrument in a powerful orchestra
of dozens of every other kind of instruments, this effect is not
consciously perceived. And the faculties which we do possess are rarely
of very remarkable strength and intensity: we have enough of them for
our ordinary wants of life, but not necessarily more. Our sense of
hearing is sufficient to distinguish the voice of one friend from
another, but not always sufficient to be able to enjoy music, still less
often to perform, least often of all to compose. And similarly with
every other mental faculty: most men can follow a simple argument,
some a more complex one, but few can reason out unaided a complicated
proposition. Now the creative degree in any faculty is the most intense
in its development. The painter is the man who receives the largest
number of most delicately complete visional impressions; the musician
the man who receives the largest number of most delicately complete
audible impressions: to the painter everything is a shape, a colour; to
the musician everything is a sound; the whole universe, to the thinker,
is but a concatenation of logical propositions. Thus, our ideal man
must, at starting, possess every higher faculty, developed to the most
intense degree, and every one of them developed equally: for out of him
is to be made every kind of artist. Here, then, we have our ideal man:
he possesses in the highest degree, and in the most perfect balance, all
the emotional, logical, and perceptive powers of the mind; he is, if
you choose, the abstract creature (never existing, and never, alas! to
exist), the all beautiful, all powerful, perfect fiction, which we call
_humanity_; and with him is our work. He is perfectly balanced, he is
a mere abstraction: for these two reasons he is, so far, inactive; we
cannot, with the best will in the world, imagine his doing anything
as long as he can do everything: he will, in all probability, merely
passively enjoy. Before he can create, we must alter him. And he is to
create, remember, not as a statesman or a handicraftsman, but as an
artist: he is to deal not with realities, but with fictions; he is not
to touch our material interests, he is merely to evoke for us a series
of phantom sights or sounds, of phantom men and women. Therefore, our
first act must be to diminish, by at least a half, all the practical
sides of his nature, so that no practical activities divert him from his
purely ideal field. So that it be for him infinitely more natural to
think, to feel, to imitate, to combine impressions, than to be of any
immediate use in the world; so that the mere employment of his powers be
his furthest aim, without thinking what effect that employment will have
upon the real condition of himself or of others. This much we have done:
we have obtained a creature whose interest is never purely practical.
But this will not suffice. We must diminish by at least a quarter his
mere logical powers, thus rendering him far more inclined to view things
as concrete, living manifestations, than as logical abstractions. This
has served to prevent his being diverted into metaphysic or scientific
speculations: there is now no longer any fear of his becoming a
psychologist instead of a poet, a mathematician or physicist instead of
a painter or a composer: things now interest him no longer for their
practical bearing, nor for their abstract meaning: he cares for them not
as forces, nor as ideas, but as forms, as visions. And this time we
have, as it were, rough-hewn our artist. But what artist? He is, it is
true, mainly attracted by the mere contemplation of things apart from
practical or scientific interests, but he is equally attracted by all
sorts of visions: he receives every kind of impression. This time,
again, he will, from perfect balance, remain inactive. We must throw his
faculties a little into disorder, we must, at random, diminish here in
order (relatively) to increase there: let us, for instance, diminish by
a trifle his faculty for manipulating colours or masses of stone, his
faculty for conceiving sounds in succession and in combination; let us,
in short, make it a little difficult for him to be a painter or sculptor
or musician.
What will he be, this first made artist of ours? this creature, clipped
in all the mere practically scientific instincts, only that his whole
intense personality may be given more completely, more absolutely to the
world of artistic phantoms? Before breaking up this huge psychological
snow-man, this ungainly monster roughly moulded into caricature shape by
awkward removing of material here and adding on there, before dashing
it back into the limbo of used up and unformed similes, let us ask
ourselves what artist he vaguely resembles: what is the artist thus
formed, it would seem, of a mere intense human being; of all the
faculties of our nature, only more subtle and powerful, and working not
in the world of practical realities, nor of abstract truths, but in that
of imaginary forms? The answer comes instinctively, unhesitatingly to
all of us: this universal artist, this artistic organism which contains
the whole intensified individual, is the poet. Nay: why call him poet?
why reserve this supreme place of artist not of colours or sounds, but
of spoken emotion, and perception, and action, for the man whose words
are grouped into metrical shape? Is it this metrical shape, this
mere enveloping form perceived merely by the ear, this monotonous,
rudimentary music, so paltry by the side of the musician's real music,
is it this which requires for its production that wondrous combination
of faculties, that whole intensified human individuality? For those same
faculties, that same intensified individuality, will act and bear fruit
in the man who lets his words drift on, unmetrical, in mere spoken
manner. And yet he shall be accounted less, and shall cede to the other,
who can measure his words into verses, and couple them into rhyme.
Surely there is injustice in this. Wherefore, I pray you, should you, my
friend, my beloved little child poet, with the keen eyes and eager lips
of Keats, who sit (in fancy at least) here by my side on the rough wall
overlooking the orchard ravine at Perugia, drowsily listening (as poets
listen to prose) to our discussion, wherefore should you, the poet, be
worth more than I, the prose writer, merely inasmuch as you are the one
and I am the other? Why be surrounded, even in my eyes, by a sort of
ideal halo; why pointed out by my own secret instinct as the artist? All
this must be mere folly, prejudice, dried old forms of thought handed
down from the days when poets were priests and lawgivers and prophets,
when their very credit depended upon their not being solely what you
modern poets are; all this is a mere historic myth, in which the world
continues foolishly to believe, letting itself be told from generation
to generation, till the idea has become engrained in its mode of
thinking, that the poet is a special creature, a thing of finer mould,
in whose life, and movements, and feelings it expects something
different from the rest of humanity; in whose eyes it seeks a dim
reflection, in whose voice a distant echo of the colours and sounds of
that fairyland out of which he has come as a changeling into the world
of realities. Infatuation and injustice. But no! mankind at large is
right in its ideas, but as it usually is, without knowing why it has
them: right in giving instinctively this place of artist of the merely
suggested, as distinguished from the absolutely seen or heard forms of
other arts, to the poet alone. For the poet is, in the kingdom of words,
the real, complete artist. The artistic external form which he gives to
his creations removes them out of the domain of the practically useful,
or the scientifically interesting. This metrical setting enables the
poet to show a part, to make perfect the tiniest thing; to give complete
significance, complete beauty, and eternal life to a perception, an
emotion, an image which cannot be expanded beyond the fourteen lines of
a sonnet; while the poor prose writer, reduced to being a mere smith or
mechanist, can do nothing with any stray gem he may cut, knows not how
to set it, and is forced in despair to stick it clumsily into some
unwieldy utensil or implement, some pot out of which to drink knowledge,
or some shield to ward off disaster. The prose writer is for ever being
driven to seek employment outside the land of pure art. Therefore, the
poet is truly the exclusive artist in words; or rather the exclusive
artist in words must needs become the poet; if the man feel that he
cannot hammer wearily at some clumsy ornamented piece of furniture, some
bastard of artistic uselessness and practical utility, that he cannot
write histories, or ethical disquisitions or psychological studies
(waxworks of spiritual pathology, technically called novels), in order
to bury in them the delicate artistic fragments which he spontaneously
produces; then that man will assuredly learn the manner of making
metrical settings; that man, that word artist will infallibly become
a poet: nay, he is one. Thus, the poet is in reality the artist who
suggests emotions, and actions, and sights, and sounds, as the painter
is the artist who shows coloured shapes, and the musician the artist who
creates forms made of sounds. The poet, therefore, is the artist into
whose work there enters, or can enter, the greatest number of fragments
of his whole personality: for his works are made up of all that which
his nature perceives and evolves and desires: of the forests and fields,
and sea and skies which have printed their likenesses on his mind; of
the faces and movements of the men and women whom he has known, nay,
of whom once perhaps, only once in his life, he has caught a never
forgotten glimpse; of the events which have taken place before his eyes,
or of which he has been told; of the emotions and passions which he has
felt hidden in himself or seen burst out in others; of all that he can
see, feel, hear, conceive, imagine. He is the man who assimilates most,
initiates most, perceives most of all that passes within and without
him, and unites it all in a homogeneous outer shape: nothing for him is
waste: not the hard, scaly first shoot of the reed, pale green, which
catches his feet as he walks on the riverside, across the grass, half
sere, half renovated by spring; not the scent of first raindrops on the
upturned mould of the fields; not the sentence read at random in a book
opened by accident; not the sudden, never-recurring look in the eyes of
one beloved; not the base appetite which he has hidden away, trampled
back out of sight of his own consciousness; not the preposterous ideal
which his vanity may have shown him for one second; not anything,
however small or however large, however common or however rare, not
anything inanimate or feeling, not anything in life or in death, not
anything which can be seen, or heard, or felt, or understood, which may
not be moulded by the poet into some form which will have meaning and
charm, and eternal value for all men. The poet is the man who receives a
greater number of more intense impressions than any other man; he is, of
all creatures, the most sensitive in the whole of his being; for the
whole of his being is at once the raw material, and the forming
mechanism of the work of art. This is the ideal, the universal poet, the
type: of him every individual poet represents a limited portion, and is
a fresh repartition of faculties, a fresh combination and proportion of
material and mechanism, due to the accident of race, of time, of birth,
of education. The typical poet assimilates and reproduces everything;
and each fragment of this type, each individual, differs from every
other individual in that which is assimilated and reproduced by him: the
one feels more, the other sees more, the third imagines more; and each
feels, sees, and imagines, according to what external things have been
put within reach of his feelings, his sight, his fancy. As, therefore,
the typical poet is the whole type of humanity affording material and
acting as manipulative apparatus to produce the work of art, so also
the individual poet is the individual man, moulding into shape all the
qualities which are strongest in his nature. All the qualities, let us
however mark, which are indisputedly dominant; often, therefore, only
the better, and in only the lowest tempers the worst. For, remembering
what we noticed about moral faculties of will which protect the artistic
workings from the interference of other parts of our nature, we may see
that it must often happen that a noble spirit may be able to keep out
of his mere abstract creations those baser instincts (which though
recognized with shame) he is unable to subdue in practice; his works
show him as he would desire himself to be, as he, alas! has not the
strength to be in reality; let us not, therefore, complain of those who
are unable to live up to their conceptions, for they have given to us
their better part, and kept for themselves, with bitterness and shame,
their worse.
The poet, therefore, is the artist into whose work there enters the
greatest proportion of his individual nature; if he be flippant in
temper his works cannot be earnest; if he be impure his writings cannot
be actively pure; the distinctive features of his nature must be
reflected in his work, since his work is made out of and by his nature.
Now let us proceed. We had constructed a sort of typical giant,
promising all the powers and qualities of all humanity; and this, by
the gradually stripping away of some of these human powers, we had
reduced to the condition of typical poet. Now let us continue our
work. Of course there are kinds of poetry which form links with other
intellectual work; and to obtain these we must remove such faculties as
do not enter into them: separate from the artist those qualities which
belong only to the man. There is first of all that great poetical
anomaly the drama, for which, it would seem, that less of the writer's
own personality is required than for any other form; for the dramatist
stands half way between the artist and the psychologist; he can obtain
innumerable varieties of character and feeling merely by his reasoning
powers, not by any personal experience. He is a sort of synthetic
metaphysician, who can construct the saint, the villain, the simpleton,
the knave, not out of anything within himself, but out of the very
elements of these characters which he has obtained by analysis; hence
it is that, while we can from their works reconstruct the character of
poets like Milton, or Wordsworth, or Leopardi, or Musset, we remain
wholly ignorant of the personality of Shakespeare; he cannot be all that
he shows us, and in the doubt he remains none of it at all. Let us put
aside therefore this anomalous artist, and continue stripping away some
of the purely emotional characters of our typical colossus. We shall
soon meet the last and simplest form of poet--the mere describer; of his
aspirations and emotions we know but little; we know only of his tastes,
his preferences for certain sights and sounds. He cares for the sea, or
the woods, or the fields, or the skies; he is very near being a mere
thing of eyes and ears. Yet not wholly; for he perceives not only the
colour and movement of the waves, but their sound, their briny scent;
he perceives not only the green and tawny tints of leaves and moss, he
hears the crackling of the brushwood, the rustling of the boughs, the
confused hum of bees, the faint murmur of waters; nay, in the waves and
in the woods he perceives something more, vague resemblances to other
things; vague expressions of mood and feeling which, when the waters
rush in, make his heart leap; when the grey light steals in among the
branches, sends a sadness throughout him. Nay, in this artist, in this
simplest, least human sort of poet, there remains yet an infinite amount
of the human individuality, of its passions and desires. Let us tear
away, throw aside this last amount of human feeling, reduce our typical
artist to mere intense powers of seeing. Shall we still have wherewith
to obtain any work at all? will this rarified, simplified mentality be
much above a mere feelingless optic machine? Let us see. Here we have a
creature out of which we have removed as much as possible of all human
qualities: a creature which can perceive with infinite keenness and
reproduce with the most perfect exactitude, every little subtle line
and tint and shadow which escapes other men; a creature whose delicate
perception vibrates with delight at every harmonious combination, and
writhes, as if it would shatter to atoms, at every displeasing mixture
of lines or colours. A living and most sensitive organism which feels,
thinks everything as form and colour, fostered with the utmost care by
other such organisms, themselves nurtured into intensity more intense
than that with which they were born; for ever put in contact with the
visual objects which are, let us remember, the air it breathes, the food
it assimilates until this visual organism becomes beyond compare perfect
in its power of perceiving and reproducing. Then, imagine this abstract
being, this quivering thing of sight, placed in the midst of a country
of austere, delicate lines, and solemn yet diaphanous tints; among
the undulating fields and oakwoods, beneath the pearly sky of Umbria;
imagine that before it are placed, as the creatures most precious and
lovely, the creatures whose likeness must for ever be copied in all its
intensity, youths, young women, old men, delicate and emaciate with
solitude and maceration, with eyes grown dilated and bright from
straining to see the glorious visions, the celestial day-dreams which
flit across their mind; with lips grown tremulous and eager with
passionate longing for constantly expected, never-coming bliss; always
alone, inactive, with listless limbs and workless hands, in the bare,
unadorned cell or oratory; or if, coming forth, walking through the
streets, passing through the crowd (giving way with awe), erect,
self-engrossed, seeing and hearing nothing around, like one entranced.
Let us imagine this organism, thus perfect for perceiving and
reproducing all that it sees, for ever in the presence of such lines and
colours, such faces and figures as these; and then let us ask ourselves
what this quite abstract, unhuman power will produce, what this artist,
who is completely divested of all that which belongs merely to the man,
would paint. What would that be, that work thus produced? What save
those delicate, wan angels and saints and apostles, standing in solitary
contemplation and ecstasy, those scarcely embodied souls, raised beyond
the bounds of time and space, concentrated, absorbed in longing for
heavenly perfection? And if this subtle visual organism, nurtured among
these sights, should happen to be lodged in the same body with a sordid,
base, cynical temper, can it be altered thereby? Surely not. The eye has
seen, the hand has reproduced--seen and reproduced that which surrounds
them--and inevitably, fatally, although eye and hand belonged to the
man "who placed all his hopes in the good things of fortune, into whose
porphyry brain no idea of good could enter, who for money would have
concluded any evil bargain," the work thus produced by this commonplace,
grasping atheist, Peter Perugino, must be the ideal of all purely
devotional art. He was an atheist and a cynic, but he was a great
painter, and lived in Umbria, in the country of sweet and austere hills
and valleys, in the country whose moral air was still scented by the
"flowerets of St. Francis."
This is the end of our long wandering up and down, round and round, the
question of artistic personality, even as we must wander up and down,
round and round, before we can reach any of these strange Umbrian towns.
And, as after long journeying, when we enter the city, and find that
that which seemed a castle, a grand, princely town, all walled and
towered and battlemented, is in reality only a large, rough village,
with blackened houses and fissured church steeples, a place containing
nothing of any interest: so also in this case, when we have finally
reached our paltry conclusion that this painter of saints was no saint
himself, we must admit to ourselves that to arrive at this conclusion
was scarcely our real object; even as while travelling through this
country of Perugino we make our guide confess that what, in all this
expedition, we were meant to see and enjoy, was not the paltry,
deceptive hill-top village, but the sere-brown oakwoods, tinged russet
by the sun, the grey olive hills through which we have slowly ascended,
and the glimpses of undulating grey-green country and distant wave-blue
mountains which we have had at every new turn of our long and up-hill
road.