Essays on art

Front matter

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

THE GIFT OF

Part II. The Ideals Of Art

Drawings by the Old Masters in the British Museum : "

I. The Early Italian Masters 83

II. The Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century 100

III. The German Masters . . . . .117

IV. The Dutch and Flemish Masters . . . .131

V. The French and Spanish Masters . . . .151 VI. The English Masters 163

PART I.

ART AND LITERATURE.

I. The Artistic Spirit In Modern English Poetry

Out of the company of poets who gave a voice to the early years of the present century, there is only one who has touched with any influence the chord that keeps poetry in sympathy with art. The genius of Keats promised so much, that we are apt to forget that the achievement also was great, and, in regret for what was lost to us, to undervalue the strength and beauty of what was actually given. And yet there is no man of the time whose work stands out more clearly as a thing of independent invention, nor among the gifts granted to him was there any more noteworthy than that by which he apprehended the true relations of art and poetry. When the author of 'Endymion' undertook to reshape for himself the material of his craft, recent revolt had brought tumult into the realm of verse, and with it an impatience of order and control. Poetry in its new birth was as yet only a spirit and emotion, eager, searching, and passionately free, but without a form to clothe and fitly express its soul. The dead, outworn

ART AND LITERATURE.

form had but lately been cast away. There was no inclination to submit again to new bondage, even if there had been no other causes at work to disturb the serenity of verse ; but linked to the purely poetic impulse, and partly controlling it, were other aims, political or humanitarian, which drew the poet from his place, and kept the spirit ever eager in the pursuit of vague ideals. Poets had, indeed, undertaken strange burdens. They were striving to carry upon their own shoulders all the weight of the revolution, and were impatient to invade the social and political world with the keen, perilous weapon of impetuous verse. Such a temper, serviceable in some other respects, was fatally opposed to the influences which come to poetry from art. The abstract method of sculpture, and even the more vivid realisation of painting, instinctively refuse to incur these inappropriate labours. Neither in the one nor the other can the artist without manifest violence to his office consent to take up arms in a social or philosophical crusade. The correspondence with the facts of physical nature is too close, the devotion to physical beauty too strong to permit any aerial pilgrimages, however rich the proffered reward. It is not that plastic art is careless of the burdens of the spirit, or powerless to express their pressure ; to effect such a divorce of mind and body has been the occupation of distinguished pedants but never of great artists, and to Winckelmann, not to Phidias, we owe a prevalent superstition that Greek art rejected energetic movement and shunned intensity of passion. But it is true, nevertheless, that plastic art can never forget physical beauty or take aught else in exchange. It can never mistake any scheme of life for life itself: it can never dream of any heaven in which there is no resurrection of the body. In this limitation inherent in its nature lies an element of security that poetry cannot always claim. The greatest poets, like the greatest painters or sculptors, are guided instinctively to what is of permanent force and beauty to the neglect of all philosophies speculative or humanitarian, but there are certain epochs when the distinction is hard to make, and when there is a more than common danger lest the poet should loose his moorings and drift away into strange waters.

It was so at the beginning of the present century. Poetry found itself suddenly confronted with new and untried problems; its world became extended both in fact and spirit, and many emotions that as yet had hardly found their place in actual life, pressed urgently for the utterance of verse. With the unexpected advent of fresh material there came the difficulty that always makes itself felt when the substance, suddenly overpowers the means, of expression. Form was lost in feeling. The keen sympathies of the great leaders of poetry yielded to the victorious influences of

ART AND LITERATURE.

the time, and the higher claims of the artist were imperilled amid the conflict of confused and unsettled passions. As politics became the arena for the play of wild fancy and unfettered invention, so, on the other hand, humanitarian and social impulses forced themselves into the ideal realm of the poet. For a while the boundary lines between philosophic speculation and the worship of unchanging beauty were borne away. Wordsworth undertook to answer Malthus, and Shelley discussed the principles of a social revolution. The things of practical life were thus mingled with the remoter and graver realities of the calm life of the imagination, and now, as we look back — though the space of time is but brief that separates us from the work of these men — we already see how much that was only of passing significance had attached itself to the lasting qualities of highest poetry.

The poet had lost for a while his hold on the calm spirit proper to all imaginative production, and which in plastic art receives its fullest expression. The rush and tumult of new passions, the rich outlook over new ideas, left him for a while at the mercy of his material, and in the sudden illumination of men's minds it was indeed difficult to distinguish rightly between the beauty that would stay and the brightness that was only fleeting. The purely artistic control which should be left to the workman, in the presence of even the most splendid

ARTISTIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH POETR V. 7

images, was continually yielding to the new onset of unforeseen ideas ; and in this season of confused outlines and rich but unshapen material, the poet often struggled ineffectually for the final shape that should be unalterably fixed.

If there had then existed any noble pictorial art, we can imagine how helpful would have been its influence to the poets in their own domain. We can conceive of art and verse striving harmoniously to reduce the new world of thought to ordered and rhythmic expression — verse reflecting the passion, and yearning, and disappointment that filled men's hearts, and art transporting the image of these things within her own stricter limits, and keeping still unspoiled that sense of majestic silence which should rest upon all great work, as the seal of a perfected vision. In this fellowship the mute formality of art would have reacted upon the full speech of verse, and would have helped to that calmer attitude of which verse stood so much in need. But such art as existed offered but a poor companionship ; all that was sincere in its achievement was concerned with the grace or the emotions of domestic life ; it was not yet conscious of the larger problems which beset the progress of poetry, or if partly conscious was without the needful technical gifts for so high an endeavour. It becomes interesting, therefore, to trace out by what means and through whom verse was to work out its own salvation,

ART AND LITERATURE.

and to note from what causes several of the great leaders of imagination were more or less shut out from the artistic influence.

Byron, the most popular poet of the century, probably felt less than any of his fellows the value of the artistic spirit. Though he hurls his brilliant rhetoric at the 'dull spoiler ' of the Parthenon, yet he gives nowhere any sign that the beauty of ancient art had so entered into his nature as to affect his own creations. It may even be said that the successes of his genius depended, in great measure, upon the deliberate abandonment of that quiet vision belonging, as of right, to the sculptor or the painter. In all the greatest of his writings which affect to be purely poetic, the motive is always romantic, the method brilliantly restless. He had not the power to dwell upon any subject until it should yield up to him its ultimate secret of beauty ; but content with what was nearer, he seized with eager and effective grasp upon old forms of pathos, touching them with new and splendid fire. He possessed an uncommon sympathy with the more common states of feeling ; and, as with all imaginative work that is not quite complete in its vision, his poetry keeps about it a savour of morality. There is an implied reference to a standard of good and evil : an accent of either penitence or rebellion, even in the moments of freest utterance. The perplexed and troubled attitude towards moral problems, great and small, survived and dominated the other phases of his genius. It availed finally to turn the poet into the satirist. For satire, however audacious its utterance, must needs possess some standpoint of morality; all its fiercest attacks and its cruellest laughter spring from the contemplation of a world of neglected duties, with its grim contrasts of faith and practice. 'Don Juan' was the complete expression of one side of Byron's genius ; and as it helped to perfect the portrait of its author, so also it increased his hold upon the popular imagination. To acknowledge a system of moral law, and at the same time to violate its rules, has a certain fascination, even for the most orthodox. The career does not disturb the empire of punishments and rewards, and the daring of the chief actor, with its ' eternal perils,' only stimulates attention into wonderment. But this spirit of revolt against morality, or acquiescence in its control, finds itself in opposition to the calm of pure poetic invention ; and even when perplexity yields to a cynical selfpossession, it has little in common with the noblest artistic vision which penetrates and leaves behind the problems of a moral world. The true mission of poetry, no less than of art, is directed to this goal. It seeks to snatch beauty, from out of the tumult of an existence controlled by the laws of good and evil, and to crown her queen of a quiet land. In sculpture, this is done absolutely and literally. The figures carved for us by Greek artists lo ART AND LITERATURE.

are the figures of men and women, of living and sentient beauty, whose loveliness has been suddenly transfixed in a passionless dream. Sometimes in perfect physical repose, or in the performance of some simple duty of graceful limbs, but not less often in the full energy of excited action, — these figures nevertheless constantly keep firm hold upon the essential calm of art. In the very noblest specimens of Greek work that survive to us — the pediments of the Parthenon and its frieze, and the frieze of the Mausoleum — there is a full expression of energetic movement, and even of violent encounter. But the movement, with its inexhaustible patterns of beauty, has outlived the passion that suggested it ; and here, in the final shape given by art, it remains only as an added means of grace. In these battles of Amazons and armed warriors, the uplifted arm is stayed for beauty's sake ; this figure in swift flight upon the pediment seems but to pursue its one fair attitude ; while these Grecian youths imaged in the Panathenaic procession guide their impetuous steeds in obedience to a hidden law of harmony.

Painting, as we know it best, is a thing of more modern date : its world comes nearer to the world that lies close around us. Colour, with its more vivid reality of effect, compels a closer imitation of the changing passions, the passing fears of actual life ; but the wider and minuter experience of emotion is still controlled by the same spirit which holds dominion in the earHer art. In poetry, this sense of silence rests as the goal to which all passion tends. The tumult and conflict of tragedy are only useful to reach the ultimate repose that follows tumult, and gives to passion its fixed shape and firm outline ; and if we would note the way in which this end is gained by the poet, whose genius, better than others, could track life through every movement, we have only to dwell upon the closing scenes of Shakespeare's King Lear, wherein all the previous suffering and human anguish seem suddenly to pass into the perfect tranquillity of a dream.

Byron's genius had no access to this spirit in poetry. His understanding of passion is not of the deeper sort, that reaches to an outer light beyond the present gloom ; and the highest occupation of his verse is but to reflect the darkness and confused human trouble, not to penetrate its mystery. Passionately sympathetic within the range of his sympathies, and bitterly regretful of all the ills that he knew, he yet never reached to that wider knowledge and profounder pity which come with the artist's assured possession of the secrets of beauty. Even in the lesser attributes of the poet, his achievement misses the intensity of definition belonging no less to literature than to art. A rhetorical splendour in the record of vague influences, a brilliant command of illustration, summoned boldly from every source, suffice to

ART AND LITERATURE.

set forth to the world whatever of possible fascination lies in a single personality. All else is but dimly seen and imperfectly apprehended ; and his verse has, therefore, no power to carve out in the mind an exact image of some form of loveliness in clear and steadfast outline. Here, not for the first, nor for the last time, the poet has been found without the artist's highest gift. The ' mortal's agony with an immortal patience blending,' was not for him ; in his art, the agony is divorced from patience, and the struggle against the maladies of life never yields the enduring outline granted to the marble. The greatly gifted artist is never thus at the mercy of any passion ; he is partly a spectator, even of his own ills, and can watch the movement and tumult of life as one may look upon the troubled line of a storm-beaten landscape cast up against a twilight sky. He has few tears, for what to others bring only grief, to him savours also of beauty. But Byron is too full of remorse for things done, of pity for his fate ; and thus it happens that not only the form of his work as a whole, but even the forms of separate thoughts and images, lose something of ideal influence and independent strength.

It is noticeable that Wordsworth and Shelley — men of genius, distinct, and in some sense opposed to that of Byron — also failed in giving to their verse the sensuous character of art. Both were irresistibly attracted towards the purely intellectual limits of poetry. Through them, more clearly than through Byron, we may note the extent of the new conquests then being made by verse ; for while they were losing hold of the formal beauty of the actual world, their spirit — sped on a new flight — had already reached to far-off undiscovered recesses of personal emotion. With both, but in different ways, the sentient life and growth of things was but a point of departure. Passion, and the lips and language of passion, grew distant and intangible in their verse ; and even the facts of outward nature were dissolved into voices of the air. We may think of the genius of Shelley as of a cloud of changing colour and uncertain form borne music-laden above our heads, and touching the earth of real grass and flowers only for brief moments, and at its topmost places.

' He who would question him Must sail alone at sunset, where the stream Of ocean sleeps around those foamless isles. When the young moon is westering as now. And evening airs wander upon the wave.'

His spirit, overcome by the passion of the intellect, turned seldom towards our world ; and in a fleet pursuit of far-off untried ideals, half forgot the undying beauty of things that fade and die. His verse is, therefore, most real when its material is most remote from reality. Clearly detached from substantial forms, it takes a new coherence, but in a realm far beyond the reach of the influence of art. There, new images group themselves under new laws, with no bondage of fact to fret a spirit that has sought to pass beyond the strict confines of the tangible earth. It is only in dealing with known things, and with actual passions and sorrows, that Shelley's genius becomes incredible. The ' Cenci ' is a drama of terrible masks and fair faces ; its presentment of an awful crime is harmless as an intellectual invention, unsubstantial as a sick dream, and even the pure and suffering voice of Beatrice herself scarcely echoes to the limits of our known world. In the ' Alastor,' or ' the Revolt of Islam,' or the ' Prometheus,' the position is reversed. The machinery is here deliberately unreal ; but, in the end, each one of these poems brings to us a conviction of its truth. And this is so, because the characters who speak and move are no more than eloquent exponents of Shelley's warm, high hopes, and of a poet's dreams for the world. The chosen phantasy has thus a force not found in the relation of credible fact. The wild, free vision that creates the land it loves, the delight in beauty that has no form or line, and the determined transmutation of our common nature into new, aerial being, do not destroy for us the loveliness or the power of the poet's work ; for we feel that these things, though we may seek them in vain in our world, nevertheless belong truly and credibly to the chosen realm of Shelley's genius. They become, in this sense, the expression of an exalted emotion, which is human, seeing that it is his, and through him, also ours, and which worthily claims verse as the means of its utterance.

Thus we see that, not through defect of artistic power, but by reason of the special devotion of his genius to a chosen task, Shelley was shut out from the peculiarly artistic influence. It was the special function of his genius to enlarge the realm of poetry on that side that was furthest from the realms of the sculptor or the painter. He opened through the awakened activity of the intellect, new ways untrodden before by the poet, bearing thence back to earth a rich experience of new emotions. He lit up philosophy with the bright light of passion, and, with the strong fellowship of unfailing music, penetrated securely into many remote and shadowy places.

To penetrate the things of the intellect with poetic heat and fire was in truth the task which Shelley had set himself to accomplish. The dull order of the world had already been shaken by actual events, and speculation was busy in the invention of all the possible forms into which disturbed society might re-shape itself These wild dreams, false to fact, had a poetic reality, and the poet, seizing the ideal element in the routine of vain logic, quickly outstripped the conclusions of the most sanguine philosophy, and presented to the world the brightest picture of its own regeneration. And the picture was none the worse because it had no better foundation than a poet's dream. It was, indeed, precisely because Shelley carried speculation clearly beyond the reach of possibility, that it has any right to the enduring utterance of verse. Had he been no more than a contributor to a barren controversy over social schemes, his fame would not have survived the failure of the principles of the revolution. But the use he made of those principles was a poet's use. Out of them he built up, with passionate hope and love of beauty penetrating at every point the inventions of his intellect, a new world for the forlorn spirit of man, far away from his present sphere of existence. He carried these wild but often beautiful visions to their proper goal in the firm land of his imagination, and combined them in such a way that they should be beyond the reach of any man's hope or knowledge but not beyond his love and worship. In this way he awoke in the things of the intellect new possibilities of emotion. He gave the vague dreams of philosophers a right to permanent existence, by showing the intense reality they had for his own nature ; and he himself truly and credibly inhabited the invented and perfect world, which, for all common men, was destined to perish quickly.

But this realm of distant purity in which we find Shelley securely seated, has but slight contact with our present life. We can reach it only through a process of the intellect, or by the magic vehicle of his verse. And the independence of outward fact, which is the one quality of this world, and is, besides, the essence of his genius, carries the poet far away from the substantial forms of art. For the painter and the sculptor there is no escape from the bondage of the earth. There is not even the desire of escape. The materials of their craft lie close around them. The forms of men and women, the shape and colour of flowers, the gold brilliance of sunlight, the sombre cloak of shadow — these things do not change— they cannot be invented. And the greatest victories possible to art — those wherein is expressed most clearly all that is divine in the thought and purpose of an artist — are only to be gained by reverent obedience to fact, and a loving and close dependence upon Nature as we know her. Thus the highest desire of the artist is not to tutor the spirit of man, but to know him in the flesh ; recording patiently the beauty that survives, expressed in changing line and subtle flush of colour.

The soul, revealed to the poet with another and closer intimacy, appears to the artist only through its garment of the flesh, and altogether escapes his grasp unless the facts of the flesh, with all their subtilties of expression, are deeply penetrated and understood. All art which has striven for more than this, or has accomplished less, has so far fallen short of its rightful goal. Christian art had to wait for a full knowledge of the flesh before it reached its final mastery, and when this

C

1 8 A JIT AND LITERATURE.

mastery came there was no longer any thought for other ideals. The earlier and more distinct religious sentiment gradually yielded to the greater mystery of revealed humanity. Human faces are no more the exponents of simple worship, or of any single sentiment ; they become, as in the faces of Da Vinci and Michael Angelo, the emblems of all human experience and aspiration and disappointment. Shelley's contact with man was seldom of this direct and immediate kind. When he approached the world at all, it was through the fascination of some harmless beauty of outward nature. The innocence of flowers, the freedom of moving waters, and the flight of high-soaring birds, were fit images for conjpanionship with his soul ; and with these images stamped clearly in the vaguer material of his verse, he withdrew again into his own distant and peculiar realm. Among the fragments of his prose writings left to us, there is a passage in which he describes the beauty of the figure of Niobe at Florence. After noting the impression of grandeur and power in the features, he passes to the elements of more human influence. 'Yet all this,' he writes, 'not only consists with, but is the cause of, the subtlest delicacy of clear and tender beauty — the expression at once of innocence and sublimity of soul, of purity and strength, of all that which touches the most removed and divine of the chords that make music in our thoughts.' Here, in truth, we find recorded the sources of the poet's own particular gift. The ' most removed and divine of the chords that make music in our thoughts ' are those over which his hand had unfailing mastery. No poet, it may be said, has carried human sympathy and human passion further from their common ways.

The career of Wordsworth, as a poet, was beset by philosophical speculation upon the basis of his art. Partly from the resistance offered to his early poems, and partly from natural inclination, he was led to commit himself to a series of rules and definitions which to us now seem of small significance. But among these definitions is one which fairly expresses a necessary element in noble poetic composition. To speak of poetry as ' emotion remembered in tranquillity ' is, indeed, not so much to define the limits of the particular art, as to denote one of the stages through which all imaginative work has to pass. The sentence in this way recalls a precept of Leonardo da Vinci. ' In the silence of the night,' writes the painter, ' think over the significance of the things you have studied : grave in thought the outlines of the faces you have seen during the day ; for where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.' The theories of an artist are sometimes most eloquent as commentaries upon his own work, and in these sentences, both taking thought of kindred elements in, imaginative production, there is an index to the indivi-

ART AND LITERATURE.

dualities of the two men. The faces of the women drawn by Leonardo, with the gentle radiance of a remembered smile upon their lips, may be not inaptly likened to visions of the day cast up upon the ' silence of the night.' They are far off, these forms, though we may touch each precise curve of flesh, and note each undulating wave of the hair; they stand in firm outline, ^ and yet their presence is mysterious with the light of a recollected dream.

Wordsworth's definition is also derived from elements special to his own poetry, but it needs to be changed slightly before it expresses truly the distinction between his unfailing tranquillity and the high calm proper to all great art. With Wordsworth, emotion is not only remembered, it is begotten in tranquillity. The highest and most sublime feeling expressed in his writings originates in reflection ; it is far removed from the first motive to feeling, and is rather deliberately sought, than borne in upon the soul with any urgent force of present impressions. We may say of his poetry that the remoteness between the first vision of outward nature and the final imaginative utterance, is its chief and dominant characteristic. It is true we find there accurate knowledge of natural objects, of their forms of growth, and of their seasons. Wordsworth was studiously observant of every smallest incident in rustic scenery • but form and colour are not fixed in his verse by force of emotion, for the emotional part of his nature made another use of these things. He endowed them with an independent hfe, but it was not the obvious sensuous life suggested by the qualities present to the eye. It was a life begotten in reflection by a remote and difficult association of natural beauty with certain qualities of the mind. In a very delicately appreciative essay on a certain aspect of Wordsworth's genius, Mr. Pater has spoken of this perception of life in inanimate things as coming of ' an exceptional susceptibility to the impressions of eye and ear,' as being, in short, 'at bottom a kind of sensuousness.' But the term would seein surely to be misapplied to a poet who possessed such an immediate control over the things of sense — who could at once translate the blinding beauty of a field of daffodils or the simple inexplicable loveliness of small flowers into a complex intellectual language. An artist who is susceptible to the impressions of eye and ear in a deeply sensuous way, finds himself, in the presence of outward nature, so moved by the beauty of actual forms and colours, that he is driven to reproduce, with intense definition, the effect of reality in his work.

And herein we may arrive at an understanding of the distinction between the perfect tractability of Wordsworth's genius and the supreme control which finally reduces the first emotions of sense to ordered expression. The stillness that pervades the

ART AND LITERATURE.

work of Michael Angelo implies of itself a foregone season of passionate preparation, wherein all the recesses of human passion have been sounded. This is not the impression given by even the most sublime of Wordsworth's poems, while in the less admirable parts of his work there is not even the evidence of restraint. The stillness is something inert and immovable, of sensibilities not quick to feel the changing pulse of things, of a nature, in short, that has no passion to unite itself closely with the thing it loves. And yet it remains true that he has discovered new and profound sources of human sympathy in the facts of natural scenery. For us, henceforth, through the might of his genius, there is a brooding personal presence in nature fit to commune with our own highest moods of meditation. We feel, in the loftiest moments of his poetry, that nature is not made up of separate images, that the sharply outlined forms of leaf or flower are only stray links whereby we may connect ourselves with a vague and distant personality underlying clouds and hills. Wordsworth's poetry, at its noblest pitch, represents for us the union of these large symbols in nature with the larger aspirings of our own minds. The thoughts that otherwise go without utterance, the strange potent emotions that grow out of these thoughts, become expressive through the recognition of the great brooding forces of the outward world. And in realising to his own consciousness the sense of