A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 32

140.

Artists are interesting to me as men. Their work, as the product of mind, should lead us to a knowledge of their own being; else, as I have often said and written, our admiration of art is a species of atheism.

To forget the soul in its highest manifestation is like forgetting G.o.d in his creation.

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141.

"Les images peints du corps humain, dans les figures ou domine par trop le savoir anatomique, en revelant trop clairement a l'homme les secrets de sa structure, lui en decouvrent aussi par trop ce qu'on pourrait appeler le point de vue _materiel_, ou, si l'on veut, _animal_."

This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have sometimes thought that his very materialism, so grand, and so peculiar in character, may have arisen out of his profound religious feeling, his stern morality, his lofty conceptions of our _mortal_, as well as _immortal_ destinies. He appears to have beheld the human form only in a pure and sublime point of view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation, fearfully and wondrously constructed, for the spirit of man,-

"The outward shape, And unpolluted temple of the mind."

This is the reason that Michal-Angelo's materialism affects us so differently from that of Rubens. In the first, the predominance of form attains almost a moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness. Michal-Angelo believed in the resurrection of THE BODY, emphatically; and in his Last Judgment the dead rise like t.i.tans, strong to contend and mighty to suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben's picture of the same subject (at Munich) the bodily presence of resuscitated life is revolting, reminding us of the text of St. Paul-"Flesh and blood shall _not_ inherit the kingdom of G.o.d." Both pictures are _aesthetically_ false, but _artistically_ miracles, and should thus be considered and appreciated.

I have never looked on those awful figures in the Medici Chapel without thinking what stupendous intellects must inhabit such stupendous forms-terrible in their quietude; but they are supernatural, rather than divine.

"Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde; Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Zurnender, wie ist Dein Gott!"

John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beautiful essay "MICHAEL-ANGELO, A POET," says truly that "Dante wors.h.i.+pped the philosophy of religion, and Michael-Angelo adored the philosophy of art." The religion of the one and the art of the other were evolved in a strange combination of mysticism, materialism, and moral grandeur. The two men were congenial in character and in genius.

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A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE.

AND ON CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN HISTORY AND POETRY CONSIDERED AS SUBJECTS OF MODERN ART.

1848.

I Should begin by admitting the position laid down by Frederick Schlegel, that art and nature are not identical. "Men," he says, "traduce nature, who falsely give her the epithet of artistic;" for though nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend all nature.

Nature, in her sources of pleasures and contemplation is infinite; and art, as her reflection in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in her powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of art and its capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite, has circ.u.mscribed the bounds of finite art; the one is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if poetic art in the _interpreting_ of nature share in her infinitude, yet in _representing_ nature through material, form, and colour, she is,-oh, how limited!

If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of limitation as determined as the musical scale, narrowest of all are the limitations of sculpture, to which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place; and it is in regard to sculpture, we find most frequently those mistakes which arise from a want of knowledge of the true principles of art.

Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the limitations of the art of sculpture as to the management of the material in giving form and expression; its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection of the complex and conventional; its bounded capabilities as to choice of subject; must we also admit, with some of the most celebrated critics of art, that there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek? And that every deviation from pure Greek art must be regarded as a depravation and perversion of the powers and subjects of sculpture? I do not see that this follows.

It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the term of its development. In so far as regards the principles of beauty and execution, it can go no farther. We may stand and look at the relics of the Parthenon in awe and in despair; we can do neither more, nor better.

But we have not done with Greek sculpture. What in it is purely _ideal_, is eternal; what is conventional, is in accordance with the primal conditions of all imitative art. Therefore though it may have reached the point at which development stops, and though its capability of adaptation be limited by necessary laws; still its all-beautiful, its immortal imagery is ever near us and around us; still "doth the old feeling bring back the old names," and with the old names, the forms; still, in those old familiar forms we continue to clothe all that is loveliest in visible nature; still, in all our a.s.sociations with Greek art-

"'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great, And Venus who brings every thing that's fair."

That the supreme beauty of Greek art-that the majestic significance of the cla.s.sical myths-will ever be to the educated mind and eye as things indifferent and worn out, I cannot believe.

But on the other hand it may well be doubted whether the impersonation of the Greek allegories in the purest forms of Greek art will ever give intense pleasure to the people, or ever speak home to the hearts of the men and women of these times. And this not from the want of an innate taste and capacity in the minds of the ma.s.ses-not because ignorance has "frozen the genial current in their souls"-not merely through a vulgar preference for mechanical imitation of common and familiar forms; but from other causes not transient-not accidental. A cla.s.sical education is not now, as heretofore, the _only_ education given; and through an honest and intense sympathy with the life of their own experience, and through a dislike to vicious a.s.sociations, though clothed in cla.s.sical language and cla.s.sical forms, _thence_ is it that the people have turned with a sense of relief from G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, Ledas and Antiopes, to shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of Charity, and young ladies in the character of Innocence,-harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the same relation to cla.s.sical sculpture that Watts's hymns bear to Homer and Sophocles.

Cla.s.sical attainments of any kind are rare in our English sculptors; therefore it is, that we find them often quite familiar with the conventional treatment and outward forms of the usual subjects of Greek art, without much knowledge of the original poetical conception, its derivation, or its significance; and equally without any real appreciation of the idea of which the form is but the vehicle. Hence they do not seem to be aware how far this original conception is capable of being varied, modified, _animated_ as it were, with an infusion of fresh life, without deviating from its essential truth, or transgressing those narrow limits, within which all sculpture must be bounded in respect to action and att.i.tude. To express _character_ within these limits is the grand difficulty. We must remember that too much value given to the head as the seat of mind, too much expression given to the features as the exponents of character, must diminish the importance of those parts of the form on which sculpture mainly depends for its effect on the imagination. To convey the idea of a complete individuality in a single figure, and under these restrictions, is the problem to be solved by the sculptor who aims at originality, yet feels his aspirations restrained by a fine taste and circ.u.mscribed by certain inevitable a.s.sociations.

It is therefore a question open to argument and involving considerations of infinite delicacy and moment, in morals and in art, whether the old Greek legends, endued as they are with an imperishable vitality derived from their abstract youth, may not be susceptible of a treatment in modern art a.n.a.logous to that which they have received in modern poetry, where the significant myth, or the ideal character, without losing its cla.s.sic grace, has been animated with a purer sentiment, and developed into a higher expressiveness. Wordsworth's Dion and Laodomia; Sh.e.l.ley's version of the Hymn to Mercury; Goethe's Iphigenia; Lord Byron's Prometheus; Keats's Hyperion; Barry Cornwall's Proserpina; are instances of what I mean in poetry. To do the same thing in art, requires that our sculptors should stand in the same relation to Phidias and Praxiteles, that our greatest poets bear to Homer or Euripides; that they should be themselves poets and interpreters, not mere translators and imitators.

Further, we all know, that there is often a necessity for conveying abstract ideas in the forms of art. We have then recourse to allegory; yet allegorical statues are generally cold and conventional and addressed to the intellect merely. Now there are occasions, in which an abstract quality or thought is far more impressively and intelligibly conveyed by an _impersonation_ than by a _personification_. I mean, that Aristides might express the idea of justice; Penelope, that of conjugal faith; Jonathan and David (or Pylades and Orestes), friends.h.i.+p; Rizpah, devotion to the memory of the dead; Iphigenia, the voluntary sacrifice for a good cause; and so of many others; and such figures would have this advantage, that with the significance of a symbol they would combine all the powers of a sympathetic reality.

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HELEN.

I have never seen any statue of Helen, ancient or modern. Treated in the right spirit, I can hardly conceive a diviner subject for a sculptor. It would be a great mistake to represent the Greek Helen merely as a beautiful and alluring woman. This, at least, is not the Homeric conception of the character, which has a wonderful and fascinating individuality, requiring the utmost delicacy and poetic feeling to comprehend, and rare artistic skill to realise. The oft-told story of the Grecian painter, who, to create a Helen, a.s.sembled some twenty of the fairest models he could find, and took from each a limb or a feature, in order to compose from their separate beauties an ideal of perfection,-this story, if it were true, would only prove that even Zeuxis could make a great mistake. Such a combination of heterogeneous elements would be psychologically and artistically false, and would never give us a Helen.

She has become the ideal type of a fatal, faithless, dissolute woman; but according to the Greek myth, she is _predestined_,-at once the instrument and the victim of that fiat of the G.o.ds which had long before decreed the destruction of Troy, and _her_ to be the cause. She must not only be supremely beautiful,-"a daughter of the G.o.ds, divinely tall, and most divinely fair!"-but as the offspring of Zeus (the t.i.tle by which she is so often designated in the Iliad), as the sister of the great twin demi-G.o.ds Castor and Pollux, she should have the heroic lineaments proper to her Olympian descent, touched with a pensive shade; for she laments the calamities which her fatal charms have brought on all who have loved her, all whom she has loved:-

"Ah! had I died ere to these sh.o.r.es I fled, False to my country and my nuptial bed!"

She shrinks from the reproachful glances of those whom she has injured; and yet, as it is finely intimated, wherever she appears her resistless loveliness vanquishes every heart, and changes curses into blessings.

Priam treats her with paternal tenderness; Hector with a sort of chivalrous respect.

"If some proud brother eyed me with disdain, Or scornful sister with her sweeping train, Thy gentle accents softened all my pain; Nor was it e'er my fate from thee to find A deed ungentle or a word unkind."

Helen, standing on the walls of Troy, and looking sadly over the battle plain, where the heroes of her forfeited country, her kindred and her friends, are a.s.sembled to fight and bleed for her sake, brings before us an image full of melancholy sweetness as well as of consummate beauty.

Another pa.s.sage in which she upbraids Venus as the cause of her fault-not as a mortal might humbly expostulate with an immortal, but almost on terms of equality, and even with bitterness,-is yet more characteristic. "For what," she asks, tauntingly, "am I reserved? To what new countries am I destined to carry war and desolation? For what new lover must I break a second vow? Let me go hence! and if Paris lament my absence, let Venus console him, and for his sake ascend the skies no more!" A regretful pathos should mingle with her conscious beauty and her half-celestial dignity; and, to render her truly, her Greek elegance should be combined with a deeper and more complex sentiment than Greek art has usually sought to express.

I am speaking here of Homer's Helen-the Helen of the Iliad, not the Helen of the tragedians-not the Helen who for two thousand years has merely served "to point a moral;" and an artist who should think to realise the true Homeric conception, should beware of counterfeits, for such are abroad.[2]

There is a wild Greek myth that it was not the real Helen, but the phantom of Helen, who fled with Paris, and who caused the destruction of Troy; while Helen herself was leading, like Penelope, a pattern life at Memphis. I must confess I prefer the proud humility, the pathetic elegance of Homer's Helen, to such jugglery.

It may flatter the pride of virtue, or it may move our religious sympathies, to look on the forlorn abas.e.m.e.nt of the Magdalene as the emblem of penitence; but there are a.s.sociations connected with Helen-"sad Helen," as she calls herself, and as I conceive the character,-which have a deep tragic significance; and surely there are localities for which the impersonation of cla.s.sical art would be better fitted than that of sacred art.

I do not know of any existing statue of Helen. Nicetas mentions among the relics of ancient art destroyed when Constantinople was sacked by the Latins in 1202, a bronze statue of Helen, with long hair flowing to the waist; and there is mention of an Etruscan figure of her, with wings (expressive of her celestial origin, for the Etruscans gave all their G.o.ds and demi-G.o.ds wings): in Muller I find these two only. There are likewise busts; and the story of Helen, and the various events of her life, occur perpetually on the antique gems, bas-reliefs, and painted vases. The most frequent subject is her abduction by Paris. A beautiful subject for a bas-relief, and one I believe not yet treated, would be Helen and Priam mourning over the lifeless form of Hector; yet the difficulty of preserving the simple sculptural treatment, and at the same time discriminating between this and other similar funereal groups, would render it perhaps a better subject for a picture, as admitting then of such scenery and accessories as would at once determine the signification.

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PENELOPE. ALCESTIS. LAODAMIA.

Statues of Penelope and Helen might stand in beautiful and expressive contrast; but it is a contrast which no profane or prosaic hand should attempt to realise. Penelope is all woman in her tenderness and her truth; Helen, half a G.o.ddess in the midst of error and remorse.

Nor is Penelope the only character which might stand as a type of conjugal fidelity in contrasted companions.h.i.+p with Helen: Alcestis, who died for her husband; or, better still, Laodamia, whose intense love and longing recalled hers from the shades below, are susceptible of the most beautiful statuesque treatment; only we must bear in mind that the leading _motif_ in the Alcestis is _duty_, in the Laodamia, _love_.