A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies Part 35

If I were to propose Lady G.o.diva as a subject now[4], I believe it would be received with a far different feeling even by those very men. If I were Queen of England I would have it painted in Fresco in my council chamber. There should be seen the palfrey with its rich housings, and near it, as preparing to mount, the n.o.ble lady should stand, timid, but resolved: her veil should lie on the ground; the drapery just falling from her fair limbs and partly sustained by one hand, while with the other she loosens her golden tresses. A bevy of waiting-maids, with averted faces, disappear hurriedly beneath the ma.s.sive porch of the Saxon palace, which forms the background, with sky and trees seen through openings in the heavy architecture. This is the picturesque version of the story; but there are many others. As a single statue, the figure of Lady G.o.diva affords an opportunity for the legitimate treatment of the undraped female form, sanctified by the purest, the most elevated a.s.sociations;-by woman's tearful pride and man's respect and grat.i.tude.

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JOAN OF ARC.

Shakspeare, who is so horribly unjust to Joan of Arc, has put a sublime speech into her mouth where she answers Burgundy who had accused her of sorcery,-

"Because you want the grace that others have.

You judge it straight a thing impossible To compa.s.s wonders but by help of devils!"

The whole theory of popular superst.i.tion comprised in three lines!

But Joan herself-how at her name the whole heart seems to rise up in resentment, not so much against her cowardly executioners as against those who have so wronged her memory! Never was a character, historically pure, bright, definite, and perfect in every feature and outline, so abominably treated in poetry and fiction,-perhaps for this reason, that she was in herself so exquisitely wrought, so complete a specimen of the heroic, the poetic, the romantic, that she could not be touched by art or modified by fancy, without being in some degree profaned. As to art, I never saw yet any representation of "Jeanne la grande Pastoure," (except, perhaps, the lovely statue by the Princess of Wurtemburg,) which I could endure to look at-and even that gives us the contemplative simplicity, but not the power, intellect, and energy, which must have formed so large a part of the character. Then as to the poets, what shall be said of them? First Shakspeare, writing for the English stage, took up the popular idea of the character as it prevailed in England in his own time. Into the hypothesis that the greater part of Henry VI. is not by Shakspeare, there is no occasion to enter here; the original conception of the character of Joan of Arc may not be his, but he has left it untouched in its princ.i.p.al features. The English hated the memory of the French Heroine because she had caused the loss of France and had humiliated us as a nation; and our chroniclers revenged themselves and healed their wounded self-love by imputing her victories to witchcraft. Shakspeare, giving her the attributes which the historians of his time a.s.signed to her, represents her as a warlike, arrogant sorceress-a "monstrous woman"-attended and a.s.sisted by demons.

I pa.s.s over the depraved and perverse spirit in which Voltaire profaned this divine character. A theme which a patriot poet would have approached as he would have approached an altar, he has made a vehicle for the most licentious parody that ever disgraced a national literature. Schiller comes next, and hardly seems to me more excusable.

Not only has he missed the character, he has deliberately falsified both character and fact. His "Johanna" might have been called by any other name; and the scene of his tragedy might have been placed anywhere in the wide world with just the same probability and truth. Schiller and Goethe held a principle that all considerations were to yield before the proprieties of art. But Milton speaks somewhere of those "faultless proprieties of nature" which never can be violated with impunity: and Art can never move freely but in the domain of nature and of truth. All the fine writing in Schiller's "Maid of Orleans" can never reconcile me to its absolute and revolting falsehood. The sublime, simple-hearted girl who to the last moment regarded herself as set apart by G.o.d to do His work, he makes the victim of an insane pa.s.sion for a young Englishman. In the love-sick cla.s.sical heroines of Corneille and Racine there is nothing more Frenchified, more absurd, more revolting. Then he makes her die victorious on the field of battle defending the oriflamme;-far, far more glorious as well as more pathetic her real death-but it offended against Schiller's aesthetic conception of the dignity of tragedy.

Lastly, we have Southey's epic: what shall be said of it?-even what he said of the Lusiad of Camoens, "that it is read with little emotion, and remembered with little pleasure." No. I do not wish to see Joan turned into a heroine of tragedy or tale, because, as it seems to me, the whole life and death of this martyred girl is too near us, and too historically distinct, and, I will add, too sacred, to be dressed out in romantic prose or verse. What Walter Scott might have made of her I do not know-something marvellously picturesque and life-like, no doubt-and yet I am glad he did not try his hand on her. But she remains a legitimate and most admirable subject for representative art; and as yet nothing has been done in sculpture to fix the ideal and heroic in her character, nor in painting, worthy of her exploits. There exists no contemporary portrait of her except in the brief description of her in the old French Chronicle of the Siege of Orleans, where it is said that her figure was tall and slender, her bust fine, her hair and eyes black; that she wore her hair short, and could never be persuaded to put on a head-piece, and farther (and in this respect both Schiller and Southey have wronged her), that she had never slain a man, using her consecrated sword merely to defend herself. I should like to see a fine equestrian statue of her by one of our best English sculptors, set up in a conspicuous place among us, as a national expiation.

Southey mentions that in the beginning of the last war, about 1795, when popular feeling, excited almost to frenzy, raged against France, a pantomime, or ballet, was performed at Covent Garden, from the story of Joan of Arc, at the conclusion of which she is carried away by demons, like a female Don Juan. This denouement caused such a storm of indignation, that the author-one James Cross-was obliged, after the first two or three representations, to change the demons into angels, and send her straight into Heaven:-an anecdote pleasant to record as ill.u.s.trating the sure ultimate triumph of truth over falsehood; of all the better sympathies over prejudice and wrong;-in spite of history, and, what is more, in spite of Shakspeare!

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CHARACTERS FROM SHAKSPEARE.

Joan of Arc is not, however, a Shakspearian character; and, in fact, there are very few of his personages susceptible of sculptural treatment. They are too dramatic, too profound, too complex in their essential nature where they are tragic; too many-sided and picturesque where they are comic.

For instance, the attempt to condense into marble such light, evanescent, quaint creations as those in "The Midsummer's Night's Dream"

is better avoided; we feel that a marble fairy must be a heavy absurdity. Oberon and t.i.tania might perhaps float along in a bas-relief; but we cannot put away the thought that they have reality without substantiality, and we do not like to see them, or Ariel, or Caliban fixed in the definite forms of sculpture.

There are, however, a few of Shakspeare's characters which appear to me beautifully adapted for statuesque treatment: Perdita holding her flowers; Miranda lingering on the sh.o.r.e; might well replace the innumerable "Floras" and "Nymphs preparing to bathe," which people the _ateliers_ of our sculptors. Cordelia has something of marble quietude about her; and Hermione is a statue ready made. And, by the way, it is observable that Shakspeare represents Hermione as a _coloured_ statue.

Paulina will not allow it to be touched, because "the colour is not yet dry." Again,-

"Would you not deem those veins Did verily bear blood?

"The very life seems warm upon her lips, The fixture of her eye hath motion in't, And we are mocked by Art!

The ruddiness upon her lip is wet,

"You'll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own With oily painting."

I think it possible to model small ornamental statuettes and groups from some few of the scenes in Shakspeare's plays; but this is quite different from life-size figures of Hamlet, Oth.e.l.lo, Shylock, Macbeth, which must either have the look of real individual portraiture, or become mere idealisations of certain qualities; and Shakspeare's creations are neither the one nor the other.

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CHARACTERS FROM SPENSER.

Spenser is so essentially a picturesque poet, he depends for his rich effects so much on the combination of colour and imagery, and multiplied accessories, that one feels-at least _I_ feel, on laying down a volume of the "Fairie Queene" dazzled as if I had been walking in a gallery of pictures. His "Masque of Cupid," for instance, although a procession of poetical creations, could not be transferred to a bas-relief without completely losing its Spenserian character-its wondrous glow of colour.

Thus Cupid "uprears himself exulting from the back of the ravenous lion;" removes the bandage from his eyes, that he may look round on his victims; "shakes the darts which his right hand doth strain full dreadfully," and "claps on high his coloured wings twain." This certainly is not the Greek Cupid, nor the Cupid of sculpture; it is the Spenserian Cupid. So of his Una, so of his Britomart, and the Red Cross Knight and Sir Guyon: one might make elegant _statuesque_ impersonations of the allegories they involve, as of Truth, Chast.i.ty, Faith, Temperance; but then they would lose immediately their Spenserian character and sentiment, and must become something altogether different.

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THE LADY. COMUS.

It is not so with Milton. The "Lady" in Comus, whether she stands listening to the echos of her own sweet voice, or motionless as marble under the spell of the "false enchanter," _looking_ that divine reproof which in the poem she _speaks_,-

"I hate when vice can bolt her arguments, And virtue has no tongue to check her pride"-

is a subject perfectly fitted for sculpture, and never, so far as I know, executed. It would be a far more appropriate ornament for a lady's _boudoir_ than French statues of MODESTY, which generally have the effect of making one feel very much ashamed.[5]

Sabrina has been beautifully treated by Marshall.

It is difficult to render Comus without making him too like a Bacchus or an Apollo. He is neither.

He represents not the beneficent, but the intoxicating and brutifying power of wine. His joviality should not be that of a G.o.d, but with something mischievous, b.e.s.t.i.a.l, Faun-like; and he should have, with the Dionysian grace, a dash of the cunning and malignity of his Mother Circe. These characteristics should be in the mind of the artist. The panther's skin, the coronal of vine leaves, and, instead of the Thyrsus, the magician's wand, are the proper accessories. It is also worth notice, that in the antique representations Comus has wings as a demiG.o.d, and in a picture described by Philostratus (a night scene) he lies crouched in a drunken sleep. Little use, however, is made of him in the antique myths, and the Miltonic conception is that which should be embodied by the modern sculptor.

Il Penseroso and L'Allegro, if embodied in sculpture as poetical abstractions (either masculine or feminine) of Melancholy and Mirth, would cease to be Miltonic, for the conceptions of the poet are essentially picturesque, and expressed in both cases by a luxuriant acc.u.mulation of images and accessories, not to be brought within the limits of plastic art without the most tasteless confusion and inconsistency.

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SATAN.

The religious idea of a Satan-the impersonation of that mixture of the b.e.s.t.i.a.l, the malignant, the impious, and the hopeless, which const.i.tute THE FIEND, the enemy of all that is human and divine-I conceive to be quite unfitted for the purpose of sculpture. Danton's attempt degenerates into grim caricature. Milton's Satan-"the archangel ruined,"-is however a strictly poetical creation, and capable of the most poetical statuesque treatment. But we must remember that, if it be a gross mistake, religious and artistic, to conceive the Messiah under the form of a larger, stronger humanity, with a _physique_ like that of a wrestler, (as M. Angelo has done in the Last Judgement) it is equally a mistake to conceive the lost angel, our spiritual adversary, under any such coa.r.s.e Herculean lineaments. There can be no image of the Miltonic Satan without the elements of beauty, "though changed by pale ire, envy, and despair!" Colossal he may be, vast as Mount Athos; but it is not necessary to express this that he should be hewn out of Mount Athos, or look like the giant Polypheme! His proportions, his figure, his features-like his power-are angelic. As the Hero-for he is so-of the "Paradise Lost," the subject is open to poetic treatment; but I am not aware that as yet it has been poetically treated.

Of the Italian poetry and history, and all the wondrous and lovely shapes which come thronging out of that Elysian land,-I can say nothing now,-or only this,-that after all I am not _quite_ sure that I am right about Spenser. For, at first view, what poet seems less amenable to statuesque treatment than Dante? One would have imagined that only a preternatural fusion of Michal-Angelo and Rembrandt could fitly render the murky recesses and ghastly and monstrous inhabitants of the Inferno, or attempt to shadow forth the dazzling mysteries of the Paradiso. Yet see what Flaxman has achieved! His designs are legitimate bas-reliefs, not pictures in outline. He has been true to his own art, and all that could be done within the limitations of his art he has accomplished. It is a translation of Dante's _ideas_ into sculpture, with every thing _peculiarly_ Dantesque in the treatment, set aside.

Now as to our more modern poets.-From amid the long array of beautiful subjects which seem to move in succession before the fancy, there are two which stand out prominent in their beauty. First, Lord Byron's "Myrrha," who with her Ionian elegance is susceptible of the purest cla.s.sical treatment. She should hold a torch; but not with the air of a Maenad, nor of a Thais about to fire Persepolis. The sentiment should be deeper and quieter.

"Dost thou think A Greek girl dare not do for love that which An Indian widow does for custom?"

Ion in Talfourd's Tragedy-the boy-hero, in all the tenderness of extreme youth, already self-devoted and touched with a melancholy grace and an elevation beyond his years-is so essentially statuesque, that I am surprised that no sculptor has attempted it; perhaps because, in this instance, as in that of Myrrha, the popular realisation of both characters as subjects of formative art has been spoiled by theatrical trappings and a.s.sociations.

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FOOTNOTES:

[1] "_Sancta Simplicitas!_" was the exclamation of Huss to the woman who, when he was burned at the stake, in her religious zeal brought a f.a.ggot to light the pile.

[2] Canova's bust of Helen is such a counterfeit; whereas the Helen of Gibson is, for a mere head, singularly characteristic.

[3] There is a fine translation of the German Iphigenia by Miss Swanwick. (Dramatic Works of Goethe. Bohn, 1850.)