Earthwork out of Tuscany Part 3

"Aristotle again," said I, "with his 'continual slight novelty.' No fits and starts."

"I have told you before I know nothing of the man," said Perugino, vexed, it appeared, at such wounding of his vanity to be new; "let me tell you this. There are fellows abroad who dub me dunce and dull-head. The young Buonarroti, forsooth, who mistakes the large for the great, quant.i.ty for quality; who in the indetermined pretends to see the mysterious. Mystery, quotha! Mystery may be in an astrologer's horoscope, in a diagram. Mystery needs no puckered virago, nor bully in the sulks. There is mystery in the morning calms, mystery in a girl's melting mood, mystery in the irresolution of a growing boy full of dreams. But behold! it is there, not here. If you see it not, the fault is your own. It may be broad as day, cut clean as with a knife, displayed at large before a brawling world too busy lapping or grudging to heed it. The many shall pa.s.s it by as they run huddling to the dark. Yet the few shall adore therein the excellency of the mystery, even as the few (the very few) may discern in the flake of wafer-bread the s.h.i.+ning wholeness of the Divine Nature----"

"'The few remain, the many change and pa.s.s,'" I interpolated in a murmur.

But Perugino never heeded me. He went on.

"The Greek, young sir, took the fact and let it alone to breed. His act lay in the taking and setting. Just so much import as it had borne it bore still; just so much weight as separation from its fellows lent it was to his credit who first cut it free. But nowadays glamour suits only with serried muscles, frowns, and writhen lips; where darkness is we shudder, saying, Behold a great mystery! Let a painter declare his incompetence to utter, it shall be enough to a.s.sure you he has walked with G.o.d; for if he stammers, look you, that testifies he is overwhelmed. Amen, I would answer. Let his head swim and be welcome; but let him not set to painting till he can stand straight again. For in one thing I am no Greek, in that I cannot hold drunkenness divine." Here the good man stopped for want of breath and I whipped in.

"Your great _Crucifixion_ in Santa Maria Maddalena," I began.

"Look you, sir," he took me up, "I know what you would be at. Take that piece (which is of my very best) or another equally good, I mean the _Charge to Peter_ in Pope Sixtus his new Chapel, and listen to me.

The first thing your painter must seek to do is to fill his wall. Let there be no mistake about this. He is at first no prophet or man of G.o.d; he is no juggler nor mountebank who shall be rewarded according to the enormity of his grins; his calling, maybe, is humbler, for all he stands for is to wash a wall so that no eye be set smarting because of it. Now that seems a very simple matter; it is just as simple as the eye itself-- so you may judge the validity of the arguments against me, that a wholesome green or goodly red wash would suffice. It would suffice indifferent well for a kennel of dogs. But mark this. Although your painter may drop hints for the soul, let him not strain above his pitch lest he crack his larynx. To his colour he may add form in the flat; but he cannot escape the flat, however he may wriggle, any more than the sculptor can escape the round, sc.r.a.pe he never so wisely. Buonarroti will sc.r.a.pe and s.h.i.+ft; the Fleming has sc.r.a.ped and s.h.i.+fted all his days to as little purpose. His seed-pearls invite your touch. Touch them, my friend, you will smear your fingers. _Ne sutor ultra crepidam._ Leave miracles, O painter, to the Saint, and stick to your brush-work. Colour and form in the flat; there is his armour to win the citadel of a man's soul."

"They call you mawkish," I dared to say.

"I am in good company," said the little man with much pomposity.

"You say boldly, then, if I catch the chain of your argument"--thus I pursued him--"that you present (as by some formula which you have elaborated) the facts of religion in colour and design? For I suppose you will allow that your Art is concerned at least as much with religion as with the was.h.i.+ng of walls?"

"Religion! Religion!" cried he. "What are you at? Concerned with religion!

Man alive, it is concerned with itself; it _is_ religion. I see you are very far indeed from the truth, and as you have spoken of my _Crucifixion_ in Florence, now you shall suffer me to speak of it. I testify what I know, not that which I have not seen. And as mine eyes have never filled with blood from Golgotha, so I do not conjure with tools I have not learned to handle. But I will tell you what I have seen. The Ma.s.s: whereof my piece is, as it were, the transfiguration or a parable.

For it grew out of a Ma.s.s I once heard, stately-ordered, solemnly and punctiliously served in a great church. Mayhap, I dreamed of it; we shall not quarrel over terms. It was a strange Ma.s.s, shorn of much ornament and circ.u.mstance; I thought, as I knelt and wondered: Here are no lamentations, no bruised b.r.e.a.s.t.s, no outpoured hearts, nor souls on flames. The day for tears is past, the fires are red, not flaming; this is a day for steadfast regard, for service, patience, and good hope; this is a day for Art to chant what the soul hath endured. For Art is a fruit sown in action and watered to utterance by tears. Two priests only, clothed in fine linen, served the Ma.s.s: ornaments of candles, incense, prostration, genuflection, there were none. Yet, step by step, and with every step pondered reverently ere another was laid to Its fellow's foundation; with full knowledge of the end ere yet was the beginning accomplished; In every gesture, every pause, intonation, invocation, stave of song, phrase of prayer; by painful degrees wrought in the soul's sweat and tears, unadorned, cold as fine stone, yet glittering none the less like fair marble set in the sun--was that solemn Ma.s.s sung through in the bare Church to the glory of G.o.d and His angels, who must ever rejoice in a work done so that the master-mind is straining and on watch over heart and voice. And I said, Calvary is done and the woe of it turned to triumph.

Love is the fulfilling of the Law. Henceforth, for me Law shall be the fulfilment of my Love.

"Therefore I paint no terrors of death, no flesh torn by iron, no pa.s.sion of an anguish greater than we can ever conceive, no bittersweet ecstasy of Self abandoned or Love inflaming; but instead, serenity, a morning sky, a meek victim, Love fulfilling Law. Shorn of accidents, for the essence is enough; not pa.s.sionate, for that were as gross an affront in face of such awful death as to be trivial. Nothing too much; Law fulfilling Love; reasonable service.

"And because we are of the earth earthy, and because what I work you must behold with bodily eyes, I limn you angels and G.o.ds in your own image; not of greater stature nor of more excellent beauty than many among you; not of finer essence, maybe, than yourselves. But as the priests about that naked altar, so stand they, that the love which transfigures them be absorbed in the fulfilling of law; and the law they exquisitely follow be at once the pattern and gla.s.s of their love."

Master Peter drained a beaker of his Orvieto. I admired; for indeed the little man spoke well.

"Now the Lord be good to you, Master Peter," I said; "men do you a great wrong. For there are some who aver that you doubt."

"Who does not doubt?" replied my host. "We doubt whenever we cannot see."

"I believe you are right," said I. "Your great Saint is, after all, your great Seer. For you, then, to question the soul's immortality is but to admit that you do not yet see your own life to come."

"Leave it so," said Perugino. "Let us talk reasonably."

"Did all men love the law as you do," I resumed after a painful pause--for I felt the force of the Master's rebuke to my impertinence (and could hope others will feel it also)--"did all love the law as you do, the world would be a cooler place and pa.s.sion at a discount. But I cannot conceive Art without pa.s.sion."

"Nor I," said the painter, "and for the excellent reason that there is no such thing. But remember this: pa.s.sion is like the Alpheus. Hedge it about with dams, you drive it deeper. Out of sight is not out of being. And the issue must needs be the fairer."

"Happy the pa.s.sion," I said, "which hath an issue. There is pa.s.sion of the vexed sort, where the tears are frozen to ice as they start. Of the tortured thus, remember--

"Lo pianto stesso li planger non lascia, E il duol, che trova in su gli occhi rintoppo, Si volve in entro a far crescer l' ambascia."

"You know our Dante?" said Master Peter blandly (though I swear he knew what I was at). "There may be such people; doubtless there are such people. For me, I find a perpetual outlet in my art." I could not forbear----

"Master Peter, Master Peter," I cried out, "how can I believe you when I know that your Madonna's eyes are br.i.m.m.i.n.g; when I know why she turns them to a misty heaven or an earth seen blotted by reason of tears? Do these tears ever fall, Master Peter? or who freezes them as they start?"

For I wondered where his patient Imola found her outlet, and whether young Simone has shown her a way. Master Peter drummed on the table and nursed one fat leg.

Before I took leave of the urbane little painter, in fact while I stood in the act of handshaking, I saw her white face at an upper window, looming behind rigid bars. On a sudden impulse I concluded my farewells rapidly and made to go. Vannucci turned back into the house and closed the door; but I stayed in the cortile pretending a trouble with my spurs. Sure enough, in a short time I heard a light footfall. Imola stood beside me.

"Wish me a safe journey," I said smiling, "and no more bare-headed cavaliers on the road." Her lips hardly moved, so still her voice was.

"Was he bare-headed?" she asked, as if in awe.

"Love-locks floating free," I answered her gaily enough. "Shall I thank him for his courtesies to you, Madonna, if we meet?"

"You will not meet: he is gone to Spello," she began, and then stopped, blus.h.i.+ng painfully.

"But I may stay in Spello this night and could seek him out."

She was mistress of her lips, and could now look steadily at me. "I wish him very well," said Imola.

VI

THE SOUL OF A FACT

In the days when it was verging on a question whether a man could be at the same time a good Christian and an artist, the chosen subjects of painting were significant of the approaching crisis--those glaring moral contrasts in history which, for want of a happier term, we call dramatic.

Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn her more intimate manifestations to await likelier times, is a question it were long to answer. The subjects, at any rate, were such as the Greeks, with their surer instincts and saving grace of sanity in matters of this kind, either forbore to meddle with or treated as decoratively as they treated acanthus-wreaths. Today we call them "effective" subjects; we find they produce shocks and tremors; we think it braces us to shudder, and we think that Art is a kind of emotional pill; we measure it quant.i.tatively, and say that we "know what we like." And doubtless there is something piquant in the quivering produced, for example, by the sight of white innocence fluttering helpless in a grey shadow of l.u.s.t. So long as the Bible remained a G.o.d that piquancy was found in a _Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents_; in our own time we find it in a _Faust and Gretchen_, in the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal Academy. It was a like appreciation of the certain effect of vivid contrasts as powerful didactic agents (coupled with, or drowning, a something purer and more devout) which had inspired those most beautiful and distinctive of all the symbols of Catholicism, the _Adoration of the Kings_, the Christ-child cycle, and which raised the Holy Child and Maid-Mother to their place above the mystic tapers and the Cross. Naturally the Old Testament, that garner of grim tales, proved a rich mine: _David and Golias, Susanna and the Elders_, the _Sacrifice of Isaac, Jethro's daughter_. But the story of Judith did not come to be painted in Tuscan sanctuaries until Donatello of Florence had first cast her in bronze at the prayer of Cosimo _pater patria_. Her entry was dramatic enough at least: Dame Fortune may well have sn.i.g.g.e.red as she spun round the city on her ball. Cosimo the patriot and his splendid grandson were no sooner dead and their brood sent flying, than Donatello's _Judith_ was set up in the Piazza as a fit emblem of rescue from tyranny, with the vigorous motto, to make a.s.surance double, "EXEMPLVM SALVTIS PVBLICae CIVES POSVERE." Savonarola, who knew his Bible, saw here a keener application of Judith's pious sin. A few years later that same _Judith_ saw him burn. Thus, as an incarnate cynicism, she will pa.s.s; as a work of art she is admittedly one of her great creator's failures. Her neighbour _Perseus_ of the Loggia makes this only too plain! For Cellini has seized the right moment in a deed of horror, and Donatello, with all his downrightness and grip of the fact, has. .h.i.t upon the wrong. It is fatal to freeze a moment of time into an eternity of waiting. His _Judith_ will never strike: her arm is palsied where it swings. The Damoclean sword is a fine incident for poetry; but Holofernes was no Damocles, and, if he had been, it were intolerable to cast his experience in bronze. Donatello has essayed that thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a moment instead of denote a permanent attribute. Art is adjectival, is it not, O Donatello? Her business is to qualify facts, to say what things are, not to state them, to affirm that they are. A sculptured _Judith_ was done not long afterwards, carved, as we shall see, with a burin on a plate; and the man who so carved her was a painter.

Meantime, _pari pa.s.su_, almost, a painter who was a poet was trying his hand; a man who knew his Bible and his mythology and was equally at home with either. Perhaps it is not extravagant to say that you cannot be an artist unless you are at home with mythology, unless mythology is the swiftest and most direct expression of your being, so that you can be measured by it as a man is known by his books, or a woman by her clothes, her way of bowing, her amus.e.m.e.nts, or her charities. For mythopoeia is just this, the incarnating the spirit of natural fact; and the generic name of that power is Art. A kind of creation, a clothing of essence in matter, an hypostatising (if you will have it) of an object of intuition within the folds of an object of sense. Lessing did not dig so deep as his Greek Voltaire (whose "dazzling ant.i.thesis," after all, touches the root of the matter) for he did not see that rhythmic extension in time or s.p.a.ce, as the case may be, with all that that implies--colour, value, proportion, all the convincing incidents of form--is simply the mode of all arts, the thing with which Art's substance must be interpenetrated, until the two form a whole, lovely, golden, irresistible, and inevitable as Nature's pieces are. This substance, I have said, is the spirit of natural fact. And so mythology is Art at its simplest and barest (where the bodily medium is neither word, nor texture of stone, nor dye), the parent art from which all the others were, so to speak, begotten by man's need. Thus much of explanation, I am sorry to say, is necessary, before we turn to our mytho-poet of Florence, to see what he made out of the story of Judith.

First of all, though, what has the story of Judith to do with mythology?

It is a legend, one of the finest of Semitic legends; and between legend and myth there is as great a gulf as between Jew and Greek. I believe there are no myths proper to Israel--I do not see how such magnificent egoists could contract to the necessary state of awe--and I do not know that there are any legends proper to Greece which are divorced from real myths. For where a myth is the incarnation of the spirit of natural fact, a legend is the embellishment of an historical event: a very different thing. A natural fact is permanent and elemental, an historical event is transient and superficial. Take one instance out of a score. The rainbow links heaven and earth. Iris then, to the myth-making Greek, was Jove's messenger, intermediary between G.o.d and Man. That is to incarnate a constant, natural fact. Plato afterwards, making her daughter of Thaumas, incarnated a fact, psychological, but none the less constant, none the less natural. But to say, as the legend-loving Jew said, that Noah floated his ark over a drowning world and secured for his posterity a standing covenant with G.o.d, Who then and once for all set His bow in the heavens; that is to indicate, somewhere, in the dim backward and abysm of time, an historical event. The rainbow is suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah, who was an ancestor of Israel. So the Judith poem may be a decorated event, or it may be the barest history in a splendid epical setting: the point to remember is that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative art. The artist, in the language of Neo-Platonism, is a demiurge; he only of men can convert dead things into life. And now we will go into the Uffizi.

Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of amaze most people have who look for the first time at Botticelli's _Judith_ tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, her steadfast maid d.o.g.g.i.ng with intent patient eyes every step she takes. You say it is flippant, affected, pedantic. For answer, I refer you to the sage himself, who, from his point of view--that painting may fairly deal with a chapter of history--is perfectly right. The prevailing strain of the story is the strength of weakness--_ex dulci fort.i.tude_, to invert the old enigma. "O G.o.d, O my G.o.d, hear me also, a widow. Break down their stateliness by the hand of a woman!" It is the refrain that runs through the whole history of Israel, that reasonable complacency of a little people in their G.o.d-fraught destiny. And, withal, a streak of savage spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to death. There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too. So "she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him, and tumbled his body down from the bed." Ho! what a fate for the emissary of the Great King. Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox, "The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman!" That is it: the amazing, thrilling ant.i.thesis insisted on over and over again by the old Hebrew bard. "Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind prisoner, and the fauchion pa.s.sed through his neck." That is the _leit-motif_: Sandro the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it, to the no small comfort of Mr. Ruskin and his men. Giuditta, dainty, blue-eyed, a girl still and three years a widow, flits homeward through a spring landscape of grey and green and the smile of a milky sky, being herself the dominant of the chord, with her bough of slipt olive and her jagged scimitar, with her pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed, and her yellow curls floating over her shoulders. On her slim feet are the sandals that ravished his eyes; all her maiden bravery is dancing and fluttering like harebells in the wind. Behind her plods the slave-girl folded in an orange scarf, bearing that shapeless, nameless burden of hers, the head of the grim Lord Holofernes. Oh, for that, it is the legend itself! For look at the girl's eyes. What does their dreamy solemnity mean if not, "the Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman"? One other delicate bit of symbolising he has allowed himself, which I may not omit. You are to see by whom this deed was done: by a woman who has uns.e.xed herself. Judith is absorbed in her awful service; her robe trails on the ground and clings about her knees; she is unconscious of the hindrance. The gates of Bethulia are in sight, the Chaldean hors.e.m.e.n are abroad, but she has no anxiety to escape. She is swift because her life just now courses swiftly; but there is no haste.

The maid, you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, and steps out the more l.u.s.tily for it.

So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr. Ruskin, reader of pictures. What says Botticelli the painter? Had he no instincts to tell him that his art could have little to say to a legend? Or that a legend might be the subject of an epic (here, indeed, was an epic ready made), might, under conditions, be the subject of a drama; but could not, under any conditions, be alone the subject of a picture? I don't for a moment suggest that he had, or that any artist ever goes to work in this double- entry, methodical way; but are we ent.i.tled to say that he was not influenced by his predilections, his determinations as a draughtsman, when he squared himself to ill.u.s.trate the Bible? We say that the subject of a picture is the spirit of natural fact. If Botticelli was a painter, _that_ is what he must have looked for, and must have found, in every picture he painted. Where, then, was he to get his natural facts in the story of Judith? What is, in that story, the natural, essential (as opposed to the historical, fleeting) fact? It is murder. Judith's deed was what the old Scots law incisively calls _slauchter_. It may be glossed over as a.s.sa.s.sination or even execution--in fact, in Florence, where Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so called: it remains, however, just murder. Botticelli, not s.h.i.+rking the position at all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or essence swiftness and stealth. Chaucer, let us note, had been of the same mind:

"The smyler with the kayf under his cloke,"

and so on, in lines not to be matched for hasty and dreadful suggestion.

Swiftness and stealth, the ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab, are the standing elements of murder: pare off all the rest, you come down to that. Your staring looks, your blood, your "chirking," are accidentals.

They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), but the horror of sudden death is above them: a man may strangle with his thoughts cleaner than with his pair of hands. And as "matter" is but the stuff wherewith Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, when we flout or mangle it, so it is against the high dignity of Art to insist upon the carrion she must use. She will press, here the terror, there the radiance, of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it in her face, to add mentally the poor stage properties we have grown to trust. No blood, if you please. Therefore, in Botticelli's _Judith_, nothing but the essentials are insisted on; the rest we instantly imagine, but it is not there to be sensed. The panel is in a tremor. So swift and secret is Judith, so furtive the maid, we need no hurrying hors.e.m.e.n to remind us of her oath,--"Hear me, and I will do a thing which shall go throughout all generations to the children of our nation." Sudden death is in the air; nature has been outraged. But there is no drop of blood--the thin scarlet line along the sword-edge is a symbol if you will--the pale head in the cloth is a mere "thing": yet we all know what has been done. Mr. Ruskin is wrong to dwell here upon the heroism of the heroine, the beneficence of the crime, the exhilaration of the patriot; he is traducing the painter by so praising the poet All those things may be there; and why should they not? But it is a pity to insist upon them until you have no s.p.a.ce for the pictorial something which is there too, and makes the picture.

Other _Judiths_ there are; two here, one next door in the Pitti, any number scattered over the galleries of Europe. There are Jacopo Palma of Venice and Allori of Florence who used the old story, the one to perpetuate a fat blonde, the other a handsome actress in a "strong"

situation; there is Sodoma; there are Horace Vernet and the moderns, the Wests and Haydons of our grandfathers. It is a pet subject of the Salon.

These men have vulgarised an epic, and smirched poetry and painting alike for the sake of a tawdry sensation. But enough: let us look at one more.

Mantegna's is worth looking at. It is a pen drawing, often repeated, best known by the fine engraving he finally made of it. I think it Is the best murder picture in the world. To begin with, the literary interest of the story is practically gone. This wild, terrible, beautiful woman may be Judith if you choose: she might be Medea or Agave, or Salome, or the Lucrezia Borgia of popular fancy and Donizetti. The fact is she is part of a scheme whose object is the aesthetic aspect of murder--murder considered by one of the fine arts. Andrea was able, and I know not that anybody else of his day could have been able, to contemplate murder purely objectively, with no thought of its ethical relations. Botticelli had been fired by the heroism and the moral grandeur of the special circ.u.mstances of a given case: down they went into his picture with what rightly belonged to it.

There is none of that here. And Mantegna makes other distinctions in the field common to both of them. Murder, for him, did not essentially subsist in its shocking suddenness; it held something more specific, a witchery of its own, a _macabre_ fascination, a mystery. Lionardo felt it when he drew his _Medusa_; Sh.e.l.ley wrote it down "the tempestuous loveliness of terror." Thus it had, for Mantegna, an unique emotional habit which set it off from other vice and gave it a positive, appreciable, aesthetic value of its own. With even more unerrancy than Botticelli, he gripped the adjectival and qualifying function of his art. He saw that crime, too, had its pictorial side. When Keats, writing of the Lamia sloughing her snake- folds, tells us how--

"She writhed about, convulsed--with scarlet pain";