II
Many people in turning over a collection of Dürer's drawings would be constantly crying, "How marvellously realistic!" and would glow with enthusiasm and smile with gratitude for the perception which these words expressed. Others would say "merely realistic"; and the words would convey, if not disapprobation for something shocking, at least indifference. In both cases the word "realistic" would, I take it, mean that the objects which the pen, brush, or charcoal strokes represented were described with great particularity. And in the first case delight would have been felt at recognising the fulness of detailed information conveyed about the objects drawn--that each drawing represented not a generalisation, but an individual. In the other case the mind would have been repelled by the infatuated insistence on insignificant or negligible details, the absence of their classification and subordination to ideas. The first of these two frames of mind is that of Paul Pry, who is delighted to see, to touch, or behold, for whom everything is a discovery; and there are members of this class of temperament who in middle life continue to make the same discoveries every day with zest and a wonder equal to that which they felt when children. The second of these frames of mind is that of the man with a system or in search of a system, who desires to control, or, if he cannot do that, at least to be taken into the confidence of the controller, or to gain a position from which he can oversee him, and approve or disapprove. Now neither of these judgments is in itself aesthetic, or implies a comprehension of Dürer as an artist.
[Illustration: ME-ENTO MEI, 1505. From the drawing in the British Museum]
The man who cries out: "Just look how that is done!" "Who could have believed a single line could have expressed so much?" judges as an artist, a craftsman. The man who, like Jean Francois Millet, exclaims: "How fine! How grand! How delicate! How beautiful!" judges as a creator. He sees that "it is good." An artist--a creator--may possess either or even both the two former temperaments; but as an artist he must be governed by the latter two, either singly or combined. Dürer, doubtless, had a considerable share in all four of these points of view. He delighted in objects as such, in the new and the strange as new and strange, in the intricate as intricate, in the powerful as powerful. And above all in his drawings does he manifest this direct and childish interest and curiosity. He was also in search of a system, of an intellectual key or plan of things; and in the many drawings he devoted to explaining or developing his ideas of proportion, of perspective, of architecture, he shows this bias strongly. But nearly every drawing by him, or attributed to him, manifests the third of these temperaments. The never-ceasing economy and daring of the invention displayed in his touch, or, as he would have said, "in his hand," is almost as signal as his perfect assurance and composure. And when one reflects that he was not, like Rembrandt, an artist who made great or habitual use of the spaces of shade and light, but that his workmanship is almost entirely confined to the expressive power of lines, wonder is only increased. Of the fourth character that creates and estimates value, though in certain works Dürer rises to supreme heights, though in almost all his important works he appeases expectation, yet often where he could surely have done much better he seems to have been content not to exert his rarest gifts, but rather to play with or parade those that are secondary. Not only is this so in drawings like the Dance of Monkeys at Basle, done to content his friend the reformer Felix Frey (see page 168), and in the borders designed to amuse Maximilian during the hours that custom ordained he should pretend to give to prayer; but there are drawings which were not apparently thrown as sops to the idleness of others, but done to content some half-vacant mood of his own (see Lippmann, 41, 83, 394, 4.20, 333).
In such drawings the economy and daring of the strokes is always admirable, can only be compared to that in drawings by Rembrandt and Hokusai; but the occasion is often idle, or treated with a condescension which well-nigh amounts to indifference. There is no impressiveness of allure, no intention in the proportions or disposition on the paper such as Erasmus justly praised in the engravings on copper, probably recollecting something which Dürer himself had said (see page 186).
Yet in his portrait heads the right proportions are nearly always found; and in many cases I believe it is no one but the artist himself who has cut down such drawings after they were completed, to find a more harmonious or impressive proportion (see illustration opposite). And often these drawings are as perfect in the harmony between the means employed and the aspect chosen, and in the proportion between the head and the framing line and the spaces it encloses, as Holbein himself could have made them; while they far surpass his best in brilliancy and intensity.
[Illustration: Drawing in black chalk heightened with white on reddish ground Formerly in the collection at Warwick Castle]
[Illustration: Silver-point drawing on prepared grey ground, in the collection of Frederick Locker, Esq.]