Albert Dürer

by T. Sturge Moore

III

The subjects of these engravings are even generally trivial or antiquated, either in themselves or by the way they are approached. Perhaps alone among them the figure of Jesus, as it is drawn in the various series on copper and wood illustrating the Passion, is conceived in a manner which touches us to-day with the directness of a revelation; and even this cannot be compared to the same figure in Rembrandt etchings and drawings, either for essential adequacy, or for various and convincing application. No, we must consent to let the expression "great thoughts" drop out of our appreciation of Dürer's works, and be replaced by the "great character" latent in them.

However, one among Dürer's engravings on copper stands out from among the rest, and indeed from all his works. In the Melancholy the composition is not more dignified in its spacing and proportion; the arabesque of line is not richer or sweeter, the variations from black to white are not more handsome, than in some half dozen of his other engravings. No, by its conception alone the Melancholy attains to its unique impressiveness. And it is the impressiveness of an image, not the impressiveness of an idea or situation, as in the case of the Knight, Death, and the Devil, by which almost as much bad literature has been inspired. There is nothing to choose between the workmanship of the two plates; both are absolutely impeccable, and outside the work of Dürer himself, unrivalled. The Melancholy is the only creation by a German which appears to me to invite and sustain comparison with the works of the greatest Italian. In it we have the impressiveness that belongs only to the image, the thing conceived for mental vision, and addressed to the eye exclusively. If there was an allegory, or if the plate formed (as has been imagined) one of a series representative of the four temperaments, the eye and the visual imagination are addressed with such force and felicity that the inquiries which attempt to answer these questions must for ever appear impertinent. They may add some languid interest to the contemplation which is sated with admiring the impeccable mastery of the Knight; for that plate always seems to me the mere illustration of a literary idea, a sheer statement of items which require to be connected by some story, and some of which have the crude obviousness of folk-lore symbols, without their racy and genial naïvety. They have not been fused in the rapture of some unique mood, not focussed by the intensity of an emotion. With the Melancholy all is different; perhaps among all his works only Dürer's most haunting portrait of himself has an equal or even similar power to bind us in its spell. For this reason I attempt the following comparison between the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel and the Melancholy a comparison which I do not suppose to have any other value or force than that of a stimulant to the imagination which the works themselves address.

[Illustration: MELANCHOLIA Copper engraving, B. 74]

The impetuosity of his Southern blood drives Michael Angelo to betray his intention of impressing in the pose and build of his Sibyls. Large and exceptional women, "limbed" and thewed as gods are, with an habitual command of gesture, they lift down or open their books or unwind their scrolls like those accustomed to be the cynosure of many eyes, who have lived before crowds of inferiors, a spectacle of dignity from their childhood upwards. On the other hand, the pose and build of the Melancholy must have been those of many a matron in Nuremberg. It is not till we come to the face that we find traits that correspond with the obvious symbolism of the wings and wreath, or the serious richness of the black and white effect of the composition; but that face holds our attention as not even the Sibylla Delphica cannot by beauty, not by conscious inspiration, but by the spell of unanswerable thought, by the power to brood, by the patience that can and dare go unresolved for many years. Everything is begun about her; she cannot see unto the end; she is powerful, she is capable in many works, she has borne children, she rests from her labours, and her thought wanders, sleeps or dreams. The spirit of the North, with its industry, its cool-headed calculation, its abundance in contrivance, its elaboration of duty and accumulation of possessions--there she sits, absorbed, unsatisfied. Impetuosity and the frank avowal of intention are themselves an expression of the will to create that which is desirable; they can but form the habit of every artist under happy circumstances. They proceed on the expectation of immediate effectiveness, they belong to power in action; while, if beauty be not impetuous, she is frank, and adds to the avowal of her intention the promise of its fulfilment. The work of art and the artist are essentially open; they promise intimacy, and fulfil that promise with entirety when successful. Nor is anything so impressive as intimacy which implies a perfect sincerity, a complete revelation, a gift without reserve, increase without let. But the circumstances of the artist never are happy: even Michael Angelo's were not. An intense brooding melancholy arises from the repressed and baffled desire to create; and in some measure this gloom of failure underlying their success is a necessary character of all lovely and spiritual creations in this world. Now Michael Angelo's works, because of their Southern impetuosity and volubility, are not so instinct with this divine sorrow, this immobility of the soul face to face with evil, as is Dürer's Melancholy. He inspires and exhilarates us more, but takes us out of ourselves rather than leads us home.

Here is Dürer's success: let and hindered as it really is, he makes us feel the inalienable constancy of rational desire, watching adverse circumstance as one beast of prey watches another. She keeps hold on the bird she has caught, the ideal that perhaps she will never fully enjoy. Michael Angelo pictures for us freedom from trammels, the freedom that action, thought and ecstasy give, the freedom that is granted to beauty by all who recognise it; Dürer shows us the constancy that bridges the intervals between such free hours, that gives continuity to man's necessarily spasmodic effort. Thus he typifies for us the Northern genius: as Michael Angelo's athletes might typify by their naked beauty and the unexplained impressiveness of their gestures, the genius of the sudden South--sudden in action, sudden in thought, suddenly mature, suddenly asleep--as day changes to night and night to day the more rapidly as the tropics are approached.

[Illustraton: Detail enlarged from the "Agony in the Garden." Etching on Iron, B. 19 Between pp. 250 & 251]

[Illustration: ANGEL WITH THE SUDARIUM Engraving in Iron, 1516. B. 26 Between pp. 250 & 251]

Instances of the highest imaginative power are rare in Dürer's work. The Melancholy has had a world-wide success. The Knight, Death and the Devil has one almost equal, but which is based on the facility with which it is associated with certain ideas dear to Christian culture, rather than on the creation of the mood in which these ideas arise. It does not move us until we know that it is an illustration of Erasmus's Christian Knight. Then all its dignity and mastery and the supremacy of the gifts employed on it are brought into touch with the idea, and each admirer operates, according to his imaginativeness, something of the transformation which Dürer had let slip or cool down before realising it.