V.
It is a pelting November rain. No leaves are left upon the branches but a few yellow flutterers on the tips of the willows and poplars, and the bleached company that will be clinging to the beeches and the white oaks for a month to come. All others are whipped away by the night-winds into the angles of old walls, or are packed under low-limbed shrubberies, there to swelter and keep warm the rootlets of the newly planted weigelias and spruces, until the snows and February suns and April mists and May heats shall have transmuted them into fat and unctuous mould. A close, pelting, unceasing rain, trying all the leaks of the mossy roof, testing all the newly laid drains, pressing the fountain at my door to an exuberant gush,—a rain that makes outside work an impossibility; and as I sit turning over the leaves of an old book of engravings, wondering what drift my rainy-day's task shall take, I come upon a pleasant view of Dovedale in Derbyshire, a little exaggerated, perhaps, in the luxuriance of its trees and the depth of its shadows, but recalling vividly the cloudy April morning on which, fifteen years agone, I left the inn of the "Green Man and Black Head," in the pretty town of Ashbourne, and strolled away by the same road on which Mr. Charles Cotton opens his discourse of fishing with Master "Viator," and plunged down the steep valley-side near to Thorpe, and wandered for three miles and more, under towering crags, and on soft, spongy bits of meadow, beside the blithe river where Walton had cast, in other days, a gray palmer-fly, past the hospitable hall of the worshipful Mr. Cotton, and the wreck of the old fishing-house, over whose lintel was graven in the stone the interlaced initials of "Piscator, Junior," and his great master of the rod. As the rain began to patter on the sedges and the pools, I climbed out of the valley, on the northward or Derbyshire side, and striding away through the heather, which belongs to the rolling heights of this region, I presently found myself upon the great London and Manchester highway. A broad and stately thoroughfare it had been in the old days of coaching, but now a close, fine turf invested it all, save one narrow strip of Macadam in the middle. The mile-stones, which had been showy, painted affairs of iron, were now deeply bitten and blotched with rust. Two of them I had passed, without sight of house, or of other traveller, save one belated drover, who was hurrying to the fair at Ashbourne; as I neared the third, a great hulk of building appeared upon my left, with a crowd of aspiring chimneys, from which only one timid little pennant of smoke coiled into the harsh sky.
The gray, inhospitable-looking pile proved to be one of the old coach-inns, which, with its score of vacant chambers and huge stable-court, was left stranded upon the deserted highway of travel. It stood a little space back from the road, so that a coach and four, or, indeed, a half-dozen together, might have come up to the door-way in dashing style. But it must have been many years since such a demand had been made upon the resources of bustling landlord and of attendant grooms and waiters. The doors were tightly closed; even the sign-board creaked uneasily in the wind, and a rampant growth of ivy that clambered over the porch so covered it with leaves and berries that I could not at all make out its burden. I gave a sharp ring to the bell, and heard the echo repeated from the deserted stable-court; there was the yelp of a hound somewhere within, and presently a slatternly-dressed woman received me, and, conducting me down a bare hall, showed me into a great dingy parlor, where a murky fire was struggling in the grate. A score of roistering travellers might have made the stately parlor gay; and I dare say they did, in years gone; but now I had only for company their heavy old arm-chairs, a few prints of "fast coaches" upon the wall, and a superannuated greyhound, who seemed to scent the little meal I had ordered, and presently stalked in and laid his thin nose, with an appealing look, in my hands. His days of coursing—if he ever had them—were fairly over; and I took a charitable pride in bestowing upon him certain tough morsels of the rump-steak, garnished with horse-radish, with which I was favored for dinner.
I had intended to push on to Buxton the same afternoon; but the deliberate sprinkling of the morning by two o'clock had quickened into a swift, pelting rain, the very counterpart of that which is beating on my windows to-day. There was nothing to be done but to make my home of the old coach-inn for the night; and for my amusement—besides the slumberous hound, who, after dinner, had taken up position upon the faded rug lying before the grate—there was a "Bell's Messenger" of the month past, and, as good luck would have it, a much-bethumbed copy of a work on horticulture and kindred subjects, first printed somewhere about the beginning of the eighteenth century, and entitled "The Clergyman's Recreation, showing the Pleasure and Profit of the Art of Gardening," by the Reverend John Laurence.
It was a queer book to be found in this pretentious old coach-inn, with its silken bell-pulls and stately parlors; and I thought how the roisterers who came thundering over the road years ago, and chucked the bar-maids under the chin, must have turned up their noses, after their pint of crusted Port, at the "Clergyman's Recreation." Yet, for all that, the book had a rare interest for me, detailing, as it did, the methods of fruit-culture in England a hundred and forty years ago, and showing with nice particularity how the espaliers could be best trained, and how a strong infusion of walnut-leaf tea will destroy all noxious worms.
And now, when, upon this other wet day, and in the quietude of my own library, I come to measure the claims of this ancient horticulturist to consideration, I find that he was the author of some six or seven distinct works on kindred subjects, showing good knowledge of the best current practice; and although he incurred the sneers of Mr. Tull, who hoped "he preached better than he ploughed," there is abundant evidence that his books were held in esteem.
Contemporary with the Rev. Mr. Laurence were London and Wise, the famous horticulturists of Brompton, (whose nursery, says Evelyn, "was the greatest work of the kind ever seen or heard of, either in books or travels,") also Switzer, a pupil of the latter, and Professor Richard Bradley.
Mr. London was the director of the royal gardens under William and Mary, and at one time had in his charge some three or four hundred of the most considerable landed estates in England. He was in the habit of riding some fifty miles a day to confer with his subordinate gardeners, and at least two or three times in a season traversed the whole length and breadth of England,—and this at a period, it must be remembered, when travelling was no holiday-affair, as is evident from the mishaps which befell those well-known contemporaneous travellers of Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams. Traces of the work of Mr. London are to be seen even now in the older parts of the grounds of Blenheim and of Castle Howard in Yorkshire.
Stephen Switzer was an accomplished gardener, well known by a great many horticultural and agricultural works, which in his day were "on sale at his seed-shop in Westminster Hall." Chiefest among these was the "Ichnographia Rustica," which gave general directions for the management of country-estates, while it indulged in some prefatory magniloquence upon the dignity and antiquity of the art of gardening. It is the first of all arts, he claims; for "tho' Chirurgery may plead high, inasmuch as in the second chapter of Genesis that operation is recorded of taking the rib from Adam, wherewith woman was made, yet the very current of the Scriptures determines in favor of Gardening." It surprises us to find that so radical an investigator should entertain the belief, as he clearly did, that certain plants were produced without seed by the vegetative power of the sun acting upon the earth. He is particularly severe upon those Scotch gardeners, "Northern lads," who, with "a little learning and a great deal of impudence, know, or pretend to know, more in one twelvemonth than a laborious, honest South-country man does in seven years."
His agricultural observations are of no special value, nor do they indicate any advance from the practice of Worlidge. He deprecates paring and burning as exhaustive of the vegetable juices, advises winter fallowing and marling, and affirms that "there is no superficies of earth, how poor soever it may be, but has in its own bowels something or other for its own improvement."
In gardening, he expresses great contempt for the clipped trees and other excesses of the Dutch school, yet advises the construction of terraces, lays out his ponds by geometric formulæ, and is so far devoted to out-of-door sculpture as to urge the establishment of a royal institution for the instruction of ingenious young men, who, on being taken into the service of noblemen and gentlemen, would straightway people their grounds with statues. And this notwithstanding Addison had published his famous papers on the "Pleasures of the Imagination" three years before.[5]
Richard Bradley was the Dr. Lardner of his day,—a man of general scientific acquirement, an indefatigable worker, venturing hazardous predictions, writing some fifteen or twenty volumes upon subjects connected with agriculture, foisting himself into the chair of Botany at Cambridge by noisy reclamation, selling his name to the booksellers for attachment to other men's wares,[6] and, finally, only escaping the indignity of a removal from his professor's chair by sudden death, in 1732. Yet this gentleman's botanical dictionary ("Historia Plantarum," etc.) was quoted respectfully by Linnæus, and his account of British cattle, their races, proper treatment, etc., was, by all odds, the best which had appeared up to his time. The same gentleman, in his "New Improvements of Planting and Gardening," lays great stress upon a novel "invention for the more speedy designing of garden-plats," which is nothing more than an adaptation of the principle of the kaleidoscope. The latter book is the sole representative of this author's voluminous agricultural works in the Astor collection; and, strange to say, there are only two in the library of the British Museum.
I take, on this dreary November day, (with my Catawbas blighted,) a rather ill-natured pleasure in reading how the Duke of Rutland, in the beginning of the last century, was compelled to "keep up fires from Lady-day to Michaelmas behind his sloped walls," in order to insure the ripening of his grapes; yet winter grapes he had, and it was a great boast in that time. The quiet country squires—such as Sir Roger de Coverley—had to content themselves with those old-fashioned fruits which would struggle successfully with out-of-door fogs. Fielding tells us that the garden of Mr. Wilson, where Parson Adams and the divine Fanny were guests, showed nothing more rare than an alley bordered with filbert-bushes.[7]
In London and its neighborhood the gourmands fared better. Cucumbers, which in Charles's time never came in till the close of May, were ready in the shops of Westminster (in the time of George I.) in early March. Melons were on sale, for those who could pay roundly, at the end of April; and the season of cauliflowers, which used to be limited to a single month, now reached over a term of six months.
Mr. Pope, writing to Dr. Swift, somewhere about 1730, says,—"I have more fruit-trees and kitchen-garden than you have any thought of; nay, I have good melons and pine-apples of my own growth." Nor was this a small boast; for Lady Wortley Montague, describing her entertainment at the table of the Elector of Hanover, in 1716, speaks of "pines" as a fruit she had never seen before.
Ornamental gardening, too, was now changing its complexion. Dutch William was dead and buried. Addison had written in praise of the natural disposition of the gardens of Fontainebleau, and, at his place near Rugby, was carrying out, so far as a citizen might, the suggestions of those papers to which I have already alluded. Milton was in better odor than he had been, and people had begun to realize that an arch-Puritan might have exquisite taste. Possibly, too, cultivated landholders had seen that charming garden-picture where the luxurious Tasso makes the pretty sorceress Armida spread her nets.
Pope affected a respect for the views of Addison; but his Twickenham garden was a very stiff affair. Bridgman was the first practical landscape-gardener who ventured to ignore old rules; and he was followed closely by William Kent, a broken-down and unsuccessful landscape-painter, who came into such vogue as a man of taste, that he was employed to fashion the furniture of scores of country-villas; and Walpole[8] tells us that he was even beset by certain fine ladies to design Birthday gowns for them:—"The one he dressed in a petticoat decorated with columns of the five orders; the other, like a bronze, in a copper-colored satin, with ornaments of gold."
Clermont, the charming home of the exiled Orléans family, shows vestiges of the taste of Kent, who always accredited very much of his love for the picturesque to the reading of Spenser. It is not often that the poet of the "Faerie Queene" is mentioned as an educator.
And now let us leave gardens for a while, to discuss Mr. Jethro Tull, the great English cultivator of the early half of the eighteenth century. I suspect that most of the gentry of his time, and cultivated people, ignored Mr. Tull, he was so rash and so headstrong and so noisy. It is certain, too, that the educated farmers, or, more strictly, the writing farmers, opened battle upon him, and used all their art to ward off his radical tilts upon their old methods of culture. And he fought back bravely; I really do not think that an editor of a partisan paper to-day could improve upon him,—in vigor, in personality, or in coarseness.
Unfortunately, the biographers and encyclopædists who followed upon his period have treated his name with a neglect that leaves but scanty gleanings for his personal history. His father owned landed property in Oxfordshire, and Jethro was a University-man; he studied for the law, (which will account for his address in a wordy quarrel,) made the tour of Europe, returned to Oxfordshire, married, took the paternal homestead, and proceeded to carry out the new notions which he had gained in his Southern travels. Ill health drove him to France a second time, from which he returned once more, to occupy the famous "Prosperous Farm" in Berkshire; and here he opened his batteries afresh upon the existing methods of farming. The gist of his proposed reform is expressed in the title of his book, "The Horse-hoeing Husbandry." He believed in the thorough tillage, at frequent intervals, of all field-crops, from wheat to turnips. To make this feasible, drilling was, of course, essential; and to make it economical, horse labor was requisite: the drill and the horse-hoe were only subsidiary to the main end of thorough tillage.
Sir Hugh Platt, as we have seen, had before suggested dibbling, and Worlidge had contrived a drill; but Tull gave force and point and practical efficacy to their suggestions. He gives no credit, indeed, to these old gentlemen; and it is quite possible that his theory may have been worked out from his own observations. He certainly gives a clear account of the growth of his belief, and sustains it by a great many droll notions about the physiology of plants, which would hardly be admissible in the botanies of to-day.
Shall I give a sample?
"Leaves," he says, "are the parts, or bowels of a plant, which perform the same office to sap as the lungs of an animal do to blood; that is, they purify or cleanse it of the recrements, or fuliginous steams, received in the circulation, being the unfit parts of the food, and perhaps some decayed particles which fly off the vessels through which blood and sap do pass respectively."
It does not appear that the success of Tull upon "Prosperous Farm" was such as to give a large warrant for its name. His enemies, indeed, alleged that he came near to sinking two estates on his system; this, however, he stoutly denies, and says, "I propose no more than to keep out of debt, and leave my estate behind me better than I found it. Yet, owned it must be, that, had I, when I first began to make trials, known as much of the system as I do now, the practice of it would have been more profitable to me." Farmers in other parts of England, with lands better adapted to the new husbandry, certainly availed themselves of it, very much to their advantage. Tull, like a great many earnest reformers, was almost always in difficulty with those immediately dependent on him; over and over he insists upon the "inconveniency and slavery attending the exorbitant power of husbandry servants and laborers over their masters." He quarrels with their wages, and with the short period of their labor. Pray, what would Mr. Tull have thought, if he had dealt with the Drogheda gentlemen in black satin waistcoats, who are to be conciliated by the farmers of to-day?
I think I can fancy such an encounter for the querulous old reformer. "Mike! blast you, you booby, you've broken my drill!" And Mike, (putting his thumb deliberately in the armlet of his waistcoat,) "Meester Tull, it's not the loikes o' me'll be leestening to insoolting worrds. I'll take me money, if ye plase." And with what a fury "Meester" Tull would have slashed away, after this, at "Equivocus," and all his newspaper-antagonists!
I wish I could believe that Tull always told the exact truth; but he gives some accounts of the perfection to which he had brought his drill to which I can lend only a most meagre trust; and it is unquestionable that his theory so fevered his brain at last as to make him utterly contemptuous of all old-fashioned methods of procedure. In this respect he was not alone among reformers. He stoutly affirmed that tillage would supply the lack of manure, and his neighbors currently reported that he was in the habit of dumping his manure carts in the river. This charge Mr. Tull firmly denied, and I dare say justly. But I can readily believe that the rumors were current; country-neighborhoods offer good starting-points for such lively scandal. The writer of this paper has heard, on the best possible authority, that he is in the habit of planting shrubs with their roots in the air.
In his loose, disputative way, and to magnify the importance of his own special doctrine, Tull affirms that the ancients, and Virgil particularly, urged tillage for the simple purpose of destroying weeds.[9] In this it seems to me that he does great injustice to our old friend Maro. Will the reader excuse a moment's dalliance with the Georgics again?
"Multum adeo, rastris glebas qui frangit inertes,
Vimineasque trahit crates, juvat arva;...
Et qui proscisso quæ suscitat æquore terga
Rursus in obliquum verso perrumpit aratro,
Exercetque frequens tellurem, atque imperat arvis."
That "imperat" looks like something more than weed-killing; it looks like subjugation; it looks like pulverization at the hands of an imperious master.
But behind all of Tull's exaggerated pretension, and unaffected by the noisy exacerbation of his speech, there lay a sterling good sense, and a clear comprehension of the existing shortcomings in agriculture, which gave to his teachings prodigious force, and an influence measured only by half a century of years. There were few, indeed, who adopted literally and fully his plans, or who had the hardihood to acknowledge the irate Jethro as a teacher; yet his hints and his example gave a stimulus to root-culture, and an attention to the benefits arising from thorough and repeated tillage, that added vastly to the annual harvests of England. Bating the exaggerations I have alluded to, his views are still reckoned sound; and though a hoed crop of wheat is somewhat exceptional, the drill is now almost universal in the best cultivated districts; and a large share of the forage-crops owe their extraordinary burden to horse-hoeing husbandry.
Even the exaggerated claims of Tull have had their advocates in these last days; and the energetic farmer of Lois-Weedon, in Northamptonshire, is reported to be growing heavy crops of wheat for a succession of years, without any supply of outside fertilizers, and relying wholly upon repeated and perfect pulverization of the soil.[10] And Mr. Way, the distinguished chemist of the Royal Society, in a paper on "The Power of Soils to absorb Manure,"[11] propounds the question as follows:—"Is it likely, on theoretical considerations, that the air and the soil together can by any means be made to yield, without the application of manure, and year after year continuously, a crop of wheat of from thirty to thirty-five bushels per acre?" And his reply is this:—"I confess I do not see why they should not do so." A practical farmer, however, (who spends only his wet days in-doors,) would be very apt to suggest here, that the validity of this dictum must depend very much on the original constituents of the soil.
Under the lee of the Coombe Hills, on the extreme southern edge of Berkshire, and not far removed from the great highway leading from Bath to London, lies the farmery where this restless, petulant, suffering, earnest, clear-sighted Tull put down the burden of life, a hundred and twenty years ago. The house is unfortunately largely modernized, but many of the out-buildings remain unchanged; and not a man thereabout, or in any other quarter, could tell me where the former occupant, who fought so bravely his fierce battle of the drill, lies buried.
About the middle of the last century, there lived in the south of Leicestershire, in the parish of Church-Langton, an eccentric and benevolent clergyman by the name of William Hanbury, who conceived the idea of establishing a great charity which was to be supported by a vast plantation of trees. To this end, he imported a great variety of seeds and plants from the Continent and America, established a nursery of fifty acres in extent, and published "An Essay on Planting, and a Scheme to make it Conducive to the Glory of God and the Advantage of Society."
But the Reverend Hanbury was beset by aggressive and cold-hearted neighbors, among them two strange old "gentlewomen," Mistress Pickering and Mistress Byrd, who malevolently ordered their cattle to be turned loose into his first plantation of twenty thousand young and thrifty trees. And not content with this, they served twenty-seven different copies of writs upon him in one day, for trespass. Of all this he gives detailed account in his curious history of the "Charitable Foundations at Church-Langton." He tells us that the "venomous rage" of these old ladies (who died shortly after, worth a million of dollars) did not even spare his dogs; but that his pet spaniel and greyhound were cruelly killed by a table-fork thrust into their entrails. Nay, their game-keeper even buried two dogs alive, which belonged to his neighbor, Mr. Wade, a substantial grazier. His story of it is very Defoe-like and pitiful:—"I myself heard them," he says, "ten days after they had been buried, and, seeing some people at a distance, inquired what dogs they were. 'They are some dogs that are lost, Sir,' said they; 'they have been lost some time.' I concluded only some poachers had been there early in the morning, and by a precipitate flight had left their dogs behind them. In short, the howling and barking of these dogs was heard for near three weeks, when it ceased. Mr. Wade's dogs were missing, but he could not suspect those dogs to be his; and the noise ceasing, the thoughts, wonder, and talking about them soon also ceased. Some time after, a person, being amongst the bushes where the howling was heard, discovered some disturbed earth, and the print of men's heels ramming it down again very close, and, seeing Mr. Wade's servant, told him he thought something had been buried there. 'Then,' said the man, 'it is our dogs, and they have been buried alive. I will go and fetch a spade, and will find them, if I dig all Caudle over.' He soon brought a spade, and, upon removing the top earth, came to the blackthorns, and then to the dogs, the biggest of which had eat the loins, and greatest share of the hind parts, of the little one."
The strange ladies who were guilty of this slaughter of innocents showed "a dying blaze of goodness" by bequeathing twelve thousand pounds to charitable societies; and "thus ended," says Hanbury, "these two poor, unhappy, uncharitable, charitable old gentlewomen."
The good old man describes the beauty of plants and trees with the same delightful particularity which he spent on his neighbors and the buried dogs.
I cannot anywhere learn whether or not the charity-plantation of Church-Langton is still thriving.
About this very time, Lancelot Brown, who was for a long period the kitchen-gardener at Stowe, came into sudden notoriety by his disposition of the waters in Blenheim Park, where, in the short period of one week, he created perhaps the finest artificial lake in the world. Its indentations of shore, its bordering declivities of wood, and the graceful swells of land dipping to its margin, remain now in very nearly the same condition in which Brown left them more than a hundred years ago. All over England the new man was sent for; all over England he rooted out the mossy avenues, and the sharp rectangularities, and laid down his flowing lines of walks, and of trees. He (wisely) never contracted to execute his own designs, and—from lack of facility, perhaps—he always employed assistants to draw his plans. But the quick eye which at first sight recognized the "capabilities" of a place, and which leaped to the recognition of its matured graces, was all his own. He was accused of sameness; but the man who at one time held a thousand lovely landscapes unfolding in his thought could hardly give a series of contrasts without startling affectations.
I mention the name of Lancelot Brown, however, not to discuss his merits, but as the principal and largest illustrator of that taste in landscape-gardening which just now grew up in England, out of a new reading of Milton, out of the admirable essays of Addison, out of the hints of Pope, out of the designs of Kent, and which was stimulated by Gilpin, by Horace Walpole, and, still more, by the delightful little landscapes of Gainsborough.
Enough will be found of Mr. Brown, and of his style, in the professional treatises, upon whose province I do not now infringe. I choose rather, for the entertainment of my readers, if they will kindly find it, to speak of that sad, exceptional man, William Shenstone, who, by the beauties which he made to appear on his paternal farm of Leasowes, fairly rivalled the best of the landscape-gardeners,—and who, by the graces and the tenderness which he lavished on his verse, made no mean rank for himself at a time when people were reading the "Elegy" of Gray, the Homer of Pope, and the "Cato" of Addison.
I think there can hardly be any doubt, however, that poor Shenstone was a wretched farmer; yet the Leasowes was a capital grazing farm, when he took it in charge, within fair marketable distance of both Worcester and Birmingham. I suspect that he never put his fine hands to the plough-tail; and his plaintive elegy, that dates from an April day of 1743, tells, I am sure, only the unmitigated truth:—
"Again the laboring hind inverts the soil;
Again the merchant ploughs the tumid wave;
Another spring renews the soldier's toil,
And finds me vacant in the rural cave."
Shenstone, like many another of the lesser poets, was unfortunate in having Dr. Johnson for his biographer. It is hard to conceive of a man who would show less of tenderness for an elaborate parterre of flowers, or for a poet who affectedly parted his gray locks on one side of his head, wore a crimson waistcoat, and warbled in anapæstics about kids and shepherds' crooks. Only fancy the great, snuffy, wheezing Doctor, with his hair-powder whitening half his shoulders, led up before some charming little extravaganza of Boucher, wherein all the nymphs are simpering marchionesses, with rosettes on their high-heeled slippers that out-color the sky! With what a "Faugh!" the great gerund-grinder would thump his cane upon the floor, and go lumbering away! And Shenstone, or rather his memory, caught the besom of just such a sneer.
But other critics were more kindly and appreciative; among them, Dodsley the bookselling author, who wrote "The Economy of Human Life," (the "Proverbial Philosophy" of its day,) and Whately, who gave to the public the most elegant and tasteful discussion of artificial scenery that was perhaps ever written.
Shenstone studied, as much as so indolent a man ever could, at Pembroke College, Oxford. His parents died when he was young, leaving to him a very considerable estate, which fortunately some relative administered for him, until, owing to this supervisor's death, it lapsed into the poet's improvident hands. Even then a sensible tenant of his own name, and a distant relative, managed very snugly the farm of Leasowes; but when Shenstone came to live with him, neither house nor grounds were large enough for the joint occupancy of the poet, who was trailing his walks through the middle of the mowing, and of the tenant, who had his beeves to fatten and his rental to pay.
So Shenstone became a farmer on his own account; and, according to all reports, a very sorry account he made of it. The good soul had none of Mr. Tull's petulance and audacity with his servants; if the ploughman broke his gear, I suspect the kind ballad-master allowed him a holiday for the mending. The herdsman stared in astonishment to find the "beasts" ordered away from their accustomed grazing-fields. A new thicket had been planted, which must not be disturbed; the orchard was uprooted to give place to some parterre; a fine bit of meadow was flowed with a miniature lake; hedges were shorn away without mercy; arbors, grottos, rustic seats, Arcadian temples, sprang up in all outlying nooks; so that the annual product of the land came presently to be limited, almost entirely, to the beauty of its disposition.
I think that the poet, unlike most, was never very thoroughly satisfied with his poems, and that, therefore, the vanity possessed him to vest the sense of beauty which he felt tingling in his blood in something more palpable than language. Hence came the charming walks and woods and waters of Leasowes. With this ambition holding him and mastering him, what mattered a mouldy grain-crop, or a debt? If he had only an ardent admirer of his walks, his wilderness, his grottos,—this was his customer. He longed for such, in troops,—as a poet longs for readers, and as a farmer longs for sun and rain.
And he had them. I fancy there was hardly a cultivated person in England, but, before the death of Shenstone, had heard of the rare beauty of his home of Leasowes. Lord Lyttleton, who lived near by, at the elegant seat of Hagley, brought over his guests to see what miracles the hare-brained, sensitive poet had wrought upon his farm. And I can fancy the proud, shy creature watching from his lattice the company of distinguished guests,—maddened, if they look at his alcove from the wrong direction,—wondering if that shout that comes booming to his sensitive ear means admiration, or only an unappreciative surprise,—dwelling on the memory of the visit, as a poet dwells on the first public mention of his poem. In his "Egotisms," (well named,) he writes,—"Why repine? I have seen mansions on the verge of Wales that convert my farm-house into a Hampton Court, and where they speak of a glazed window as a great piece of magnificence. All things figure by comparison."
And this reflection, with its flavor of philosophy, was, I dare say, a sweet morsel to him. He saw very little of the world in his later years, save that part of it which at odd intervals found its way to the delights of Leasowes; indeed, he was not of a temper to meet the world upon fair terms. "The generality of mankind," he cynically says, "are seldom in good humor but whilst they are imposing upon you in some shape or other."[12]
Our farmer of Leasowes published a pastoral that was no way equal to the pastoral he wrote with trees, walks, and water upon his land; yet there are few cultivated readers who have not some day met with it, and been beguiled by its mellifluous seesaw. How its jingling resonance comes back to me to-day from the "Reader" book of the High School!
"I have found out a gift for my fair;
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed:
But let me that plunder forbear;
She will say 'twas a barbarous deed.
For he ne'er could be true, she averred,
Who could rob a poor bird of its young:
And I loved her the more, when I heard
Such tenderness fall from her tongue."
And what a killing look over at the girl in the corner, in check gingham, with blue bows in her hair, as I read (always on the old school-benches),—
"I have heard her with sweetness unfold
How that pity was due to—a dove:
That it ever attended the bold;
And she called it the sister of love.
But her words such a pleasure convey,
So much I her accents adore,
Let her speak, and whatever she say,
Methinks I should love her the more."
There is a rhythmic prettiness in this; but it is the prettiness of a lover in his teens, and not the kind we look for from a man who stood five feet eleven in his stockings, and wore his own gray hair. Strangely enough, Shenstone had the physique of a ploughman or a prize-fighter, and with it the fine, sensitive brain of a woman; a Greek in his refinements, and a Greek in indolence. I hope he gets on better in the other world than he ever did in this.
ON THE RELATION OF ART TO NATURE.
IN TWO PARTS.
PART II.
The repulsive ugliness of the early Christian paintings was not the consequence of any break in the tradition. There was no reason why the graceful drawing of the human figure should not have been transmitted, as well as the technical procedures and the pigments. Nor was effort wanting: these pictures were often very elaborate and splendid in execution. But it is clear that grace and resemblance to anything existing, so far from being aimed at, were intentionally avoided. Even as late as the thirteenth century we find figures with blue legs and red bodies,—the horses in a procession blue, red, and yellow. Any whim of association, or fanciful color-pattern, was preferred to beauty or correctness. Likeness to actual things seemed to be regarded, indeed, as an unavoidable evil, to be restricted as far as possible. The problem was, to show God's omnipresence in the world, especially His appearance on the earth as man, and His abiding presence in holy men and women as an inspiration obliterating their humanity. But so long as the divine and the human are looked upon as essentially opposed, their union can be by miracle only, and the first thought must be to keep prominent this miraculousness, and guard against confusion of this angelic existence with every-day reality. The result is this realm of ghosts, at home neither in heaven nor on earth, neither presuming to be spirit nor condescending to be body, but hovering intermediate. But the more strongly the antithesis is felt, the nearer the thought to end this remaining tenderness for the gross and unspiritual,—to drop this ballast of earth, and rise into the region of heavenly realities. Upon a window of Canterbury Cathedral, beneath a representation of the miracle of Cana, is the legend,—"Lympha dat historiam, vinum notat allegoriam." But if the earthly is there only for the sake of this heavenly transmutation,—if the miracle, and the miracle alone, shows God's purpose accomplished,—then all things must be miraculous, for all else may be safely ignored. Henceforth, nothing is of itself profane, for the profane is only that wherein the higher and truer sense has not yet been recognized. What is demanded is not an exceptional transmutation, but a translation,—that all Nature should be interpreted of the spirit.
The result is, on the one hand, a greater license in dealing with actual forms, since Art sees all things on one level of dignity,—respects one no more than another, but only its own purpose,—is careless of material qualities, and of moral qualities, too, as far as they are bound to particular shapes. Why dwell tediously upon one particle, when the value of it consists not in its particularity, but in its harmony with the rest of the universe? Giotto seems to make short work with the human form divine by wrapping all his figures from head to foot in flowing draperies. But these figures have more humanity in them, stand closer to us, because the meaning is no longer petrified in the shape, but speaks to us freely and directly, in a look, a gesture, a sweep of the garment. The Greek said,—"With these superhuman lineaments you are to conceive the presence of Jove; these are the appropriate forms of the immortals." Giotto said,—"See what divine meanings in every-day faces and actions; with these eyes you are to look upon the people in the street." The one is a remote and incredible perfection,—the other, the intimate reality of the actual and present. It is, in truth, therefore, a closer approach to Nature than was before possible. The artist no longer shuns full actuality for his conception, for he fears no confusion with the actual. For instance, from the earliest times the celestial nature of angels had been naïvely intimated by appending wings to them. There was no attempt to carry out the suggestion, or to show the mechanical possibility of it, for that would be only to make winged men. The painters of the sixteenth century, on the other hand, from a nervous dread lest wings should prove insufficient, establish a sure basis of clouds for their angels, with more and more emphasis of buoyancy and extent, until at last, no longer trusting their own statement, they settle the question by showing them from below, already risen, and so choke off the doubt whether they can rise. But Orcagna's angels float without assistance or effort, by their own inherent lightness, as naturally as we walk. They are not out of their element, but bring their element with them. These are not men caught up into the skies, and do not need to be sustained there. The world they inhabit is not earth in heaven, but heaven on earth,—the earth seen in accordance with the purpose of its existence.
Giotto's fellow-citizens were struck with the new interest which the language of attitude and gesture and all the familiar details of life acquired in his representation of them. Looking around them, they saw what they had been taught to see, and concluded it was only an unexampled closeness of copying. No doubt Giotto thought so, too,—but had that been all, we should not have heard of it. It is this new interest that has to be accounted for. The charm did not lie in the fact, nor in the reproduction of it in the picture, but in a sudden sense of its value as expression, resting on a still obscurer feeling that herein lay its whole value,—that the actual is not what it seems, still less a pure delusion, but that it is pure seeming, so that its phenomenal character is no reproach, but the bond that connects it with reality. Just because it is only "the outward show," and does not pretend to be anything more, what it shows is not "the things that only seem," but the things that are. The attractiveness of beauty is due to the sense of higher affinities in the object; it is finality felt, but not comprehended, so that the form shines with the splendor of a purpose that belongs not to it, but to the whole whereof it is a part. Aristotle makes wonder the forerunner of science. So our admiration of beauty is a tribute paid in advance to the fresh insight it promises. Whether it be called miracle or inspiration, the artist must see his theme as something excellent and singular. This is perhaps that "strangeness" which Lord Bacon requires in all "excellent beauty," the new significance coming direct, and not through reflection, and therefore ineffable and incomparable. That Giotto and his successors went on for two hundred years painting saints and miracles was not because the Church so ordained, nor from any extraordinary devoutness of the artists, but because they still needed an outward assurance that what they did was not the petty triviality it seemed. There must always remain the sense of an ulterior, undeveloped meaning; when that is laid bare, Art has become superfluous, and makes haste to withdraw into obscure regions. For it is only as language that the picture or the statue avails anything, and this circumstantiality of expression is tolerable only so long as it is the only expression. Beauty is an honor to matter; but spirit, the source of beauty, is impatient of such measure of it as Art can give. As, in the legend, Eurydice, the dawn, sinks back into night at the look of the arisen sun, so this lovely flush of the dawning intelligence wanes before the eye of the intellect. The picture is a help so long as it transcends previous conception; but when the mind comes up with these sallies, and the picture is compared with the idea, it sinks back into a thing. Thenceforth it takes rank with Nature, and falls victim to the natural laws. It is only an aspect and an instant,—not eternal, but a petty persistence,—not God, but an idol,—not the saint, but his flesh and integuments.
Shall we say, then, that beauty is an illusion? Certainly it is no falsity; we may call it provisional truth,—truth at a certain stage, as appearance, not yet as idea. It is appearance seen as final, as the highest the mind has reached. Hence its miraculousness. It is in advance of consciousness; we cannot account for it any more than the savage could account for his fetich,—why this bunch of rags and feathers should be more venerable to him than other rags and feathers. But to deny that the impressiveness it adds to matter comes from a deeper sense of the truth would be as unwise as for him to deny his fetich. The fetich is false, not as compared with other rags and feathers, but as compared with a higher conception of God. The falsity is not that he sees God in this rubbish, but that he does not see Him elsewhere. Coleridge said that a picture is something between a thought and a thing. It must keep the mean; either extreme is fatal. Plato makes Eros intermediate between wisdom and ignorance, born of unequal parentage, neither mortal nor immortal, forever needy, forever seeking the Psyche whom he can never meet face to face.
The history of Art has a certain analogy to the growth of the corals. Like them, it seeks the light which it cannot endure. A certain depth beneath the surface is most favorable to it,—a dim, midway region of twilight and calm, remote alike from the stagnant obscurity of mere sensation and from the agitated surface of day, the dry light of the intellect. When it is laid bare, it dies,—its substance, indeed, enduring as the basis of new continents, but the life gone, and only the traces of its action left in the stony relics of the past. Greek Art perished when its secret was translated into clearer language by Plato and Aristotle; and Duccio and Cimabue and Giotto must go the same way as soon as St. Francis of Assisi or Luther or Calvin puts into words what they meant. It is its own success that is fatal to Art; for just in proportion as the expressiveness it insists upon is shown to be pervading, universal, and not the property of this or that shape, the particular manifestation is degraded. Color and form are due to partial opacity; the light must penetrate to a certain depth, but not throughout.
The name of Giotto has come to stand for Devotional Art, for an earnestness that subordinates all display to the sacredness of the theme. But his fellow-citizens knew him for a man of quick worldly wit, who despised asceticism, and was ready with the most audacious jokes, even at sacred things. Ghiberti and Cennini do not praise him for piety, but for having "brought Art back to Nature" and "translated it from Greek into Latin,"—that is, from the language of clerks into the vernacular. It is not anything special in the intention that gives Giotto his fame, but the freedom, directness, and variety of the language with which it is expressed. The effort to escape from traditional formulas and conventional shapes often makes itself felt at the expense even of beauty. Instead of the statuesque forms of the earlier time, it is the dramatic interest that is now prominent,—the composition, the convergent action of numerous figures, separately, perhaps, insignificant, but pervaded by a common emotion that subordinates all distinctions and leaves itself alone visible. Even in the traditional groups, as, for instance, the Holy Families, etc., the aim is more complete realization, in draperies, gestures, postures, rather than beauty of form. We miss in Giotto much that had been attained before him. What Madonna of his can rank with Giovanni Pisano's? The Northern cathedral-sculptures, even some of the Byzantine carvings, have a dignity that is at least uncommon in his pictures. Especially the faces are generally wooden,—destitute alike of individuality and of the loveliness of Duccio's and even of some of Cimabue's. On the other hand, in the picture wherein the school attained, perhaps, its highest success as to beauty of the faces, Orcagna's "Paradise" at Santa Maria Novella, the blessed are ranged in row above row, with mostly no relation to each other but juxtaposition. We see here two directions,—one in continuation of the antique, seeking beauty as the property of certain privileged forms, the other as the hidden possibility that pervades all things. One or the other must abate something: either the image must become less sacred, or the meaning narrower; for the language of painting is not figurative, like the language of poetry, but figure, and unless the form bear on its face that it is not all that is meant, its inherent limitations are transferred to the thought itself. When Dante tells us that Brunetto Latini and his companions looked at him,—
"Come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna,"
it is the intensity of the gaze that is present with us, not the old tailor and his needle. But in Painting the image is usurping and exclusive.
Of these divergent tendencies it is easy to see which must conquer. The gifts of the spirit are more truly honored as the birthright of humanity than as the property of this or that saint. The worship of the Madonna is better than the worship of Athene just so far as the homage is paid to a sentiment and not to a person. Now the Madonna, too, must come down from her throne. The painters grew tired of painting saints and angels. Giotto already had diverged from the traditional heads and draperies, and begun to put his figures into the Florentine dress. Masaccio and Filippino Lippi brought their fellow-citizens into their pictures. Soon the Holy Family is only a Florentine matron with her baby. The sacred histories are no longer the end, but only the excuse; everything else is insisted on rather than the pretended theme. The second Nicene Council had declared that "the designing of the holy images was not to be left to the invention of artists, but to the approved legislation and tradition of the Catholic Church." But now the Church had to take a great deal that it had not bargained for. Perspective, chiaroscuro, picturesque contrast and variety, and all that belongs to the show of things, without regard to what they are,—this is now the religion of Art.
These things may seem to us rather superficial, and Art to have declined from its ancient dignity. But see how they took hold of men, and what men they took hold of. In the midst of that bloody and shameless fifteenth century, when only force seems sacred, men hunted these shadows as if they were wealth and power. Paolo Uccello could not be got away from his drawing to his meals or his rest, and only replied to his wife's remonstrances, "Ah, this perspective is so delightful!" With what ardor Mantegna and Luca Signorelli seized upon a new trait or action! Leonardo da Vinci, "the first name of the fifteenth century," a man to whom any career was open, and who seemed almost equally fit for any, never walked the streets without a sketch-book in his hand, and was all his life long immersed in the study of Appearance, with a persistent scrutiny that is revealed by his endless caricatures and studies, but perhaps by nothing more clearly than by his incidental discovery of the principle of the stereoscope, which he describes in his treatise on Painting. This was no learned curiosity, nor the whim of seeing the universe under drill, but only a clearer instinct of what the purpose of Art is, namely, to see the reality of the actual world in and as the appearance, instead of groping for some ulterior reality hidden behind it. Leonardo has been called the precursor of Bacon. Certainly the conviction that underlies this passion for the outside of things is the same in both,—the firm belief that the truth is not to be sought in some remote seventh heaven, but in a truer view of the universe about us.
Donatello told Paolo Uccello that he was leaving the substance for the show. But the painter doubtless felt that the show was more real than any such "substance." For it is the finite taken as what it truly is, nothing in itself, but only the show of the infinite. If it seem shadowy and abstract, it is to be considered with what it is compared. What an abstraction is depends on what is taken away and what left behind. For instance, the Slavery question in our politics is sometimes termed an abstraction. Yes, surely, if the dollar is almighty, is the final reality,—if peace and comfort are alone worth living for,—then the Slavery question and several other things are abstractions. So in the world of matter, if the chemical results are the reality of it, the appearance may well be considered as an abstraction. But this is not the view of Art; Art has never magnified the materiality of the finite; on the contrary, its history is only the record of successive attempts to dispose of matter, the failure always lying in the hasty effort to abolish it altogether in favor of an immaterial principle outside of it, something behind the phenomena, like Kant's noumenon,—too fine to exist, yet unable to dispense with existence, and so, after all, not spirit, but only a superfine kind of matter; or as in a picture in the Campo Santo at Pisa, where the world is figured as a series of concentric circles, held up like a shield by God standing behind it.
It may be asked, Was not the appearance, and this alone, from all time, the object of Art? But so long as the figment of a separate reality of the finite is kept up, an antagonism subsists between this and truth, and the appearance cannot be frankly made the end, but has only an indirect, derivative value. In the classic it was the human form in superhuman perfection; in the early Christian Art, God condescending to inhabit human shape; in each case, what is given is felt to be negative to the reality,—a fiction, not the truth.
But now the antagonism falls away, and the truth of Art is felt to be a higher power of the truth of Nature. Perspective puts the mind in the place of gravitation as the centre, thus naïvely declaring mind and not matter to be the substance of the universe. It will see only this, feeling well that there is no other reality. It may be said that Perspective is as much an outward material fact as any other. So it is, as soon as the point of sight is fixed. The mind alters nothing, but gives to the objects that coherency that makes them into a world. The universe has no existence for the idiot, not because it is not there, but because he makes no image of it, or, as we say, does not mind it. The point of sight is the mark of a foregone action of the mind; what is embraced in it is seen together, because it belongs to one conception. The effect can be simulated to a certain extent by mechanical contrivance; but before the rules of perspective were systematized, the perspective of a picture betrays its history, tells how much of it was seen together, and what was added. Even late in the fifteenth century pictures are still more or less mosaics,—their piecemeal origin confessed by slight indications in the midst even of very advanced technical skill. Thus, in Antonio Pollaiuolo's "Three Archangels," in the Florence Academy,—three admirably drawn figures, abreast, and about equally distant from the frame, the line of the right wing touches the head at the same point in each, with no allowance for their different relations to the centre of the picture.
But there is a deeper kind of perspective, not so easily manufactured, though the manufacture of this, too, is often attempted, namely, Composition. The true ground of perspective in a picture is not a mechanical arrangement of lines, but a definite vision,—an affection of the painter by the subject, the net result of it in his mind, instantaneous and complete. It is a mistake to suppose that Composition is anything arbitrary,—that in the landscape out-of-doors we see the world as God made it, but in the picture as the painter makes it. Composition is nothing but the logic of vision; an uncomposed view is no more possible than an unlogical sentence. The eyes convey in each case what the mind is able to grasp,—no less, no more. As to any particular work, it is always a question of fact what it amounts to; the composition may be shallow, it may be bad,—the work of the understanding, not of the imagination,—put together, instead of seen together. But a picture without composition would be the mathematical point. Mr. Ruskin thinks any sensible person would exchange his pictures, however good, for windows through which he could see the scenes themselves. This does not quite meet the point, for it may be only a preference of quantity to quality. The window gives an infinitude of pictures; the painter, whatever his merit, but one. A fair comparison would be to place by the side of the Turner drawing a photograph of the scene, which we will suppose taken at the most favorable moment, and complete in color as well as light and shade. Whoever should then prefer the photograph must be either more of a naturalist than an artist, or else a better artist than Turner. The photograph, supposing it to be perfect in its way, gives what is seen at a first glance, only with the optical part of the process expanded over the whole field, instead of being confined to one point, as the eye is. The picture in it is the first glance of the operator, as he selected it; whatever delicacy of detail told in the impression on his mind tells in the impression on the plate; whatever is more than that does not go to increase the richness of the result, as picture, but belongs to another sphere. The landscape-photographs that we have lately had in such admirable perfection, however they may overpower our judgment at first sight, will, I believe, be found not to wear well; they have really less in them than even second-rate drawings, and therefore are sooner exhausted. The most satisfactory results of the photograph are where the subject is professedly a fragment, as in near foliage, tree-trunks, stone-texture; or where the mind's work is already done, and needs only to be reflected, as in buildings, sculpture, and, to a certain extent, portrait,—as far as the character has wrought itself into the clothes, habitual attitude, etc. Is not the popularity of the small full-length portrait-photographs owing to the predominance they give to this passive imprint of the mind's past action upon externals over its momentary and elusive presence? It is to the fillip received from the startling likeness of trivial details, exciting us to supply what is deficient in more important points, that is to be ascribed the leniency to the photograph on the part of near relatives and friends, who are usually hard to please with a painted likeness.
But all comparisons between the photograph and the hand-drawn picture are apt to be vitiated by the confusion of various extraneous interests with a purely artistic satisfaction resting in the thing itself. It is the old fallacy, involved in all the comparisons of Art with Nature. Of course, at bottom the interest is always that of the indwelling idea. But the question is, whether we stop at the outside, the material texture, or pass at once to the other extreme, the thought conveyed, or whether the two sides remain undistinguished. In the latter case only is our enjoyment strictly æsthetic, that is, attached to the bare perception of this particular thing; in the others, it is not this thing that prevails, but the physical or moral qualities, the class to which it belongs. It is true all these qualities play in and influence or even constitute the impression that particular works of Art make upon us. One man admires a picture for its handling, its surface, the way in which the paint is laid on; another, for its illustration of the laws of physiognomy; another, because it reminds him of the spring he spent in Rome, the pleasant people he met there, etc. We do not always care to distinguish the sources of the pleasure we feel; but for any criticism we must quit these accidents and personalities, and attend solely to that in the work which is unique, peculiar to it, that in which it suggests nothing, and associates itself with nothing, but refuses to be classed or distributed. This may not be the most important aspect of the thing represented, nor the deepest interest that a picture can have; but here, strictly speaking, lies all the beauty of it. The photograph has or may have a certain value of this kind, but a little time is needful before we discriminate what is general and what is special. Its extraneous interest, as specimen, as instance only, tends at once to abate from the first view, as the mind classifies and disposes of it. What remains, not thus to be disposed of, is its value as picture. Under this test, the photograph, compared with works of Art of a high order, will prove wanting in substance, thin and spotty, faulty in both ways, too full and too empty. For the result in each case must be proportionate to the impression that it echoes; but this, in the work of the artist, is reinforced by all his previous study and experience, as well as by the force and delicacy which his perception has over that of other men. It is thus really more concrete, has more in it, than the actual scene.
But when Composition is decried as artificial, what is meant is that it is artifice. It must be artificial, in the sense that all is there for the sake of the picture. But it is not to be the contrivance of the painter; the purpose must be in the work, not in his head. Diotima, in Plato's "Banquet," tells Socrates that Eros desires not the beautiful, but to bring forth in the beautiful; the creative impulse itself must be the motive, not anything ulterior. We require of the artist that he shall build better than he knows,—that his work shall not be the statement of his opinions, however correct or respectable, but an infinity, inexhaustible like Nature. He is to paint, as Turner said, only his impressions, and this precisely because they are not his, but stand outside of his will. To further this, to get the direct action of the artist's instinct, clear of the meddling and patching of forethought and afterthought, is no doubt the aim of the seemingly careless, formless handling now in vogue,—the dash which Harding says makes all the difference between what is good and what is intolerable in water-colors,—and the palette-knife-and-finger procedure of the French painters.
The sin of premeditated composition is that it is premeditated; the why and wherefore is of less consequence. If the motive be extraneous to the work, a theory, not an instinct, it does not matter much how high it is. It is fatal to beauty to see in the thing only its uses,—in the tree only the planks, in Niagara only the water-power; but a reverence for the facts themselves, or even for the moral meaning of them, so far as it is consciously present in the artist's mind, is just so far from the true intent of Art. This is the bane of the modern German school, both in landscape and history. They are laborious, learned, accurate, elevated in sentiment; Kaulbach's pictures, for instance, are complete treatises upon the theme, both as to the conception and the drawing, grouping, etc.; but it is mostly as treatises that they have interest. So the allegories in Albert Dürer's "Melancholia" are obstructive to it as a work of Art, and just in proportion to their value as thoughts.
The moral meaning in a picture, and its fidelity to fact, may each serve as measure of its merit after it is done. They must each be there, for its aim is to express after its own fashion the reality that lurks in every particle of matter. But it is for the spectator to see them, not the artist, and it is talking at cross-purposes to make either the motive,—to preach morality to Art, or to require from the artist an inventory of the landscape. That five or ten million pines grow in a Swiss valley is no reason why every one of them should be drawn. No doubt every one of them has its reason for being there, and it is conceivable that an exhaustive final statement might require them all to be shown. But there are no final statements in this world, least of all in Art. There are many things besides pines in the valley, and more important, and they can be drawn meanwhile. Besides, if all the pines, why not every pebble and blade of grass?
The earnestness that attracts us in mediæval Art, the devout fervor of the earlier time and the veracity of the later, the deference of the painter to his theme, is profoundly interesting as history, but it was conditioned also by the limitations of that age. The mediæval mind was oppressed by a sense of the foreignness and profaneness of Nature. The world is God's work, and ruled by Him; but it is not His dwelling-place, but only His foot-stool. The Divine spirit penetrates into the world of matter at certain points and to a certain depth, does not possess and inhabit it now and here, but only elsewhere and at a future time, in heaven, and at the final Judgment; and meantime the Church and the State are to maintain His jurisdiction over this outlying province as well as they can. The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him down into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart. Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection of fragments from various worlds. The figures in their landscapes do not tread the earth as if they belonged there, but like actors upon a stage, tricked up for the occasion. The earth is a desert upon which stones have been laid and herbs stuck into the crevices. The trees are put together out of separate leaves and twigs, and the rocks and mountains inserted like posts. In the earliest specimens the figures themselves have the same piecemeal look: their members are not born together, but put together. We see just how far the soul extends into them,—sometimes only to the eyes, then to the rest of the features, afterwards to the limbs and extremities. Evidently the artist's conception left much outside of it, to be added by way of label or explanation. In the trees, the care is to give the well-known fruit, the acorn or the apple, not the character of the tree; for what is wanted is only an indication what tree is meant. The only tie between man and the material world is the use he makes of it, elaborating and turning it into something it was not. Hence the trim orderliness of the mediæval landscape. Dante shows no love of the woods or the mountains, but only dread and dislike, and draws his tropes from engineering, from shipyards, moats, embankments.
The mediæval conception is higher than the antique; it recognizes a reality beyond the immediate, but not yet that it is the reality of the immediate and present also. But Art must dislodge this phantom of a lower, profane reality, and accept its own visions as authentic and sufficient. The modern mind is in this sense less religious than the mediæval, that the antithesis of phenomenal and real is less present to it. But the pungency of this antithesis comes from an imperfect realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines of the ideal.
The complaints of want of earnestness, devoutness, in modern Art, are as short-sighted as Schiller's lament over the prosaic present, as a world bereft of the gods. It is a loss to which we can well resign ourselves, that we no longer see God throned on Olympus, or anywhere else outside of the world. It is no misfortune that the mind has recognized under these alien forms a spirit akin to itself, and therefore no longer gives bribes to Fate by setting up images to it. The deity it worships is thenceforth no longer powerless to exist, nor is there any existence out of him; it needs not, then, to provide a limbo for him in some sphere of abstraction. What has fled is not the divinity, but its false isolation, its delegation to a corner of the universe. Instead of the god with his whims, we have law universal, the rule of mind, to which matter is not hostile, but allied and affirmative. That the sun is no longer the chariot of Helios, but a gravitating fireball, is only the other side of the perception that it is mind embodied, not some unrelated entity for which a charioteer must be deputed.
We no longer worship groves and fountains, nor Madonnas and saints, and our Art accordingly can no longer have the fervency, since its objects have not the concreteness, that belonged to former times. But it is to be noticed that Art can be devout only in proportion as Religion is artistic,—that is, as matter, and not spirit, is the immediate object of worship. Art and Religion spring from the same root, but coincide only at the outset, as in fetichism, the worship of the Black Stone of the Caaba, or the wonder-working Madonnas of Italy. The fetich is at once image and god; the interest in the appearance is not distinct from the interest in the meaning. It needs neither to be beautiful nor to be understood. But as the sense springs up of a related mind in the idol, the two sides are separated. It is no longer this thing merely, but, on the one hand, spirit, above and beyond matter, and, on the other, the appearance, equally self-sufficing and supreme among earthly things, just because its reality is not here, but elsewhere,—appearance, therefore, as transcendent, or Beauty.
To every age the religion of the foregoing seems artificial, incumbered with forms, and its Art superstitious, over-scrupulous, biased by considerations that have nothing to do with Art. Hence religious reformers are mystics, enthusiasts: this is the look of Luther, even of the hard-headed Calvin, as seen from the Roman-Catholic side. Hence, also, every epoch of revolution in Art seems to the preceding like an irruption of frivolity and profanity. Christian Art would have seemed so to the ancients; the Realism of the fourteenth century must have seemed so to the Giotteschi and the Renaissance, to both. The term Pre-Raphaelitism, though it seems an odd collocation to bring together such men as Frà Angelico, Filippo Lippi, and Luca Signorelli, has so far an intelligible basis, that all this period, from Giotto to Raphael, amidst all diversities, is characterized throughout by a deference of Art to something extraneous. It is not beauty that Frà Angelico looks for, but holiness, or beauty as expressing this; it is not beauty that draws Filippo Lippi, but homely actuality. It is from this point of view that the Renaissance has been attacked as wanting in faith, earnestness, humility. The Renaissance had swallowed all formulas. Nothing was in itself sacred, but all other considerations were sacrificed to the appeal to the eye. But this, so far from proving any "faithlessness," shows, on the contrary, an entire faith in their Art, that it was able to accomplish what was required of it, and needed not to be bolstered up by anything external. Mr. Ruskin wants language to express his contempt for Claude, because, in a picture entitled "Moses at the Burning Bush," he paints only a graceful landscape, in which the Bush is rather inconspicuous. But Claude might well reply, that what he intended was not a history, nor a homily, but a picture; that the name was added for convenience' sake, as he might name his son, John, without meaning any comparisons with the Evangelist. It is no defect, but a merit, that it requires nothing else than itself to explain it.
Claude depicts "an unutilized earth," whence all traces of care, labor, sorrow, rapine, and want,—all that can suggest the perils and trials of life,—is removed. The buildings are palaces or picturesque ruins; the personages promenade at leisure, or only pretend to be doing something. All action and story, all individuality of persons, objects, and events, is merged in a pervading atmosphere of tranquil, sunny repose,—as of a holiday-afternoon. It may seem to us an idle lubberland, a paradise of do-nothings;—Mr. Ruskin sees in it only a "dim, stupid, serene, leguminous enjoyment." But whoever knows Rome will at least recognize in Claude's pictures some reflex of that enchantment that still hangs over the wondrous city, and draws to it generation after generation of pilgrims. In what does the mysterious charm consist? Is it not that the place seems set apart from the working-day world of selfish and warring interests? that here all manner of men, for once, lay aside their sordid occupations and their vulgar standards, to come together on the ground of a common humanity? It is easy to sneer at the Renaissance, but to understand it we must take it in its connection. The matters that interested that age seem now superfluous, the recreations of a holiday rather than the business of life. But coming from the dust and din of the fifteenth century, it looks differently. It was, in whatever dim or fantastic shape, a recognition of universal brotherhood,—of a common ground whereon all mankind could meet in peace and even sympathy, were it only for a picnic. In this villeggiatura of the human race the immediate aim is no very lofty one,—not truth, not duty, but to please or be pleased. But who is it that is to be pleased? Not the great of the earth, not the consecrated of the Church, not the men merely of this guild or this nation, but Man. It is the festival of the new saint, Humanus,—a joyful announcement that the ancient antagonism is not fundamental, but destined to be overcome.
This dreamy, half-sad, but friendly and soothing influence, that breathes from Claude's landscapes, is not the highest that Nature can inspire, but it is far better than to see in the earth only food, lodging, and a place to fight in, or even mere background and filling-in.
The builders of the Rhine-castles looked down the reaches of the river only to spy out their prey or their enemy; the monks in their quiet valleys looked out for their trout-stream and kitchen-garden, but any interest beyond that would have been heathenish and dangerous. Whilst to the ancients the earth had value only as enjoyable, inhabitable, the earlier Christian ages valued it only as uninhabitable, as a wilderness repelling society. In the earliest mediæval landscapes, the effort to represent a wilderness that is there only for the sake of the hermits leads to the curious contradiction of a populous hermitage, every part of it occupied by figures resolutely bent on being alone, and sedulously ignoring the others. Humboldt quotes from the early Fathers some glowing descriptions of natural scenery, but they turn always upon the seclusion from mankind, and upon the contrast between the grandeur of God's works and the littleness of ours. But in Claude we have the hint, however crude, of a relation as unsordid as this, but positive and direct,—the soul of the landscape speaking at once to the soul of man,—showing itself cognate, already friendly, and needing only to throw off the husk of opposition. The defect is not that he defers too much to the purely pictorial, that he postpones the facts or the story to beauty, but that he does not defer enough, that he does not sufficiently trust his own eyes, but by way of further assurance drags in architecture, ships, mythological or Scripture stories, not caring for them himself, but supposing the spectator cares, so that they remain unassimilated, a scum floating on the surface and obscuring the work. Here is the "want of faith" with which, if any, he is justly chargeable,—that beauty is not enough for him, but he must make it pleasing. Pleasingness implies a languid acceptance, in which the mind is spared the shock of fresh suggestion or incitement. We call the Venus de' Medici, for instance, a pleasing statue, but the Venus of Milo beautiful; because in the one we find in fuller measure only what was already accepted and agreeable, whilst in the other we feel the presence of an unexplored and formidable personality, provoking the endeavor to follow it out and guess at its range and extent.
This deference to the spectator marks the decline of Art from the supremacy of its position as the interpreter of religion to mankind. The work is no longer a revelation devoutly received by the artist and piously transmitted to a believing world; but he is a cultivated man, who gives what is agreeable to a cultivated society, where the Bible is treated with decorum, but all enthusiasm is reserved for Plato and Cicero. The earlier and greater men brought much of what they were from the fifteenth century, but even Raphael is too academic. It is not a Chinese deference to tradition, nor conformity to a fixed national taste, such as ruled Greek Art as by an organic necessity. One knows not whether to wonder most at the fancied need to attach to the work the stamp of classic authority, or at the levity with which the venerable forms of antiquity are treated. Nothing can be more superficial than this varnish of classicality. The names of Cicero, Brutus, Augustus were in all mouths; but the real character of these men, or of any others, or of the times they lived in, was very slightly realized. The classic architecture, with its cogent adaptation and sequence of parts, is cut up into theatre-scenery: its "members" are members no longer, but scraps to be stuck about at will. The gods and heroes of the ancient world have become the pageant of a holiday; even the sacred legends of the Church receive only an outward respect, and at last not even that. Claude wants a foreground-figure and puts in Æneas, Diana, or Moses, he cares little which, and he would hear, unmoved, Mr. Ruskin's eloquent denunciation of their utter unfitness for the assumed character, and the absurdity of the whole action of the piece.
But the Renaissance had its religion, too,—namely, Culture. The one "virtue," acknowledged on all hands, alike by busy merchants, soldiers, despots, women, the acquaintance with Greek and Roman literature and art, was not quite the idle dilettanteism it seems. Lorenzo de' Medici said, that, without the knowledge of the Platonic philosophy, it was hard to be a good citizen and Christian. Leo X. thought, "Nothing more excellent or more useful has been given by the Creator to mankind, if we except only the knowledge and true worship of Himself, than these studies, which not only lead to the ornament and guidance of human life, but are applicable and useful to every particular situation." That this culture was superficial, that it regarded only show and outside, is no reproach, but means only that it was not a mere galvanizing of dead bones, that a new spirit was masquerading in these garments. Had it been in earnest in its revival of the past, it would have been insignificant; its disregard of the substance, and care for the form alone, showed that the form was used only as a protest against the old forms. A provincial narrowness, even a slight air of vulgarity, was felt to attach to the teachings of the Church. Gentility had come to imply not only heathendom, ("gentilis est qui in Christum non credit,") but liberal breeding. The attraction of the classic culture, "the humanities," as it was well called, was just this cosmopolitan largeness, that it had no prejudices and prescribed no test, but was open to all kinds of merit and every manner of man. Goethe, who belongs in good part to the Renaissance, frequently exemplifies this feeling, perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in the account of his pilgrimage to the temple of Minerva at Assisi, which he lovingly describes, remarking, at the same time, that he passed with only aversion the Church of St. Francis, with its frescos by Cimabue, Giotto, and their followers, which no traveller of our day willingly misses or soon forgets, though the temple may probably occupy but a small space in his memory. "I made no doubt," says Goethe, "that all the heads there bore the same stamp as my Captain's,"—an Italian officer, more orthodox than enlightened, with whom he had been travelling.
In truth, however diverse in its first appearance, the Italian Renaissance was the counterpart of the German Reformation, and, like that, a declaration that God is not shut up in a corner of the universe, nor His revelation restricted in regard of time, place, or persons. The day was long past when the Church was synonymous with civilization. The Church-ideal of holiness had long since been laid aside; a new world had grown up, in which other aims and another spirit prevailed. Macchiavelli thought the Church had nothing to do with worldly affairs, could do nothing for the State or for freedom. And the Church thought so, too. If it was left out of the new order of things, it was because it had left itself out. "The world" was godless, pompa Diaboli; devotion to God implied devotion (of the world) to the Devil. But the world, thus cut adrift, found itself yet alive and vigorous, and began thenceforth to live its own life, leaving the "other world" to take care of itself. Salvation, whether for the State or the individual, it was felt must come from individual effort, and not be conferred as a stamp or visa from the Pope and the College of Cardinals. It was not Religion that was dead, but only the Church. The Church being petrified into a negation, Culture, the religion of the world, was necessarily negative to that, and for a time absorbed in the mere getting rid of obstructions. Sainthood had never been proposed even as an ideal for all mankind, but only as fuga sæculi, the avoidance of all connection with human affairs. Logically, it must lead to the completest isolation, and find its best exponent in Simeon Stylites. The new ideal of Culture must involve first of all the getting rid of isolation, natural and artificial. Its representatives are such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Leon-Battista Alberti, masters of all arts and sciences, travelled, well-bred, at home in the universe,—thoroughly accomplished men of the world, with senses and faculties in complete harmonious development. It is an age full of splendid figures; whatever growth there was in any country came now to its flowering-time.
The drawback is want of purpose. This splendor looks only to show; there is no universal aim, no motive except whim,—the whims of men of talent, or the whim of the crowd. For the approbation of the Church is substituted the applause of cultivated society, a wider convention, but conventional still. This is the frivolous side of the Renaissance, not its holding light the old traditions, but that for the traditions it rejected it had nothing but tradition to substitute. But if this declaration of independence was at first only a claim for license, not for liberty, this is only what was natural, and may be said of Protestantism as well. Protestantism, too, had its orthodoxy, and has not even yet quite realized that the private judgment whose rights it vindicated does not mean personal whim, and therefore is not fortified by the assent of any man or body of men, nor weakened by their dissent, but belongs alone to thought, which is necessarily individual, and at the same time of universal validity; whereas, personality is partial, belongs to the crowd, and to that part of the man which confounds him with the crowd. Were the private judgment indeed private, it would have no rights. Of what consequence the private judgments of a tribe of apes, or of Bushmen? This reference to the bystanders means only an appeal from the Church; it is at bottom a declaration that the truth is not a miraculous exception, a falsehood which for this particular occasion is called truth, but the substance of the universe, apparent everywhere, and to all that seek it. The perception must be its own evidence, it must be true for us, now and here. We have no right to blame the Renaissance painters for their love of show, for Art exists for show, and the due fulfilment of its purpose, bringing to the surface what was dimly indicated, must engage it the more thoroughly in the superficial aspect, and make all reference to a hidden ulterior meaning more and more a mere pretence. What was once Thought has now become form, color, surface; to make a mystery of it would be thoughtlessness or hypocrisy.
The shortcoming is not in the artists, but in Art. Painting shares the same fate as Sculpture: not only is the soul not a thing, it is not wholly an appearance, but combines with its appearing a constant protest against the finality of it. Not only is the body an inadequate manifestation, but what it manifests is itself progressive, and any conception of it restrictive and partial. Henceforth any representation of the human form must either pretend a mystery that is not felt, or, if inspired by a genuine interest, it must be of a lower kind, and must avoid of set purpose any undue exaltation of one part over another, as of the face over the limbs, and dwell rather upon harmony of lines and colors, wherein nothing shall be prominent at the expense of the rest, seeking to make up what is wanting in intensity, in inward meaning, by allusion, by an interest reflected from without, instead of the immediate and intuitive. We often feel, even in Raphael's pictures, that the aim is lower than, for instance, Frà Angelico's. But it is at least genuine, and what that saves us from we may see in some of Perugino's and Pinturicchio's altar-pieces, where spirituality means kicking heels, hollow cheeks, and a deadly-sweet smile. That Raphael, among all his Holy Families, painted only one Madonna di San Sisto, and that hastily, on trifling occasion, shows that it was a chance-hit rather than the normal fruit of his genius. The beauty that shines like celestial flame from the face of the divine child, and the transfigured humanity of the mother, are no denizens of earth, but fugitive radiances that tinge it for a moment and are gone. For once, the impossible is achieved; the figures hover, dreamlike, disconnected from all around, as if the canvas opened and showed, not what is upon it, but beyond it. But it is a casual success, not to be sought or expected. A wise instinct made the painter in general shun such direct, explicit statement, and rather treat the subject somewhat cavalierly than allow it to confront and confound him. The greater he is, and the more complete his development, the more he must dread whatever makes his Art secondary or superfluous. Whatever force we give to the reproach of want of elevation, etc., the only impossible theme is the unartistic.
But before we give heed to any such reproach we must beware of confounding the personality of the artist or the fashion of the time with the moving spirit in both. He works always—as Michel Angelo complained that he was painting the ceiling of the Sistine—over his own head, and blinded by his own paint. The purpose that we speak of is not his petty doings and intentions, but what he unintentionally accomplishes. It is the spiritual alone that interests; and if later Art seem, by comparison, wanting in spirituality, this is partly the effect of its juster appreciation, that rendered direct expression hopeless, but at the same time superfluous, by discovering the same import more accessible elsewhere, as the higher indirect meaning of all material things. Critics tell us that the charm of landscape is incomplete without the presence of man,—that there must always be some hint, at least, of human habitation or influence. Certainly it is always a human interest, it is not the timber and the water, that moves us, but the echo of a kindred mind. But in the "landscape and figures" it is hardly a human interest that we take in the figures. The "dull victims of pipe and mug" serve our turn perhaps better than the noblest mountaineers. It is not to them that we look for the spirit of the landscape,—rather anywhere else. It is the security of the perception that allows it to dispense with pointed demonstration, and to delight rather in obscurer intimations of its meaning.
The modern ideal is the Picturesque,—a beauty not detachable, belonging to the picture, to the composition, not to the component parts. It has no favorites; it is violated alike by the systematic glorification and the systematic depreciation of particular forms. The Apollo Belvedere would make as poor a figure in the foreground of a modern landscape as a fisherman in jack-boots and red nightcap on a pedestal in the Vatican. Claude's or Turner's figures may be absurd, when taken by themselves; but the absurdity consists in taking them by themselves. Turner, it is said, could draw figures well; Claude probably could not; (he is more likely to have tried;) but each must have felt that anything that should call attention to the figures would be worse than any bad drawing. Nicolas Poussin was well called "the learned"; for it is his learning, his study of the antique, of Raphael, of drapery and anatomy, that most appears in his landscapes and gives his figures their plastic emphasis. But this is no praise for a painter.
Of course the boundary-lines cannot be very exactly drawn; the genius of a Delaroche or a Millais will give interest to a figure-piece at whatever epoch. But such pictures as Etty's, or Page's Venus, where the beauty of the human body is the point of attraction, are flat anachronisms, and for this reason, not from any prudishness of the public, can never excite a hearty enthusiasm. From the sixteenth century downwards all pictures become more and more tableaux de genre,—the piece is not described by the nominal subject, but only the class to which it belongs, leaving its special character wholly undetermined. And in proportion as the action and the detail are dwelt upon, the more evident is it that the theme is only a pretence. Martyrdoms, when there was any fervency of faith in the martyrs, were very abstract. A hint of sword or wheel sufficed. The saints and the angels, as long as men believed in them, carried their witness in their faces, with only some conventional indication of their history. As soon as direct representation is aimed at and the event portrayed as an historical fact, it is proof enough that all direct interest is gone and nothing left but the technical problem. The martyrdoms are vulgar execution-scenes,—the angels, men sprawling upon clouds. Michel Angelo was a noble, devout man, but it is clear that the God he prayed to was not the God he painted.
This essential disparity between idea and representation is the weak side of Art, plastic and pictorial; but because it is essential it is not felt by the artist as defect. His genius urges him to all advance that is possible within the limits of his Art, but not to transcend it. It will be in vain to exhort him to unite the ancient piety to the modern knowledge. If he listen to the exhortation, he may be a good critic, but he is no painter. He must be absorbed in what he sees to the exclusion of everything else; impartiality is a virtue to all the world except him. There will always be a onesidedness; either the conception or the embodying of it halts, is only partially realized; some incompleteness, some mystery, some apparent want of coincidence between form and meaning is a necessity to the artist, and if he does not find it, he will invent it. Hence the embarrassment of some of the English Pre-Raphaelitists, particularly in dealing with the human form. They have no hesitation in pursuing into still further minuteness the literal delineation of inanimate objects, draperies, etc.; but they shrink from giving full life to their figures, not from a slavish adherence to their exemplars, but from a dread lest it should seem that what is shown is all that is meant. The early painters were thus naïve and distinct because of their limitations; they knew very well what they meant,—as, that the event took place out-of-doors, with the sun shining, the grass under-foot, an oak-tree here, a strawberry-vine there,—mere adjunct and by-play, not to be questioned as to the import of the piece: that the Church took care of. But who can say what a modern landscape means? The significance that in the older picture was as it were outside of it, presupposed, assured elsewhere, has now to be incorporated, verily present in every atom of soil and film of vapor. The realism of the modern picture must be infinitely more extended, for the meaning of it is that nothing is superfluous or insignificant. But with the reality that it lends to every particle of matter, it must introduce, at the same time, the protest that spirit makes against matter,—most distinct, indeed, in the human form and countenance, but nowhere absent. In its utmost explication there must be felt that there is yet more behind; its utmost distinctness must be everywhere indefinable, evanescent,—must proclaim that this parade of surface-appearance is not there for its own sake. This is what Mr. Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy": but there is nothing fallacious in it; it is solid truth, only under the guise of mystery. Turner said that Mr. Ruskin had put all sorts of meanings into his pictures that he knew nothing about. Of course, else they would never have got into the pictures. But this does not affect their validity, but means only that it is the imagination, not the intellect, that must apprehend them.
It is not an outward, arbitrary incompleteness that is demanded, but a visible dependence of each part, by its partiality declaring the completeness of the whole. It is often said that the picture must "leave room for the imagination." Yes, and for nothing else; but this does not imply that it should be unfinished, but that, when the painter has set down what the imagination grasped in one view, he shall stop, no matter where, and not attempt to eke out the deficiency by formula or by knack of fingers. Wherever the inspiration leaves him, there is an end of the picture. Beyond that we get only his personalities; no skill, no earnestness of intention, etc., can avail him; he is only mystifying himself or us. At these points we sooner or later come up with him, are as good as he, and the work forthwith begins to tire. What is tiresome is to have thrust upon us the dead surface of matter: this is the prose of the world, which we come to Art to escape. It is prosaic, because it is seen as the understanding sees it, as an aggregate only, apart from its vital connection; it matters little whose the understanding is. The artist must be alive only to the totality of the impression, blind and deaf to all outside of that. He must believe that the idyl he sees in the landscape is there because he sees it, and will appear in the picture without the help of demonstration. The danger is, that from weakness of faith he will fancy or pretend that he sees something else, which may be there, but formed no part of the impression. It is simply a question of natural attraction, magnetism, how much he can take up and carry; all beyond that is hindrance, and any conscious endeavor of his cannot help, but can only thwart.
The picturesque has its root in the mind's craving for totality. It is Nature seen as a whole; all the characteristics and prerequisites of it come back to this,—such as roughness, wildness, ruin, obscurity, the gloom of night or of storm; whatever the outward discrepancy, wherever the effect is produced, it is because in some way there is a gain in completeness. On this condition everything is welcome,—without it, nothing. Thus, a broken, weedy bank is more picturesque than the velvet slope,—the decayed oak than the symmetry of the sapling,—the squalid shanty by the railroad, with its base of dirt, its windows stuffed with old hats, and the red shirts dependent from its eaves, than the neatest brick cottage. They strike a richer accord, while the others drone on a single note. Moonlight is always picturesque, because it substitutes mass and breadth for the obtrusiveness of petty particulars. It is not the pettiness, but the particularity, that makes them unpicturesque. No impressiveness in the object can atone for exclusiveness. Niagara cannot be painted, not because it is too difficult, but because it is no landscape, but like a vast illuminated capital letter filling the whole page, or the sublime monotony of the mosque-inscriptions, declaring in thousandfold repetition that God is great. The soaring sublimity of the Moslem monotheism comes partly from its narrowness and abstractness. Is it because we are a little hard of hearing that it takes such reiteration to move us?
The wholeness which the imagination demands is not quantitative, but qualitative; it has nothing to do with size or with number, except so far as, by confusing the sense, they obscurely intimate infinity, with which all quantities are incommensurable. Mr. Ruskin's encyclopedic anatomizing of the landscape, to the end of showing the closeness of Turner's perception, has great interest, but not the interest merely of a longer list, for it is to be remembered that the longest list would be no nearer to an exhaustive analysis than the shortest. It is not a specious completeness, but a sense of infinity that can never be completed,—greater intensity, not greater extension,—that distinguishes modern landscape-art. Hence there is no incongruity in the seeming license that it takes with the firm order of Nature. It is in no spirit of levity or profanity that the substantial distinctions of things are thus disregarded,—that all absolute rank is denied, and the value of each made contingent and floating. It is only that the mind is somewhat nearer apprehending the sense, and dwells less on the characters.
If Art suffers in its relative rank among human interests by this democratic levelling, it is to the gain of what Art intends. It is true, no picture can henceforth move us as men were once moved by pictures. No Borgo Allegro will ever turn out again in triumph for a Madonna of Cimabue or of any one else; whatever feeling Turner or another may excite comes far short of that. But the splendor that clothed the poor, pale, formal image belonged very little to it, but expressed rather the previous need of utterance, and could reach that pitch only when the age had not yet learned to think and to write, but must put up with these hieroglyphics. Art has no more grown un-religious than Religion has, but only less idolatrous. As fast as religion passes into life,—as the spiritual nature of man begins to be recognized as the ground of legislation and society, and not merely in the miracle of sainthood,—the apparatus and imagery of the Church, its dogmas and ceremonies, grow superfluous, as what they stand for is itself present. It is the dawn that makes these stars grow pale. So in Art, as fast as the dream of the imagination becomes the common sense of mankind, and only so fast, the awe that surrounded the earlier glimpses is lost. Its influence is not lessened, but diffused and domesticated as Culture.
Art is the truly popular philosophy. Our picture-gazing and view-hunting only express the feeling that our science is too abstract, that it does not attach us, but isolates us in the universe. What we are thus inwardly drawn to explore is not the chaff and exuviæ of things, not their differences only, but their central connection, in spite of apparent diversity. This, stated, is the Ideal, the abrupt contradiction of the actual, and the creation of a world extraordinary, in which all defect is removed. But the defect cannot be cured by correction, for that admits its right to exist; it is not by exclusion that limitation is overcome,—this is only to establish a new limitation,—but by inclusion, by reaching the point where the superficial antagonism vanishes. Then the ideal is seen no longer in opposition, but everywhere and alone existent. As this point is approached, the impulse to reconstruct the actual—as if the triumph of truth were staked on that venture—dies out. The elaborate contradiction loses interest, earliest where it is most elaborate and circumstantial, and latest where the image has least materiality and fixity, where it is only a reminder of what the actual is securely felt to be, in spite of its stubborn exterior.
The modern mind is therefore less demonstrative; our civilization seeks less to declare and typify itself outwardly in works of Art, manners, dress, etc. Hence it is, perhaps, that the beauty of the race has not kept pace with its culture. It is less beautiful, because it cares less for beauty, since this is no longer the only reconcilement of the actual with the inward demands. The vice of the imagination is its inevitable exaggeration. It is our own weakness and dulness that we try to hide from ourselves by this partiality. Therefore it was said that the images were the Bible of the laity. Bishop Durandus already in the thirteenth century declared that it is only where the truth is not yet revealed that this "Judaizing" is permissible.
The highest of all arts is the art of life. In this the superficial antagonisms of use and beauty, of fact and reality, disappear. A little gain here, or the hint of it, richly repays all the lost magnificence. We need not concern ourselves lest these latter ages should be left bankrupt of the sense of beauty, for that is but a phase of a force that is never absent; nothing can supersede it but itself in a higher power. What we lament as decay only shows its demands fulfilled, and the arts it has left behind are but the landmarks of its accomplished purpose.