This law of duality, or reaction of genius on genius, will also be found to apply to artists, philosophers, historians, orators. These also come in pairs, manifesting the same antagonistic qualities.
Some artists are lyric; putting their own souls into every face, every figure, making even a landscape alive with their own mood; adding—
"A gleam
Of lustre known to neither sea nor land
But borrowed from the poet-painter's dream."
In every landscape of Claude we find the soul of Claude; in every rugged rock-defile of Salvator we read his mood. These artists are lyric; but there are also great dramatic painters, who give you, not themselves, but men and women; so real, so differentiated, characters so full of the variety and antagonism of nature, that the whole life of a period springs into being at their touch.
Take for instance two names, which always go together, standing side by side at the summit of Italian art,—Michael Angelo and Raphael. Though Raphael was a genius of boundless exuberance, and poured on the wall and canvas a flood of forms, creating as nature creates, without pause or self-repetition, yet there is a tone in all which irresistibly speaks of the artist's own soul. He created a world of Raphaels. Grace, sweetness, and tenderness went into all his work. Every line has the same characteristic qualities.
Turn to the frescoes by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. As we look up at those mighty forms—prophets, sibyls, seers, with multitudes of subordinate figures—we gradually trace in each prophet, king, or bard an individual character. Each one is himself. How fully each face and attitude is differentiated by some inward life. How each—David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Persian and the Libyan sibyl—stands out, distinct, filled with a power or a tenderness all his own. Michael Angelo himself is not there, except as a fountain of creative life, from whose genius all these majestic persons come forth as living realities.
Hanging on my walls are the well-known engravings of Guido's Aurora and Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. One of these is purely lyrical; the other as clearly dramatic.
The Aurora is so exquisitely lovely, the forms so full of grace, the movement of all the figures so rapid yet so firm, that I can never pass it without stopping to enjoy its charms. But variety is absent. The hours are lovely sisters, as Ovid describes sisters:—
"Facies non omnibus una,
Nec diversa tamen, qualis decet esse sororum."