THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
If this picture in any degree fulfil its object, if we are impressed and moved by it, then it is not matter for words, it partakes of the unspeakableness of its subject. If it fall short of this, it fails utterly, and is not worth any words but those of displeasure, for nothing is more worthless, nothing is more truly profane, and few things are more common, than the attempt to represent sacred ideas by a man who is himself profane, and incapable of impressing others. For it is as unseemly, and in the true sense as profane, for a painter to paint such subjects if he do not feel them, as it is for a man to preach the great truths of our most holy faith, being himself an unbeliever, or at the best a Gallio, in both cases working merely for effect, or to bring in wages.
This picture is not liable to any such rebuke. Whatever may be thought of its central idea and of its expression, no one can doubt—no one can escape coming-under—its power, its true sacredness. Watch the people studying it; listen, not to their words, but to their silence; they are all as if performing an act of worship, or at least of devout reverence. The meaning of the picture reaches you at once: that lonely, serious, sorrowful, majestic countenance and form; those wonderful listening eyes, so full of concern, of compassion—"acquainted with grief;" the attitude of anxious hearkening, as if "waiting to be gracious." This idea rules the whole. We all feel who He is, and what He is desiring; and we feel, perhaps it may be in a way never felt before, the divine depth of the words, "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man open unto me, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with me;" and we see that though He is a king, and is "travelling in the greatness of his strength, mighty to save," He cannot open the door—it must open from within—He can only stand and knock.
We confess that, with this thought filling our mind, we care little for the beautiful and ingenious symbols with which the painter has enriched his work; that garden run wild, that Paradise Lost, with the cold starlight indicating and concealing its ruin—all things waste, the light from the lantern falling on the apple (a wonderful bit of painting)—the fruit of that forbidden tree the darnel or tares choking up the door, and the gentle but inveterate ivy grasping it to the lintel; the Jewish and the Gentile emblems clasped together across his breast; the crown, at once royal and of thorns set with blood-red carbuncles; and many other emblems full of subtle spiritual meaning. We confess to rather wishing the first impression had been left alone.
The faults of the picture as a work of art are, like its virtues, those of its school—imitation is sometimes mistaken for representation. There is a want of the unity, breadth, and spaciousness of nature about the landscape, as if the painter had looked with one eye shut, and thus lost the stereoscopic effect of reality—the solidarity of binocular vision; this gives a displeasing flatness. It is too full of astonishing bits, as if it had been looked at, as well as painted, piece-meal. With regard to the face of our Saviour, this is hardly a subject for criticism,—as we have said, it is full of majesty and tenderness and meaning; but we have never yet seen any image of that face so expressive as not to make us wish that it had been left alone to the heart and imagination of each for himself. In the "Entombment," by Titian, one of the three or four greatest pictures in the world, the face of the dead Saviour is in shadow, as if the painter preferred leaving it thus, to making it more definite; as if he relied on the idea—on the spiritual image—rising up of itself; as if he dared not be definite; thus showing at once his greatness and modesty by acknowledging that there is "that within which passeth show."
RIZPAH.
Take one of Turner's sketches in his Liber Studiorum, a book which, for truth and power, and the very highest imaginative vis, must be compared, not with any other book of prints, but with such word-pictures as you find in Dante, in Cowper, in Wordsworth, or in Milton. It is a dark foreground filled with gloom, savage and wild in its structure; a few grim heavy trees deepen the gloom: in the centre, and going out into the illimitable sky, is a brief, irregular bit of the purest radiance, luminous, but far off. There is a strange meaning about the place; it is "not uninformed with phantasy, and looks that threaten the profane." You look more keenly into it. In the centre of the foreground sits a woman, her face hidden, her whole form settled down as by some deep sorrow; she holds up, but with her face averted, a flaming torch; behind, and around her, lie stretched out seven bodies as of men, half-naked, and dimly indicating far-gone decay; at their feet are what seem like crowns. There is a lion seen with extended tail slinking off, and a bittern has just sprung up in the corner from a reedy pool. The waning moon is lying as if fainting in the grey heavens. The harvest sheaves stand near at hand, against the sky. The picture deepens in its gloom. The torch gives more of its fitful light as you steadily gaze. What is all this? These are two sons and five grandsons of Saul, who "fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the beginning of barley harvest." And she who sits there solitary is "Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, who took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night." For five months did this desolate mother watch by the bodies of her sons! She is at her ceaseless work, morn, noon, and night incessantly. How your heart now fills, as well as your eyes! How you realize the idea! What a sacred significance it gives to the place, and receives from it! What thoughts it awakens! Saul and his miserable story, David and his lamentation, the mountains of Gil-boa, the streets of Askelon. The king of beasts slinking off once more, hungry, angry, and afraid—finding her still there. The barley sheaves, indicating by a touch of wonderful genius, that it is nearer the beginning than the end of her time, so that we project our sympathy forward upon the future months. No one but a great artist would have thought of this. And that unfailing, forlorn woman, what love! That only love which He whose name and nature it has honoured by admitting to be nearest, though at an infinite distance from His own. "Can a woman forget?—Yea, she may forget." Here we have a scene in itself impressive, and truthfully rendered, enriched, and sanctified by a subject of the highest dignity, and deepest tenderness, and in perfect harmony with it.