“Oh hark, oh hear! how thin and clear
And thinner, clearer, further going.
Ah! sweet and far, from cliff and scar,
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing.”
In those lines we have the idea of sound conveyed to us most forcibly. The flow of the words describes exactly (and they even imitate) the long travel of the bugle notes, far across the lake, up the vales, and finally dying away into the remotest distance. Surely the thought of that passage is best told in language. What could pigments do with it? What could a fine technician like Bargue or a poet in paint like Delacroix make of that mellow music? They might picture someone with a horn to his lips and a mountain lake in the background; but the fetching part of those Elfland horns is not their look, but their sound. What could the painters do with the sound? Why nothing except to let it alone. A flat canvas will not discourse music like the board of a piano. Forms and colors may talk very eloquently to the eye, but they say nothing to the ear. The old division of the arts made over a century ago by Lessing is still acceptable to-day. The fine arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting address the sense of sight; the fine arts of music and literature address the sense of hearing. Therefore, let us assume that such thoughts, ideas, or emotions, poetic or otherwise, as a painter may wish to express in painting should be primarily pictorial by addressing the sense of sight.
XVII.—BENOZZO GOZZOLI, Adoration of Kings (detail). Riccardi Palace, Florence.
There is another, a minor limitation put upon painting which in its way is quite as binding as the major one. This is the time limit. A painting is not a shifting panorama like a drama. It cannot picture (though it may hint at) the past or the future; it can deal adequately only with the present. You may turn the leaves of a book and pass from Greek days to the present time as you read; but you cannot do that with a picture. It does not turn or shift or show any more than the one face. Therefore the idea in art, generally speaking, should not concern itself with time, or be dependent upon shiftings of scene, or deal with anything that has gone before or is to come after. A picture of Charlotte Corday on the way to the guillotine indicates a present happening, and, so far as it offers something complete in itself, it is pictorial enough; but the picture fails to tell us that some days before she assassinated Marat, and that some minutes later she herself will be done away with by the executioner’s knife. The title of the picture may tell us her story, but then that is leaning upon literature again. A painting of “Alexander Entering Babylon” by Lebrun may show us marching troops, elephants, chariots, and Alexander himself surrounded by his generals. It is a present scene; but how shall the picture tell you who Alexander was, what battles he fought, what ending he came to? It may suggest the past and the future by the present condition, but the suggestion is often too vague for human comprehension. Time-movement, sequential events are really beyond the reach of pigments.
It is much easier deciding what painting can picture than what it cannot. We have only to ask ourselves if the subject is one that may be comprehended by the unaided eye, and if it is a theme completed in present time. Painting moves freely only within these boundaries, whereas literature moves within and without them as it pleases, and with measurable success even in pictorial themes. Here is a word-landscape by Scott that illustrates my meaning:
“Sweet Teviot, on thy silver tide