These are two cases of that complete welding of form and spirit which is all one need or should demand of art; the rest is a mere question of the artist’s emotional quality and stature. Art, in fact, will take all paths after the war just as before; and now and then the artist will fashion that true blend of form and fancy which is the achievement of beauty.
For Monsieur Rodin, beauty is the adoration of all that man perceives with his spiritual senses. Yes. And the task of artists is to kneel before life till they rive the heart from it and with that heart twine their own; out of such marriages come precious offspring, winged messengers.
There is a picture of Francesca’s in the Louvre, too much restored—some say it is not a Francesca, but if not, then neither are they Francescas in the English National Gallery, and those, so far as I know, are not disputed—a picture of the Virgin, with hands pressed together, before her naked Babe, in a landscape of hills and waters. Her kneeling figure has in it I cannot tell what of devotion and beauty, which makes the heart turn over within one. With his spiritual senses the painter has perceived, and in adoration set down what he has seen, mingling with it the longings of his own heart. And they who look on that picture know for evermore what devotion and beauty are. And if they be artists, they go away fortified again to the taking up of a long quest.
This is the utility of art. It plays between men like light, showing the heights and depths of nature, beckoning on, or warning of destruction, and ever through emotion revealing heart to heart. It is the priestess of Humanism, confirming to us our future, reassuring our faltering faith in our own approach to the Unknowable, till the tides of the Creative Purpose turn, and our world gets cold; and Man, having lived his day to the uttermost, finds gradual sleep.
TRE CIME DI LAVAREDO
(From the Book of Italy, 1916.)
Most of us who have lived a good long time have found some part of the world to look on as the happy hunting-ground of our spirits, the place most blessed by memory. And within that sacred circle there will be some spot, above all others, enchanted.
Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Drei Zinnen! You three rock mountains above Misurina of the Italian Tyrol—how many times have we not climbed up, to lie on your high stony slopes, steeping our eyes in wild form and colour, wherefrom even a dull spirit must take wings and soar a little! Width of thought is surely born, in some sort, of majestic sights—cloud forms, and a burning sky, rock pinnacles, and wandering, deep-down valleys, the gray-violet shadows on the hills, the frozen serenity of far snows. All the outspread miracle there lies fan-shaped to the south, south-east, south-west, having that warmth which so makes the heart rejoice the moment one passes over and looks southward from any mountain. What traveller does not feel strange loveliness steal up into his soul from southern slopes? Domodossola below the Simplon; Val d’Aosta beyond the Matterhorn; Bormio beneath the Stelvio; and many another holy place. It is not merely charm and mellowness—the South can be savage as the North—it is some added poignancy of form and colour, and a look of being blessed.
Tre Cime di Lavaredo! Music comes drifting up your slopes, from pasture far down enough to give magic to cow-bells.
But now, where but three years ago we watched a little white cow licking its herd’s sprained hand, men are fighting to the death. Batteries must be adorning that steep forcella running from the refuge hut. A new kind of thunder reverberates, in whose roar the stones that were for ever falling will have lost their voices. And the beasts, the gray, the dun, the white, mild-eyed—their pasture below must be a desert! Even the goats surely have gone. Or do they and their young masters attend placidly on these new mysteries, just pricking their ears now and again at some too raucous clap and clatter of guns?