148. That generation is passing away, and another dynasty is putting forth its character and its laws. Care and observance, more mischievous in their misdirection than indifference or scorn, have in many places given the mediæval relics the aspect and associations of a kind of cabinet preservation, instead of that air of majestic independence, or patient and stern endurance, with which they frowned down the insult of the regardless crowd. Nominal restoration has done tenfold worse, and has hopelessly destroyed what time, and storm, and anarchy, and impiety had spared. The picturesque material of a lower kind is fast departing—and forever. There is not, so far as we know, one city scene in central Europe which has not suffered from some jarring point of modernization. The railroad and the iron wheel have done their work, and the characters of Venice, Florence, and Rouen are yielding day by day to a lifeless extension of those of Paris and Birmingham. A few lusters more, and the modernization will be complete: the archæologist may still find work among the wrecks of beauty, and here and there a solitary fragment of the old cities may exist by toleration, or rise strangely before the workmen who dig the new foundations, left like some isolated and tottering rock in the midst of sweeping sea. But the life of the middle ages is dying from their embers, and the warm mingling of the past and present will soon be forever dissolved. The works of Prout, and of those who have followed in his footsteps, will become memorials the most precious of the things that have been; to their technical value, however great, will be added the far higher interest of faithful and fond records of a strange and unreturning era of history. May he long be spared to us, and enabled to continue the noble series, conscious of a purpose and function worthy of being followed with all the zeal of even his most ardent and affectionate mind. A time will come when that zeal will be understood, and his works will be cherished with a melancholy gratitude when the pillars of Venice shall lie moldering in the salt shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have become ballast for the barges of the Seine.
SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.[22]
149. Long ago discarded from our National Gallery, with the contempt logically due to national or English pictures,—lost to sight and memory for many a year in the Ogygian seclusions of Marlborough House—there have reappeared at last, in more honorable exile at Kensington, two great pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two, with others; but these alone worth many an entanglement among the cross-roads of the West, to see for half an hour by spring sunshine:—the Holy Family, and the Graces, side by side now in the principal room. Great, as ever was work wrought by man. In placid strength, and subtlest science, unsurpassed;—in sweet felicity, incomparable.
150. If you truly want to know what good work of painter's hand is, study those two pictures from side to side, and miss no inch of them (you will hardly, eventually, be inclined to miss one): in some respects there is no execution like it; none so open in the magic. For the work of other great men is hidden in its wonderfulness—you cannot see how it was done. But in Sir Joshua's there is no mystery: it is all amazement. No question but that the touch was so laid; only that it could have been so laid, is a marvel forever. So also there is no painting so majestic in sweetness. He is lily-sceptered: his power blossoms, but burdens not. All other men of equal dignity paint more slowly; all others of equal force paint less lightly. Tintoret lays his line like a king marking the boundaries of conquered lands; but Sir Joshua leaves it as a summer wind its trace on a lake; he could have painted on a silken veil, where it fell free, and not bent it.
151. Such at least is his touch when it is life that he paints: for things lifeless he has a severer hand. If you examine that picture of the Graces you will find it reverses all the ordinary ideas of expedient treatment. By other men flesh is firmly painted, but accessories lightly. Sir Joshua paints accessories firmly,[23] flesh lightly;—nay, flesh not at all, but spirit. The wreath of flowers he feels to be material; and gleam by gleam strikes fearlessly the silver and violet leaves out of the darkness. But the three maidens are less substantial than rose petals. No flushed nor frosted tissue that ever faded in night wind is so tender as they; no hue may reach, no line measure, what is in them so gracious and so fair. Let the hand move softly—itself as a spirit; for this is Life, of which it touches the imagery.
152. "And yet——" Yes: you do well to pause. There is a "yet" to be thought of. I did not bring you to these pictures to see wonderful work merely, or womanly beauty merely. I brought you chiefly to look at that Madonna, believing that you might remember other Madonnas, unlike her; and might think it desirable to consider wherein the difference lay:—other Madonnas not by Sir Joshua, who painted Madonnas but seldom. Who perhaps, if truth must be told, painted them never: for surely this dearest pet of an English girl, with the little curl of lovely hair under her ear, is not one.
153. Why did not Sir Joshua—or could not—or would not Sir Joshua—paint Madonnas? neither he, nor his great rival-friend Gainsborough? Both of them painters of women, such as since Giorgione and Correggio had not been; both painters of men, such as had not been since Titian. How is it that these English friends can so brightly paint that particular order of humanity which we call "gentlemen and ladies," but neither heroes, nor saints, nor angels? Can it be because they were both country-bred boys, and for ever after strangely sensitive to courtliness? Why, Giotto also was a country-bred boy. Allegri's native Correggio, Titian's Cadore, were but hill villages; yet these men painted, not the court, nor the drawing-room, but the Earth: and not a little of Heaven besides: while our good Sir Joshua never trusts himself outside the park palings. He could not even have drawn the strawberry girl, unless she had got through a gap in them—or rather, I think, she must have been let in at the porter's lodge, for her strawberries are in a pottle, ready for the ladies at the Hall. Giorgione would have set them, wild and fragrant, among their leaves, in her hand. Between his fairness, and Sir Joshua's May-fairness, there is a strange, impassable limit—as of the white reef that in Pacific isles encircles their inner lakelets, and shuts them from the surf and sound of sea. Clear and calm they rest, reflecting fringed shadows of the palm-trees, and the passing of fretted clouds across their own sweet circle of blue sky. But beyond, and round and round their coral bar, lies the blue of sea and heaven together—blue of eternal deep.
154. You will find it a pregnant question, if you follow it forth, and leading to many others, not trivial, Why it is, that in Sir Joshua's girl, or Gainsborough's, we always think first of the Ladyhood; but in Giotto's, of the Womanhood? Why, in Sir Joshua's hero, or Vandyck's, it is always the Prince or the Sir whom we see first; but in Titian's, the man.
Not that Titian's gentlemen are less finished than Sir Joshua's; but their gentlemanliness[24] is not the principal thing about them; their manhood absorbs, conquers, wears it as a despised thing. Nor—and this is another stern ground of separation—will Titian make a gentleman of everyone he paints. He will make him so if he is so, not otherwise; and this not merely in general servitude to truth, but because in his sympathy with deeper humanity, the courtier is not more interesting to him than anyone else. "You have learned to dance and fence; you can speak with clearness, and think with precision; your hands are small, your senses acute, and your features well-shaped. Yes: I see all this in you, and will do it justice. You shall stand as none but a well-bred man could stand; and your fingers shall fall on the sword-hilt as no fingers could but those that knew the grasp of it. But for the rest, this grisly fisherman, with rusty cheek and rope-frayed hand, is a man as well as you, and might possibly make several of you, if souls were divisible. His bronze color is quite as interesting to me, Titian, as your paleness, and his hoary spray of stormy hair takes the light as well as your waving curls. Him also I will paint, with such picturesqueness as he may have; yet not putting the picturesqueness first in him, as in you I have not put the gentlemanliness first. In him I see a strong human creature, contending with all hardship: in you also a human creature, uncontending, and possibly not strong. Contention or strength, weakness or picturesqueness, and all other such accidents in either, shall have due place. But the immortality and miracle of you—this clay that burns, this color that changes—are in truth the awful things in both: these shall be first painted—and last."