THE DANCE OF THE PLEIADES
Elihu Vedder
If art is a corner of the universe seen through a temperament, the temperament of Mr. Vedder must offer an enthralling study, for it seems to be a lens whose power of refraction defies prophecy because it deals with the incalculable forces. His art concerns itself little with the æsthetic, but is chiefly the art of the intellect and the imagination. All manner of symbols and analogies; the laws of the universe that prevail beyond the stars; the celestial figures; the undreamed significance in prophecy or in destiny; omens, signs, and wonders; the world forces, advancing stealthily in the shadows of a dusky twilight; the Fates, under brilliant skies, gathering in the stars; oracles and supernatural coincidences that lurk in undreamed-of days; the Pleiades dancing in a light that never was on sea or land; unknown Shapes that meet outside space and time and question each other’s identity; the dead that come forth from their graves and glide, silent and spectral, through a crowd, unseen by any one; the prayer of the celestial powers poured forth in the utter solitude of the vast desert,—it is these that are the realm of Vedder’s art, and what has the normal world of portrait and landscape to do with such art as this? Can it only be relegated to a class, an order, of its own, and considered as being—Vedderesque? It seems to stand alone and unparalleled. In his work lies the transfiguration of all mystery. Vedder never paints nature, in the sense of landscapes, and yet one often feels that he has the key to the very creation of nature; that he has supped with gods and surprised the secrets of the stars. Do the winds whisper to him?—
“The Muse can knit
What is past, what is done,
With the web that’s just begun.”
How can he find the design to phrase his thought—this painter of ideas?
“Can blaze be done in cochineal,
Or noon in mazarin?”
Whatever the Roman environment may have done for Allston, Page, and Story, there is no question but that to Vedder it has been as his soul’s native air. For him the sirens sing again on the coast; the sorceress works her spell; the Cumæan Sibyl again flies, wraithlike, over the plain, clasping her rejected leaves of destiny which Tarquin in his blindness has refused to buy. The Rome that lies buried under the ages rises for Vedder. His art cannot be catalogued under any known division of portrait, landscape, marine, or genre, but it is simply—the art of Vedder. It stands alone and absolutely unrivalled. The pictorial creations of Vedder are as wholly without precedent or comparison as if they were the sole pictorial treasures of the world. The visitor may care for them, or not care, according to his own ability to comprehend and to recognize the inscrutable genius there manifested; but in either case he will find nowhere else, in either ancient or contemporary art, any parallel to these works.
One could well fancy that to any interrogation of his conceptions the artist might reply:—
“I am seeker of the stone,
Living gem of Solomon.
But what is land, or what is wave,
To me, who only jewels crave?
*****
I’m all-knowing, yet unknowing;
Stand not, pause not in my going.”