The Fair Haven

by Samuel Butler

Now, the fragmentary character, and the partial obscurity—I might have almost written, the incomparable chiaroscuro—of the Evangelistic writings have added to the value of our Lord’s character as an ideal, not only in the case of Christians, but as bringing the Christ-ideal within the reach and comprehension of an infinitely greater number of minds than it could ever otherwise have appealed to. It is true that those who are insensible to spiritual influences, and whose materialistic instinct leads them to deny everything which is not as clearly demonstrable by external evidence as a fact in chemistry, geography, or mathematics, will fail to find the hardness, definition, tightness, and, let me add, littleness of outline, in which their souls delight; they will find rather the gloom and gleam of Rembrandt, or the golden twilight of the Venetians, the losing and the finding, and the infinite liberty of shadow; and this they hate, inasmuch as it taxes their imagination, which is no less deficient than their power of sympathy; they would have all found, as in one of those laboured pictures wherein each form is as an inflated bladder and, has its own uncompromising outline remorselessly insisted upon.

Looking to the ideals of purely human creation which have come down to us from old times, do we find that the Theseus suffers because we are unable to realise to ourselves the precise features of the original? Or again do the works of John Bellini suffer because the hand of the painter was less dexterous than his intention pure? It is not what a man has actually put upon his canvas, but what he makes us feel that he felt, which makes the difference between good and bad in painting. Bellini’s hand was cunning enough to make us feel what he intended, and did his utmost to realise; but he has not realised it, and the same hallowing effect which has been wrought upon the Theseus by decay (to the enlarging of its spiritual influence), has been wrought upon the work of Bellini by incapacity—the incapacity of the painter to utter perfectly the perfect thought which was within. The early Italian paintings have that stamp of individuality upon them which assures us that they are not only portraits, but as faithful portraits as the painter could make them, more than this we know not, but more is unnecessary.

Do we not detect an analogy to this in the records of the Evangelists? Do we not see the child-like unself-seeking work of earnest and loving hearts, whose innocence and simplicity more than atone for their many shortcomings, their distorted renderings, and their omissions? We can see through these things as through a glass darkly, or as one looking upon some ineffable masterpiece of Venetian portraiture by the fading light of an autumnal evening, when the beauty of the picture is enhanced a hundredfold by the gloom and mystery of dusk. We may indeed see less of the actual lineaments themselves, but the echo is ever more spiritually tuneful than the sound, and the echo we find within us. Our imagination is in closer communion with our longings than the hand of any painter.

Those who relish definition, and definition only, are indeed kept away from Christianity by the present condition of the records, but even if the life of our Lord had been so definitely rendered as to find a place in their system, would it have greatly served their souls? And would it not repel hundreds and thousands of others, who find in the suggestiveness of the sketch a completeness of satisfaction, which no photographic reproduction could have given? The above may be difficult to understand, but let me earnestly implore the reader to endeavour to master its import.

People misunderstand the aim and scope of religion. Religion is only intended to guide men in those matters upon which science is silent. God illumines us by science as with a mechanical draughtsman’s plan; He illumines us in the Gospels as by the drawing of a great artist. We cannot build a “Great Eastern” from the drawings of the artist, but what poetical feeling, what true spiritual emotion was ever kindled by a mechanical drawing? How cold and dead were science unless supplemented by art and by religion! Not joined with them, for the merest touch of these things impairs scientific value—which depends essentially upon accuracy, and not upon any feeling for the beautiful and lovable. In like manner the merest touch of science chills the warmth of sentiment—the spiritual life. The mechanical drawing is spoiled by being made artistic, and the work of the artist by becoming mechanical. The aim of the one is to teach men how to construct, of the other how to feel.

For the due conservation therefore of both the essential requisites of human well-being—science, and religion—it is requisite that they be kept asunder and reserved for separate use at different times. Religion is the mistress of the arts, and every art which does not serve religion truly is doomed to perish as a lying and unprofitable servant. Science is external to religion, being a separate dispensation, a distinct revelation to mankind, whereby we are put into full present possession of more and more of God’s modes of dealing with material things, according as we become more fitted to receive them through the apprehension of those modes which have been already laid open to us.

We ought not therefore to have expected scientific accuracy from the Gospel records—much less should we be required to believe that such accuracy exists. Does any great artist ever dream of aiming directly at imitation? He aims at representation—not at imitation. In order to attain true mastery here, he must spend years in learning how to see; and then no less time in learning how not to see. Finally, he learns how to translate. Take Turner for example. Who conveys so living an impression of the face of nature? Yet go up to his canvas and what does one find thereon? Imitation? Nay—blotches and daubs of paint; the combination of these daubs, each one in itself when taken alone absolutely untrue, forms an impression which is quite truthful. No combination of minute truths in a picture will give so faithful a representation of nature as a wisely arranged tissue of untruths.

Absolute reproduction is impossible even to the photograph. The work of a great artist is far more truthful than any photograph; but not even the greatest artist can convey to our minds the whole truth of nature; no human hand nor pigments can expound all that lies hidden in “Nature’s infinite book of secrecy”; the utmost that can be done is to convey an impression, and if the impression is to be conveyed truthfully, the means must often be of the most unforeseen character. The old Pre-Raphaelites aimed at absolute reproduction. They were succeeded by a race of men who saw all that their predecessors had seen, but also something higher. The Van Eycks and Memling paved the way for painters who found their highest representatives in Rubens, Vandyke, and Rembrandt—the mightiest of them all. Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio and Mantegna were succeeded by Titian, Giorgione, and Tintoretto; Perugino was succeeded by Raphael. It is everywhere the same story; a reverend but child-like worship of the letter, followed by a manful apprehension of the spirit, and, alas! in due time by an almost total disregard of the letter; then rant and cant and bombast, till the value of the letter is reasserted. In theology the early men are represented by the Evangelicals, the times of utter decadence by infidelity—the middle race of giants is yet to come, and will be found in those who, while seeing something far beyond either minute accuracy or minute inaccuracy, are yet fully alive both to the letter and to the spirit of the Gospels.

Again, do not the seeming wrongs which the greatest ideals of purely human origin have suffered at the hands of time, add to their value instead of detracting from it? Is it not probable that if we were to see the glorious fragments from the Parthenon, the Theseus and the Ilyssus, or even the Venus of Milo, in their original and unmutilated condition, we should find that they appealed to us much less forcibly than they do at present? All ideals gain by vagueness and lose by definition, inasmuch as more scope is left for the imagination of the beholder, who can thus fill in the missing detail according to his own spiritual needs. This is how it comes that nothing which is recent, whether animate or inanimate, can serve as an ideal unless it is adorned by more than common mystery and uncertainty. A new Cathedral is necessarily very ugly. There is too much found and too little lost. Much less could an absolutely perfect Being be of the highest value as an ideal, as long as He could be clearly seen, for it is impossible that He could be known as perfect by imperfect men, and His very perfections must perforce appear as blemishes to any but perfect critics. To give therefore an impression of perfection, to create an absolutely unsurpassable ideal, it became essential that the actual image of the original should become blurred and lost, whereon the beholder now supplies from his own imagination that which is to him more perfect than the original, though objectively it must be infinitely less so.

It is probably to this cause that the incredulity of the Apostles during our Lord’s life-time must be assigned. The ideal was too near them, and too far above their comprehension; for it must be always remembered that the convincing power of miracles in the days of the Apostles must have been greatly weakened by the current belief in their being events of no very unusual occurrence, and in the existence both of good and evil spirits who could take possession of men and compel them to do their bidding. A resurrection from the dead or a restoration of sight to the blind, must have seemed even less portentous to them, than an unusually skilful treatment of disease by a physician is to us. We can therefore understand how it happened that the faith of the Apostles was so little to be depended upon even up to the Crucifixion, inasmuch as the convincing power of miracles had been already, so to speak, exhausted, a fact which may perhaps explain the early withdrawal of the power to work them; we cannot indeed believe that it could have been so far weakened as to make the Apostles disregard the prophecies of their Master that He should rise from the dead, if He had ever uttered them, and we have already seen reason to think that these prophecies are the ex post facto handiwork of time; but the incredulity of the disciples, when seen through the light now thrown upon it, loses that wholly inexplicable character which it would otherwise bear.