It would seem the simplest thing in the world to be able to help yourself to what lies all around you ready to your hand; but writers of verse commonly find it a difficult, if not impossible, thing to do. Conscious that a certain remoteness from ordinary life is essential in poetry, they aim at it by laying their scenes far away in time, and taking their images from far away in space,—thus contriving to be foreign at once to their century and their country. Such self-made exiles and aliens are never repatriated by posterity. It is only here and there that a man is found, like Hawthorne, Judd, and Mr. Holland, who discovers or instinctively feels that this remoteness is attained, and attainable only, by lifting up and transfiguring the ordinary and familiar with the mirage of the ideal. We mean it as very high praise, when we say that "Bitter-Sweet" is one of the few books that have found the secret of drawing up and assimilating the juices of this New World of ours.
The Mustee; or, Love and Liberty. By B.F. PRESBURY. Boston: Shepard, Clark, & Brown. 12mo.
The plot of this novel is open to criticism, and we might take exception to some of the opinions expressed in it; but it is evidently the work of a thoughtful and scholarly mind and benevolent heart,—is exceedingly well written, shows a great deal of power in the delineation both of ideal and humorous character, and includes some scenes of the most absorbing dramatic interest. The character of Featherstone is admirably drawn, and Bill Frink is a positive addition to the literature of American low life. We commend him to our Southern friends, as an example of one of the most peculiar products of their peculiar institution. The author of the novel has lived at the South, and his descriptions of slavery display accurate observation, candid judgment, and a vivid power of pictorial representation. The scenes in New Orleans are all good; and in few novels of the present day is there a finer instance of animated narration than the account of Flora's escape from slavery. The incidents are so managed that the reader is kept in breathless suspense to the end, with sympathies excited almost to pain, as one circumstance after another seems to threaten the capture of the beautiful fugitive. Though the book belongs to the class of anti-slavery novels, it is not confined to the subject of slavery, but includes a consideration of almost all the "exciting topics" of the day, and treats of them all with singular conscientiousness of spirit and vigor of thought.
Rowse's Portrait of Emerson. Published in Photograph. Boston: Williams & Everett.
Durand's Portrait of Bryant. Engraved by Schoff & Jones. New York: Published by the Century Club.
Barry's Portrait of Whittier. Published in Photograph. Boston: Brainard.
Almost one of the lost arts is that of portraiture. Raised by Titian and his contemporaries to the position of one of the noblest walks of Art, and in the generations following depressed to the position of minister to vanity and foolish pride, it has remained, during the most of the years since, one of the lowest and least reputable of the fields of artistic labor. The lost vein was broken into by Reynolds and Gainsborough, who left a golden glory in all they did for us; but no one came to inherit, and in England no one has since appeared worthy of comparison with them. In all Europe there is no school of portraiture worth notice; the so-called portrait-painters are only likeness-makers, comparing with the true portraitist as a topographical draughtsman does with a landscape artist. The intellectual elements of the artistic character, which successful portraiture insists on, are some of its very greatest,—if we admit, as it seems to us that we must, that imagination is not strictly intellectual, but an inspiration, an exaltation of the whole nature. To paint a great man, one must not merely comprehend that he is great, but must in some sense rise up by the side of, and sympathize with, his greatness,—must enter into and identify himself with some essential quality of his character, which quality will be the theme of his portrait. So it inevitably follows that the greatness of the artist is the limitation of his art,—that he expresses in his work himself as much as his subject, but no more of the latter than he can comprehend and appreciate.
The distinction between the true and the false portraitist is that between expression of something felt and representation of something seen; and as the subtilest and noblest part of the human soul can only be felt, as the signs of it in the face can be recognized and translated only by sympathy, so no mere painter can ever succeed in expressing in its fulness the character of any great man. The lines in which holiest passion, subtilest thought, divinest activity have recorded in the face their existence and presence, are hieroglyphs unintelligible to one who has not kindled with that passion, been rapt in that thought, or swept away in sympathy with that activity; he may follow the lines, but must certainly miss their meaning. A successful portrait implies an equality, in some sense, between the artist and his original. The greatest of artists fail most completely in painting people with whom they have no sympathy, and only the mechanical painter succeeds alike with all,—the fair average of his works being a general levelling of his subjects; the great successes of the genuine artist being as surely offset (if one success can find offset in a thousand failures) by as absolute and extreme failure.
As regards portraiture in general, the public may, without injury to Art or history, employ the painters who make the prettiest pictures of them; it doesn't matter to the future, if Mr. Jenkins, or even the Hon. Mr. Twaddle, has employed the promising Mr. Mahlstock to perpetuate him with a hundred transitory and borrowed graces,—if the talented young littérateur, Mr. Simeah, has been found by his limner to resemble Lord Byron amazingly, and has in consequence consented to sit for a half-length, to be done à la Corsair, etc., etc.; but for our men of thought, for those whose works will stand to all time as the signals pointing out the road a nation followed, whose presence and acts shall be our intellectual history,—it is of some little moment that these should be given to us in such visible form, that men shall not conjecture, a thousand years hence, if Emerson were really a man, or a name under which some metaphysical club chose to publish their philosophies. In psychological history, portraits are as necessary as dates; and one of the most valuable gifts to an age is a great portrait-painter,—a Titian, a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, or a Page,—which last has more of the Titianesque character than any one who has painted since the great Venetians lived, and few, indeed, are the generations so endowed.
Beside this full insight and representation of character, which makes the ideal portraiture, we have the less complete, but only in degree less valuable, apprehension which results from a point of sympathy, a likeness of liking in one or more fields of thought, a common sensitiveness, a common interest; and the rarer sympathy between artist and subject, of that intimacy and complete understanding of personal character, which, even where no great talent exists in the artist, gives a unique value to his work, but which, where the intimacy is that of great minds, gives us works on which no dilettanteism, even, makes a criticism,—as in that portrait of Dante by Giotto, to our mind the portrait par excellence of past time.