Poor Sally Patten was not nearly so cruel as she appeared. In truth, she had never laid the weight of her hand upon her husband. But, then, he was always afraid she would.
MEXICAN ART AND ITS MICHAEL ANGELO.
The society of Mexico has become a ruin in which it is necessary to search with some labor to discover monuments of literature and art. Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, though for her time an extraordinary woman, is unknown to the greater portion of the continent of whose letters she seems to have been the true morning star. Of Siguenza, mathematician, philosopher, historian, antiquary, and of Velasquez Cardenas, the astronomer and geometrician, the world knew little until Humboldt praised their remarkable talents. Not without a shrug of surprise, we imagine, did the readers of half a century ago accept his assurance that "M. Tolsa, professor of sculpture at Mexico, was even able to cast an equestrian statue of King Charles the Fourth; a work which, with the exception of the Marcus Aurelius at Rome, surpasses in beauty and purity of style everything which remains in this way in Europe." Miguel Cabrera, a greater artist than Tolsa, and the most vigorous imaginative genius which Mexico has produced, has yet to be adequately recognized in America. The art of our northern republic boasts the names of Trumbull, Stuart, Allston, Inman, Vanderlyn, Sully, Neagle, Hamilton, Rothermel, Church, Crawford, Powers, Akers, Greenough, Hosmer, and others; but we doubt if among all these can be found an artist as praiseworthy as was this Mexican Cabrera. Do we exaggerate? No; we are addressing a practical public, much in love with its own works and ways and ideals, and not too well disposed to imagine the difficulties of a Mexican artist one hundred and thirty years ago.
But, first, let us describe, so far as we may, the scene and circumstances of his artistic labors. Mexico, as compared with our northern cities, is a wonderfully old-fashioned capital. The walls of its houses have been built to last till doomsday, and its doors are like doors of castles. Many of its flat fronts boast stuccoed ornaments: all are painted with tints ranging from yellow to pink and pale blue—colors of art which, as applied in particular cases, are seldom at once tolerable to a foreign eye, but which find their reason in necessity as well as taste, and partly in the dull, unlovely character of the building material. This is often a kind of lava-stone or tezontle, a stone the volcano itself seems to have supplied for the purpose of resisting earthquake, and which defies the insidious action of Mexican damps. The churches are instances of colored architecture. La Profesa is yellowed; the cathedral's chapel is browned. San Domingo, San Agustin, and, in fact, all the Mexican churches are tinted more or less, the favorite hue being a mild and not offensive yellow, qualified by white plasters. One remembers gratefully that neutral tint which makes a long range of Mexican houses, with their balconies and tasteful awnings, quaint and elegant letterings of signs, and flags hung out at shop-doors, so picturesque, so pleasant, and so characteristic. The perspective of a Mexican street, especially toward the close of the day, enjoys a repose of many colors well blended with such lines of substantial houses as cannot but impress the eye of the musing stranger. Their architecture, so simple and massive, but so different from a certain wide-awake familiarity which is written upon the houses of the North, best assimilates in his view with some mood of twilight. Yet, seen at dawn or at dusk, or under the moon, the city of Mexico never loses its one decided charm of picturesqueness. It was this exceeding quality which doubtless delighted the eye of Humboldt when he praised Mexico as one of the finest of cities. He had, perhaps, beheld from its cathedral's steeple a most unique capital—a city set not on a hill, but in one of the dreamiest of valleys near one of the dreamiest and shallowest of lakes, with Popocatapetl and Ixtaccihuatl, snow-crowned and heaven-seeking, for monuments of its guardian valley.
In such a scene, Cabrera and his contemporary artists did their work. Their school was the church. What this church was in their day the splendid traditions of art found even now in its corridors and near its altars bear faithful witnesses. Something from their hands has gone into every community of Mexico, and, if war has spared one-half the relics of her art as it existed one hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago, the republic is still fortunate in one respect. The cathedrals of Puebla and Mexico, and La Profesa, were perhaps the chief homes of that genius of painting which was manifested not merely in one, but in a number of Mexicans. Who are the artists of the exceedingly fine pictures which may be seen in the church at Puebla the stranger rarely ascertains. The tradition that Velasquez, the great pupil of Murillo, and Cabrera, the native Mexican, sowed the religion of the New World with their pencils some centuries ago, supplies him with the morsel of vague knowledge with which he reluctantly leaves a building full of rich and curious shrines. Mexico is to all appearances singularly deficient in a proper memory of her noblest painters. Go into one of the city's oldest churches, and your friendly guide, though he be a priest, may not be able to tell you who painted the saints on the walls and the heads of the apostles on the shrines. The information possessed outside of the church respecting its treasures of art has, under stress of various revolutions, dissipated into vague generalities. Three or four remarkable names are known, and a few famous pictures; but who can at once point out to us the masterpieces of any of the five or six painters whose works are worth remembering, or tell us near what shrines, outside of the capital itself, we are likely to find rare pictures? Nevertheless, art is almost the chief boast of Mexico, aside from its natural endowments, though, like so much else in a land subject to all manner of vicissitudes, the boast is to some extent shadowy and unsubstantial. In successive revolutions, it is conjectured, those true homes of fine art, the convents, have been despoiled, and the saints and angels of their galleries sent hither and thither, to be kept by natives or to be sold to foreigners as Joseph was sold by his brethren. Another spoliation, and perhaps a searching and sweeping one, is said to have taken place under the eye of the French during their mercenary intervention. How or by whom robbed and mutilated in the last half-century of wars, Mexican art is but the wreck of what it was. That so much of it still survives is a proof of its original abundance and vitality.
But, notwithstanding the whirlwinds of revolution, art in the country of Cabrera has retained a number of impregnable and indestructible asylums. Altar ornaments of gold or silver may have been stolen from the cathedral, but apparently no sacrilegious criminal has ever carried away its pictures. These treasures of the church are set fast in their places round the shrines, so closely and plentifully that, wherever they are most congregated, the altar-places seem walled and tiled with them. Not all of them are worthy of Cabrera or Xuarez or Ximenez, let alone Murillo and Velasquez; but all have their value as portions of a chapter in art the like of which is not to be seen elsewhere on the American continent. Confused and perplexed as the real beauties of many of these paintings are by the endless bedizenments of altars, it is impossible to ignore or conceal the richness, delicacy, and even tenderness which belong to their best specimens. The extravagance of gilding, the wilderness of carved flourishes, which the taste of the sixteenth century placed at the back of the altars, do not form the best repository for the subdued beauty which a noble picture acquires with age. The great back altar-wall of the cathedral is from floor to roof one mass of most ingenious carving and gilding, out of which what seem to be pious aborigines, associated with warriors and saints on the same background, blossom in paint and gold. Our modern and practical tastes do not easily give room to an ornamentation as loud and prodigal as figures in this great recess; but it is nevertheless a rare and meritorious work in its way. Other shrines display the same gilding in an inferior degree; and we must divest ourselves of some prejudice, artistic and otherwise, before we appreciate the merit of extreme elaboration in their ornaments, and discover, notwithstanding this lavish wealth of surrounding decoration, the modest worth of the best pictures of the church.
The cathedral is well constituted to be the ark and refuge of religious art. It is about 428 feet long and 200 wide, while its general height is almost 100, that of its towers being nearly 200 feet. These dimensions argue an interior vast enough to enclose three or four such churches as we may see on Broadway, without taking into account its large adjoining chapel. Its exterior is a congregation of heavy masses crowned by great bell-shaped towers, but wanting a grand unity and exaltation. Nevertheless, the charm of picturesqueness which belongs to so many solid monuments of the sixteenth century has rested upon this cathedral, in spite of its dinginess and heaviness; and a view of it under the magic of a moonlight which Italian skies could not more than rival is one of the finest of a series of Mexican lithographs. Gothic height, space, and freedom are the prime qualities of the cathedral's interior. Not less than twenty-two shrines are there visible in an extent of two aisles and twenty arches, the columns of which are each quintupled. The high porphyry columns, the range of the apostles, the burst of gilded glory, and the outspread angels over the principal altar are exceedingly impressive, notwithstanding an exuberance of colors. The choir, altogether the best architectural feature of the great building, rises rather toward the middle of the church, and up from the floor, in a high and luxurious growth of oaken carvings and embellishments. Inside is the assembly of the saints, finely panelled. Cherub and seraph are busy apparently with the superb organ-pipes, and make merry overhead with all the instruments of an orchestra, while impish faces beneath them seem to be out of temper. The nobleness of the choir as a work of art is, in great part, due to its gravity, though it is as ingenious, perhaps, as anything of the kind need be, without seeking comparison with the mightiest fancies of the Old World.