Indubitably, history of the highest kind may be written from the evolutionist’s standpoint, but as yet works of the lower variety predominate. Therefore, in a time when the development of institutions chiefly commands attention, Carlyle, who magnifies individuals, will naturally be neglected. But in reality, histories of both kinds are needed to supplement each other. All institutions originate and exist in the activities of individuals. The hero, the great man, makes concrete and human what would otherwise be abstract. Environment does not wholly explain him. It is easy to show wherein he resembles his fellows; that difference from them which constitutes his peculiar, original gift is the real mystery, which the study of resemblances cannot solve. Men will cease to be men when personality shall lose its power over them.
Accepting, therefore, the inherent antagonism in the two points of view,—antagonism which implies parity and not the necessary extinction of one by the other,—we can judge Carlyle fairly. Among historians he excels in vividness. Perhaps more than any other who has attempted to chronicle the past, he has visualized the past. The men he describes are not lay figures, with wooden frames and sawdust vitals, to be called Frenchmen or Germans or Englishmen according as a different costume is draped upon them; but human beings, each swayed by his own passions, striving and sinning, and incessantly alive. They are actors in a real drama: such as they are, Carlyle has seen them; such as he has seen, he depicts them. To go back to Carlyle from one of the “scientific historians” is like passing from a museum of mummies out into the throng of living men. If his portraits differ from those of another artist, it does not follow that they are false. In ordinary affairs, two witnesses may give a different report of the same event, yet each may, from his angle of observation, have given exact testimony. Absolute truth, who shall utter it? Since history of the highest, architectonic kind is interpretation, its value must depend on the character of the interpreter. Not to be greatly esteemed, we suspect, are those grubbers among the rubbish heaps who imagine that Carlyle’s interpretation of the French Revolution, or of Cromwell, or of Frederick, may be ignored. Character, insight, and imagination went to the production of works like these: they require kindred gifts to be appreciated.
Neither of Carlyle’s portrait gallery, unparalleled in range, in which from each picture an authentic human face looks out at us; nor of his masterpieces of narration, long since laureled even by the unwilling,—is there space here to speak. In portraiture he used Rembrandt’s methods: seizing on structural and characteristic traits, he displays them in strong, full light, and heightens the effect by surrounding them with shadows. As a biographer he succeeded equally well in telling the story of Schiller and that of John Sterling: the latter a most difficult task, as it must always be to make intelligible to strangers a beautiful character whose charm and force are felt by his friends, but have no proportionate expression in his writings. As an essayist he has left models in many branches: “Mirabeau,” “Johnson,” “Goethe,” “Characteristics,” “Burns,” “History,” stand as foothills before his more massive works. His is creative criticism, never restricted, like the criticism of the schools, to purely literary, academic considerations, but penetrating to the inmost heart of a book or a man, to discover what deepest human significance may there be found. A later generation has, as we have noted, adopted a different treatment in all these fields: bending itself to trace the ancestry and to map out the environment of men of genius; concentrating attention on the chain rather than its links; necessarily belittling the individual to aggrandize the mass. It behooves us, while we recognize the value of this treatment as a new means to truth, not to forget that it is not the only one. By and by—perhaps the time is already at hand—we shall recognize that the other method, which deals with the individual as an ultimate rather than in relation to a series, which is human rather than abstract, cannot be neglected without injury to truth. Either alone is partial; each corrects and enlightens the other.
Meanwhile we will indulge in no vain prophecies as to Carlyle’s probable rank with posterity. That a man’s influence shall be permanent depends first on his having grasped elemental facts in human nature, and next on his having given them an enduring form. Systems struggle into existence, mature, and pass away, but the needs of the individual remain. Though we were to wake up to-morrow in Utopia, the next day Utopia would have vanished, unless we ourselves had been miraculously transformed. To teach the individual soul the way of purification; to make it a worthy citizen of Eternity which laps it around; to kindle its conscience; to fortify it with courage; to humanize it with sympathy; to make it true,—this has been Carlyle’s mission, performed with all the vigor of a spirit “in earnest with the universe,” and with intellectual gifts most various, most powerful, most rare. It will be strange if, in time to come, souls with these needs, which are perpetual, lose contact with him. But, whatever befall in the future, Carlyle’s past is secure. He has influenced the élite of two generations: men as different as Tyndall and Ruskin, as Mill and Tennyson, as Browning and Arnold and Meredith, have felt the infusion of his moral force. And to the new generation we would say: “Open your ‘Sartor;’ there you shall hear the deepest utterances of Britain in our century on matters which concern you most; there, peradventure, you shall discover yourselves.”
TINTORET.[5]
[5] First printed in The Atlantic Monthly, June, 1891.
I. HIS LIFE.
We have no authentic biography of Tintoret. The men of his epoch hungered for fame, but it was by the splendor of their genius, and not by the details of their personal lives, that they hoped to be known to posterity. The days of judicious Boswells and injudicious Froudes had not then come to pass; so that we are now as ignorant of the lives of the painters of the great school which flourished at Venice during the sixteenth century as of the lives of that group of poets who flourished in England during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Nevertheless, Providence sees to it that nothing essential be lost; and, in the absence of memoirs, the masterpiece itself becomes a memoir for those who have insight. In art, works which proceed from the soul, and not from the skill, are truthful witnesses to the character of the artist. “For by the greatness and beauty of the creatures proportionably the maker of them is seen.” It is not wholly to be regretted, therefore, that the meagreness of our information concerning Tintoret compels us to study his paintings the more earnestly. The lives of artists are generally scanty in those adventures and dramatic incidents which make entertaining biographies. Men of action express their character in deeds: poems, statues, paintings, are the deeds of artists. Blot out a few pages of history, and what remains of Hannibal or Scipio? But we should know much about Michael Angelo or Raphael from their paintings, had no written word about either come down to us.
The year of Tintoret’s birth is variously stated as 1512 and 1518. Even his name has been a cause of dispute to antiquaries; but since he was content to call and sign himself Jacopo (or Giacomo) Robusti, we may accept this as correct. His father was a dyer of silk (tintore), and as the boy early helped at that trade he got the nickname il tintoretto, “the little dyer.” Vasari, also born in 1512, is the only contemporary who furnishes an account of Tintoret. Unsatisfactory and well-nigh ridiculous it is, if we remember that by 1574, when Vasari died, Tintoret had already produced many of his masterpieces. Yet the Florentine painter-historian did not accord to him so much as a separate chapter in his “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,” but inserted his few pages of criticism and gossip, as if by an afterthought, in the sketch of the forgotten Battista Franco. Since much that has been subsequently written about Tintoret is merely a repetition of Vasari’s shallow opinions, which created a mythical Tintoret, just as English reviewers created a mythical “Johnny Keats,” long believed to be the real Keats, I quote a few sentences from Vasari.