The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864

Shenstone studied, as much as so indolent a man ever could, at Pembroke College, Oxford. His parents died when he was young, leaving to him a very considerable estate, which fortunately some relative administered for him, until, owing to this supervisor's death, it lapsed into the poet's improvident hands. Even then a sensible tenant of his own name, and a distant relative, managed very snugly the farm of Leasowes; but when Shenstone came to live with him, neither house nor grounds were large enough for the joint occupancy of the poet, who was trailing his walks through the middle of the mowing, and of the tenant, who had his beeves to fatten and his rental to pay.

So Shenstone became a farmer on his own account; and, according to all reports, a very sorry account he made of it. The good soul had none of Mr. Tull's petulance and audacity with his servants; if the ploughman broke his gear, I suspect the kind ballad-master allowed him a holiday for the mending. The herdsman stared in astonishment to find the "beasts" ordered away from their accustomed grazing-fields. A new thicket had been planted, which must not be disturbed; the orchard was uprooted to give place to some parterre; a fine bit of meadow was flowed with a miniature lake; hedges were shorn away without mercy; arbors, grottos, rustic seats, Arcadian temples, sprang up in all outlying nooks; so that the annual product of the land came presently to be limited, almost entirely, to the beauty of its disposition.

I think that the poet, unlike most, was never very thoroughly satisfied with his poems, and that, therefore, the vanity possessed him to vest the sense of beauty which he felt tingling in his blood in something more palpable than language. Hence came the charming walks and woods and waters of Leasowes. With this ambition holding him and mastering him, what mattered a mouldy grain-crop, or a debt? If he had only an ardent admirer of his walks, his wilderness, his grottos,—this was his customer. He longed for such, in troops,—as a poet longs for readers, and as a farmer longs for sun and rain.

And he had them. I fancy there was hardly a cultivated person in England, but, before the death of Shenstone, had heard of the rare beauty of his home of Leasowes. Lord Lyttleton, who lived near by, at the elegant seat of Hagley, brought over his guests to see what miracles the hare-brained, sensitive poet had wrought upon his farm. And I can fancy the proud, shy creature watching from his lattice the company of distinguished guests,—maddened, if they look at his alcove from the wrong direction,—wondering if that shout that comes booming to his sensitive ear means admiration, or only an unappreciative surprise,—dwelling on the memory of the visit, as a poet dwells on the first public mention of his poem. In his "Egotisms," (well named,) he writes,—"Why repine? I have seen mansions on the verge of Wales that convert my farm-house into a Hampton Court, and where they speak of a glazed window as a great piece of magnificence. All things figure by comparison."

And this reflection, with its flavor of philosophy, was, I dare say, a sweet morsel to him. He saw very little of the world in his later years, save that part of it which at odd intervals found its way to the delights of Leasowes; indeed, he was not of a temper to meet the world upon fair terms. "The generality of mankind," he cynically says, "are seldom in good humor but whilst they are imposing upon you in some shape or other."[12 - Detached Thoughts on Men and Manners: Wm. Shenstone.]

Our farmer of Leasowes published a pastoral that was no way equal to the pastoral he wrote with trees, walks, and water upon his land; yet there are few cultivated readers who have not some day met with it, and been beguiled by its mellifluous seesaw. How its jingling resonance comes back to me to-day from the "Reader" book of the High School!

"I have found out a gift for my fair;
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed:
But let me that plunder forbear;
She will say 'twas a barbarous deed.
For he ne'er could be true, she averred,
Who could rob a poor bird of its young:
And I loved her the more, when I heard
Such tenderness fall from her tongue."

And what a killing look over at the girl in the corner, in check gingham, with blue bows in her hair, as I read (always on the old school-benches),—

"I have heard her with sweetness unfold
How that pity was due to—a dove:
That it ever attended the bold;
And she called it the sister of love.
But her words such a pleasure convey,
So much I her accents adore,
Let her speak, and whatever she say,
Methinks I should love her the more."

There is a rhythmic prettiness in this; but it is the prettiness of a lover in his teens, and not the kind we look for from a man who stood five feet eleven in his stockings, and wore his own gray hair. Strangely enough, Shenstone had the physique of a ploughman or a prize-fighter, and with it the fine, sensitive brain of a woman; a Greek in his refinements, and a Greek in indolence. I hope he gets on better in the other world than he ever did in this.

ON THE RELATION OF ART TO NATURE

IN TWO PARTS

PART II

The repulsive ugliness of the early Christian paintings was not the consequence of any break in the tradition. There was no reason why the graceful drawing of the human figure should not have been transmitted, as well as the technical procedures and the pigments. Nor was effort wanting: these pictures were often very elaborate and splendid in execution. But it is clear that grace and resemblance to anything existing, so far from being aimed at, were intentionally avoided. Even as late as the thirteenth century we find figures with blue legs and red bodies,—the horses in a procession blue, red, and yellow. Any whim of association, or fanciful color-pattern, was preferred to beauty or correctness. Likeness to actual things seemed to be regarded, indeed, as an unavoidable evil, to be restricted as far as possible. The problem was, to show God's omnipresence in the world, especially His appearance on the earth as man, and His abiding presence in holy men and women as an inspiration obliterating their humanity. But so long as the divine and the human are looked upon as essentially opposed, their union can be by miracle only, and the first thought must be to keep prominent this miraculousness, and guard against confusion of this angelic existence with every-day reality. The result is this realm of ghosts, at home neither in heaven nor on earth, neither presuming to be spirit nor condescending to be body, but hovering intermediate. But the more strongly the antithesis is felt, the nearer the thought to end this remaining tenderness for the gross and unspiritual,—to drop this ballast of earth, and rise into the region of heavenly realities. Upon a window of Canterbury Cathedral, beneath a representation of the miracle of Cana, is the legend,—"Lympha dat historiam, vinum notat allegoriam." But if the earthly is there only for the sake of this heavenly transmutation,—if the miracle, and the miracle alone, shows God's purpose accomplished,—then all things must be miraculous, for all else may be safely ignored. Henceforth, nothing is of itself profane, for the profane is only that wherein the higher and truer sense has not yet been recognized. What is demanded is not an exceptional transmutation, but a translation,—that all Nature should be interpreted of the spirit.

The result is, on the one hand, a greater license in dealing with actual forms, since Art sees all things on one level of dignity,—respects one no more than another, but only its own purpose,—is careless of material qualities, and of moral qualities, too, as far as they are bound to particular shapes. Why dwell tediously upon one particle, when the value of it consists not in its particularity, but in its harmony with the rest of the universe? Giotto seems to make short work with the human form divine by wrapping all his figures from head to foot in flowing draperies. But these figures have more humanity in them, stand closer to us, because the meaning is no longer petrified in the shape, but speaks to us freely and directly, in a look, a gesture, a sweep of the garment. The Greek said,—"With these superhuman lineaments you are to conceive the presence of Jove; these are the appropriate forms of the immortals." Giotto said,—"See what divine meanings in every-day faces and actions; with these eyes you are to look upon the people in the street." The one is a remote and incredible perfection,—the other, the intimate reality of the actual and present. It is, in truth, therefore, a closer approach to Nature than was before possible. The artist no longer shuns full actuality for his conception, for he fears no confusion with the actual. For instance, from the earliest times the celestial nature of angels had been naïvely intimated by appending wings to them. There was no attempt to carry out the suggestion, or to show the mechanical possibility of it, for that would be only to make winged men. The painters of the sixteenth century, on the other hand, from a nervous dread lest wings should prove insufficient, establish a sure basis of clouds for their angels, with more and more emphasis of buoyancy and extent, until at last, no longer trusting their own statement, they settle the question by showing them from below, already risen, and so choke off the doubt whether they can rise. But Orcagna's angels float without assistance or effort, by their own inherent lightness, as naturally as we walk. They are not out of their element, but bring their element with them. These are not men caught up into the skies, and do not need to be sustained there. The world they inhabit is not earth in heaven, but heaven on earth,—the earth seen in accordance with the purpose of its existence.

Giotto's fellow-citizens were struck with the new interest which the language of attitude and gesture and all the familiar details of life acquired in his representation of them. Looking around them, they saw what they had been taught to see, and concluded it was only an unexampled closeness of copying. No doubt Giotto thought so, too,—but had that been all, we should not have heard of it. It is this new interest that has to be accounted for. The charm did not lie in the fact, nor in the reproduction of it in the picture, but in a sudden sense of its value as expression, resting on a still obscurer feeling that herein lay its whole value,—that the actual is not what it seems, still less a pure delusion, but that it is pure seeming, so that its phenomenal character is no reproach, but the bond that connects it with reality. Just because it is only "the outward show," and does not pretend to be anything more, what it shows is not "the things that only seem," but the things that are. The attractiveness of beauty is due to the sense of higher affinities in the object; it is finality felt, but not comprehended, so that the form shines with the splendor of a purpose that belongs not to it, but to the whole whereof it is a part. Aristotle makes wonder the forerunner of science. So our admiration of beauty is a tribute paid in advance to the fresh insight it promises. Whether it be called miracle or inspiration, the artist must see his theme as something excellent and singular. This is perhaps that "strangeness" which Lord Bacon requires in all "excellent beauty," the new significance coming direct, and not through reflection, and therefore ineffable and incomparable. That Giotto and his successors went on for two hundred years painting saints and miracles was not because the Church so ordained, nor from any extraordinary devoutness of the artists, but because they still needed an outward assurance that what they did was not the petty triviality it seemed. There must always remain the sense of an ulterior, undeveloped meaning; when that is laid bare, Art has become superfluous, and makes haste to withdraw into obscure regions. For it is only as language that the picture or the statue avails anything, and this circumstantiality of expression is tolerable only so long as it is the only expression. Beauty is an honor to matter; but spirit, the source of beauty, is impatient of such measure of it as Art can give. As, in the legend, Eurydice, the dawn, sinks back into night at the look of the arisen sun, so this lovely flush of the dawning intelligence wanes before the eye of the intellect. The picture is a help so long as it transcends previous conception; but when the mind comes up with these sallies, and the picture is compared with the idea, it sinks back into a thing. Thenceforth it takes rank with Nature, and falls victim to the natural laws. It is only an aspect and an instant,—not eternal, but a petty persistence,—not God, but an idol,—not the saint, but his flesh and integuments.

Shall we say, then, that beauty is an illusion? Certainly it is no falsity; we may call it provisional truth,—truth at a certain stage, as appearance, not yet as idea. It is appearance seen as final, as the highest the mind has reached. Hence its miraculousness. It is in advance of consciousness; we cannot account for it any more than the savage could account for his fetich,—why this bunch of rags and feathers should be more venerable to him than other rags and feathers. But to deny that the impressiveness it adds to matter comes from a deeper sense of the truth would be as unwise as for him to deny his fetich. The fetich is false, not as compared with other rags and feathers, but as compared with a higher conception of God. The falsity is not that he sees God in this rubbish, but that he does not see Him elsewhere. Coleridge said that a picture is something between a thought and a thing. It must keep the mean; either extreme is fatal. Plato makes Eros intermediate between wisdom and ignorance, born of unequal parentage, neither mortal nor immortal, forever needy, forever seeking the Psyche whom he can never meet face to face.

The history of Art has a certain analogy to the growth of the corals. Like them, it seeks the light which it cannot endure. A certain depth beneath the surface is most favorable to it,—a dim, midway region of twilight and calm, remote alike from the stagnant obscurity of mere sensation and from the agitated surface of day, the dry light of the intellect. When it is laid bare, it dies,—its substance, indeed, enduring as the basis of new continents, but the life gone, and only the traces of its action left in the stony relics of the past. Greek Art perished when its secret was translated into clearer language by Plato and Aristotle; and Duccio and Cimabue and Giotto must go the same way as soon as St. Francis of Assisi or Luther or Calvin puts into words what they meant. It is its own success that is fatal to Art; for just in proportion as the expressiveness it insists upon is shown to be pervading, universal, and not the property of this or that shape, the particular manifestation is degraded. Color and form are due to partial opacity; the light must penetrate to a certain depth, but not throughout.

The name of Giotto has come to stand for Devotional Art, for an earnestness that subordinates all display to the sacredness of the theme. But his fellow-citizens knew him for a man of quick worldly wit, who despised asceticism, and was ready with the most audacious jokes, even at sacred things. Ghiberti and Cennini do not praise him for piety, but for having "brought Art back to Nature" and "translated it from Greek into Latin,"—that is, from the language of clerks into the vernacular. It is not anything special in the intention that gives Giotto his fame, but the freedom, directness, and variety of the language with which it is expressed. The effort to escape from traditional formulas and conventional shapes often makes itself felt at the expense even of beauty. Instead of the statuesque forms of the earlier time, it is the dramatic interest that is now prominent,—the composition, the convergent action of numerous figures, separately, perhaps, insignificant, but pervaded by a common emotion that subordinates all distinctions and leaves itself alone visible. Even in the traditional groups, as, for instance, the Holy Families, etc., the aim is more complete realization, in draperies, gestures, postures, rather than beauty of form. We miss in Giotto much that had been attained before him. What Madonna of his can rank with Giovanni Pisano's? The Northern cathedral-sculptures, even some of the Byzantine carvings, have a dignity that is at least uncommon in his pictures. Especially the faces are generally wooden,—destitute alike of individuality and of the loveliness of Duccio's and even of some of Cimabue's. On the other hand, in the picture wherein the school attained, perhaps, its highest success as to beauty of the faces, Orcagna's "Paradise" at Santa Maria Novella, the blessed are ranged in row above row, with mostly no relation to each other but juxtaposition. We see here two directions,—one in continuation of the antique, seeking beauty as the property of certain privileged forms, the other as the hidden possibility that pervades all things. One or the other must abate something: either the image must become less sacred, or the meaning narrower; for the language of painting is not figurative, like the language of poetry, but figure, and unless the form bear on its face that it is not all that is meant, its inherent limitations are transferred to the thought itself. When Dante tells us that Brunetto Latini and his companions looked at him,—

"Come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna,"

it is the intensity of the gaze that is present with us, not the old tailor and his needle. But in Painting the image is usurping and exclusive.

Of these divergent tendencies it is easy to see which must conquer. The gifts of the spirit are more truly honored as the birthright of humanity than as the property of this or that saint. The worship of the Madonna is better than the worship of Athene just so far as the homage is paid to a sentiment and not to a person. Now the Madonna, too, must come down from her throne. The painters grew tired of painting saints and angels. Giotto already had diverged from the traditional heads and draperies, and begun to put his figures into the Florentine dress. Masaccio and Filippino Lippi brought their fellow-citizens into their pictures. Soon the Holy Family is only a Florentine matron with her baby. The sacred histories are no longer the end, but only the excuse; everything else is insisted on rather than the pretended theme. The second Nicene Council had declared that "the designing of the holy images was not to be left to the invention of artists, but to the approved legislation and tradition of the Catholic Church." But now the Church had to take a great deal that it had not bargained for. Perspective, chiaroscuro, picturesque contrast and variety, and all that belongs to the show of things, without regard to what they are,—this is now the religion of Art.

These things may seem to us rather superficial, and Art to have declined from its ancient dignity. But see how they took hold of men, and what men they took hold of. In the midst of that bloody and shameless fifteenth century, when only force seems sacred, men hunted these shadows as if they were wealth and power. Paolo Uccello could not be got away from his drawing to his meals or his rest, and only replied to his wife's remonstrances, "Ah, this perspective is so delightful!" With what ardor Mantegna and Luca Signorelli seized upon a new trait or action! Leonardo da Vinci, "the first name of the fifteenth century," a man to whom any career was open, and who seemed almost equally fit for any, never walked the streets without a sketch-book in his hand, and was all his life long immersed in the study of Appearance, with a persistent scrutiny that is revealed by his endless caricatures and studies, but perhaps by nothing more clearly than by his incidental discovery of the principle of the stereoscope, which he describes in his treatise on Painting. This was no learned curiosity, nor the whim of seeing the universe under drill, but only a clearer instinct of what the purpose of Art is, namely, to see the reality of the actual world in and as the appearance, instead of groping for some ulterior reality hidden behind it. Leonardo has been called the precursor of Bacon. Certainly the conviction that underlies this passion for the outside of things is the same in both,—the firm belief that the truth is not to be sought in some remote seventh heaven, but in a truer view of the universe about us.

Donatello told Paolo Uccello that he was leaving the substance for the show. But the painter doubtless felt that the show was more real than any such "substance." For it is the finite taken as what it truly is, nothing in itself, but only the show of the infinite. If it seem shadowy and abstract, it is to be considered with what it is compared. What an abstraction is depends on what is taken away and what left behind. For instance, the Slavery question in our politics is sometimes termed an abstraction. Yes, surely, if the dollar is almighty, is the final reality,—if peace and comfort are alone worth living for,—then the Slavery question and several other things are abstractions. So in the world of matter, if the chemical results are the reality of it, the appearance may well be considered as an abstraction. But this is not the view of Art; Art has never magnified the materiality of the finite; on the contrary, its history is only the record of successive attempts to dispose of matter, the failure always lying in the hasty effort to abolish it altogether in favor of an immaterial principle outside of it, something behind the phenomena, like Kant's noumenon,—too fine to exist, yet unable to dispense with existence, and so, after all, not spirit, but only a superfine kind of matter; or as in a picture in the Campo Santo at Pisa, where the world is figured as a series of concentric circles, held up like a shield by God standing behind it.

It may be asked, Was not the appearance, and this alone, from all time, the object of Art? But so long as the figment of a separate reality of the finite is kept up, an antagonism subsists between this and truth, and the appearance cannot be frankly made the end, but has only an indirect, derivative value. In the classic it was the human form in superhuman perfection; in the early Christian Art, God condescending to inhabit human shape; in each case, what is given is felt to be negative to the reality,—a fiction, not the truth.

But now the antagonism falls away, and the truth of Art is felt to be a higher power of the truth of Nature. Perspective puts the mind in the place of gravitation as the centre, thus naïvely declaring mind and not matter to be the substance of the universe. It will see only this, feeling well that there is no other reality. It may be said that Perspective is as much an outward material fact as any other. So it is, as soon as the point of sight is fixed. The mind alters nothing, but gives to the objects that coherency that makes them into a world. The universe has no existence for the idiot, not because it is not there, but because he makes no image of it, or, as we say, does not mind it. The point of sight is the mark of a foregone action of the mind; what is embraced in it is seen together, because it belongs to one conception. The effect can be simulated to a certain extent by mechanical contrivance; but before the rules of perspective were systematized, the perspective of a picture betrays its history, tells how much of it was seen together, and what was added. Even late in the fifteenth century pictures are still more or less mosaics,—their piecemeal origin confessed by slight indications in the midst even of very advanced technical skill. Thus, in Antonio Pollaiuolo's "Three Archangels," in the Florence Academy,—three admirably drawn figures, abreast, and about equally distant from the frame, the line of the right wing touches the head at the same point in each, with no allowance for their different relations to the centre of the picture.

But there is a deeper kind of perspective, not so easily manufactured, though the manufacture of this, too, is often attempted, namely, Composition. The true ground of perspective in a picture is not a mechanical arrangement of lines, but a definite vision,—an affection of the painter by the subject, the net result of it in his mind, instantaneous and complete. It is a mistake to suppose that Composition is anything arbitrary,—that in the landscape out-of-doors we see the world as God made it, but in the picture as the painter makes it. Composition is nothing but the logic of vision; an uncomposed view is no more possible than an unlogical sentence. The eyes convey in each case what the mind is able to grasp,—no less, no more. As to any particular work, it is always a question of fact what it amounts to; the composition may be shallow, it may be bad,—the work of the understanding, not of the imagination,—put together, instead of seen together. But a picture without composition would be the mathematical point. Mr. Ruskin thinks any sensible person would exchange his pictures, however good, for windows through which he could see the scenes themselves. This does not quite meet the point, for it may be only a preference of quantity to quality. The window gives an infinitude of pictures; the painter, whatever his merit, but one. A fair comparison would be to place by the side of the Turner drawing a photograph of the scene, which we will suppose taken at the most favorable moment, and complete in color as well as light and shade. Whoever should then prefer the photograph must be either more of a naturalist than an artist, or else a better artist than Turner. The photograph, supposing it to be perfect in its way, gives what is seen at a first glance, only with the optical part of the process expanded over the whole field, instead of being confined to one point, as the eye is. The picture in it is the first glance of the operator, as he selected it; whatever delicacy of detail told in the impression on his mind tells in the impression on the plate; whatever is more than that does not go to increase the richness of the result, as picture, but belongs to another sphere. The landscape-photographs that we have lately had in such admirable perfection, however they may overpower our judgment at first sight, will, I believe, be found not to wear well; they have really less in them than even second-rate drawings, and therefore are sooner exhausted. The most satisfactory results of the photograph are where the subject is professedly a fragment, as in near foliage, tree-trunks, stone-texture; or where the mind's work is already done, and needs only to be reflected, as in buildings, sculpture, and, to a certain extent, portrait,—as far as the character has wrought itself into the clothes, habitual attitude, etc. Is not the popularity of the small full-length portrait-photographs owing to the predominance they give to this passive imprint of the mind's past action upon externals over its momentary and elusive presence? It is to the fillip received from the startling likeness of trivial details, exciting us to supply what is deficient in more important points, that is to be ascribed the leniency to the photograph on the part of near relatives and friends, who are usually hard to please with a painted likeness.

But all comparisons between the photograph and the hand-drawn picture are apt to be vitiated by the confusion of various extraneous interests with a purely artistic satisfaction resting in the thing itself. It is the old fallacy, involved in all the comparisons of Art with Nature. Of course, at bottom the interest is always that of the indwelling idea. But the question is, whether we stop at the outside, the material texture, or pass at once to the other extreme, the thought conveyed, or whether the two sides remain undistinguished. In the latter case only is our enjoyment strictly æsthetic, that is, attached to the bare perception of this particular thing; in the others, it is not this thing that prevails, but the physical or moral qualities, the class to which it belongs. It is true all these qualities play in and influence or even constitute the impression that particular works of Art make upon us. One man admires a picture for its handling, its surface, the way in which the paint is laid on; another, for its illustration of the laws of physiognomy; another, because it reminds him of the spring he spent in Rome, the pleasant people he met there, etc. We do not always care to distinguish the sources of the pleasure we feel; but for any criticism we must quit these accidents and personalities, and attend solely to that in the work which is unique, peculiar to it, that in which it suggests nothing, and associates itself with nothing, but refuses to be classed or distributed. This may not be the most important aspect of the thing represented, nor the deepest interest that a picture can have; but here, strictly speaking, lies all the beauty of it. The photograph has or may have a certain value of this kind, but a little time is needful before we discriminate what is general and what is special. Its extraneous interest, as specimen, as instance only, tends at once to abate from the first view, as the mind classifies and disposes of it. What remains, not thus to be disposed of, is its value as picture. Under this test, the photograph, compared with works of Art of a high order, will prove wanting in substance, thin and spotty, faulty in both ways, too full and too empty. For the result in each case must be proportionate to the impression that it echoes; but this, in the work of the artist, is reinforced by all his previous study and experience, as well as by the force and delicacy which his perception has over that of other men. It is thus really more concrete, has more in it, than the actual scene.

But when Composition is decried as artificial, what is meant is that it is artifice. It must be artificial, in the sense that all is there for the sake of the picture. But it is not to be the contrivance of the painter; the purpose must be in the work, not in his head. Diotima, in Plato's "Banquet," tells Socrates that Eros desires not the beautiful, but to bring forth in the beautiful; the creative impulse itself must be the motive, not anything ulterior. We require of the artist that he shall build better than he knows,—that his work shall not be the statement of his opinions, however correct or respectable, but an infinity, inexhaustible like Nature. He is to paint, as Turner said, only his impressions, and this precisely because they are not his, but stand outside of his will. To further this, to get the direct action of the artist's instinct, clear of the meddling and patching of forethought and afterthought, is no doubt the aim of the seemingly careless, formless handling now in vogue,—the dash which Harding says makes all the difference between what is good and what is intolerable in water-colors,—and the palette-knife-and-finger procedure of the French painters.

The sin of premeditated composition is that it is premeditated; the why and wherefore is of less consequence. If the motive be extraneous to the work, a theory, not an instinct, it does not matter much how high it is. It is fatal to beauty to see in the thing only its uses,—in the tree only the planks, in Niagara only the water-power; but a reverence for the facts themselves, or even for the moral meaning of them, so far as it is consciously present in the artist's mind, is just so far from the true intent of Art. This is the bane of the modern German school, both in landscape and history. They are laborious, learned, accurate, elevated in sentiment; Kaulbach's pictures, for instance, are complete treatises upon the theme, both as to the conception and the drawing, grouping, etc.; but it is mostly as treatises that they have interest. So the allegories in Albert Dürer's "Melancholia" are obstructive to it as a work of Art, and just in proportion to their value as thoughts.

The moral meaning in a picture, and its fidelity to fact, may each serve as measure of its merit after it is done. They must each be there, for its aim is to express after its own fashion the reality that lurks in every particle of matter. But it is for the spectator to see them, not the artist, and it is talking at cross-purposes to make either the motive,—to preach morality to Art, or to require from the artist an inventory of the landscape. That five or ten million pines grow in a Swiss valley is no reason why every one of them should be drawn. No doubt every one of them has its reason for being there, and it is conceivable that an exhaustive final statement might require them all to be shown. But there are no final statements in this world, least of all in Art. There are many things besides pines in the valley, and more important, and they can be drawn meanwhile. Besides, if all the pines, why not every pebble and blade of grass?

The earnestness that attracts us in mediæval Art, the devout fervor of the earlier time and the veracity of the later, the deference of the painter to his theme, is profoundly interesting as history, but it was conditioned also by the limitations of that age. The mediæval mind was oppressed by a sense of the foreignness and profaneness of Nature. The world is God's work, and ruled by Him; but it is not His dwelling-place, but only His foot-stool. The Divine spirit penetrates into the world of matter at certain points and to a certain depth, does not possess and inhabit it now and here, but only elsewhere and at a future time, in heaven, and at the final Judgment; and meantime the Church and the State are to maintain His jurisdiction over this outlying province as well as they can. The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him down into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart. Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection of fragments from various worlds. The figures in their landscapes do not tread the earth as if they belonged there, but like actors upon a stage, tricked up for the occasion. The earth is a desert upon which stones have been laid and herbs stuck into the crevices. The trees are put together out of separate leaves and twigs, and the rocks and mountains inserted like posts. In the earliest specimens the figures themselves have the same piecemeal look: their members are not born together, but put together. We see just how far the soul extends into them,—sometimes only to the eyes, then to the rest of the features, afterwards to the limbs and extremities. Evidently the artist's conception left much outside of it, to be added by way of label or explanation. In the trees, the care is to give the well-known fruit, the acorn or the apple, not the character of the tree; for what is wanted is only an indication what tree is meant. The only tie between man and the material world is the use he makes of it, elaborating and turning it into something it was not. Hence the trim orderliness of the mediæval landscape. Dante shows no love of the woods or the mountains, but only dread and dislike, and draws his tropes from engineering, from shipyards, moats, embankments.

The mediæval conception is higher than the antique; it recognizes a reality beyond the immediate, but not yet that it is the reality of the immediate and present also. But Art must dislodge this phantom of a lower, profane reality, and accept its own visions as authentic and sufficient. The modern mind is in this sense less religious than the mediæval, that the antithesis of phenomenal and real is less present to it. But the pungency of this antithesis comes from an imperfect realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into effect,—its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but accepted,—just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,—the fugitive image petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines of the ideal.

The complaints of want of earnestness, devoutness, in modern Art, are as short-sighted as Schiller's lament over the prosaic present, as a world bereft of the gods. It is a loss to which we can well resign ourselves, that we no longer see God throned on Olympus, or anywhere else outside of the world. It is no misfortune that the mind has recognized under these alien forms a spirit akin to itself, and therefore no longer gives bribes to Fate by setting up images to it. The deity it worships is thenceforth no longer powerless to exist, nor is there any existence out of him; it needs not, then, to provide a limbo for him in some sphere of abstraction. What has fled is not the divinity, but its false isolation, its delegation to a corner of the universe. Instead of the god with his whims, we have law universal, the rule of mind, to which matter is not hostile, but allied and affirmative. That the sun is no longer the chariot of Helios, but a gravitating fireball, is only the other side of the perception that it is mind embodied, not some unrelated entity for which a charioteer must be deputed.

We no longer worship groves and fountains, nor Madonnas and saints, and our Art accordingly can no longer have the fervency, since its objects have not the concreteness, that belonged to former times. But it is to be noticed that Art can be devout only in proportion as Religion is artistic,—that is, as matter, and not spirit, is the immediate object of worship. Art and Religion spring from the same root, but coincide only at the outset, as in fetichism, the worship of the Black Stone of the Caaba, or the wonder-working Madonnas of Italy. The fetich is at once image and god; the interest in the appearance is not distinct from the interest in the meaning. It needs neither to be beautiful nor to be understood. But as the sense springs up of a related mind in the idol, the two sides are separated. It is no longer this thing merely, but, on the one hand, spirit, above and beyond matter, and, on the other, the appearance, equally self-sufficing and supreme among earthly things, just because its reality is not here, but elsewhere,—appearance, therefore, as transcendent, or Beauty.

To every age the religion of the foregoing seems artificial, incumbered with forms, and its Art superstitious, over-scrupulous, biased by considerations that have nothing to do with Art. Hence religious reformers are mystics, enthusiasts: this is the look of Luther, even of the hard-headed Calvin, as seen from the Roman-Catholic side. Hence, also, every epoch of revolution in Art seems to the preceding like an irruption of frivolity and profanity. Christian Art would have seemed so to the ancients; the Realism of the fourteenth century must have seemed so to the Giotteschi and the Renaissance, to both. The term Pre-Raphaelitism, though it seems an odd collocation to bring together such men as Frà Angelico, Filippo Lippi, and Luca Signorelli, has so far an intelligible basis, that all this period, from Giotto to Raphael, amidst all diversities, is characterized throughout by a deference of Art to something extraneous. It is not beauty that Frà Angelico looks for, but holiness, or beauty as expressing this; it is not beauty that draws Filippo Lippi, but homely actuality. It is from this point of view that the Renaissance has been attacked as wanting in faith, earnestness, humility. The Renaissance had swallowed all formulas. Nothing was in itself sacred, but all other considerations were sacrificed to the appeal to the eye. But this, so far from proving any "faithlessness," shows, on the contrary, an entire faith in their Art, that it was able to accomplish what was required of it, and needed not to be bolstered up by anything external. Mr. Ruskin wants language to express his contempt for Claude, because, in a picture entitled "Moses at the Burning Bush," he paints only a graceful landscape, in which the Bush is rather inconspicuous. But Claude might well reply, that what he intended was not a history, nor a homily, but a picture; that the name was added for convenience' sake, as he might name his son, John, without meaning any comparisons with the Evangelist. It is no defect, but a merit, that it requires nothing else than itself to explain it.

Claude depicts "an unutilized earth," whence all traces of care, labor, sorrow, rapine, and want,—all that can suggest the perils and trials of life,—is removed. The buildings are palaces or picturesque ruins; the personages promenade at leisure, or only pretend to be doing something. All action and story, all individuality of persons, objects, and events, is merged in a pervading atmosphere of tranquil, sunny repose,—as of a holiday-afternoon. It may seem to us an idle lubberland, a paradise of do-nothings;—Mr. Ruskin sees in it only a "dim, stupid, serene, leguminous enjoyment." But whoever knows Rome will at least recognize in Claude's pictures some reflex of that enchantment that still hangs over the wondrous city, and draws to it generation after generation of pilgrims. In what does the mysterious charm consist? Is it not that the place seems set apart from the working-day world of selfish and warring interests? that here all manner of men, for once, lay aside their sordid occupations and their vulgar standards, to come together on the ground of a common humanity? It is easy to sneer at the Renaissance, but to understand it we must take it in its connection. The matters that interested that age seem now superfluous, the recreations of a holiday rather than the business of life. But coming from the dust and din of the fifteenth century, it looks differently. It was, in whatever dim or fantastic shape, a recognition of universal brotherhood,—of a common ground whereon all mankind could meet in peace and even sympathy, were it only for a picnic. In this villeggiatura of the human race the immediate aim is no very lofty one,—not truth, not duty, but to please or be pleased. But who is it that is to be pleased? Not the great of the earth, not the consecrated of the Church, not the men merely of this guild or this nation, but Man. It is the festival of the new saint, Humanus,—a joyful announcement that the ancient antagonism is not fundamental, but destined to be overcome.

This dreamy, half-sad, but friendly and soothing influence, that breathes from Claude's landscapes, is not the highest that Nature can inspire, but it is far better than to see in the earth only food, lodging, and a place to fight in, or even mere background and filling-in.

The builders of the Rhine-castles looked down the reaches of the river only to spy out their prey or their enemy; the monks in their quiet valleys looked out for their trout-stream and kitchen-garden, but any interest beyond that would have been heathenish and dangerous. Whilst to the ancients the earth had value only as enjoyable, inhabitable, the earlier Christian ages valued it only as uninhabitable, as a wilderness repelling society. In the earliest mediæval landscapes, the effort to represent a wilderness that is there only for the sake of the hermits leads to the curious contradiction of a populous hermitage, every part of it occupied by figures resolutely bent on being alone, and sedulously ignoring the others. Humboldt quotes from the early Fathers some glowing descriptions of natural scenery, but they turn always upon the seclusion from mankind, and upon the contrast between the grandeur of God's works and the littleness of ours. But in Claude we have the hint, however crude, of a relation as unsordid as this, but positive and direct,—the soul of the landscape speaking at once to the soul of man,—showing itself cognate, already friendly, and needing only to throw off the husk of opposition. The defect is not that he defers too much to the purely pictorial, that he postpones the facts or the story to beauty, but that he does not defer enough, that he does not sufficiently trust his own eyes, but by way of further assurance drags in architecture, ships, mythological or Scripture stories, not caring for them himself, but supposing the spectator cares, so that they remain unassimilated, a scum floating on the surface and obscuring the work. Here is the "want of faith" with which, if any, he is justly chargeable,—that beauty is not enough for him, but he must make it pleasing. Pleasingness implies a languid acceptance, in which the mind is spared the shock of fresh suggestion or incitement. We call the Venus de' Medici, for instance, a pleasing statue, but the Venus of Milo beautiful; because in the one we find in fuller measure only what was already accepted and agreeable, whilst in the other we feel the presence of an unexplored and formidable personality, provoking the endeavor to follow it out and guess at its range and extent.

This deference to the spectator marks the decline of Art from the supremacy of its position as the interpreter of religion to mankind. The work is no longer a revelation devoutly received by the artist and piously transmitted to a believing world; but he is a cultivated man, who gives what is agreeable to a cultivated society, where the Bible is treated with decorum, but all enthusiasm is reserved for Plato and Cicero. The earlier and greater men brought much of what they were from the fifteenth century, but even Raphael is too academic. It is not a Chinese deference to tradition, nor conformity to a fixed national taste, such as ruled Greek Art as by an organic necessity. One knows not whether to wonder most at the fancied need to attach to the work the stamp of classic authority, or at the levity with which the venerable forms of antiquity are treated. Nothing can be more superficial than this varnish of classicality. The names of Cicero, Brutus, Augustus were in all mouths; but the real character of these men, or of any others, or of the times they lived in, was very slightly realized. The classic architecture, with its cogent adaptation and sequence of parts, is cut up into theatre-scenery: its "members" are members no longer, but scraps to be stuck about at will. The gods and heroes of the ancient world have become the pageant of a holiday; even the sacred legends of the Church receive only an outward respect, and at last not even that. Claude wants a foreground-figure and puts in Æneas, Diana, or Moses, he cares little which, and he would hear, unmoved, Mr. Ruskin's eloquent denunciation of their utter unfitness for the assumed character, and the absurdity of the whole action of the piece.

But the Renaissance had its religion, too,—namely, Culture. The one "virtue," acknowledged on all hands, alike by busy merchants, soldiers, despots, women, the acquaintance with Greek and Roman literature and art, was not quite the idle dilettanteism it seems. Lorenzo de' Medici said, that, without the knowledge of the Platonic philosophy, it was hard to be a good citizen and Christian. Leo X. thought, "Nothing more excellent or more useful has been given by the Creator to mankind, if we except only the knowledge and true worship of Himself, than these studies, which not only lead to the ornament and guidance of human life, but are applicable and useful to every particular situation." That this culture was superficial, that it regarded only show and outside, is no reproach, but means only that it was not a mere galvanizing of dead bones, that a new spirit was masquerading in these garments. Had it been in earnest in its revival of the past, it would have been insignificant; its disregard of the substance, and care for the form alone, showed that the form was used only as a protest against the old forms. A provincial narrowness, even a slight air of vulgarity, was felt to attach to the teachings of the Church. Gentility had come to imply not only heathendom, ("gentilis est qui in Christum non credit,") but liberal breeding. The attraction of the classic culture, "the humanities," as it was well called, was just this cosmopolitan largeness, that it had no prejudices and prescribed no test, but was open to all kinds of merit and every manner of man. Goethe, who belongs in good part to the Renaissance, frequently exemplifies this feeling, perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in the account of his pilgrimage to the temple of Minerva at Assisi, which he lovingly describes, remarking, at the same time, that he passed with only aversion the Church of St. Francis, with its frescos by Cimabue, Giotto, and their followers, which no traveller of our day willingly misses or soon forgets, though the temple may probably occupy but a small space in his memory. "I made no doubt," says Goethe, "that all the heads there bore the same stamp as my Captain's,"—an Italian officer, more orthodox than enlightened, with whom he had been travelling.

In truth, however diverse in its first appearance, the Italian Renaissance was the counterpart of the German Reformation, and, like that, a declaration that God is not shut up in a corner of the universe, nor His revelation restricted in regard of time, place, or persons. The day was long past when the Church was synonymous with civilization. The Church-ideal of holiness had long since been laid aside; a new world had grown up, in which other aims and another spirit prevailed. Macchiavelli thought the Church had nothing to do with worldly affairs, could do nothing for the State or for freedom. And the Church thought so, too. If it was left out of the new order of things, it was because it had left itself out. "The world" was godless, pompa Diaboli; devotion to God implied devotion (of the world) to the Devil. But the world, thus cut adrift, found itself yet alive and vigorous, and began thenceforth to live its own life, leaving the "other world" to take care of itself. Salvation, whether for the State or the individual, it was felt must come from individual effort, and not be conferred as a stamp or visa from the Pope and the College of Cardinals. It was not Religion that was dead, but only the Church. The Church being petrified into a negation, Culture, the religion of the world, was necessarily negative to that, and for a time absorbed in the mere getting rid of obstructions. Sainthood had never been proposed even as an ideal for all mankind, but only as fuga sæculi, the avoidance of all connection with human affairs. Logically, it must lead to the completest isolation, and find its best exponent in Simeon Stylites. The new ideal of Culture must involve first of all the getting rid of isolation, natural and artificial. Its representatives are such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Leon-Battista Alberti, masters of all arts and sciences, travelled, well-bred, at home in the universe,—thoroughly accomplished men of the world, with senses and faculties in complete harmonious development. It is an age full of splendid figures; whatever growth there was in any country came now to its flowering-time.

The drawback is want of purpose. This splendor looks only to show; there is no universal aim, no motive except whim,—the whims of men of talent, or the whim of the crowd. For the approbation of the Church is substituted the applause of cultivated society, a wider convention, but conventional still. This is the frivolous side of the Renaissance, not its holding light the old traditions, but that for the traditions it rejected it had nothing but tradition to substitute. But if this declaration of independence was at first only a claim for license, not for liberty, this is only what was natural, and may be said of Protestantism as well. Protestantism, too, had its orthodoxy, and has not even yet quite realized that the private judgment whose rights it vindicated does not mean personal whim, and therefore is not fortified by the assent of any man or body of men, nor weakened by their dissent, but belongs alone to thought, which is necessarily individual, and at the same time of universal validity; whereas, personality is partial, belongs to the crowd, and to that part of the man which confounds him with the crowd. Were the private judgment indeed private, it would have no rights. Of what consequence the private judgments of a tribe of apes, or of Bushmen? This reference to the bystanders means only an appeal from the Church; it is at bottom a declaration that the truth is not a miraculous exception, a falsehood which for this particular occasion is called truth, but the substance of the universe, apparent everywhere, and to all that seek it. The perception must be its own evidence, it must be true for us, now and here. We have no right to blame the Renaissance painters for their love of show, for Art exists for show, and the due fulfilment of its purpose, bringing to the surface what was dimly indicated, must engage it the more thoroughly in the superficial aspect, and make all reference to a hidden ulterior meaning more and more a mere pretence. What was once Thought has now become form, color, surface; to make a mystery of it would be thoughtlessness or hypocrisy.