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

The shortcoming is not in the artists, but in Art. Painting shares the same fate as Sculpture: not only is the soul not a thing, it is not wholly an appearance, but combines with its appearing a constant protest against the finality of it. Not only is the body an inadequate manifestation, but what it manifests is itself progressive, and any conception of it restrictive and partial. Henceforth any representation of the human form must either pretend a mystery that is not felt, or, if inspired by a genuine interest, it must be of a lower kind, and must avoid of set purpose any undue exaltation of one part over another, as of the face over the limbs, and dwell rather upon harmony of lines and colors, wherein nothing shall be prominent at the expense of the rest, seeking to make up what is wanting in intensity, in inward meaning, by allusion, by an interest reflected from without, instead of the immediate and intuitive. We often feel, even in Raphael's pictures, that the aim is lower than, for instance, Frà Angelico's. But it is at least genuine, and what that saves us from we may see in some of Perugino's and Pinturicchio's altar-pieces, where spirituality means kicking heels, hollow cheeks, and a deadly-sweet smile. That Raphael, among all his Holy Families, painted only one Madonna di San Sisto, and that hastily, on trifling occasion, shows that it was a chance-hit rather than the normal fruit of his genius. The beauty that shines like celestial flame from the face of the divine child, and the transfigured humanity of the mother, are no denizens of earth, but fugitive radiances that tinge it for a moment and are gone. For once, the impossible is achieved; the figures hover, dreamlike, disconnected from all around, as if the canvas opened and showed, not what is upon it, but beyond it. But it is a casual success, not to be sought or expected. A wise instinct made the painter in general shun such direct, explicit statement, and rather treat the subject somewhat cavalierly than allow it to confront and confound him. The greater he is, and the more complete his development, the more he must dread whatever makes his Art secondary or superfluous. Whatever force we give to the reproach of want of elevation, etc., the only impossible theme is the unartistic.

But before we give heed to any such reproach we must beware of confounding the personality of the artist or the fashion of the time with the moving spirit in both. He works always—as Michel Angelo complained that he was painting the ceiling of the Sistine—over his own head, and blinded by his own paint. The purpose that we speak of is not his petty doings and intentions, but what he unintentionally accomplishes. It is the spiritual alone that interests; and if later Art seem, by comparison, wanting in spirituality, this is partly the effect of its juster appreciation, that rendered direct expression hopeless, but at the same time superfluous, by discovering the same import more accessible elsewhere, as the higher indirect meaning of all material things. Critics tell us that the charm of landscape is incomplete without the presence of man,—that there must always be some hint, at least, of human habitation or influence. Certainly it is always a human interest, it is not the timber and the water, that moves us, but the echo of a kindred mind. But in the "landscape and figures" it is hardly a human interest that we take in the figures. The "dull victims of pipe and mug" serve our turn perhaps better than the noblest mountaineers. It is not to them that we look for the spirit of the landscape,—rather anywhere else. It is the security of the perception that allows it to dispense with pointed demonstration, and to delight rather in obscurer intimations of its meaning.

The modern ideal is the Picturesque,—a beauty not detachable, belonging to the picture, to the composition, not to the component parts. It has no favorites; it is violated alike by the systematic glorification and the systematic depreciation of particular forms. The Apollo Belvedere would make as poor a figure in the foreground of a modern landscape as a fisherman in jack-boots and red nightcap on a pedestal in the Vatican. Claude's or Turner's figures may be absurd, when taken by themselves; but the absurdity consists in taking them by themselves. Turner, it is said, could draw figures well; Claude probably could not; (he is more likely to have tried;) but each must have felt that anything that should call attention to the figures would be worse than any bad drawing. Nicolas Poussin was well called "the learned"; for it is his learning, his study of the antique, of Raphael, of drapery and anatomy, that most appears in his landscapes and gives his figures their plastic emphasis. But this is no praise for a painter.

Of course the boundary-lines cannot be very exactly drawn; the genius of a Delaroche or a Millais will give interest to a figure-piece at whatever epoch. But such pictures as Etty's, or Page's Venus, where the beauty of the human body is the point of attraction, are flat anachronisms, and for this reason, not from any prudishness of the public, can never excite a hearty enthusiasm. From the sixteenth century downwards all pictures become more and more tableaux de genre,—the piece is not described by the nominal subject, but only the class to which it belongs, leaving its special character wholly undetermined. And in proportion as the action and the detail are dwelt upon, the more evident is it that the theme is only a pretence. Martyrdoms, when there was any fervency of faith in the martyrs, were very abstract. A hint of sword or wheel sufficed. The saints and the angels, as long as men believed in them, carried their witness in their faces, with only some conventional indication of their history. As soon as direct representation is aimed at and the event portrayed as an historical fact, it is proof enough that all direct interest is gone and nothing left but the technical problem. The martyrdoms are vulgar execution-scenes,—the angels, men sprawling upon clouds. Michel Angelo was a noble, devout man, but it is clear that the God he prayed to was not the God he painted.

This essential disparity between idea and representation is the weak side of Art, plastic and pictorial; but because it is essential it is not felt by the artist as defect. His genius urges him to all advance that is possible within the limits of his Art, but not to transcend it. It will be in vain to exhort him to unite the ancient piety to the modern knowledge. If he listen to the exhortation, he may be a good critic, but he is no painter. He must be absorbed in what he sees to the exclusion of everything else; impartiality is a virtue to all the world except him. There will always be a onesidedness; either the conception or the embodying of it halts, is only partially realized; some incompleteness, some mystery, some apparent want of coincidence between form and meaning is a necessity to the artist, and if he does not find it, he will invent it. Hence the embarrassment of some of the English Pre-Raphaelitists, particularly in dealing with the human form. They have no hesitation in pursuing into still further minuteness the literal delineation of inanimate objects, draperies, etc.; but they shrink from giving full life to their figures, not from a slavish adherence to their exemplars, but from a dread lest it should seem that what is shown is all that is meant. The early painters were thus naïve and distinct because of their limitations; they knew very well what they meant,—as, that the event took place out-of-doors, with the sun shining, the grass under-foot, an oak-tree here, a strawberry-vine there,—mere adjunct and by-play, not to be questioned as to the import of the piece: that the Church took care of. But who can say what a modern landscape means? The significance that in the older picture was as it were outside of it, presupposed, assured elsewhere, has now to be incorporated, verily present in every atom of soil and film of vapor. The realism of the modern picture must be infinitely more extended, for the meaning of it is that nothing is superfluous or insignificant. But with the reality that it lends to every particle of matter, it must introduce, at the same time, the protest that spirit makes against matter,—most distinct, indeed, in the human form and countenance, but nowhere absent. In its utmost explication there must be felt that there is yet more behind; its utmost distinctness must be everywhere indefinable, evanescent,—must proclaim that this parade of surface-appearance is not there for its own sake. This is what Mr. Ruskin calls "the pathetic fallacy": but there is nothing fallacious in it; it is solid truth, only under the guise of mystery. Turner said that Mr. Ruskin had put all sorts of meanings into his pictures that he knew nothing about. Of course, else they would never have got into the pictures. But this does not affect their validity, but means only that it is the imagination, not the intellect, that must apprehend them.

It is not an outward, arbitrary incompleteness that is demanded, but a visible dependence of each part, by its partiality declaring the completeness of the whole. It is often said that the picture must "leave room for the imagination." Yes, and for nothing else; but this does not imply that it should be unfinished, but that, when the painter has set down what the imagination grasped in one view, he shall stop, no matter where, and not attempt to eke out the deficiency by formula or by knack of fingers. Wherever the inspiration leaves him, there is an end of the picture. Beyond that we get only his personalities; no skill, no earnestness of intention, etc., can avail him; he is only mystifying himself or us. At these points we sooner or later come up with him, are as good as he, and the work forthwith begins to tire. What is tiresome is to have thrust upon us the dead surface of matter: this is the prose of the world, which we come to Art to escape. It is prosaic, because it is seen as the understanding sees it, as an aggregate only, apart from its vital connection; it matters little whose the understanding is. The artist must be alive only to the totality of the impression, blind and deaf to all outside of that. He must believe that the idyl he sees in the landscape is there because he sees it, and will appear in the picture without the help of demonstration. The danger is, that from weakness of faith he will fancy or pretend that he sees something else, which may be there, but formed no part of the impression. It is simply a question of natural attraction, magnetism, how much he can take up and carry; all beyond that is hindrance, and any conscious endeavor of his cannot help, but can only thwart.

The picturesque has its root in the mind's craving for totality. It is Nature seen as a whole; all the characteristics and prerequisites of it come back to this,—such as roughness, wildness, ruin, obscurity, the gloom of night or of storm; whatever the outward discrepancy, wherever the effect is produced, it is because in some way there is a gain in completeness. On this condition everything is welcome,—without it, nothing. Thus, a broken, weedy bank is more picturesque than the velvet slope,—the decayed oak than the symmetry of the sapling,—the squalid shanty by the railroad, with its base of dirt, its windows stuffed with old hats, and the red shirts dependent from its eaves, than the neatest brick cottage. They strike a richer accord, while the others drone on a single note. Moonlight is always picturesque, because it substitutes mass and breadth for the obtrusiveness of petty particulars. It is not the pettiness, but the particularity, that makes them unpicturesque. No impressiveness in the object can atone for exclusiveness. Niagara cannot be painted, not because it is too difficult, but because it is no landscape, but like a vast illuminated capital letter filling the whole page, or the sublime monotony of the mosque-inscriptions, declaring in thousandfold repetition that God is great. The soaring sublimity of the Moslem monotheism comes partly from its narrowness and abstractness. Is it because we are a little hard of hearing that it takes such reiteration to move us?

The wholeness which the imagination demands is not quantitative, but qualitative; it has nothing to do with size or with number, except so far as, by confusing the sense, they obscurely intimate infinity, with which all quantities are incommensurable. Mr. Ruskin's encyclopedic anatomizing of the landscape, to the end of showing the closeness of Turner's perception, has great interest, but not the interest merely of a longer list, for it is to be remembered that the longest list would be no nearer to an exhaustive analysis than the shortest. It is not a specious completeness, but a sense of infinity that can never be completed,—greater intensity, not greater extension,—that distinguishes modern landscape-art. Hence there is no incongruity in the seeming license that it takes with the firm order of Nature. It is in no spirit of levity or profanity that the substantial distinctions of things are thus disregarded,—that all absolute rank is denied, and the value of each made contingent and floating. It is only that the mind is somewhat nearer apprehending the sense, and dwells less on the characters.

If Art suffers in its relative rank among human interests by this democratic levelling, it is to the gain of what Art intends. It is true, no picture can henceforth move us as men were once moved by pictures. No Borgo Allegro will ever turn out again in triumph for a Madonna of Cimabue or of any one else; whatever feeling Turner or another may excite comes far short of that. But the splendor that clothed the poor, pale, formal image belonged very little to it, but expressed rather the previous need of utterance, and could reach that pitch only when the age had not yet learned to think and to write, but must put up with these hieroglyphics. Art has no more grown un-religious than Religion has, but only less idolatrous. As fast as religion passes into life,—as the spiritual nature of man begins to be recognized as the ground of legislation and society, and not merely in the miracle of sainthood,—the apparatus and imagery of the Church, its dogmas and ceremonies, grow superfluous, as what they stand for is itself present. It is the dawn that makes these stars grow pale. So in Art, as fast as the dream of the imagination becomes the common sense of mankind, and only so fast, the awe that surrounded the earlier glimpses is lost. Its influence is not lessened, but diffused and domesticated as Culture.

Art is the truly popular philosophy. Our picture-gazing and view-hunting only express the feeling that our science is too abstract, that it does not attach us, but isolates us in the universe. What we are thus inwardly drawn to explore is not the chaff and exuviæ of things, not their differences only, but their central connection, in spite of apparent diversity. This, stated, is the Ideal, the abrupt contradiction of the actual, and the creation of a world extraordinary, in which all defect is removed. But the defect cannot be cured by correction, for that admits its right to exist; it is not by exclusion that limitation is overcome,—this is only to establish a new limitation,—but by inclusion, by reaching the point where the superficial antagonism vanishes. Then the ideal is seen no longer in opposition, but everywhere and alone existent. As this point is approached, the impulse to reconstruct the actual—as if the triumph of truth were staked on that venture—dies out. The elaborate contradiction loses interest, earliest where it is most elaborate and circumstantial, and latest where the image has least materiality and fixity, where it is only a reminder of what the actual is securely felt to be, in spite of its stubborn exterior.

The modern mind is therefore less demonstrative; our civilization seeks less to declare and typify itself outwardly in works of Art, manners, dress, etc. Hence it is, perhaps, that the beauty of the race has not kept pace with its culture. It is less beautiful, because it cares less for beauty, since this is no longer the only reconcilement of the actual with the inward demands. The vice of the imagination is its inevitable exaggeration. It is our own weakness and dulness that we try to hide from ourselves by this partiality. Therefore it was said that the images were the Bible of the laity. Bishop Durandus already in the thirteenth century declared that it is only where the truth is not yet revealed that this "Judaizing" is permissible.

The highest of all arts is the art of life. In this the superficial antagonisms of use and beauty, of fact and reality, disappear. A little gain here, or the hint of it, richly repays all the lost magnificence. We need not concern ourselves lest these latter ages should be left bankrupt of the sense of beauty, for that is but a phase of a force that is never absent; nothing can supersede it but itself in a higher power. What we lament as decay only shows its demands fulfilled, and the arts it has left behind are but the landmarks of its accomplished purpose.

OUR CLASSMATE

F. W. C

Fast as the rolling seasons bring
The hour of fate to those we love,
Each pearl that leaves the broken string
Is set in Friendship's crown above.
As narrower grows the earthly chain,
The circle widens in the sky;
These are our treasures that remain,
But those are stars that beam on high.

We miss—oh, how we miss!—his face,—
With trembling accents speak his name.
Earth cannot fill his shadowed place
From all her rolls of pride and fame.
Our song has lost the silvery thread
That carolled through his jocund lips;
Our laugh is mute, our smile is fled,
And all our sunshine in eclipse.

And what and whence the wondrous charm
That kept his manhood boy-like still,—
That life's hard censors could disarm
And lead them captive at his will?
His heart was shaped of rosier clay,—
His veins were filled with ruddier fire,—
Time could not chill him, fortune sway,
Nor toil with all its burdens tire.

His speech burst throbbing from its fount
And set our colder thoughts aglow,
As the hot leaping geysers mount
And falling melt the Iceland snow.
Some word, perchance, we counted rash,—
Some phrase our calmness might disclaim;
Yet 't was the sunset lightning's flash,
No angry bolt, but harmless flame.

Man judges all, God knoweth each;
We read the rule, He sees the law;
How oft His laughing children teach
The truths His prophets never saw!
O friend, whose wisdom flowered in mirth!
Our hearts are sad, our eyes are dim;
He gave thy smiles to brighten earth,—
We trust thy joyous soul to Him!

Alas!—our weakness Heaven forgive!
We murmur, even while we trust,
"How long earth's breathing burdens live,
Whose hearts, before they die, are dust!"
But thou!—through grief's untimely tears
We ask with half-reproachful sigh,
"Couldst thou not watch a few brief years
Till Friendship faltered, 'Thou mayst die'?"

Who loved our boyish years so well?
Who knew so well their pleasant tales,
And all those livelier freaks could tell
Whose oft-told story never fails?
In vain we turn our aching eyes,—
In vain we stretch our eager hands,—
Cold in his wintry shroud he lies
Beneath the dreary drifting sands!

Ah, speak not thus! He lies not there!
We see him, hear him as of old!
He comes! he claims his wonted chair;
His beaming face we still behold!
His voice rings clear in all our songs,
And loud his mirthful accents rise;
To us our brother's life belongs,—
Dear boys, a classmate never dies!