Decoration.
Mrs. Siddons, when looking over the statues in Lord Lansdowne’s gallery, told him that one mode of expressing intensity of feeling was suggestedto her by the position of some of the Egyptian statues with the arms close down at the sides and the hands clenched. This is curious, for the attitude in the Egyptian gods is intended to express repose. As the expression of intense passion self-controlled, it might be appropriate to some characters and not to others. Rachel, as I recollect, uses it in the Phêdre:—Madame Rettich uses it in the Medea. It would not be characteristic in Constance.
Decoration.
Ona certain occasion when Fanny Kemble was reading Cymbeline, a lady next to me remarked that Imogen ought not to utter the words “Senseless linen!—happier therein than I!” aloud, and to Pisanio,—that it detracted from the strength of the feeling, and that they should have been uttered aside, and in a low, intense whisper. “Iachimo,” she added, “might easily have won a woman who could have laid her heart so bare to a mere attendant!”
On my repeating this criticism to Fanny Kemble, she replied just as I had anticipated: “Such criticismis the mere expression of the natural emotions or character of the critic.Shewould have spoken the words in a whisper;Ishould have made the exclamation aloud. If there had been a thousand people by, I should not have cared for them—I should not have been conscious of their presence. I should have exclaimed before them all, ‘Senseless linen!—happier therein than I!’”
And thus the artist fell into the same mistake of which she accused her critic—she made Imogen utter the words aloud, becauseshewould have done so herself. This sort of subjective criticism in both was quite feminine; but the question was not how either A. B. or F. K. would have spoken the words, but what would have been most natural in such a woman as Imogen?
And most undoubtedly the first criticism was as exquisitely true and just as it was delicate. Such a woman as Imogen wouldnothave uttered those words aloud. She would have uttered them in a whisper, and turning her face from her attendant. With such a woman, the more intense the passion, the more conscious and the more veiled the expression.
Decoration.
Ireadin the life of Garrick that, “about 1741, a taste for Shakespeare had lately been revived by the encouragement of some distinguished persons of taste of both sexes; but more especially by the ladies who formed themselves into a society, called the ‘Shakespeare Club.’” There exists a Shakespeare Society at this present time, but I do not know that any ladies are members of it, or allowed to be so.
Decoration.
The“Maria Maddalena” of Friedrich Hebbel is a domestic tragedy. It represents the position of a young girl in the lower class of society—a character of quiet goodness and feeling, in a position the most usual, circumstances the most common-place. The representation is from the life, and set forth with a truth which in its naked simplicity, almost hardness, becomes most tragic and terrible. Around this girl,portrayed with consummate delicacy, is a group of men. First her father, an honest artisan, coarse, harsh, despotic. Then a light-minded, good-natured, dissipated brother, and two suitors. All these love her according to their masculine individuality. To the men of her own family she is as a part of the furniture—something they are accustomed to see—necessary to the daily well-being of the house, without whom the fire would not be on the hearth, nor the soup on the table; and they are proud of her charms and good qualities as belonging to them. By her lovers she is loved as an object they desire to possess—and dispute with each other. But no one of all these thinks ofher—of what she thinks, feels, desires, suffers, is, or may be. Nor does she seem to think of it herself, until the storm falls upon her, enwraps her, overwhelms her. Then she stands in the midst of the beings around her, and who are one and all in a kind of external relation to her, completely alone. In her grief, in her misery, in her amazement, her perplexity, her terror, there is no one to take thought for her, no one to help, no one to sympathise. Each is self-occupied, self-satisfied. And so she sinks down and perishes, and they stand wondering at what they had not the sense to see, wringing their hands over the irremediable. It is the Lucy Ashton of vulgar life.
The manners and characters of this play are essentially German; but thestuff—the material of the piece—the relative position of the personages, might be true of any place in this christian, civilised Europe. The whole is wonderfully, painfully natural, and strikes home to the heart, like Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs.” It was a surprise to me that such a piece should have been acted, and with applause, at the Court Theatre at Vienna; but I believe it has not been given since 1849.
Decoration.
Hereis a very good analysis of the artistic nature: “Il ressent une véritable émotion, mais il s’arrange pour la montrer. Il fait un peu ce que faisait cet acteur de l’antiquité qui, venant de perdre son fils unique et jouant quelque temps après le rôle d’Electre embrassant l’urne d’Oreste, prit entre ses mains l’urne qui contenait les cendres de son enfant, et joua sa propre douleur, dit Aulus Gellius, au lieu de jouer celle de son rôle. Ce melange de l’émotion naturelle et de l’émotion théatrale est plus fréquent qu’on ne croit, surtout à certaines époques quand le raffinement de l’Education fait que l’homme ne sentpas seulement ses émotions, mais qu’il sent aussi l’effet qu’elles peuvent produire. Beaucoup de gens alors, sont naturellement comédiens; c’est à dire qu’ils donnent un rôle à leurs passions: ils sentent en dehors au lieu de sentir en dedans; leurs émotions sonten reliefau lieu d’êtreen profondeur.”—St. Marc Girardin.
I think Margaret Fuller must have had the above passage in her mind when she worked out this happy illustration into a more finished form. She says:—“The difference between the artistic nature and the unartistic nature in the hour of emotion, is this: in the first the feeling is a cameo, in the last an intaglio. Raised in relief and shapedoutof the heart in the first; cutintothe heart, and hardly perceptible till you take the impression, in the last.”
And to complete this fanciful and beautiful analogy, we might add, that because the artistic nature is demonstrative, it is sometimes thought insincere; and insincere itiswhere the form is hollow in proportion as it is cast outward, as in the casts and electrotype copies of the solid sculpture. And because the unartistic nature is undemonstrative, it is sometimes thought cold, unreal; for of this also there are imitations; and in passing the touch over certain intaglios, we feel by contact that they are not so deep as we supposed.
God defend us from both! from the hollownessthat imitates solidity, and the shallowness that imitates depth!
Decoration.
Goethesaid of some woman, “She knew something of devotion and love, but of the pure admiration for a glorious piece of man’s handiwork—of a mere sympathetic veneration for the creation of the human intellect—she could form no idea.”
This may have been true of the individual woman referred to; but that female critics look for something in a production of art beyond the mere handiwork, and that “our sympathetic veneration for a creation of human intellect,” is often dependent on our moral associations, is not a reproach to us. Nor, if I may presume to say so, does it lessen the value of our criticism, where it can be referred to principles. Women have a sort of unconscious logic in these matters.
Decoration.
“Whenfiction,” says Sir James Mackintosh, “represents a degree of ideal excellence superior to any virtue which is observed in real life, the effect is perfectly analogous to that of a model of ideal beauty in the fine arts.”
That is to say—As the Apollo exalts our idea of possible beauty, in form, so the moral ideal of man or woman exalts our idea of possible virtue, provided it beconsistentas a whole. If we gave the Apollo a god-like head and face and left a part of his frame below perfection, the elevating effect of the whole would be immediately destroyed, though the figure might be more according to the standard of actual nature.
Decoration.
“InDante, as in Shakespeare, every man selects by instinct that which assimilates with the course of his own previous occupations and interests.” (Merivale.) True, not of Dante and Shakespeare only, but of all books worth reading; and not merely of books and authors, but of all productions of mind in whatever form which speak to mind; all works of art, from which weimbibe, as it were, what is sympathetic with our individuality. The more universal thesympathies of the writer or the artist, the more of such individualities will be included in his domain of power.
Decoration.
Thedistinction so cleverly and beautifully drawn by the Germans (by Lessing first I believe) between “Bildende” and “Redende Kunst” is not to be rendered into English without a lengthy paraphrase. It places in immediate contradistinction the art which is evolved inwords, and the art which is evolved informs.
Decoration.
Venus, or rather the Greek Aphrodite, in the sublime fragment of Eschylus (the Danaïdes) is a grand, severe, and pure conception; the principle eternal of beauty, of love, and of fecundity—or the law of the continuation of being through beauty andthrough love. Such a conception is no more like the Ovidean Roman Venus than the Venus of Milo is like the Venus de Medicis.
Decoration.
Inthe Greek tragedy, love figures as one of the laws of nature—not as a power, or a passion; these are the aspects given to it by the Christian imagination.
Yet this higher idea of lovedidexist among the ancients—only we must not seek it in their poetry, but in their philosophy. Thus we find it in Plato, set forth as a beautiful philosophical theory; not as a passion, to influence life, nor as a poetic feeling, to adorn and exalt it. Nor do we moderns owe this idea of a mystic, elevated, and elevating love to the Greek philosophy. I rather agree with those who trace it to the mingling of Christianity with the manners of the old Germans, and their (almost) superstitious reverence for womanhood. In the Middle Ages, where morals were most depraved, and women most helpless and oppressed, there still survived the theory formed out of the combination of the Christian spirit, and the Germanic customs; and when in the 15thcentury Plato became the fashion, then the theory became a science, and what had been religion became again philosophy. This sort of speculative love became to real love what theology became to religion; it was a thesis to be talked about and argued in universities, sung in sonnets, set forth in art; and so being kept as far as possible from all bearings on our moral life, it ceased to find consideration either as a primæval law of God, or as a moral motive influencing the duties and habits of our existence; and thus we find the social code in regard to it diverging into all the vagaries of celibacy on one hand, and all the vilenesses of profligacy on the other.
Decoration.
Wilkie’s“Life and Letters” have not helped me much. His opinions and criticisms on his own art are sensible, not suggestive. I find, however, one or two passages strongly illustrative of the value oftruthas a principle in art, and the sort ofvitalityit gives to scenery and objects.
He writes, when travelling in Holland, to his friend, Sir George Beaumont;—
“One of the first circumstances that struck me wherever I went was what you had prepared me for; the resemblance that everything bore to the Dutch and Flemish pictures. On leaving Ostend, not only the people, houses, trees, but whole tracks of country reminded me of Teniers, and on getting further into the country this was only relieved by the pictures of Rubens and Wouvermans, or some other masters taking his place.
“I thought I could trace the particular districts in Holland where Ostade, Cuyp, and Rembrandt had studied, and could almost fancy the spot where the pictures of other masters had been painted. Indeed nothing seemed new to me in the whole country; and what one could not help wondering at, was, that these old masters should have been able to draw the materials of so beautiful a variety of art, from so contracted and monotonous a theme.”
Their variety arose out of their truthfulness. I had the same feeling when travelling in Holland and Belgium. It was to me a perpetual succession of reminiscences, and so it has been with others. Rubens and Rembrandt (as landscape painters)—Cuyp, Hobbima, were continually in my mind; occasionally the yet more poetical Ruysdaal; but who ever thinks of Wouvermans, or Bergham, orKarel du Jardin, as national or natural painters? their scenery is allgot uplike the scenery in a ballet, and I can conceive nothing more tiresome than a room full of their pictures, elegant as they are.
Again, writing from Jerusalem, Wilkie says, “Nothing here requires revolution in our opinions of the finest works of art: with all their discrepancies of detail, they are yet constantly recalled by what is here before us. The background of the Heliodorus of Raphael is a Syrian building; the figures in the Lazarus of Sebastian del Piombo are a Syrian people; and the indescribable tone of Rembrandt is brought to mind at every turn, whether in the street, the Synagogue, or the Sepulchre.” And again: “The painter we are always referring to, as one who has most truly given the eastern people, is Rembrandt.”
He partly contradicts this afterwards, but says, that Venetian art reminds him of Syria. Now, the Venetians were in constant communication with the East; all their art has a tinge of orientalism. As to Rembrandt, he must have been in familiar intercourse with the Jew merchants and Jewish families settled in the Dutch commercial towns; he painted them frequently as portraits, and they perpetually appear in his compositions.
Inthe following passage Wilkie seems unconsciously to have anticipated the invention (or rather thediscovery) of the Daguerreotype, and some of its results. He says:—“If by an operation of mechanism, animated nature could be copied with the accuracy of a cast in plaster, a tracing on a wall, or a reflection in a glass, without modification, and without the proprieties and graces of art, all that utility could desire would be perfectly attained, but it would be at the expense of almost every quality which renders art delightful.”
One reason why the Daguerreotype portraits are in general so unsatisfactory may perhaps be traced to a natural law, though I have not heard it suggested. It is this: every object that we behold we see not with the eye only, but with the soul; and this is especially true of the human countenance, which in so far as it is the expression of mind we see through the medium of our own individual mind. Thus a portrait is satisfactory in so far as the painter has sympathy with his subject, and delightful to us in proportion as the resemblance reflected throughhissympathies is in accordance withour own. Now in the Daguerreotype there is no such medium, and the face comes before us without passing through the human mind and brain to our apprehension. This may bethe reason why a Daguerreotype, however beautiful and accurate, is seldom satisfactory or agreeable, and that while we acknowledge its truth as to fact, it always leaves something for the sympathies to desire.
He says, “One thing alone seems common in all the stages of early art; the desire of making all other excellences tributary to the expression of thought and sentiment.”
The early painters hadno otherexcellences except those of thought and expression; therefore could not sacrifice what they did not possess. They drew incorrectly, coloured ineffectively, and were ignorant of perspective.
Decoration.
Whenat Dusseldorf, I found the President of the Academy, Wilhelm Schadow, employed on a church picture in three compartments; Paradise inthe centre; on the right side, Purgatory; on the left side, Hell. He explained to me that he had not attempted to paint the interior of Paradise as the sojourn of the blessed, because he could imagine no kind of occupation or delight which, prolonged to eternity, would not be wearisome. He had therefore represented the exterior of Paradise, where Christ, standing on the threshold with outstretched arms, receives and welcomes those who enter. (This was better and in finer taste than the more common allegory of St. Peter and his keys.) On one side of the door, the Virgin Mary and a group of guardian angels encourage those who approach. Among these we distinguish a martyr who has died for the truth, and a warrior who has fought for it. A care-worn, penitent mother is presented by her innocent daughter. Those who were “in the world and the world knew them not,” are here acknowledged—and eyes dim with weeping, and heads bowed with shame, are here uplifted, and bright with the rapturous gleam which shone through the portals of Paradise.
Theidea of Purgatory, he told me, was suggested by a vision or dream related by St. Catherine of Genoa, in which she beheld a great number of men and women shut up in a dark cavern; angels descending from heaven, liberate them from time to time, and they are borne away one after another from darkness, pain, and penance, into life and light—againto behold the face of their Maker—reconciled and healed. In his picture, Schadow has represented two angels bearing away a liberated soul. Below in the fore-ground groups of sinners are waiting, sadly, humbly, but not unhopefully, the term of their bitter penance. Among these he had placed a group of artists and poets who, led away by temptation, had abused their glorious gifts to wicked or worldly purposes;—Titian, Ariosto, and, rather to my surprise, the beautiful, lamenting spirit of Byron. Then, what was curious enough, as types of ambition, Lady Macbeth and her husband, who, it seems, were to be ultimately saved, I do not know why—unless for the love of Shakespeare.
Hell, like all the hells I ever saw, was a failure. There was the usual amount of fire and flames, dragons and serpents, ghastly, despairing spirits, but nothing of original or powerful conception. When I looked in Schadow’s face, so beautiful with benevolence, I wonderedhowhe could—but in truth he couldnot—realise to himself the idea of a hell; all the materials he had used were borrowed and common-place.
But among his cartoons for pictures already painted, there was one charming idea of quite a different kind. It was for an altar, and he called it “The Fountain of Life.” Above, the sacrificed Redeemer lies extended in his mother’s arms. Thepure abundant Waters of Salvation, gushing from the rock beneath their feet, are received into a great cistern. Saints, martyrs, teachers of the truth, are standing round, drinking or filling their vases, which they present to each other. From the cistern flows a stream, at which a family of poor peasants are drinking with humble, joyful looks; and as the stream divides and flows away through flowery meadows, little sportive children stoop to drink of it, scooping up the water in their tiny hands, or sipping it with their rosy smiling lips. A beautiful and significant allegory beautifully expressed, and as intelligible to the people as any in the “Pilgrim’s Progress.”
Decoration.
Haydondiscussed “High Art” as if it depended solely on the knowledge and the appreciation ofform. In this lay his great mistake. Form is but the vehicle of the highest art.
Decoration.
Southeysays that the Franciscan Order “excluded all art, all science;—no pictures mightprofane their churches.” This is a most extraordinary instance of ignorance in a man of Southey’s universal learning. Did he forget Friar Bacon? had he not heard of that museum of divine pictures, the Franciscan church and convent at Assisi? And that some of the greatest mathematicians, architects, mosaic workers, carvers, and painters, of the 13th and 14th centuries were Franciscan friars?
Decoration.
Wordsworth’sremark on Sir Joshua Reynolds as a painter, that “he lived too much for the age and the people among whom he lived,” is hardly just; as a portrait-painter he could not well do otherwise; his profession was to represent the people among whom he lived. An artist who takes the higher, the creative and imaginative walks of art, and who thinks he can, at the same time, live for and with the age, and for the passing and clashing interests of the world, and the frivolities of society, does so at a great risk: there must be perilous discord between the inner and the outer life—such discord as wears and irritates the whole physical and moral being. Where the original material of the character is not strong, the artistic genius will begradually enfeebled and conventionalised, through flattery, through sympathy, through misuse. If the material be strong, the result may perhaps be worse; the genius may be demoralised and the mind lose its balance. I have seen in my time instances of both.
Decoration.
“Theman,” says Coleridge, “who reads a work meant for immediate effect on one age, with the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined gentleman but a very sorry critic.”
This is especially true with regard to art: but Coleridge should have put in the word,only, (“only the notions and feelings of another age,”) for a very great pleasure lies in the power of throwing ourselves into the sentiments and notions of one age, while feelingwiththem, and reflectinguponthem, with the riper critical experience which belongs to another age.
Decoration.
Agoodtaste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; ajusttaste discriminates the degree,—thepoco-piùand thepoco-meno. Agoodtaste rejects faults; ajusttaste selects excellences. Agoodtaste is often unconscious; ajusttaste is always conscious. Agoodtaste may be lowered or spoilt; ajusttaste can only go on refining more and more.
Decoration.
Artistsare interesting to me as men. Their work, as the product of mind, should lead us to a knowledge of their own being; else, as I have often said and written, our admiration of art is a species of atheism. To forget the soul in its highest manifestation is like forgetting God in his creation.
Decoration.
“Lesimages peints du corps humain, dans les figures où domine par trop le savoir anatomique, en révèlant trop clairement à l’homme les secrets de sastructure, lui en découvrent aussi par trop ce qu’on pourrait appeler le point de vuematériel, ou, si l’on veut,animal.”
This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have sometimes thought that his very materialism, so grand, and so peculiar in character, may have arisen out of his profound religious feeling, his stern morality, his lofty conceptions of ourmortal, as well asimmortaldestinies. He appears to have beheld the human form only in a pure and sublime point of view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation, fearfully and wondrously constructed, for the spirit of man,—
“The outward shape,And unpolluted temple of the mind.”
“The outward shape,And unpolluted temple of the mind.”
This is the reason that Michal-Angelo’s materialism affects us so differently from that of Rubens. In the first, the predominance of form attains almost a moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness. Michal-Angelo believed in the resurrection ofTHE BODY, emphatically; and in his Last Judgment the dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty to suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben’s picture of the same subject (at Munich) the bodily presence of resuscitated life is revolting, reminding us of the text of St. Paul—“Flesh and blood shallnotinherit the kingdom of God.” Both pictures areæstheticallyfalse, butartisticallymiracles, and should thus be considered and appreciated.
I have never looked on those awful figures in the Medici Chapel without thinking what stupendous intellects must inhabit such stupendous forms—terrible in their quietude; but they are supernatural, rather than divine.
“Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde;Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Zürnender, wie ist Dein Gott!”
“Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde;Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Zürnender, wie ist Dein Gott!”
John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beautiful essay “Michael-Angelo, a Poet,” says truly that “Dante worshipped the philosophy of religion, and Michael-Angelo adored the philosophy of art.” The religion of the one and the art of the other were evolved in a strange combination of mysticism, materialism, and moral grandeur. The two men were congenial in character and in genius.
Decoration.
Decoration.
I Should begin by admitting the position laid down by Frederick Schlegel, that art and nature are not identical. “Men,” he says, “traduce nature, who falsely give her the epithet of artistic;” for though nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend all nature. Nature, in her sources of pleasures and contemplation is infinite; and art, as her reflection in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in her powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of art and its capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite,has circumscribed the bounds of finite art; the one is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if poetic art in theinterpretingof nature share in her infinitude, yet inrepresentingnature through material, form, and colour, she is,—oh, how limited!
If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of limitation as determined as the musical scale, narrowest of all are the limitations of sculpture, to which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place; and it is in regard to sculpture, we find most frequently those mistakes which arise from a want of knowledge of the true principles of art.
Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the limitations of the art of sculpture as to the management of the material in giving form and expression; its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection of the complex and conventional; its bounded capabilities as to choice of subject; must we also admit, with some of the most celebrated critics of art, that there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek? And that every deviation from pure Greek art must be regarded as a depravation and perversion of the powers and subjects of sculpture? I do not see that this follows.
It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the term of its development. In so far as regards theprinciples of beauty and execution, it can go no farther. We may stand and look at the relics of the Parthenon in awe and in despair; we can do neither more, nor better. But we have not done with Greek sculpture. What in it is purelyideal, is eternal; what is conventional, is in accordance with the primal conditions of all imitative art. Therefore though it may have reached the point at which development stops, and though its capability of adaptation be limited by necessary laws; still its all-beautiful, its immortal imagery is ever near us and around us; still “doth the old feeling bring back the old names,” and with the old names, the forms; still, in those old familiar forms we continue to clothe all that is loveliest in visible nature; still, in all our associations with Greek art—
“’Tis Jupiter who brings whate’er is great,And Venus who brings every thing that’s fair.”
“’Tis Jupiter who brings whate’er is great,And Venus who brings every thing that’s fair.”
That the supreme beauty of Greek art—that the majestic significance of the classical myths—will ever be to the educated mind and eye as things indifferent and worn out, I cannot believe.
But on the other hand it may well be doubted whether the impersonation of the Greek allegories in the purest forms of Greek art will ever give intense pleasure to the people, or ever speak hometo the hearts of the men and women of these times. And this not from the want of an innate taste and capacity in the minds of the masses—not because ignorance has “frozen the genial current in their souls”—not merely through a vulgar preference for mechanical imitation of common and familiar forms; but from other causes not transient—not accidental. A classical education is not now, as heretofore, theonlyeducation given; and through an honest and intense sympathy with the life of their own experience, and through a dislike to vicious associations, though clothed in classical language and classical forms,thenceis it that the people have turned with a sense of relief from gods and goddesses, Ledas and Antiopes, to shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of Charity, and young ladies in the character of Innocence,—harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the same relation to classical sculpture that Watts’s hymns bear to Homer and Sophocles.
Classical attainments of any kind are rare in our English sculptors; therefore it is, that we find them often quite familiar with the conventional treatment and outward forms of the usual subjects of Greek art, without much knowledge of the original poetical conception, its derivation, or its significance; and equally without any real appreciation of the idea of which the form is but the vehicle. Hence they donot seem to be aware how far this original conception is capable of being varied, modified,animatedas it were, with an infusion of fresh life, without deviating from its essential truth, or transgressing those narrow limits, within which all sculpture must be bounded in respect to action and attitude. To expresscharacterwithin these limits is the grand difficulty. We must remember that too much value given to the head as the seat of mind, too much expression given to the features as the exponents of character, must diminish the importance of those parts of the form on which sculpture mainly depends for its effect on the imagination. To convey the idea of a complete individuality in a single figure, and under these restrictions, is the problem to be solved by the sculptor who aims at originality, yet feels his aspirations restrained by a fine taste and circumscribed by certain inevitable associations.
It is therefore a question open to argument and involving considerations of infinite delicacy and moment, in morals and in art, whether the old Greek legends, endued as they are with an imperishable vitality derived from their abstract youth, may not be susceptible of a treatment in modern art analogous to that which they have received in modern poetry, where the significant myth, or the ideal character, without losing its classic grace, has beenanimated with a purer sentiment, and developed into a higher expressiveness. Wordsworth’s Dion and Laodomia; Shelley’s version of the Hymn to Mercury; Goethe’s Iphigenia; Lord Byron’s Prometheus; Keats’s Hyperion; Barry Cornwall’s Proserpina; are instances of what I mean in poetry. To do the same thing in art, requires that our sculptors should stand in the same relation to Phidias and Praxiteles, that our greatest poets bear to Homer or Euripides; that they should be themselves poets and interpreters, not mere translators and imitators.
Further, we all know, that there is often a necessity for conveying abstract ideas in the forms of art. We have then recourse to allegory; yet allegorical statues are generally cold and conventional and addressed to the intellect merely. Now there are occasions, in which an abstract quality or thought is far more impressively and intelligibly conveyed by animpersonationthan by apersonification. I mean, that Aristides might express the idea of justice; Penelope, that of conjugal faith; Jonathan and David (or Pylades and Orestes), friendship; Rizpah, devotion to the memory of the dead; Iphigenia, the voluntary sacrifice for a good cause; and so of many others; and such figures would have this advantage, that with the significance of a symbol they would combine all the powers of a sympathetic reality.
Decoration.
Ihavenever seen any statue of Helen, ancient or modern. Treated in the right spirit, I can hardly conceive a diviner subject for a sculptor. It would be a great mistake to represent the Greek Helen merely as a beautiful and alluring woman. This, at least, is not the Homeric conception of the character, which has a wonderful and fascinating individuality, requiring the utmost delicacy and poetic feeling to comprehend, and rare artistic skill to realise. The oft-told story of the Grecian painter, who, to create a Helen, assembled some twenty of the fairest models he could find, and took from each a limb or a feature, in order to compose from their separate beauties an ideal of perfection,—this story, if it were true, would only prove that even Zeuxis could make a great mistake. Such a combination of heterogeneous elements would be psychologically and artistically false, and would never give us a Helen.
She has become the ideal type of a fatal, faithless, dissolute woman; but according to the Greek myth,she ispredestined,—at once the instrument and the victim of that fiat of the gods which had long before decreed the destruction of Troy, andherto be the cause. She must not only be supremely beautiful,—“a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair!”—but as the offspring of Zeus (the title by which she is so often designated in the Iliad), as the sister of the great twin demi-gods Castor and Pollux, she should have the heroic lineaments proper to her Olympian descent, touched with a pensive shade; for she laments the calamities which her fatal charms have brought on all who have loved her, all whom she has loved:—
“Ah! had I died ere to these shores I fled,False to my country and my nuptial bed!”
“Ah! had I died ere to these shores I fled,False to my country and my nuptial bed!”
She shrinks from the reproachful glances of those whom she has injured; and yet, as it is finely intimated, wherever she appears her resistless loveliness vanquishes every heart, and changes curses into blessings. Priam treats her with paternal tenderness; Hector with a sort of chivalrous respect.
“If some proud brother eyed me with disdain,Or scornful sister with her sweeping train,Thy gentle accents softened all my pain;Nor was it e’er my fate from thee to findA deed ungentle or a word unkind.”
“If some proud brother eyed me with disdain,Or scornful sister with her sweeping train,Thy gentle accents softened all my pain;Nor was it e’er my fate from thee to findA deed ungentle or a word unkind.”
Helen, standing on the walls of Troy, and looking sadly over the battle plain, where the heroes of herforfeited country, her kindred and her friends, are assembled to fight and bleed for her sake, brings before us an image full of melancholy sweetness as well as of consummate beauty. Another passage in which she upbraids Venus as the cause of her fault—not as a mortal might humbly expostulate with an immortal, but almost on terms of equality, and even with bitterness,—is yet more characteristic. “For what,” she asks, tauntingly, “am I reserved? To what new countries am I destined to carry war and desolation? For what new lover must I break a second vow? Let me go hence! and if Paris lament my absence, let Venus console him, and for his sake ascend the skies no more!” A regretful pathos should mingle with her conscious beauty and her half-celestial dignity; and, to render her truly, her Greek elegance should be combined with a deeper and more complex sentiment than Greek art has usually sought to express.
I am speaking here of Homer’s Helen—the Helen of the Iliad, not the Helen of the tragedians—not the Helen who for two thousand years has merely served “to point a moral;” and an artist who should think to realise the true Homeric conception, should beware of counterfeits, for such are abroad.2
There is a wild Greek myth that it was not the real Helen, but the phantom of Helen, who fled with Paris, and who caused the destruction of Troy; while Helen herself was leading, like Penelope, a pattern life at Memphis. I must confess I prefer the proud humility, the pathetic elegance of Homer’s Helen, to such jugglery.
It may flatter the pride of virtue, or it may move our religious sympathies, to look on the forlorn abasement of the Magdalene as the emblem of penitence; but there are associations connected with Helen—“sad Helen,” as she calls herself, and as I conceive the character,—which have a deep tragic significance; and surely there are localities for which the impersonation of classical art would be better fitted than that of sacred art.
I do not know of any existing statue of Helen. Nicetas mentions among the relics of ancient art destroyed when Constantinople was sacked by the Latins in 1202, a bronze statue of Helen, with long hair flowing to the waist; and there is mention of an Etruscan figure of her, with wings (expressive of her celestial origin, for the Etruscans gave all their gods and demi-gods wings): in Müller I find these two only. There are likewise busts; and the story of Helen, and the various events of her life, occur perpetually on the antique gems, bas-reliefs, and painted vases. The most frequent subject is herabduction by Paris. A beautiful subject for a bas-relief, and one I believe not yet treated, would be Helen and Priam mourning over the lifeless form of Hector; yet the difficulty of preserving the simple sculptural treatment, and at the same time discriminating between this and other similar funereal groups, would render it perhaps a better subject for a picture, as admitting then of such scenery and accessories as would at once determine the signification.