Chapter 11

Decoration.

Statues of Penelope and Helen might stand in beautiful and expressive contrast; but it is a contrast which no profane or prosaic hand should attempt to realise. Penelope is all woman in her tenderness and her truth; Helen, half a goddess in the midst of error and remorse.

Nor is Penelope the only character which might stand as a type of conjugal fidelity in contrasted companionship with Helen: Alcestis, who died forher husband; or, better still, Laodamia, whose intense love and longing recalled hers from the shades below, are susceptible of the most beautiful statuesque treatment; only we must bear in mind that the leadingmotifin the Alcestis isduty, in the Laodamia,love.

I remember a bas-relief in the Vatican, which represents Hermes restoring Protesilaus to his mourning wife. The interview was granted for three hours only; and when the hero was taken from her a second time, she died on the threshhold of her palace. This is a frequent and appropriate subject for sarcophagi and funereal vases. But there exists, I believe, no single statue commemorative of the wife’s passionate devotion.

The modern sculptor should penetrate his fancy with the sentiment of Wordsworth’s Laodamia.

While the pen is in my hand I may remark that two of the stanzas in the Laodamia have been altered, and, as it seems to me, not improved, since the first edition. Originally the poem opened thus:

“With sacrifice, before the rising mornPerform’d, my slaughter’d lord have I required;And in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn,Him of the infernal Gods have I desired:Celestial pity I again implore;Restore him to my sight—great Jove, restore!”

Altered thus, and comparatively flat:—

“With sacrifice before the rising mornVows have I made, by fruitless hope inspired;And from the infernal Gods, mid shades forlornOf night, my slaughtered lord have I required:Celestial pity I again implore;Restore him to my sight—great Jove, restore!”

In the early edition the last stanza but one stood thus:—

“Ah! judge her gently who so deeply loved!Her who, in reason’s spite, yet without crime,Was in a trance of passion thus removed;Delivered from the galling yoke of time,And these frail elements,—to gather flowersOf blissful quiet ’mid unfading bowers!”

In the later editions thus altered, and, to my taste, spoiled:—

“By no weak pity might the Gods be moved;She who thus perish’d not without the crimeOf lovers that in Reason’s spite have loved,Was doomed to wander in a grosser climeApart from happy ghosts, that gather flowersOf blissful quiet ’mid unfading bowers.”

Altered, probably, because Virgil has introduced the shade of Laodamia among the criminal and unhappy lovers,—an instance of extraordinary bad taste in the Roman poet; whatever may have been her faults, she surely deserved to be placed in better company than Phædra and Pasiphäe. Wordsworth’sintuitive feeling and taste were true in the first instance, and he might have trusted to them. In my own copy of Wordsworth I have been careful to mark the original reading in justice to theoriginalLaodamia.

Decoration.

I have never met with a statue, ancient or modern, of Hippolytus; the finest possible ideal of a Greek youth, touched with some individual characteristics which are peculiarly fitted for sculpture. He is a hunter, not a warrior; a tamer of horses, not a combatant with spear and shield. He should have the slight, agile build of a young Apollo, but nothing of the God’s effeminacy; on the contrary, there should be an infusion of the severe beauty of his Amazonian mother, with that sedateness and modesty which should express the votary and companion of Diana;while, as the fated victim of Venus, whom he had contemned, and of his stepmother Phædra, whom he had repulsed, there should be a kind of melancholy in his averted features. A hound and implements of the chase would be the proper accessories, and the figure should be undraped, or nearly so.

A sculptor who should be tempted to undertake this fine, and, as I think, untried subject—at least as a single figure—must begin by putting Racine out of his mind, whose “Seigneur Hippolyte” makes sentimental love to the “Princesse Aricie,” and must penetrate his fancy with the conception of Euripides.

I find in Schlegel’s “Essais littéraires,” a few lines which will assist the fancy of the artist, in representing the person and character of Hippolytus.

“Quant à l’Hippolyte d’Euripide il a une teinte si divine que pour le sentir dignement il faut, pour ainsi dire, être initié dans les mystères de la beauté, avoir respiré l’air de la Grèce. Rappelez vous ce que l’antiquité nous a transmis de plus accompli parmi les images d’une jeunesse héroïque, les Dioscures de Monte-Cavallo, le Méléagre et l’Apollon du Vatican. Le caractère d’Hippolyte occupe dans la poësie à peu près la même place que ces statues dans la sculpture.” “On peut remarquer dans plusieurs beautés idéales de l’antique que les anciensvoulant créer une image perfectionnée de la nature humaine ont fondu les nuances du caractère d’un sexe avec celui de l’autre; que Junon, Pallas, Diane, out une majesté, une sévérité mâle; qu’ Apollon, Mercure, Bacchus, au contraire, ont quelque chose de la grace et de la douceur des femmes. De même nous voyons dans la beauté héroïque et vierge d’Hippolyte l’image de sa mère l’Amazone et le reflet de Diane dans un mortel.”

(The last lines are especially remarkable, and are an artistic commentary on what I have ventured to touch upon ethically at page 85.)

The story of Hippolytus is to be found in bas-reliefs and gems; it occurs on a particularly fine sarcophagus now preserved in the cathedral at Agrigentum, of which there is a cast in the British Museum.

Under the heroic and classical form, Hippolytus conveys the same idea of manly chastity and self-control which in sacred art would be suggested by the figure of Joseph, the son of Jacob.

A noble companion to the Hippolytus would be Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. He is the young Greek warrior, strong and bold and brave; a fineideal type of generosity and truth. The conception, as I imagine it, should be taken from the Philoctetes of Sophocles, where Neoptolemus, indignant at the craft of Ulysses, discloses the trick of which he had been made the unwilling instrument, and restores the fatal, envenomed arrows to Philoctetes. The celebrated lines in the Iliad spoken by Achilles—

“Who dares think one thing and another tellMy soul detests him as the gates of hell!”

should give the leading characteristicmotifin the figure of his son. There should be something of remorseful pity in the very youthful features; the form ought to be heroically treated, that is, undraped, and he should hold the arrows in his hand.

Neoptolemus, as the savage avenger of his father’s death, slaying the grey-haired Priam at the foot of the altar, and carrying off Andromache, is, of course, quite a different version of the character. He then figures as Pyrrhus—

“The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,Black as his purpose, did the night resemble.”

The fine moral story of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes is figured on the Etruscan vases. Of the young, truth-telling, Greek hero I find no single statue.

Decoration.

I have often been surprised that we have no statue of this eminently beautiful subject. We have the story of Iphigenia constantly repeated in gems and bas-reliefs; the most celebrated example extant being the Medici Vase. But no single figure of Iphigenia, as the Greek ideal of heroic maidenhood and self-devotion, exists, I believe, in antique sculpture. The small and rather feebly elegant statuette by Christian Tieck is the only modern example I have seen.

Iphigenia may be represented under two very different aspects, both beautiful.

First, as the Iphigenia in Aulis; the victim sacrificed to obtain a fair wind for the Grecian fleet detained on its way to Troy. Extreme youth and grace, with a tender resignation not devoid of dignity, should be the leading characteristics; for we must bear in mind that Iphigenia, while regretting life and the “lamp-bearing day,” and “thebeloved light,” and her Argive home and her “Mycenian handmaids,” dies willingly, as the Greek girl ought to die, for the good of her country. She begins, indeed, with a prayer for pity, with lamentations for her untimely end, but she resumes her nobler self; and all her sentiments, when she is brought forth, crowned for sacrifice, are worthy of the daughter of Agamemnon. She even exults that she is called upon to perish for the good of Greece, and to avenge the cause of right on the Spartan Helen. “I give,” she exclaims, “my life for Greece! sacrifice me—and let Troy perish!” When her mother weeps, she reproves those tears: “It is not well, O my mother! that I should love life too much. Think that thou hast brought me forth for the common good of Greece, not for thyself only!” She glories in her anticipated renown, not vainly, since, while the world endures, and far as the influences of literature and art extend, her story and her name shall live. The scene in Euripides should be taken as the basis of the character—the finest scene in his finest drama. The tradition that Iphigenia was not really sacrificed, but snatched away from the altar by Diana, and a hind substituted in her place, should be present to the fancy of the artist, when he sets himself to represent the majestic resignation of the consecrated virgin; as adding a touch of the marvellous and ideal to the Greek elegance and simplicity of the conception.

Thepictureof Iphigenia as drawn by Tennyson is wonderfully vivid; but it wants the Greek dignity and statuesque feeling; it is emphatically a picture, all over colour and light, and crowded with accessories. He represents her as encountering Helen in the land of Shadows, and, turning from her “with sick and scornful looks averse,” for she remembers the tragedy at Aulis.

“My youth (she said) was blasted with a curse:This woman was the cause!I was cut off from hope in that sad placeWhich yet to name my spirit loathes and fears.My father held his hand upon his face;I, blinded with my tears,Essayed to speak; my voice came thick with sighsAs in a dream; dimly I could descryThe stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyesWaiting to see me die.The tall masts quiver’d as they lay afloat,The temples and the people and the shore;One drew a sharp knife thro’ my tender throatSlowly—and nothing more.”

The famous picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Timanthes, the theme of admiration and criticism for the last two thousand years, which every writer on art deems it proper to mention in praise or in blame, could hardly have been more vivid or more terrible than this.

The analogous idea, that of heroic resignation and self-devotion in a great cause, would be conveyed in sacred art by the figure of Jephtha’s daughter; she too regrets the promises of life, but dies not the lesswillingly. “My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon.” And for a single statue, Jephtha’s daughter would be a fine subject—one to task the powers of our best sculptors; thesentimentwould be the same as the Iphigenia, but thetreatmentaltogether different.

For the Iphigenia in Tauris I think the modern sculptor would do well to set aside the character as represented by Euripides, and rather keep in view the conception of Goethe.3In his hand it has lost nothing of its statuesque elegance and simplicity, and has gained immeasurably in moral dignity and feminine tenderness. The Iphigenia in Tauris is no longer young, but she is still the consecrated virgin; no more the victim, but herself the priestess of those very rites by which she was once fated to perish. While Euripides has depicted her as stern and astute, Goethe has made her the impersonation of female devotedness, and mild, but unflinching integrity. She is like the young Neoptolemus when she disdains to use the stratagem which Pylades had suggested, when

she dares to speak the truth, and trust to it alone for help and safety. The scene in which she is haunted by the recollection of her doomed ancestry, and mutters over the song of the Parcæ on that far-off sullen shore, is sublime, but incapable of representation in plastic art. It should, however, be well studied, as helping the artist to the abstract conception of the character as a whole.

Carstens made a design, suggested by this tragedy, of the Three Parcæ singing their fatal mysterious song. A model of one of the figures (that of Atropos) used to stand in Goethe’s library, and a cast from this is before me while I write: every one who sees it takes it for an antique.

Decoration.

I have but a few words to say of Eve. As she is the only undraped figure which is allowable in sacred art, the sculptors have multiplied representations ofher, more or less finely imagined; but what I conceive to be the true type has seldom, very seldom, been attained. The remarks which follow are, however, suggestive, not critical.

It appears to me—and I speak it with reverence—that the Miltonic type is not the highest conceivable, nor the best fitted for sculptural treatment. Milton has evidently lavished all his power on this fairest of created beings; but he makes her too nymph-like—too goddess-like. In one place he compares her to a Wood-nymph, Oread, or Dryad of the groves; in another to Diana’s self, “though not, as she, with bow and quiver armed.” The scriptural conception of our first parent is not like this; it is ampler, grander, nobler far. I fancy her the sublime ideal of maternity. It may be said that this idea of her predestined motherhood should not predominate in the conception of Eve before the Fall: but I think it should.

It is most beautifully imagined by Milton that Eve, separated from her mate, her Adam, is weak, and given over to the merely womanish nature, for only when linked together and supplying the complement to each other’smoralbeing, can man or woman be strong; but we must also remember that the “spirited sly snake,” in tempting Eve, even when he finds her alone, uses no vulgar allurements. “Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.” Milton, indeed, seasons his harangue with flattery: but for this he has no warrant in Scripture.

As the Eve of Paradise should be majestically sinless, so after the Fall she should not cower and wail like a disappointed girl. Her infinite fault, her infinite woe, her infinite penitence, should have a touch of grandeur. She has paid the inevitable price for that mighty knowledge of good and evil she so coveted; that terrible predestined experience—she has found it, or it has found her;—and she wears her crown of grief as erst her crown of innocence.

I think the noble picture of Eve in Mrs. Browning’s Drama of Exile, as that of the Mother of our redemption not less than the Mother of suffering humanity, might be read and considered with advantage by a modern sculptor.

“Rise, woman, riseTo thy peculiar and best altitudesOf doing good and of resisting ill!Something thou hast to bear through womanhood;Peculiar suffering answering to the sin,Some pang paid down for each new human life;Some weariness in guarding such a life,Some coldness from the guarded; some mistrustFrom those thou hast too well served; from those belovedToo loyally, some treason. But go, thy loveShall chant to itself its own beatitudesAfter its own life-working!I bless thee to the desert and the thorns,To the elemental change and turbulence,And to the solemn dignities of grief;To each one of these ends, and to this endOf Death and the hereafter!Eve.I accept,For me and for my daughters, this high partWhich lowly shall be counted!”

The figure of Eve in Raphael’s design (the one engraved by Marc Antonio) is exquisitely statuesque as well as exquisitely beautiful. In the moment that she presents the apple to Adam she looks—perhaps she ought to look—like theVenus Vincitriceof the antique time; but I am not sure; and, at all events, the less of the classical sentiment the better.

Decoration.

I have seen no statue of Adam; but surely he is a fine subject, either alone or as the companion of Eve; and the Miltonic type is here all-sufficient, combining the heroic ideal of Greek art with something higher still—

“Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,”

whence true authority in men—in fact, essential manliness.

Goethe had the idea that Adam ought to be represented with a spade, as the progenitor of all who till the ground, and partially draped with a deerskin, that is, after the Fall; which would be well: but he adds that Adam should have a child at his feet in the act of strangling a serpent. This appears to me objectionable and ambiguous; if admissible at all, the accessory figure would be a fitter accompaniment for Eve.

Decoration.

Angels, properly speaking, are neither winged men nor winged children. Wings, in ancient art, were the symbols of a divine nature; and the early Greeks, who humanised their gods and goddesses, and deified humanity through the perfection of the forms, at first distinguished the divine and the human by giving wings to all the celestial beings; thus lifting them above the earth. Our religious idea of angels is altogether different. Give to the child-form wings, in other words, give to the child-nature, innocent, and pure, the adjuncts of wisdom and power, and thus you realise the idea of theangel as Raphael conceived it. It is so difficult to imagine in the adult form the union of perfect purity and perfect wisdom, the absence of experience and suffering, and the capacity of thinking and feeling, a condition of being in which all consciousmotiveis lost in theimpulseto good, that it remains a problem in art. The angels of Angelico da Fiesole, who are not only winged, but convey the idea of movement only by the wings, not by the limbs, are exquisite, as fitted to minister to us in heaven, but hardly as fitted to keep watch and ward for us on earth—

“Against foul fiends to aid us militant.”

The feminine element always predominates in the conception of angels, though they are supposed to be masculine: I doubt whether it ought to be so.

While these sheets are going through the press, I find the following beautiful passage relative to angels in the last number of “Fraser’s Magazine”:—

“It is safer, even, and perhaps more orthodox and scriptural, to ‘impersonate’ time and space, strength and love, and even the laws of nature, than to give us any more angel worlds, which are but dead skeletons of Dante’s creations without that awful and living reality which they had in his mind; or to fill children’s books, as the High Church party are doingnow, with pictures and tales of certain winged hermaphrodites, in whom one cannot think (even by the extremest stretch of charity) that the writers or draughtsmen really believe, while one sees them servilely copying mediæval forms, and intermingling them with the ornaments of an extinct architecture; thus confessingnaïvelyto every one but themselves, that they accept the whole notion as an integral portion of a creed, to which, if they be members of the Church of England, they cannot well belong, seeing that it was, happily for us, expelled both by law and by conscience at the Reformation.”

This is eloquent and true; but not the less true it is, that if we have to represent in art those “spiritual beings who walk this earth unseen, both when we sleep and when we wake”—beings, who (as the author of the above passage seems to believe) may be intimately connected with the phenomena of the universe—we must have a type, a bodily type, under which to represent them; and as we cannot do this from knowledge, we must do it symbolically. Angels, as we figure them, aresymbolsof moral and spiritual existences elevated above ourselves—we do not believe in the forms, we only accept their significance. I should be glad to see a better impersonation than the impossible creatures represented in art; but till some artist-poet, or poet-artist, has invented such an impersonation, we must employ that whichis already familiarised to the eye and hallowed to the fancy without imposing on the understanding.

Decoration.

Both the Old and the New Testament abound in sculptural subjects; but fitly to deal with the Old Testament required a Michal-Angelo. Beautiful as are the gates of Ghiberti they are hardly what the Germans would call “alt-testamentische,” they are so essentially elegant and graceful, and the old Hebrew legends and personages are so tremendous. Even Miriam and Ruth dilate into a sort of grandeur. In representation I always fancy them above life-size.

I doubt whether the same artist who could conceive the Prophets would be able to represent the Apostles, or that the same hand which gave us Moses could give us Christ. Michal-Angelo’s idea of Christ, both in painting and sculpture is, to me, revolting.

Decoration.

I do not like the idea of Moses and Christ placed together. Much finer in artistic and moral contrast would be the two teachers,—Christ as the divine and spiritual law-giver, Solomon as the type of worldly wisdom. They should stand side by side, or be seated each on his throne, a crowned King, with book and sceptre—but how different in character!

We have multiplied statues of David. I have never seen one which realised the finest conception of his character, either as Hero, King, Prophet, or Poet. In general he figures as the slayer of Goliath, and is always too feeble and boyish. David, singing to his lute before Saul; David as the musician and poet, young, beautiful, half-draped, heaven-inspired, exorcising by his art the dark spirit of evil which possessed the jealous King:—this would be a theme for an artist, and would as finely represent the power of sacred song as a figure of St. Cecilia. But the sentiment should not be that of a young Apollo, or an Orpheus; therein would lie the chief difficulty.

Decoration.

I remember to have seen fine statues of Hagar holding her pitcher, of Rebekah contemplating her bracelet, and of Rachel as the shepherdess. But I would have a different version; Hagar as the poor cast-away, driven forth with her boy into the wilderness; Rebekah as the exulting bride; and Rachel as the mild, pensive wife. They would represent, in a very complete manner, contrasted phases of the destiny of Woman, connected together by our religious associations, and appealing to our deepest human sympathies.

Decoration.

The Queen of Sheba would be a fine subject for asingle statue, as the religious type of the queenly, intellectual woman, the treatment being kept as far as possible from that of a Pallas or a Muse.

The journey of the Queen of the South to visit Solomon would be a capital subject for a processional bas-relief, and as apendantto the journey of “the Wise Men of the East,” to visit a greater than Solomon. The latter has been perpetually treated from the fourth century. Of the journey of the Queen of Sheba I have seen, as yet, no example.

Decoration.

With regard to statuesque subjects from modern history and poetry,—Romantic Sculpture, as it is styled,—the taste both of the public and the artist evidently sets in this direction. That the treatment of such subjects should not be classical is admitted; but in the development of this romantic tendency there is cause to fear that we may be inundatedwith all kinds of picturesque vagaries and violations of the just laws and limits of art.

I remember, however, a circumstance which makes me hopeful as to the progress of feeling; knowledge may come hereafter. I remember about twenty years ago proposing the figure and story of Lady Godiva as beautiful subjects for sculpture and painting. There were present on that occasion, among others, two artists and a poet. The two artists laughed outright, and the poet extemporised an epigram upon Peeping Tom. If I were to propose Lady Godiva as a subject now4, I believe it would be received with a far different feeling even by those very men. If I were Queen of England I would have it painted in Fresco in my council chamber. There should be seen the palfrey with its rich housings, and near it, as preparing to mount, the noble lady should stand, timid, but resolved: her veil should lie on the ground; the drapery just falling from her fair limbs and partly sustained by one hand, while with the other she loosens her golden tresses. A bevy of waiting-maids, with averted faces, disappear hurriedly beneath the massive porch of the Saxon

palace, which forms the background, with sky and trees seen through openings in the heavy architecture. This is the picturesque version of the story; but there are many others. As a single statue, the figure of Lady Godiva affords an opportunity for the legitimate treatment of the undraped female form, sanctified by the purest, the most elevated associations;—by woman’s tearful pride and man’s respect and gratitude.

Decoration.

Shakspeare, who is so horribly unjust to Joan of Arc, has put a sublime speech into her mouth where she answers Burgundy who had accused her of sorcery,—

“Because you want the grace that others have.You judge it straight a thing impossibleTo compass wonders but by help of devils!”

The whole theory of popular superstition comprised in three lines!

But Joan herself—how at her name the wholeheart seems to rise up in resentment, not so much against her cowardly executioners as against those who have so wronged her memory! Never was a character, historically pure, bright, definite, and perfect in every feature and outline, so abominably treated in poetry and fiction,—perhaps for this reason, that she was in herself so exquisitely wrought, so complete a specimen of the heroic, the poetic, the romantic, that she could not be touched by art or modified by fancy, without being in some degree profaned. As to art, I never saw yet any representation of “Jeanne la grande Pastoure,” (except, perhaps, the lovely statue by the Princess of Wurtemburg,) which I could endure to look at—and even that gives us the contemplative simplicity, but not the power, intellect, and energy, which must have formed so large a part of the character. Then as to the poets, what shall be said of them? First Shakspeare, writing for the English stage, took up the popular idea of the character as it prevailed in England in his own time. Into the hypothesis that the greater part of Henry VI. is not by Shakspeare, there is no occasion to enter here; the original conception of the character of Joan of Arc may not be his, but he has left it untouched in its principal features. The English hated the memory of the French Heroine because she had caused the loss of France and had humiliated us as a nation; and ourchroniclers revenged themselves and healed their wounded self-love by imputing her victories to witchcraft. Shakspeare, giving her the attributes which the historians of his time assigned to her, represents her as a warlike, arrogant sorceress—a “monstrous woman”—attended and assisted by demons. I pass over the depraved and perverse spirit in which Voltaire profaned this divine character. A theme which a patriot poet would have approached as he would have approached an altar, he has made a vehicle for the most licentious parody that ever disgraced a national literature. Schiller comes next, and hardly seems to me more excusable. Not only has he missed the character, he has deliberately falsified both character and fact. His “Johanna” might have been called by any other name; and the scene of his tragedy might have been placed anywhere in the wide world with just the same probability and truth. Schiller and Goethe held a principle that all considerations were to yield before the proprieties of art. But Milton speaks somewhere of those “faultless proprieties of nature” which never can be violated with impunity: and Art can never move freely but in the domain of nature and of truth. All the fine writing in Schiller’s “Maid of Orleans” can never reconcile me to its absolute and revolting falsehood. The sublime, simple-hearted girl who to the last moment regarded herself as setapart by God to do His work, he makes the victim of an insane passion for a young Englishman. In the love-sick classical heroines of Corneille and Racine there is nothing more Frenchified, more absurd, more revolting. Then he makes her die victorious on the field of battle defending the oriflamme;—far, far more glorious as well as more pathetic her real death—but it offended against Schiller’s æsthetic conception of the dignity of tragedy.

Lastly, we have Southey’s epic: what shall be said of it?—even what he said of the Lusiad of Camoens, “that it is read with little emotion, and remembered with little pleasure.” No. I do not wish to see Joan turned into a heroine of tragedy or tale, because, as it seems to me, the whole life and death of this martyred girl is too near us, and too historically distinct, and, I will add, too sacred, to be dressed out in romantic prose or verse. What Walter Scott might have made of her I do not know—something marvellously picturesque and life-like, no doubt—and yet I am glad he did not try his hand on her. But she remains a legitimate and most admirable subject for representative art; and as yet nothing has been done in sculpture to fix the ideal and heroic in her character, nor in painting, worthy of her exploits. There exists no contemporary portrait of her except in the brief description of her in the old French Chronicle of the Siege of Orleans,where it is said that her figure was tall and slender, her bust fine, her hair and eyes black; that she wore her hair short, and could never be persuaded to put on a head-piece, and farther (and in this respect both Schiller and Southey have wronged her), that she had never slain a man, using her consecrated sword merely to defend herself. I should like to see a fine equestrian statue of her by one of our best English sculptors, set up in a conspicuous place among us, as a national expiation.

Southey mentions that in the beginning of the last war, about 1795, when popular feeling, excited almost to frenzy, raged against France, a pantomime, or ballet, was performed at Covent Garden, from the story of Joan of Arc, at the conclusion of which she is carried away by demons, like a female Don Juan. This denouement caused such a storm of indignation, that the author—one James Cross—was obliged, after the first two or three representations, to change the demons into angels, and send her straight into Heaven:—an anecdote pleasant to record as illustrating the sure ultimate triumph of truth over falsehood; of all the better sympathies over prejudice and wrong;—in spite of history, and, what is more, in spite of Shakspeare!

Decoration.

Joan of Arc is not, however, a Shakspearian character; and, in fact, there are very few of his personages susceptible of sculptural treatment. They are too dramatic, too profound, too complex in their essential nature where they are tragic; too many-sided and picturesque where they are comic.

For instance, the attempt to condense into marble such light, evanescent, quaint creations as those in “The Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” is better avoided; we feel that a marble fairy must be a heavy absurdity. Oberon and Titania might perhaps float along in a bas-relief; but we cannot put away the thought that they have reality without substantiality, and we do not like to see them, or Ariel, or Caliban fixed in the definite forms of sculpture.

There are, however, a few of Shakspeare’s characters which appear to me beautifully adapted for statuesque treatment: Perdita holding her flowers; Miranda lingering on the shore; might well replacethe innumerable “Floras” and “Nymphs preparing to bathe,” which people theatéliersof our sculptors. Cordelia has something of marble quietude about her; and Hermione is a statue ready made. And, by the way, it is observable that Shakspeare represents Hermione as acolouredstatue. Paulina will not allow it to be touched, because “the colour is not yet dry.” Again,—

“Would you not deem those veinsDid verily bear blood?“The very life seems warm upon her lips,The fixture of her eye hath motion in’t,And we are mocked by Art!The ruddiness upon her lip is wet,“You’ll mar it if you kiss it, stain your ownWith oily painting.”

I think it possible to model small ornamental statuettes and groups from some few of the scenes in Shakspeare’s plays; but this is quite different from life-size figures of Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Macbeth, which must either have the look of real individual portraiture, or become mere idealisations of certain qualities; and Shakspeare’s creations are neither the one nor the other.

Decoration.

Spenser is so essentially a picturesque poet, he depends for his rich effects so much on the combination of colour and imagery, and multiplied accessories, that one feels—at leastIfeel, on laying down a volume of the “Fairie Queene” dazzled as if I had been walking in a gallery of pictures. His “Masque of Cupid,” for instance, although a procession of poetical creations, could not be transferred to a bas-relief without completely losing its Spenserian character—its wondrous glow of colour. Thus Cupid “uprears himself exulting from the back of the ravenous lion;” removes the bandage from his eyes, that he may look round on his victims; “shakes the darts which his right hand doth strain full dreadfully,” and “claps on high his coloured wings twain.” This certainly is not the Greek Cupid, nor the Cupid of sculpture; it is the Spenserian Cupid. So of his Una, so of his Britomart, and the Red Cross Knight and Sir Guyon: one might make elegantstatuesqueimpersonations of the allegories they involve, as of Truth, Chastity, Faith, Temperance; but then they would lose immediately their Spenseriancharacter and sentiment, and must become something altogether different.

Decoration.

It is not so with Milton. The “Lady” in Comus, whether she stands listening to the echos of her own sweet voice, or motionless as marble under the spell of the “false enchanter,”lookingthat divine reproof which in the poem shespeaks,—

“I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,And virtue has no tongue to check her pride”—

is a subject perfectly fitted for sculpture, and never, so far as I know, executed. It would be a far more appropriate ornament for a lady’sboudoirthan French statues ofModesty, which generally have the effect of making one feel very much ashamed.5

Sabrina has been beautifully treated by Marshall.

It is difficult to render Comus without making him too like a Bacchus or an Apollo. He is neither.

He represents not the beneficent, but the intoxicating and brutifying power of wine. His joviality should not be that of a God, but with something mischievous, bestial, Faun-like; and he should have, with the Dionysian grace, a dash of the cunning and malignity of his Mother Circe. These characteristics should be in the mind of the artist. The panther’s skin, the coronal of vine leaves, and, instead of the Thyrsus, the magician’s wand, are the proper accessories. It is also worth notice, that in the antique representations Comus has wings as a demigod, and in a picture described by Philostratus (a night scene) he lies crouched in a drunken sleep. Little use, however, is made of him in the antique myths, and the Miltonic conception is that which should be embodied by the modern sculptor.

Il Penseroso and L’Allegro, if embodied in sculpture as poetical abstractions (either masculine or feminine) of Melancholy and Mirth, would cease to be Miltonic, for the conceptions of the poet are essentially picturesque, and expressed in both cases by a luxuriant accumulation of images and accessories, not to be brought within the limits of plastic art without the most tasteless confusion and inconsistency.

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