Decoration.
Decoration.
“Asa man embraces the determination to become a soldier and go to the wars, bravely resolved to bear dangers, and difficulties, and wounds, and death itself, but at the same time never anticipating the particular form in which those evils may surprise us in an extremely unpleasant manner;—just so we rush into authorship!”
Goethesays of Lavater, “that the conception of humanity which had been formed in himself, and in his own humanity, was so akin to the living image of Christ, that it was impossible for him to conceive how a man could live and breathe without being a Christian. He had, so to speak, a physicalaffinity with Christianity; it was to him a necessity, not only morally, but from organisation.”
Lavater’s individual feeling was, perhaps, but an anticipation of that which may become general, universal. As we rise in the scale of being, as we become more gentle, spiritualised, refined, and intelligent, will not our “physical affinity” with the religion of Christ become more and more apparent, till it is less a doctrine than a principle of life? So its Divine Author knew, who prepared it for us, and is preparing and moulding us through progressive improvement to comprehend and receive it.
Goethespeaks of “polishing up life with the varnish of fiction;” the artistic turn of the man’s mind showed itself in this love of creating an effect in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. But what can fiction—what can poetry do for life, but present some one or two out of the multitudinous aspects of that grand, beautiful, terrible, and infinite mystery? or bylife, does he mean here the mere external forms of society?—for it is not clear.
Decoration.
Decoration.
Islove, like faith, ennobled through its own depth and fervour and sincerity? or is it ennobled through the nobility, and degraded through the degradation of its object? Is it with love as with worship? Is it areligion, and holy when the object is pure and good? Is it asuperstition, and unholy when the object is impure and unworthy?
Of all the histories I have read of the aberrations of human passion, nothing ever so struck me with a sort of amazed and painful pity as Hazlitt’s “Liber Amoris.” The man was in love with a servant girl, who in the eyes of others possessed no particular charms of mind or person, yet did the mighty love ofthis strong, masculine, and gifted being, lift her into a sort of goddess-ship; and make his idolatry in its intense earnestness and reality assume something of the sublimity of an act of faith, and in its expression take a flight equal to anything that poetry or fiction have left us. It was all so terribly real, he sued with such a vehemence, he suffered with such resistance, that the powerful intellect reeled, tempest-tost, and might have foundered but for the gift of expression. He might have said like Tasso—like Goethe rather—“Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen was ich leide!” And this faculty of utterance, eloquent utterance, was perhaps the only thing which saved life, or reason, or both. In such moods of passion, the poor uneducated man, dumb in the midst of the strife and the storm, unable to comprehend his intolerable pain or make it comprehended, throws himself in a blind fury on the cause of his torture, or hangs himself in his neckcloth.
Hazlitttakes up his pen, dips it in fire and thus he writes:—
“Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of it nothing farther to desire. There is one object (at least), in which the soul finds absolute content;—for which it seeks to live or dares to die. The heart has, as it were, filled up the mouldsof the imagination; the truth of passion keeps pace with, and outvies, the extravagance of mere language. There are no words so fine, no flattery so soft, that there is not a sentiment beyond them that it is impossible to express, at the bottom of the heart where true love is. What idle sounds the common phrasesadorable creature,divinity,angel, are! What a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these, rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable, to which all other feelings are light and vain! Perfect love reposes on the object of its choice, like the halcyon on the wave, and the air of heaven is around it!”
“Shestood (while I pleaded my cause before her with all the earnestness and fondness in the world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes, her head drooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest expression that ever was seen of mixed regret, pity, and stubborn resolution, but without speaking a word—without altering a feature.It was like a petrifaction of a human face in the softest moment of passion.”
“ShallI not love her,” he exclaims, “for herself alone, in spite of fickleness and folly? to love her for her regard for me, is not to love her butmyself. She has robbed me of herself, shall she also rob me of my love of her? did I not live on her smile? is it less sweet because it is withdrawn from me? Did I not adore her every grace? and does she bend less enchantingly because she has turned from me to another? Is my love then in the power of fortune or of her caprice? No, I will have it lasting as it is pure; and I will make a goddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her, and my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled symmetry of form. And when that fails, the memory of it shall survive, and my bosom shall be proof to scorn as hers has been to pity; and I will pursue her with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave and tend her steps without notice, and without reward; and serve her living, and mourn for her when dead; and thus my love will have shown itself superior to her hate, and I shall triumph and then die. This is my idea of the only true and heroic love, and such is mine for her.”
Hazlitt, when he wrote all this, seemed to himself full of high and calm resolve. The hand did not fail, the pen did not stagger over the paper in a formless scrawl, yet the brain was reeling like a tower in an earthquake. “Passion,” as it has been well said, “when in a state of solemn and omnipotent vehemence, always appears to be calmness to him whom it domineers;” not unfrequently to others also, as the tide at its highest flood looks tranquil, and “neither way inclines.”
Decoration.
Readingthe Life and Letters of Francis Horner, in the midst of a correspondence about Statistics and Bullion, and Political Economy, and the Balance of Parties, I came upon the following exquisite passage in a letter to his friend Mrs. Spencer:—
“I was amused by your interrogatory to me about the Nightingale’s note. You meant to put me in a dilemma with my politics on one side and my gallantry on the other. Of course you consider it as a plaintive note, and you were in hopes that no idolater of Charles Fox would venture to agree with that opinion. In this difficulty I must make the best escape I can by saying, that it seems to me neither cheerful nor melancholy,—but always according to the circumstances in which you hear it, the scenery,your own temper of mind, and so on. I settled it so with myself early in this month, when I heard them every night and all day long at Wells. In daylight, when all the other birds are in active concert, the Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emulous, and successful of the whole band. At night, especially if it is a calm one, with light enough to give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary music of this bird takes quite another character, from all the associations of the scene, from the languor one feels at the close of the day, and from the stillness of spirits and elevation of mind which comes upon one when walking out at that time. But it is not always so—different circumstances will vary in every possible way the effect. Will the Nightingale’s note sound alike to the man who is going on an adventure to meet his mistress (supposing he heeds it at all), and when he loiters along upon his return? The last time I heard the Nightingale it was an experiment of another sort. It was after a thunderstorm in a mild night, while there was silent lightning opening every few minutes, first on one side of the heavens then on the other. The careless little fellow was piping away in the midst of all this terror. Tome, there was no melancholy in his note, but a sort of sublimity; yet it was the same song which I had heard in the morning, and which then seemed nothing but bustle.”
And in the same spirit Portia moralises:—
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,When every goose is cackling, would be thoughtNo better a musician than the wren.How many things by season, seasoned areTo their right praise and true perfection!
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,When every goose is cackling, would be thoughtNo better a musician than the wren.How many things by season, seasoned areTo their right praise and true perfection!
Nor will Coleridge allow the song of the nightingale to be always plaintive,—“most musical, mostmelancholy;” he defies the epithet though it be Milton’s.
’Tis themerrynightingale,That crowds and hurries and precipitatesWith thick fast warble his delicious notes,As he were fearful that an April nightWould be too short for him to utter forthHis love-chaunt, and disburthen his full soulOf all its music.
’Tis themerrynightingale,That crowds and hurries and precipitatesWith thick fast warble his delicious notes,As he were fearful that an April nightWould be too short for him to utter forthHis love-chaunt, and disburthen his full soulOf all its music.
As a poetical commentary on these beautiful passages, every reader of Joanna Baillie will remember the night scene in De Montfort, where the cry of the Owl suggests such different feelings and associations to the two men who listen to it, under such different circumstances. To De Montfort it is the screech-owl, foreboding death and horror,—and he stands and shudders at the “instinctive wailing.” To Rezenvelt it is the sound which recalls his boyish days, when he merrily mimicked the night-bird till it returned him cry for cry,—and he pauses to listen with a fanciful delight.
Decoration.
Alectureshould not read like an essay; and, therefore, it surprises me that these lectures so carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet the requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable reading. Aslectures, they wanted only a little more point, and emphasis and animation on the part of the speaker: asessays, they atone in eloquence and earnestness for what they want in finish and purity of style.
Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when I heard them, (and it strikes me now in turning over the written pages,) is this: we deal here with writersand artists, yet the purpose, from beginning to end, is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray tells us himself that he has not assembled his hearers to bring them better acquainted with the writings of these writers, or to illustrate the wit of these wits, or to enhance the humour of these humourists;—no; but to deal justice on the men asmen—to tell us howtheylived, and loved, suffered and made suffer, who still have power to pain or to please; to settletheirclaims to our praise or blame, our love or hate, whose right to fame was settled long ago, and remains undisputed. This is his purpose. Thus then he has laid down and acted on the principle that “morals have something to do with art;” that there is a moral account to be settled with men of genius; that the power and the right remains with us to do justice on those who being dead yet rule our spirits from their urns; to try them by a standard which perhaps neither themselves, nor those around them, would have admitted. Did Swift when he bullied men, lampooned women, trampled over decency and humanity, flung round him filth and fire, did he anticipate the time when before a company of intellectual men, and thinking, feeling women, in both hemispheres, he should be called up to judgment, hands bound, tongue-tied? Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors? Thackeray turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, awarning; probes the lacerated self-love, holds up to scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable egotism, the half-distempered brain. O Stella! O Vanessa! are you not avenged?
Then Sterne—how he takes to pieces his feigned originality, his feigned benevolence, his feigned misanthropy—all feigned!—the licentious parson, the trader in sentiment, the fashionable lion of his day, the man without a heart for those who loved him, without a conscience for those who trusted him! yet the same man who gave us the pathos of “Le Fevre,” and the humours of “Uncle Toby!” Sad is it? ungrateful is it? ungracious is it?—well, it cannot be helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of humanity. You might as well exclaim against any natural result of any natural law. Fancy a hundred years hence some brave, honest, human-hearted Thackeray standing up to discourse before our great-great-grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same stern truth, on the wits, and the poets and the artists of the present time! Hard is your fate, O ye men and women of genius! very hard and pitiful, if ye must be subjected to the scalpel of such a dissector! You, gifted sinner, whoever you may be, walking among us now in all the impunity of conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and sentimentalisms, performing great things, teaching good things, you are set up as one of the lights of theworld:—Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out of your hand, and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a face? “Off, off ye lendings!” O God! how much wiser, as well as better, not to study how toseem, but how tobe! How much wiser and better, not to have to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine; not to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who “shall pluck out the heart of your mystery,” and shall anatomise you, and deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard of morals and manners in Queen Victoria’s reign!
In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative passages on character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies in the novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No woman resents his Rebecca—inimitable Becky!—no woman but feels and acknowledges with a shiver the completeness of that wonderful and finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish inane Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the author’s own words when speaking of ‘Tom Jones:’—“I can’t say that I think Amelia a virtuous character. I can’t say but I think Mr. Thackeray’s evident liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that the great humourist’s moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in art andethics there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we are to admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable.”
Laura, in ‘Pendennis,’ is a yet more fatal mistake. She is drawn with every generous feeling, every good gift. We do not complain that she loves that poor creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her childhood. She grew up with that love in her heart; it came between her and the perception of his faults; it is a necessity indivisible from her nature. Hallowed, through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless to that first affection; Laura, waked up to the appreciation of a far more manly and noble nature, in love with Warrington, and then going back to Pendennis, and marryinghim! Such infirmity might be true of some women, but not of such a woman as Laura; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy of the portrait.
And then Lady Castlewood,—so evidently a favourite of the author, what shall we say of her? The virtuous woman,par excellence, who “never sins and never forgives,” who never resents, nor relents, nor repents; the mother, who is the rival of her daughter; the mother, who for years is theconfidanteof a man’s delirious passion for her own child, and then consoles him by marrying him herself! O Mr. Thackeray! this will never do! such womenmayexist, but to hold them up as examples of excellence, and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and proves a low standard in ethics and in art. “When an author presents to us a heroine whom we are called upon to admire, let him at least take care that she is admirable.” If in these, and in some other instances, Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the lectures we may thank him for some amends: he has shown us what he conceives true womanhood and true manliness ought to be; so with this expression of gratitude, and a far deeper debt of gratitude left unexpressed, I close his book, and say, good night!
Decoration.
Decoration.
Sometimes, in thoughtful moments, I am struck by those beautiful analogies between things apparently dissimilar—those awful approximations between things apparently far asunder—which many people would call fanciful and imaginary, but they seem to bring all God’s creation, spiritual and material, into one comprehensive whole; they give me, thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that overwhelming unity which we call the universe, the multitudinousONE.
Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art, as conceived by the Greeks, and unsurpassed in its purity and beauty, lay in considering well the characteristics which distinguish thehumanform from the brute form; and then, in rendering the human form, the first aim was to soften down, or, if possible, throw out wholly, those characteristics which belong to the brute nature, or are common to the brute and the man; and the next, to bring into prominence and even enlarge the proportions of those manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity; till, at last, thehumanmerged into thedivine, and the God in look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.
Let us now suppose this broad principle which the Greeks applied to form, ethically carried out, and made the basis of all education—the training of men as a race. Suppose we started with the general axiom that all propensities which we have in common with the lower animals are to be kept subordinate, and so far as is consistent with the truth of nature refined away; and that all the qualities which elevate, all the aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are to be cultivated and rendered more and more prominent, till at last the human being, in faculties as well as form, approaches the God-like—I only say—suppose?——
Again: it has been said of natural philosophy (Zoology) that in order to make any real progress in the science, as such, we must more and more disregarddifferences, and more and more attend to the obscured but essential conditions which are revealed inresemblances, in the constant and similar relations of primitive structure. Now if the same principle were carried out in theology, in morals, in art, as well as in science, should we not come nearer to the essential truth inall?
Decoration.
“Thereis an instinctive sense of propriety and reality in every mind; and it is not true, as some great authority has said, that in art we are satisfied with contemplating the work without thinking of the artist. On the contrary, the artist himself is one great object in the work. It is as embodying the energies and excellences of the human mind, as exhibiting the efforts of genius, as symbolising high feeling, that we most value the creations of art; without design the representations of art are merely fantastical, and without the thought of a design acting upon fixed principles in accordance with a high standard of goodness and truth, half the charm of design is lost.”
Decoration.
“Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanising nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation. Colour, form, motion, sound, are the elements which it combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of amoralidea.”
This is Coleridge’s definition:—Art then is nature,humanised; and in proportion as humanity is elevated by the interfusion into our life of noble aims and pure affections will art be spiritualised and moralised.
Decoration.
Iffaith has elevated art, superstition has everywhere debased it.
Decoration.
Goethe observes that there is no patriotic art and no patriotic science—that both are universal.
There is, however,nationalart, but notnationalscience: we say “national art,” “natural science.”
Decoration.
“Verseis in itself music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry as contradistinguished from history civil or natural.”—Coleridge.
In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse is to prose—a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.
Decoration.
Subjectsand representations in art not elevated nor interesting in themselves, become instructive and interesting to higher minds from themannerin which they have been treated; perhaps because they have passed through the medium of a higher mind in taking form.
This is one reason, though we are not always conscious of it, that the Dutch pictures of common and vulgar life give us a pleasure apart from their wonderful finish and truth of detail. In the mind of the artist there must have been the power to throw himself into a sphereabovewhat he represents. Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been something far better than a sot; Ostade something higher than a boor; though the habits of both led them into companionship with sots and boors. In the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a depth of feeling and observation which remind me of the humour of Goldsmith; and Teniers, we know, was in his habits a refined gentleman; the brilliant elegance of his pencil contrasting with the grotesque vulgarity of his subjects. To a thinking mind, some of these Dutch pictures of character are full of material for thought, pathetic even where least sympathetic: no doubt, because of a latent sympathy with the artist, apart from his subject.
Decoration.
Coleridgesays,—“Every human feeling is greater and larger than the exciting cause.” (A philosophical way of putting Rochefoucauld’s neatly expressed apophthegm: “Nous ne sommes jamais ni si heureux ni si malheureux que nous l’imaginons.”) “A proof,” he proceeds, “that man is designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied in music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate expression.”
But not music only, every production of art ought to excite emotions greater and thoughts larger than itself. Thoughts and emotions which never perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were anticipated, never were intended by him—may be strongly suggested by his work. This is an important part of the morals of art, which we must never lose sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit, but for good and for evil.
Goethe (in theDichtung und Wahrheit) describes the reception of Marie Antoinette at Strasbourg, where she passed the frontier to enter her new kingdom. She was then a lovely girl of sixteen. Herelates that on visiting before her arrival the reception room on the bridge over the Rhine, where her German attendants were to deliver her into the hands of the French authorities, he found the walls hung with tapestries representing the ominous story of Jason and Medea—of all the marriages on record the most fearful, the most tragic in its consequences. “What!” he exclaims, his poetical imagination struck with the want of moral harmony, “was there among these French architects and decorators no man who could perceive that pictures represent things,—that they have a meaning in themselves,—that they can impress sense and feeling,—that they can awaken presentiments of good or evil?” But, as he tells us, his exclamations of horror were met by the mockery of his French companions, who assured him that it was not everybody’s concern to look for significance in pictures.
These self-same tapestries of the story of Jason and Medea were after the Restoration presented by Louis XVIII. to George IV., and at present they line the walls of the Ball-room in Windsor Castle. We might repeat, with some reason, the question of Goethe; for if pictures have a significance, and speak to the imagination, what has the tragedy of Jason and Medea to do in a ball-room?
Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that worksof art speak to the feelings and the conscience, and can awaken associations tending to good and evil, by some strange inconsistency places art and artists out of the sphere of morals. He speaks somewhere with contempt and ridicule of those who take their conscience and their morality with them to an opera or a picture gallery. Yet surely he is wrong. Why should we not? Are our conscience and our morals like articles of dress which we can take off and put on again as we fancy it convenient or expedient?—shut up in a drawer and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or a gallery of art? or are they not rather a part of ourselves—our very life—to graduate the worth, to fix the standard of all that mingles with our life? The idea that what we calltastein art has something quite distinctive from conscience, is one cause that the popular notions concerning the productions of art are abandoned to such confusion and uncertainty; that simple people regardtasteas something forensic, something to be learned, as they would learn a language, and mastered by a study of rules and a dictionary of epithets; and they look up to a professor of taste, just as they would look up to a professor of Greek or of Hebrew. Either they listen to judgments lightly and confidently promulgated with a sort of puzzled faith and a surrender of their own moral sense, which are pitiable;as if art also had its infallible church and its hierarchy of dictators!—or they fly into the opposite extreme, and seeing themselves deceived and misled, fall away into strange heresies. All from ignorance of a few laws simple in their form, yet infinite in their application;—naturallaws we must call them, though here applied to art.
In my younger days I have known men conspicuous for their want of elevated principle, and for their dissipated habits, held up as arbiters and judges of art; but it was to them only another form of epicurism and self-indulgence; and I have seen them led into such absurd and fatal mistakes for want of the power to distinguish and to generalise, that I have despised their judgment, and have come to the conclusion that a really high standard of taste and a low standard of morals are incompatible with each other.
Decoration.
“Thefact of the highest artistic genius having manifested itself in a polytheistic age, and among a people whose moral views were essentially degraded, has, we think, fostered the erroneous notionthat the sphere of art has no connection with that of morality. The Greeks, with penetrative insight, dilated the essential characteristics of man’s organism as a vehicle of superior intelligence, while their intense sympathy with physical beauty made them alive to its most subtle manifestations; and reproducing their impressions through the medium of art, they have given birth to models of the human form, which reveal its highest possibilities, and the excellence of which depends upon their being individual expressions of ideal truth. Thus, too, in their descriptions of nature, instead of multiplying insignificant details, they seized instinctively upon the characteristic features of her varying aspects, and not unfrequently embodied a finished picture in one comprehensive and harmonious word. In association with their marvellous genius, however, we find a cruelty, a treachery, and a licence which would be revolting if it were not for the historical interest which attaches to every genuine record of a bygone age. Their low moral standard cannot excite surprise when we consider the debasing tendency of their worship, the objects of their adoration being nothing more than their own degraded passions invested with some of the attributes of deity. Now, among the modifications of thought introduced by Christianity, there is perhaps none more pregnant with important results than the harmony which ithas established between religion and morality. The great law of right and wrong has acquired a sacred character, when viewed as an expression of the divine will; it takes its rank among the eternal verities, and to ignore it in our delineations of life, or to represent sin otherwise than as treason against the supreme ruler, is to retain in modern civilisation one of the degrading elements of heathenism. Conscience is as great a fact of our inner life as the sense of beauty, and the harmonious action of both these instinctive principles is essential to the highest enjoyment of art, for any internal dissonance disturbs the repose of the mind, and thereby shatters the image mirrored in its depths.”—A. S.
Decoration.
“Maisvous autres artistes, vous ne considerez pour la plupart dans les œuvres que la beauté ou la singularité de l’exécution, sans vous pénétrer de l’idée dont cet œuvre est la forme; ainsi votre intelligence adore souvent l’expression d’un sentiment que votre cœur repousserait s’il en avait la conscience.”—George Sand.
Decoration.
Lavatertold Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual, the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.
What then shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted the hands of his men and women, not from individual nature, but from a model hand—his own very often?—and every one who considers for a moment will see in Van Dyck’s portraits, that, however well painted and elegant the hands, they in very few instances harmonise with thepersonalité;—that the position is often affected, and as if intended for display,—the display of what is in itself a positive fault, and from which some little knowledge of comparative physiology would have saved him.
There are hands of various character; the hand to catch, and the hand to hold; the hand to clasp, andthe hand to grasp. The hand that has worked or could work, and the hand that has never done anything but hold itself out to be kissed, like that of Joanna of Arragon in Raphael’s picture.
Let any one look at the hands in Titian’s portrait of old Paul IV.: though exquisitely modelled, they have an expression which reminds us of claws; they belong to the face of that grasping old man, and could belong to no other.
Decoration.
Mozartand Chopin, though their genius was differently developed, were alike in some things: in nothing more than this, that the artistic element in both minds wholly dominated over the social and practical, and that their art was the element in which they moved and lived, through which they felt and thought. I doubt whether either of them could have said, “D’abord je suis homme et puis je suis artiste;” whereas this could have been said with truth by Mendelsohn and by Litzst. In Mendelsohn the enormous creative power was modified by the intellectand the conscience. Litzst has no creative power.
Liszt has thus drawn the character of Chopin:—“Rien n’était plus pur et plus exalté en même temps que ses pensées; rien n’était plus tenace, plus exclusif, et plus minutieusement dévoué que ses affections. Mais cet être ne comprenait que ce qui était identique à lui-même:—le reste n’existait pour lui que comme une sorte de rêve fâcheux, auquel il essayait de se soustraire en vivant au milieu du monde. Toujours perdu dans ses rêveries, la réalité lui deplaisait. Enfant il ne pouvait toucher à un instrument tranchant sans se blesser; homme il ne pouvait se trouver en face d’un homme différent de lui, sans se heurter contre cette contradiction vivante.”
“Ce qui le préservait d’un antagonisme perpétuel c’était l’habitude volontaire et bientôt invétérée de ne point voir, de ne pas entendre ce qui lui deplaisait: en général sans toucher à ses affections personelles, les êtres qui ne pensaient pas comme lui devenaient à ses yeux comme des espèces de fantômes; et comme il était d’une politesse charmante, on pouvait prendre pour une bienveillance courtoise ce qui n’était chez lui qu’un froid dédain—une aversion insurmontable.”
Thefather of Mozart was a man of high and strict religious principle. He had a conviction—in hiscase more truly founded than is usual—that he was the father of a great, a surpassing genius, and consequently of a being unfortunate in this, that he must be in advance of his age, exposed to error, to envy, to injustice, to strife; and to do his duty to his son demanded large faith and large firmness. But because hedidestimate this sacred trust as a duty to be discharged, not only with respect to his gifted son, but to the God who had so endowed him; so, in spite of many mistakes, the earnest straightforward endeavour to do right in the parent seems to have saved Mozart’s moral life, and to have given that completeness to the productions of his genius, which the harmony of the moral and creative faculties alone can bestow.
“The modifying power of circumstances on Mozart’s style, is an interesting consideration. Whatever of striking, of new or beautiful he met with in the works of others left its impression on him; and he often reproduced these efforts, not servilely, but mingling his own nature and feelings with them in a manner not less surprising than delightful.”
This is true equally of Shakespeare and of Raphael, both of whom adapted or rather adopted much from their precursors in the way of material to work upon; and whose incomparable originality consisted in the interfusion of their own great individual geniuswith every subject they touched, so that it became theirs, and could belong to no other.
The Figaro was composed at Vienna. The Don Juan and Clemenza di Tito at Prague;—which I note because the localities are so characteristic of the operas. Cimarosa’s Matrimonio Segreto was composed at Prague; it was on the fortification of the Hradschin one morning at sun-rise that he composed thePria che spunti in ciel l’aurora.
When called upon to describe his method of composing, what Mozart said of himself was very striking from itsnaïvetéand truth. “I do not,” he said, “aim at originality. I do not know in what my originality consists. Why my productions take from my hand that particular form or style which makes themMozartish, and different from the works of other composers is probably owing to the same cause which makes my nose this or that particular shape; makes it, in short, Mozart’s nose, and different from other people’s.”
Yet, as a composer, Mozart was asobjective, as dramatic, as Shakspeare and Raphael; Chopin, in comparison, was whollysubjective,—the Byron of Music.
Decoration.
Talkingonce with Adelaide Kemble, after she had been singing in the “Figaro,” she compared the music to the bosom of a full blown rose in its voluptuous, intoxicating richness. I said that some of Mozart’s melodies seemed to me not so much composed, but found—found on some sunshiny day in Arcadia, among nymphs and flowers. “Yes,” she replied, with ready and felicitous expression, “notinventions, butexistences.”
Decoration.
OldGeorge the Third, in his blindness and madness, once insisted on making the selection of pieces for the concert of ancient music (May, 1811),—it was soon after the death of the Princess Amelia.“The programme included some of the finest passages in Handel’s ‘Samson,’ descriptive of blindness; the ‘Lamentation of Jephthah,’ for his daughter; Purcel’s ‘Mad Tom,’ and closed with ‘God save the King,’ to make sure the application of all that went before.”
Decoration.
Everyone who remembers what Madlle. Rachel was seven or eight years ago, and who sees her now (1853), will allow that she has made no progress in any of the essential excellences of her art:—a certain proof that she is not a great artist in the true sense of the word. She is a finished actress, but she is nothing more, and nothing better; not enough the artist ever to forget or conceal her art; consequently there is a want somewhere, which a mind highly toned and of quick perceptions feels from beginning to end. The parts in which she once excelled—the Phêdre and the Hermione, for instance—have become formalised and hard, like studies cast in bronze; and when she plays a new part it has nofreshness. I always go to see her whenever I can. I admire her as what she is—the Parisian actress, practised in every trick of hermétier. I admire what she does, I think how well it is alldone, and am inclined to clap and applaud her drapery, perfect and ostentatiously studied in every fold, just with the same feeling that I applaud herself.
As to the last scene of Adrienne Lecouvreur, (which those who areavides de sensation, athirst for painful emotion, go to see as they would drink a dram, and critics laud as a miracle of art,) it is altogether a mistake and a failure; it is beyond the just limits of terror and pity—beyond the legitimate sphere ofart. It reminds us of the story of Gentil Bellini and the Sultan. The Sultan much admired Bellini’s picture of the decollation of John the Baptist, but informed him that it was inaccurate—surgically—for the tendons and muscles ought to shrink where divided; and then calling for one of his slaves, he drew his scimitar, and striking off the head of the wretch, gave the horror-struck artist a lesson in practical anatomy. So we might possibly learn from Rachel’s imitative representation, (studied in an hospital as they say,) how poison acts on the frame, and how the limbs and features writhe into death; but if she were a great moral artist she would feel that what is allowed to be true in painting, is true in art generally; that mere imitation, such as the vulgardelight in, and hold up their hands to see, is the vulgarest and easiest aim of the imitative arts, and that between the true interpretation of poetry in art and such base mechanical means to the lowest ends, there lies an immeasurable distance.
I am disposed to think that Rachel has not genius, but talent, and that her talent, from what I see year after year, has a downward tendency,—there is not sufficient moral seasoning to save it from corruption. I remember that when I first saw her in Hermione she reminded me of a serpent, and the same impression continues. The long meagre form with its graceful undulating movements, the long narrow face and features, the contracted jaw, the high brow, the brilliant supernatural eyes which seem to glance every way at once; the sinister smile; the painted red lips, which look as though they had lapped, or could lap, blood; all these bring before me the idea of a Lamia, the serpent nature in the woman’s form. In Lydia, and in Athalie, she touches the extremes of vice and wickedness with such a masterly lightness and precision, that I am full of wondering admiration for the actress. There is not a turn of her figure, not an expression in her face, not a fold in her gorgeous drapery, that is not a study; but withal such a consciousness of her art, and such an ostentation of the means she employs, that the power remainsalwaysextraneous, as it were, and exciting only to the senses and the intellect.
Latterly she has become a hard mannerist. Her face, once so flexible, has lost the power of expressing the nicer shades and softer gradations of feeling; so much so, that they write dramas for her with supernaturally wicked and depraved heroines to suit her especial powers. I conceive that an artist could not sink lower in degradation. Yet to satisfy the taste of a Parisian audience and the ambition of a Parisian actress this was not enough, and wickedness required the piquancy of immediate approximation with innocence. In the Valeria she played two characters, and appeared on the stage alternately as a miracle of vice and a miracle of virtue: an abandoned prostitute and a chaste matron. There was something in this contrasted impersonation, considered simply in relation to the aims and objects of art, so revolting, that I sat in silent and deep disgust, which was partly deserved by the audience which could endure the exhibition.
It is the entire absence of the high poetic and moral element which distinguishes Rachel as an actress, and places her at such an immeasurable distance from Mrs. Siddons, that it shocks me to hear them named together.
Itis no reproach to a capital actress to play effectively a very wicked character. Mrs. Siddons played the abandoned Milwood as carefully, as completely as she played Hermoine and Constance; but if it had required a perpetual succession of Calistas and Milwoods to call forth her highest powers, what should we think of the woman and the artist?
Whendramas and characters are invented to suit the particular talent of a particular actor or actress, it argues rather a limited range of the artistic power; though within that limit the power may be great and the talent genuine.
Thus for Liston and for Miss O’Neil, so distinguished in their respective lines of Comedy and Tragedy, characters were especially constructed and plays written, which have not been acted since their time.
AcelebratedGerman actress (who has quitted the stage for many years) speaking of Rachel, said that the reason she must always stop short of the highest place in art, is because she is nothing but an actress—that only; and has no aims in life, hasno duties, feelings, employments, sympathies, but those which centre in herself in the interests of her art;—which thus ceases to beartand becomes amétier.
This reminded me of what Pauline Viardot once said to me:—“D’abord je suisfemme, avec les dévoirs, les affections, les sentiments d’une femme; et puis je suisartiste.”
Thesame German actress whose opinion I have quoted, told me that the Leonora and the Iphigenia of Goethe were the parts she preferred to play. The Thekla and the Beatrice of Schiller next. (In all these she excelled.) The parts easiest to her, requiring no effort scarcely, were Jerta (in Houwald’s Tragedy, “Die Schuld”), and Clärchen in Egmont; of the character of Jerta, she said beautifully:—“Ich habe es nicht gespielt, Ich habe es gesagt!” (I did notplayit, Iutteredit.) This was extremely characteristic of the woman.
I once asked Mrs. Siddons, which of her great characters she preferred to play? She replied, after a moment’s consideration, and in her rich deliberate emphatic tones:—“Lady Macbeth is the character I have moststudied.” She afterwards said that she had played the character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once, without carefully reading overthe part and generally the whole play in the morning; and that she never read over the play without finding something new in it; “something,” she said, “which had not struck me so much as itoughtto have struck me.”
Of Mrs. Pritchard, who preceded Mrs. Siddons in the part of Lady Macbeth, it was well known that she had never read the play. She merely studied her own part as written out by the stage-copyist; of the other parts she knew nothing but thecues.
WhenI asked Mrs. Henry Siddons, which of her characters she preferred playing? she said at once “Imogen, in Cymbeline, was the character I played with most ease to myself, and most success as regarded the public; it cost no effort.”
This was confirmed by others. A very good judge said of her—“In some of her best parts, as Juliet, Rosalind, and Lady Townley, she may have been approached or equalled. In Viola and Imogen she was never equalled. In the grace and simplicity of the first, in the refinement and shy but impassioned tenderness of the last,Iat least have never seen any one to be compared to her. She hardly seemed toactthese parts; they came naturally to her.”
This reminds me of another anecdote of the same accomplished actress and admirable woman. The people of Edinburgh, among whom she lived, had so identified her with all that was gentle, refined and noble, that they did not like to see her play wicked parts. It happened that Godwin went down to Edinburgh with a tragedy in his pocket, which had been accepted by the theatre there, and in which Mrs. Henry Siddons was to play the principal part—that of a very wicked woman (I forget the name of the piece). He was warned that it risked the success of his play, but her conception of the part was so just and spirited, that he persisted. At the rehearsal she stopped in the midst of one of her speeches and said, with greatnaïveté, “I am afraid, Mr. Godwin, the people will not endure to hear me say this!” He replied coolly, “My dear, you cannot be always young and pretty—you must come to this at last,—go on.” He mistook her meaning and the feeling of “the people.” The play failed; and the audience took care to discriminate between their disapprobation of the piece and their admiration for the actress.
Madame Schrœder Devrienttold me that she sung with most pleasure to herself in the “Fidelio;” and in this part I have never seen her equalled.
Fanny Kemble told me the part she had played with most pleasure to herself, was Camiola, in Massinger’s “Maid of Honour.” It was an exquisite impersonation, but the play itself ineffective and not successful, because of the weak and worthless character of the hero.
Mrs. Charles Keantold me that she had played with great ease and pleasure to herself, the part of Ginevra, in Leigh Hunt’s “Legend of Florence.” Shemadethe part (as it is technically termed), and it was a very complete and beautiful impersonation.
These answers appear to me psychologically, as well as artistically, interesting, and worth preserving.