“So may the outward shows be least themselves,The world is still deceived with ornament.”
“So may the outward shows be least themselves,The world is still deceived with ornament.”
“So may the outward shows be least themselves,The world is still deceived with ornament.”
“So may the outward shows be least themselves,
The world is still deceived with ornament.”
It was the leaden casket, in which was hidden the perfect beauty of Portia; there was the choice, and made with a judgment that won the prize, and took the inheritance of Belmont.
“You that choose not by theview,Chance as fair, and choose as true.”
“You that choose not by theview,Chance as fair, and choose as true.”
“You that choose not by theview,Chance as fair, and choose as true.”
“You that choose not by theview,
Chance as fair, and choose as true.”
Would you take away from landscape painters the high privilege of genius?—invention—which you allow to historical painters? You do this, if you do not grant to the fullest extent the suggestive character of nature. The musician takes music from the air, which is his raw material; the conception, which works from mere sounds the perfect mystery of power, to shake, to raise, and melt to pity and to love the whole soul, belongs to the mind. And so, for the more perfect work of landscape, the mind must add of its own immortal store, the keeper and dispenser of which is genius.
Curate.—You would raise landscape painting to the dignity of a creative, from the lower grade of an imitative art.
Aquilius.—I would do more; I would make it creative, not only in things like, but, to speak boldly at once, in things unlike itself; but, nevertheless, perfectly congenial; and to be adopted as a recognised mark of submission of all matter to mind, which alone is privileged to diffuse itself over and into all nature, and to animate it with a soul—life; and when that is superadded, and then only, is the sympathy complete between external nature and ourselves. I care not for art that is not creative, that does not construct poetry. From all that is most soft and tender, to all that is most great and rugged, from the sweet to the awful and sublime, thereis in all art, whether it be of landscape or historical, (which embraces the poetical), a dominion bounded only by the limitations of the original power with which genius is gifted. Why may there not be a Michael Angelo for trees, as for the human form? Nay, I verily believe, that those landscapes would have the greatest fascination, where there would be, in fact, the greatest unlikeness to usually recognised nature, both in form and colour, provided one part were in keeping with another, so as to bring the whole within the idea of the natural; and where the conception is clearly expressed, and is worthy the dignity of feeling. Hence, suggestive nature is the best nature. We want not height and magnitude, vast distances: if we have the science of form and colour, the materials need not be vast, let them only be suggestive.
Gratian.—You laid down some such theory with regard to colour, as a means of telling the story, in your late paper on Rubens. I could not but agree with you there. I see now how you would extend the subject. We certainly do talk too much about “thetruth of nature,” not considering sufficiently how many truths there are.
Curate.—And what a great truth there is that is of our own making, greater than all the others; for, according to the showing of Aquilius, it comes of a divine gift, of the creative faculty, under a higher power; works the wonders in poetry, painting, music, and architecture, fittest for our admiration and our improvement. It is surprising that our landscape painters have not seen this walk within their reach; nearly all confine themselves to the imitative.
Gratian.—But in that they have raised their pretensions. We had nothing great or poetical in the least degree in landscape, before Wilson; nay, to a late period, our landscape subjects were of the most limited range. They do now go at least to beautiful nature, and while we have such painters of landscape as Creswick and Stanfield, and Lee, and Danby, (but there you will say is an advance into a higher walk,) for my own part, I shall hesitate before I give my vote for your more perfect ideal.
Aquilius.—The works of the painters you mention are beautiful, fascinatingly so, both from the character of their chosen scenery, and their agreeable manner of representing it. And I rejoice to see, that even these are advancing, are discarding something or other of the old recipes every year. We have at last some better English scenery. We must no longer refer to Gainsborough asthepainter of English landscape; we find it not, that is, true English scenery, in his pictures, nor in his “studies.”
Gratian.—And yet he painted nature, and came upon the world that began to be sick of the attempts at your ideal compositions, the prince of whom, and who won the prize over Wilson, was Smith of Chichester.
Aquilius.—Oh, do not dignify his presumptions with the name of ideal.
Gratian.—I can’t give up Gainsborough, his sweet cottage scenery, with his groups of rustic figures.
Aquilius.—Was there nothing better within the realms of England than beggary and poverty, rags and brambles,—her highest industry, the cart and the plough,—her wealth in stock, the pig, poultry, and donkey?
Gratian.—But it was the taste of the day; even our aristocracy were painted not as ideal, but as real shepherds and shepherdesses. A few years ago, there was a picture fished out of some lumber room, where it ought to have been buried till it had rotted, of George the Third’s family group, as cottagers’ children, playing in the dirt before a mud hovel. It was by Gainsborough, and I believe was held at a high price.
Aquilius.—This was a descent from the non-natural pastoral of the by-gone age, to the low natural, from which art derived but little benefit. Goldsmith very aptly and wittily satirised the transition state in the Primrose family-group, in which each individual adopted a singular independence. Venus, Cupids, an Amazon, and Alexander the Great, with Dr Primrose, holding his books on the Whistonian controversy.
Curate.—One would rather imagine that Goldsmith was severe uponthe practice of an earlier date. There are several pictures at Hampton Court, and one large one, if I remember, on the stair-wall, in which the statesmen of the day represent the deities of the heathen mythology.
Lydia.—Yes, and I remember a very ridiculous smaller picture, a portrait of Queen Elizabeth—but it affects the historical. The queen and her train enter on one side of the piece, and on the other Juno, Venus, and Minerva. The goddesses are in every respect outdone, and start with astonishment,—Juno at the superior power, Minerva, the superior wisdom, and Venus the superior beauty of the queen. There must be something very curious in the nature of taste: seeing such pictures, one cannot but reflect, that though they are now perfectly ridiculous, they could not have been so when they were painted. They were men of understanding who sat for their portraits in these whimsical characters; and the queen—it is surprising!—there is surely something involved in it, that history does not touch.
Gratian.—It is the more surprising, as Holbein had painted, and his works were before their eyes.
Aquilius.—It would be not undeserving curiosity to sift the history of allegory—what is the cause that it was then so generally accepted in Europe; infected the poetry and painting of every civilised country. The new aspect of religion had much to do with it: images, pictures, particularly the earlier, representing the Deity, and the Virgin, had become objects of hatred—of persecution. And thus the arts made their escape into the regions of allegory.
Curate.—Chilling regions, in which even genius with all his natural glow was frost-bitten. An escape from what was believed to what could not be believed. It was the cold fit of the ague of superstition.
Gratian.—The devotion of the early painters produced, what nothing but devotion could produce; theirs was a true devotion, notwithstanding the superstition contained in it. The iconoclast spirit has scarcely been yet laid. As we rise from the prostrate position of our fears, the more readily shall we acknowledge the spirituality of the early painters. They are daily approximating a more just estimation. But we are wandering; we were speaking of landscape: surely, it is difficult to find a subject that shall be altogether unpleasing. I do not remember ever to have seen an outdoor scene, unless it might have been in a town, that did not please with some beauty or other.
Aquilius.—Indeed! then I think you must have been led away by some associations, in which art had but little share. You have loved “A southerly wind and a cloudy sky,” as the song says, for the sport offered. Be not shocked, Gratian, at the confession, but the truth is, that I see very many outward scenes, that not only give me no pleasure but pain. Shall I confess a still more shocking heterodoxy; I have but little love for the scenery of the country!—am very often displeased with what offers itself, and becomes the common picture. Even in what is denominated a beautiful country, I look more for its suggestive materials in form and colour than for whole scenes. If pictures are to be no more than what we see—even landscapes, the art is not creative; and an imitative, uncreative art, leaves the best faculties of the mind unemployed. What is art without enthusiasm?—and you may be sure that no painter of views, and nothing more, was ever an enthusiast. It is the part of enthusiasm not to copy, but to make. Is it more startling if I assert, that the ideal is more true than the natural? Yet am I convinced that it is so. The natural requires the comparison of the eye; the ideal, as it is the work of the mind, will not be controlled by any comparison, but such as mind can bring. It commands the organ of sight, and teaches it. We all have more or less of this creative faculty; the education of the world is against it, for it is a world of much business, more of doing than of thinking, and more of thinking about what is foreign to feeling, than what cherishes it till it embodies itself in imagination. The rising faculty becomes suppressed. More or less all are born poets—to make, to combine, to imagine, to create; but very early does the time come with most of us, when we arecommanded to put away, as the world calls it, the “childish things.”
Lydia.—Oh, I believe it—the infant’s dream is a creation, and perhaps as beautiful as we know it must be pleasing, for there are no smiles like infant smiles.
Curate.—And past that age, when the external world has given its lessons in pictures, which in practice and education we only imitate, do we not find the impressions then made of a goodness, a beauty, not realised and acknowledged in advanced life, as existing actually in the scenes themselves?
Aquilius.—At the earlier time, we take up little but what is consonant to our affections; the minor detail is an after lesson: but, as to this “natural” of landscapes, which seems to have so long held our artists and amateurs under an infatuation—as they construe it—this mindless thing,—after all what is its petty truth? Could the boy who hides himself under a hedge to read his Robinson Crusoe, put on canvass the pictures his imagination paints, do you think they would be exactly of the skies and the fields every day before his eyes? A year or two older, when he shall feel his spirit begin to glow with a sense of beauty, with the incessant love and heroism of best manhood—see him under the shade of some wide-spreading oak devouring the pages of befitting romance, “The Seven Champions of Christendom,” the tale of castles, of enchantments, of giants, and forlorn damsels to be rescued. Do you not credit his mind’s painting for other scenes, in colour and design, than any he ever saw? The fabulous is in him, and he must create, or look on nothing. He will take no sheep for a dragon, nor farmer Plod-acre for an enchanter, nor the village usher for an armed knight. The overseer will not be his redresser of wrongs. There is vision in his day-dream, but it is painting to the mind’s eye; and imagination must be the great enchanter to conjure up a new country, raise rocks, and build him castles; nay, in his action to run to the rescue, he has a speed beyond his limbs’ power, an arm that has been charmed with new strength. Now is he not quite out of the locality, the movement and power of any world he ever saw, of any world to whose laws of motion and of willing he has ever yet been subject? Take his pictures—look at them well; for I will suppose them painted to your sight: nay, put yourself in his place and paint them yourself—forgetting before you do so all you have ever heard said about landscape painting. Have you them? then tell me, are they untrue? No, no, you will admit they are beautiful truth. The lover paints with all a poet’s accuracy, but not like Denner. Now, if this mind-vision be not destroyed,—if the man remain the poet, he will not be satisfied with the common transcript of what, as far as enjoyment goes, he can more fully enjoy without art. He will have a craving for the ideal painting, for more truths and perhaps higher truths than the sketch-book can afford. And if he cultivate his taste, and practise the art too, he will find in nature a thousand beauties before hidden, that while he was the view-seeker, he saw not; he will be cognisant of the suggestive elements, the grammar of his mind and of his art, by which he will express thoughts and feelings, of a truth that is in him, and in all, only to be embodied by a creation.
Curate.—I fear the patrons of art are not on your side. Does not encouragement go in a contrary direction?
Gratian.—Patrons of art are too often mere lovers of furniture,—have not seriously considered art, nor cultivated taste. And if it be a fault, it is not altogether their own; it is in character with genius to be in advance, and to teach, and by its own works. It is that there is a want of cultivation, of serious study, among artists themselves. If the patron could dictate, he would himself be the maker, the poet, the painter, the musician,—excellence of every kind precedes the taste to appreciate it. It makes the taste as well as the work: my friend Aquilius has made me a convert. I had not considered art, as it should be viewed, as a means of, as one of the languages of poetry. In truth, I have loved pictures more for their reminiscences than their independent power; and have therefore chiefly fixed my attention on views—actual scenery, with all its particulars.
Aquilius.—What is high, what is great enough wholly to possess the mind, is not of particulars; like our religion, in this it is for all ages, all countries, and must not by adopting the particular, the peculiar one, diminish the catholicity of its empire. “The golden age” is, wherever or however embodied, a creation; and as no present age ever showed any thing like it, that is, visibly so,—what is seen must be nothing more than the elements out of which it may be made.—The golden age—where all is beauty, all is perfect! Purest should be the mind that would desire to see it.
Curate.—The golden age, if you mean by it the happy age, is but one field for art; you seem for the moment to forget, that we are so constituted as to feel a certain pleasure from terror, from fear—from the deepest tragedy—from what moves us to shed tears of pity, as well as what soothes to repose, or excites to gaiety.
Aquilius.—Not so—but as we commenced to discuss chiefly the agreeability of subjects for pictures, let me be allowed to add, that I question if what is disgusting should not be excluded from even the tragic, perhaps chiefly from what is tragic. Cruelty even is not necessarily disgusting; it becomes so when meanness is added to it, and there is not a certain greatness in it. There might be a greatness even in deformity, and where it is not gratuitously given, but for a purpose.
Curate.—Yet, has not Raffaele been censured for the painfully distorted features of the Possessed Boy in his “Transfiguration.”
Aquilius.—And it has with some show of truth (for who would like to speak more positively against the judgment of Raffaele) been thought that Domenichino, who borrowed this subject from him, has improved the interest by rendering the face of the lunatic one of extreme beauty!
The Curate was here called away upon his parochial duties, and our discussion for the present terminated. Will it amuse you, Eusebius? If not, you have incurred the penalty of reading it, by not making one of our party. Yours ever,
Aquilius.