1. The Spirit of Light, moral and physical, by name the "Physician-Destroyer," bearing arrows in his hand, and a lyre; pre-eminently the destroyer of human pride, and the guide of human harmony. Physically, Lord of the Sun; and a mountain Spirit, because the sun seems first to rise and set upon hills.2. The Spirit of helpful Darkness—of shade and rest. Night the Restorer.3. The Spirit of Wisdom inConduct, bearing, in sign of conquest over troublous and disturbing evil, the skin of the wild goat, and the head of the slain Spirit of physical storm. In her hand, a weaver's shuttle, or a spear.4. The Spirit of Wisdom inArrangement; called the Lord or Father of Truth: throned on a four-square cubit, with a measuring-rod in his hand, or a potter's wheel.5. The Spirit of Wisdom inAdaptation; or of serviceablelabor: the Master of human effort in its glow; and Lord of useful fire, moral and physical.6. The Spirit, first of young or nascent grace, and then of fulfilled beauty: the wife of the Lord of Labor. I have taken the two lines in which Homer describes her girdle, for the motto of these essays: partly in memory of these outcast fancies of the great masters: and partly for the sake of a meaning which we shall find as we go on.7. The Spirit of pure human life and gladness. Master of wholesome vital passion; and physically, Lord of the Vine.
1. The Spirit of Light, moral and physical, by name the "Physician-Destroyer," bearing arrows in his hand, and a lyre; pre-eminently the destroyer of human pride, and the guide of human harmony. Physically, Lord of the Sun; and a mountain Spirit, because the sun seems first to rise and set upon hills.
2. The Spirit of helpful Darkness—of shade and rest. Night the Restorer.
3. The Spirit of Wisdom inConduct, bearing, in sign of conquest over troublous and disturbing evil, the skin of the wild goat, and the head of the slain Spirit of physical storm. In her hand, a weaver's shuttle, or a spear.
4. The Spirit of Wisdom inArrangement; called the Lord or Father of Truth: throned on a four-square cubit, with a measuring-rod in his hand, or a potter's wheel.
5. The Spirit of Wisdom inAdaptation; or of serviceablelabor: the Master of human effort in its glow; and Lord of useful fire, moral and physical.
6. The Spirit, first of young or nascent grace, and then of fulfilled beauty: the wife of the Lord of Labor. I have taken the two lines in which Homer describes her girdle, for the motto of these essays: partly in memory of these outcast fancies of the great masters: and partly for the sake of a meaning which we shall find as we go on.
7. The Spirit of pure human life and gladness. Master of wholesome vital passion; and physically, Lord of the Vine.
37. From these ludicrous notions of motive force, inconsistent as they are with modern physiology and organic chemistry, we may, nevertheless, hereafter gather, in the details of their various expressions, something useful to us. But I grieve to say that when our provoking teachers descend from dreams about the doings of Gods to assertions respecting the deeds of Men, little beyond the blankest discouragement is to be had from them. Thus, they represent the ingenuity, and deceptive or imitative Arts of men, under the type of a Master who builds labyrinths, and makes images of living creatures, for evil purposes, or for none; and pleases himself and the people with idle jointing of toys, and filling of them with quicksilver motion; and brings his child to foolish, remediless catastrophe, in fancying his father's work as good, and strong, and fit to bear sunlight, as if it had been God's work. So, again, they represent the foresight and kindly zeal of men by a most rueful figure of one chained down to a rock by the brute force and bias and methodical hammer-stroke of the merely practical Arts, and by the merciless Necessities or Fates of present time; and so having his very heart torn piece by piece out of him by a vulturous hunger and sorrow, respecting things he cannot reach, nor prevent, nor achieve. So, again, they describe the sentiment and pure soul-power of Man, as moving the very rocks and trees, and giving themlife, by its sympathy with them; but losing its own best-beloved thing by mere venomous accident: and afterwards going down to hell for it, in vain; being impatient and unwise, though full of gentleness; and, in the issue, after as vainly trying to teach this gentleness to others, and to guide them out of their lower passions to sunlight of true healing Life, it drives the sensual heart of them, and the gods that govern it, into mere and pure frenzy of resolved rage, and gets torn to pieces by them, and ended; only the nightingale staying by its grave to sing. All which appearing to be anything rather than helpful or encouraging instruction for beginners, we shall, for the present, I think, do well to desire these enigmatical teachers to put up their pipes and be gone; and betaking ourselves in the humblest manner to intelligible business, at least set down some definite matter for decision, to be made a first stepping-stone at the shore of this brook of despond and difficulty.
38. Most masters agree (and I believe they are right) that the first thing to be taught to any pupil, is how to draw an outline of such things as can be outlined.
Now, there are two kinds of outline—the soft and hard. One must be executed with a soft instrument, as a piece of chalk or lead; and the other with some instrument producing for ultimate result a firm line of equal darkness; as a pen with ink, or the engraving tool on wood or metal.
And these two kinds of outline have both of them their particular objects and uses, as well as their proper scale of size in work. Thus Raphael will sketch a miniature head with his pen, but always takes chalk if he draws of the size of life. So also Holbein, and generally the other strong masters.
But the black outline seems to be peculiarly that which we ought to begin to reason upon, because it is simple and open-hearted, and does not endeavor to escape into mist. A pencil line may be obscurely and undemonstrably wrong; false in a cowardly manner, and without confession: but the ink line, if it goes wrong at all, goes wrong with a will, and may be convicted at our leisure, and put to such shame as itsblack complexion is capable of. May we, therefore, begin with the hard line? It will lead us far, if we can come to conclusions about it.
39. Presuming, then, that our schoolboys are such as Coleridge would have them—i.e.that they are
"Innocent, steady, and wise,And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies,"
and, above all, in a moral state in which they may be trusted with ink—we put a pen into their hands (shall it be steel?) and a piece of smooth white paper, and something before them to draw. But what? "Nay," the reader answers, "you had surely better give them pencil first, for that may be rubbed out." Perhaps so; but I am not sure that the power of rubbing out is an advantage; at all events, we shall best discover what the pencil outline ought to be, by investigating the power of the black one, and the kind of things we can draw with it.
40. Suppose, for instance, my first scholar has a turn for entomology, and asks me to draw for him a wasp's leg, or its sting; having first humanely provided me with a model by pulling one off or out. My pen must clearly be fine at the point, and my execution none of the boldest, if I comply with his request. If I decline, and he thereupon challenges me at least to draw the wasp's body, with its pretty bands of black crinoline—behold us involved instantly in the profound question of local color! Am I to tell him he is not to draw outlines of bands or spots? How, then, shall he know a wasp's body from a bee's? I escape, for the present, by telling him the story of Dædalus and the honeycomb; set him to draw a pattern of hexagons, and lay the question of black bands up in my mind.
41. The next boy, we may suppose, is a conchologist, and asks me to draw a white snail-shell for him! Veiling my consternation at the idea of having to give a lesson on the perspective of geometrical spirals, with an "austere regard of control" I pass on to the next student:—Who, bringingafter him, with acclamation, all the rest of the form, requires of me contemptuously, to "draw a horse."
And I retreat in final discomfiture; for not only I cannot myself execute, but I have never seen, an outline, quite simply and rightly done, either of a shell or a pony; nay, not so much as of a pony's nose. At a girls' school we might perhaps take refuge in rosebuds: but these boys, with their impatient battle-cry, "my kingdom for a horse," what is to be done for them?
42. Well, this is what I should like to be able to do for them. To show them an enlarged black outline, nobly done, of the two sides of a coin of Tarentum, with that fiery rider kneeling, careless, on his horse's neck, and reclined on his surging dolphin, with the curled sea lapping round them; and then to convince my boys that no one (unless it were Taras's father himself, with the middle prong of his trident) could draw a horse like that, without learning;—that for poor mortals like us there must be sorrowful preparatory stages; and, having convinced them of this, set them to draw (if I had a good copy to give them) a horse's hoof, or his rib, or a vertebra of his thunder-clothed neck, or any other constructive piece of him.
43. Meanwhile, all this being far out of present reach, I am fain to shrink back into my snail-shell, both for shelter and calm of peace; and ask of artists in general how the said shell, or any other simple object involving varied contour,shouldbe outlined in ink?—how thick the lines should be, and how varied? My own idea of an elementary outline is that it should be unvaried; distinctly visible; not thickened towards the shaded sides of the object; not express any exaggerations of aërial perspective, nor fade at the further side of a cup as if it were the further side of a crater of a volcano; and therefore, in objects of ordinary size, show no gradation at all, unless where the real outline disappears, as in soft contours and folds. Nay, I think it may even be a question whether we ought not to resolve that the line should never gradate itself at all, but terminate quite bluntly! Albert Dürer's "Cannon" furnishes a very peculiar and curious example of this entirelyequal line, even to the extreme distance; being in that respect opposed to nearly all his other work, which is wrought mostly by tapering lines; and his work in general, and Holbein's, which appear to me entirely typical of rightness in use of the graver and pen, are to be considered carefully in their relation to Rembrandt's loose etching, as in the "Spotted Shell."
44. But I do not want to press my own opinions now, even when I have been able to form them distinctly. I want to get at some unanimous expression of opinion and method; and would propose, therefore, in all modesty, this question for discussion, by such artists as will favor me with answer,[65]giving their names:—How ought the pen to be used to outline a form of varied contour; and ought outline to be entirely pure, or, even in its most elementary types, to pass into some suggestion of shade in the inner masses?For there are no examples whatever of pure outlines by the great masters. They are always touched or modified by inner lines, more or less suggestive of solid form, and they are lost or accentuated in certain places, not so much in conformity with any explicable law, as in expression of the master's future purpose, or of what he wishes immediately to note in the character of the object. Most of them are irregular memoranda, not systematic elementary work: of those which are systematized, the greater part are carried far beyond the initiative stage; and Holbein's are nearly all washed with color: the exact degree in which he depends upon the softening and extending his touch of ink by subsequent solution of it, being indeterminable, though exquisitely successful. His stupendous drawings in the British Museum (I can justly use no other term than "stupendous," of their consummately decisive power) furnish finer instances of this treatment than any at Basle; but itwould be very difficult to reduce them to a definable law. Venetian outlines are rare, except preparations on canvas, often shaded before coloring;—while Raphael's, if not shaded, are quite loose, and useless as examples to a beginner: so that we are left wholly without guide as to the preparatory steps on which we should decisively insist; and I am myself haunted by the notion that the students were forced to shade firmly from the very beginning, in all the greatest schools; only we never can get hold of any beginnings, or any weak work of those schools: whatever is bad in them comes of decadence, not infancy.
45. I purpose in the next essay[66]to enter upon quite another part of the inquiry, so as to leave time for the reception of communications bearing upon the present paper: and, according to their importance, I shall ask leave still to defer our return to the subject until I have had time to reflect upon them, and to collect for public service the concurrent opinions they may contain.
Transcriber's note:Chapter II is missing in the original.
Transcriber's note:
Chapter II is missing in the original.
"Dame Paciencë sitting there I fonde,With facë pale, upon an hill of sonde."
46. As I try to summon this vision of Chaucer's into definiteness, and as it fades before me, and reappears, like the image of Piccarda in the moon, there mingles with it another;—the image of an Italian child, lying, she also, upon a hill of sand, by Eridanus' side; a vision which has never quite left me since I saw it. A girl of ten or twelve, it might be; one of the children to whom there has never been any other lesson taught than that of patience:—patience of famine and thirst; patience of heat and cold; patience of fierce word and sullen blow; patience of changeless fate and giftless time. She was lying with her arms thrown back over her head, all languid and lax, on an earth-heap by the river side (the softness of the dust being the only softness she had ever known), in the southern suburb of Turin, one golden afternoon in August, years ago. She had been at play, after her fashion, with other patient children, and had thrown herself down to rest, full in the sun, like a lizard. The sand was mixed with the draggled locks of her black hair, and some of it sprinkled over her face and body, in an "ashes to ashes" kind of way; a few black rags about her loins, but her limbs nearly bare, and her little breasts, scarce dimpled yet,—white,—marble-like—but, as wasted marble, thin with the scorching and the rains of Time. So she lay, motionless; black and white bythe shore in the sun; the yellow light flickering back upon her from the passing eddies of the river, and burning down on her from the west. So she lay, like a dead Niobid: it seemed as if the Sun-God, as he sank towards gray Viso (who stood pale in the southwest, and pyramidal as a tomb), had been wroth with Italy for numbering her children too carefully, and slain this little one. Black and white she lay, all breathless, in a sufficiently pictorial manner: the gardens of the Villa Regina gleamed beyond, graceful with laurel-grove and labyrinthine terrace; and folds of purple mountain were drawn afar, for curtains round her little dusty bed.
47. Pictorial enough, I repeat; and yet I might not now have remembered her, so as to find her figure mingling, against my will, with other images, but for her manner of "revival." For one of her playmates coming near, cast some word at her which angered her; and she rose—"en ego, victa situ"—she rose with a single spring, like a snake; one hardly saw the motion; and with a shriek so shrill that I put my hands upon my ears; and so uttered herself, indignant and vengeful, with words of justice,—Alecto standing by, satisfied, teaching her acute, articulate syllables, and adding her own voice to carry them thrilling through the blue laurel shadows. And having spoken, she went her way, wearily: and I passed by on the other side, meditating, with such Levitical propriety as a respectable person should, on the asplike Passion, following the sorrowful Patience; and on the way in which the saying, "Dust shalt thou eat all thy days" has been confusedly fulfilled, first by much provision of human dust for the meat of what Keats calls "human serpentry;" and last, by gathering the Consumed and Consumer into dust together, for the meat of the death spirit, or serpent Apap. Neither could I, for long, get rid of the thought of this strange dust-manufacture under the mill-stones, as it were, of Death; and of the two colors of the grain, discriminate beneath, though indiscriminately cast into the hopper. For indeed some of it seems only to be made whiter for its patience, and becomes kneadable into spiced bread, where they sell in Babylonian shops"slaves, and souls of men;" but other some runs dark from under the mill-stones; a little sulphurous and nitrous foam being mingled in the conception of it; and is ominously stored up in magazines near river-embankments; patient enough—for the present.
48. But it is provoking to me that the image of this child mingles itself now with Chaucer's; for I should like truly to know what Chaucer means by his sand-hill. Not but that this is just one of those enigmatical pieces of teaching which we have made up our minds not to be troubled with, since it may evidently mean just what we like. Sometimes I would fain have it to mean the ghostly sand of the horologe of the world: and I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap, which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises, tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, but she abiding;—to herself, her home. And sometimes I think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that she is seated on her sand-heap as the only treasure to be gained by human toil; and that the little ant-hill, where the best of us creep to and fro, bears to angelic eyes, in the patientest gathering of its galleries, only the aspect of a little heap of dust; while for the worst of us, the heap, still lower by the leveling of those winged surveyors, is high enough, nevertheless, to overhang, and at last to close in judgment, on the seventh day, over the journeyers to the fortunate Islands; while to their dying eyes, through the mirage, "the city sparkles like a grain of salt."
49. But of course it does not in the least matter what it means. All that matters specially to us in Chaucer's vision, is that, next to Patience (as the reader will find by looking at the context in the "Assembly of Foules"), were "Beheste" and "Art;"—Promise, that is, and Art: and that, although these visionary powers are here waiting only in one of the outer courts of Love, and the intended patience is here only the long-suffering of love; and the intended beheste, its promise; and the intended art, its cunning,—the same powers companion each other necessarily in the courts and antechamber of every triumphal home of man. I say triumphal home, for, indeed, triumphalarcheswhich you pass under, are but foolish things, and may be nailed together any day, out of pasteboard and filched laurel; but triumphaldoors, which you can enter in at, with living laurel crowning the Lares, are not so easy of access: and outside of them waits always this sad portress, Patience; that is to say, the submission to the eternal laws of Pain and Time, and acceptance of them as inevitable, smiling at the grief. So much pains you shall take—so much time you shall wait: that is the Law. Understand it, honor it; with peace of heart accept the pain, and attend the hours; and as the husbandman in his waiting, you shall see, first the blade, and then the ear, and then the laughing of the valleys. But refuse the Law, and seek to do your work in your own time, or by any serpentine way to evade the pain, and you shall have no harvest—nothing but apples of Sodom: dust shall be your meat, and dust in your throat—there is no singing in such harvest time.
50. And this is true for all things, little and great. There is a time and a way in which they can be done: none shorter—none smoother. For all noble things, the time is long and the way rude. You may fret and fume as you will; for every start and struggle of impatience there shall be so much attendant failure; if impatience become a habit, nothing but failure: until on the path you have chosen for your better swiftness, rather than the honest flinty one, there shall follow you, fast at hand, instead of Beheste and Art for companions, those two wicked hags,
"With hoary locks all loose, and visage grim;Their feet unshod, their bodies wrapt in rags,And both as swift on foot as chased stags;And yet the one her other legge had lame,Which with a staff all full of little snagsShe did support, and Impotence her name:But th' other was Impatience, armed with raging flame."
"Ragingflame," note; unserviceable;—flame of the black grain. But the fire which Patience carries in her hand is that truly stolen from Heaven, in thepithof the rod—fire of the slow match; persistent Fire like it also in her own body,—fire in the marrow; unquenchable incense of life: though it may seem to the bystanders that there is no breath in her, and she holds herself like a statue, as Hermione, "the statue lady," or Griselda, "the stone lady;" unless indeed one looks close for the glanceforward, in the eyes, which distinguishes such pillars from the pillars, not of flesh, but of salt, whose eyes are set backwards.
51. I cannot get to my work in this paper, somehow; the web of these old enigmas entangles me again and again. That rough syllable which begins the name of Griselda, "Gries," "the stone;" the roar of the long fall of the Toccia seems to mix with the sound of it, bringing thoughts of the great Alpine patience; mute snow wreathed by gray rock, till avalanche time comes—patience of mute tormented races till the time of the Gray league came; at last impatient. (Not that, hitherto, it has hewn its way to much: the Rhine-foam of the Via Mala seeming to have done its work better.) But it is a noble color that Grison Gray;—dawn color—graceful for a faded silk to ride in, and wonderful, in paper, for getting a glow upon, if you begin wisely, as you may some day perhaps see by those Turner sketches at Kensington, if ever anybody can see them.
52. But wewillget to work now; the work being to understand, if we may, what tender creatures are indeed riding with us, the British public, in faded silk, and handing our plates for us with tender little thumbs, and never wearing, or doing, anything else (not always having much to put on their own plates). The loveliest arts, the arts of noblest descent, have been long doing this for us, and are still, and we have noidea of their being Princesses, but keep them ill-entreated and enslaved: vociferous as we are against Black slavery, while we are gladly acceptant of Gray; and fain to keep Aglaia and her sisters—Urania and hers,—serving us in faded silk, and taken for kitchen-wenches. We are mad Sanchos, not mad Quixotes: our eyes enchantDownwards.
53. For one instance only: has the reader ever reflected on the patience, and deliberate subtlety, and unostentatious will, involved in the ordinary process of steel engraving; that process of which engravers themselves now with doleful voices deplore the decline, and with sorrowful hearts expect the extinction, after their own days?
By the way—my friends of the field of steel,—you need fear nothing of the kind. What there is of mechanical in your work; of habitual and thoughtless, of vulgar or servile—for that, indeed, the time has come; the sun will burn it up for you, very ruthlessly; but what there is of human liberty, and of sanguine life, in finger and fancy, is kindred of the sun, and quite inextinguishable by him. He is the very last of divinities who would wish to extinguish it. With his red right hand, though full of lightning coruscation, he will faithfully and tenderly clasp yours, warm blooded; you will see the vermilion in the flesh-shadows all the clearer; but your hand will not be withered. I tell you—(dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well)—a square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that ever were dipped in acid (or left half-washed afterwards, which is saying much)—only it must be man's engraving; not machine's engraving. You have founded a school on patience and labor—only. That school must soon be extinct. You will have to found one on thought, which is Phœnician in immortality and fears no fire. Believe me, photography can do against line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against sculpture. That, and no more. You are too timid in this matter; you are like Isaac in that picture of Mr. Schnorr's in the last number of this Journal, and with Teutonically metaphysical precaution, shade your eyes from thesun with your back to it. Take courage; turn your eyes to it in an aquiline manner; put more sunshine on your steel, and less burr; and leave the photographers to their Phœbus of Magnesium wire.
54. Not that I mean to speak disrespectfully of magnesium. I honor it to its utmost fiery particle (though I think the soul a fierier one); and I wish the said magnesium all comfort and triumph; nightly-lodging in lighthouses, and utter victory over coal gas. Could Titian but have known what the gnomes who built his dolomite crags above Cadore had mixed in the make of them,—and that one day—one night, I mean—his blue distances would still be seen pure blue, by light got out of his own mountains!
Light out of limestone—color out of coal—and white wings out of hot water! It is a great age this of ours, for traction and extraction, if it only knew what to extract from itself, or where to drag itself to!
55. But in the meantime I want the public to admire this patience of yours, while they have it, and to understand what it has cost to give them even this, which has to pass away. We will not take instance in figure engraving, of which the complex skill and textural gradation by dot and checker must be wholly incomprehensible to amateurs; but we will take a piece of average landscape engraving, such as is sent out of any good workshop—the master who puts his name at the bottom of the plate being of course responsible only for the general method, for the sufficient skill of subordinate hands, and for the few finishing touches if necessary. We will take, for example, the plate of Turner's "Mercury and Argus," engraved in this Journal.[68]
56. I suppose most people, looking at such a plate, fancy it is produced by some simple mechanical artifice, which is to drawing only what printing is to writing. They conclude, at all events, that there is something complacent, sympathetic,and helpful in the nature of steel; so that while a pen-and-ink sketch may always be considered an achievement proving cleverness in the sketcher, a sketch on steel comes out by mere favor of the indulgent metal: or perhaps they think the plate is woven like a piece of pattern silk, and the pattern is developed by pasteboard cards punched full of holes. Not so. Look close at that engraving—imagine it to be a drawing in pen and ink, and yourself required similarly to produce its parallel! True, the steel point has the one advantage of not blotting, but it has tenfold or twentyfold disadvantage, in that you cannot slur, nor efface, except in a very resolute and laborious way, nor play with it, nor even see what you are doing with it at the moment, far less the effect that is to be. You mustfeelwhat you are doing with it, and know precisely what you have got to do; how deep—how broad—how far apart—your lines must be, etc. and etc. (a couple of lines of etc.'s would not be enough to imply all you must know). But suppose the platewereonly a pen drawing: take your pen—your finest—and just try to copy the leaves that entangle the nearest cow's head and the head itself; remembering always that the kind of work required here is mere child's play compared to that of fine figure engraving. Nevertheless, take a strong magnifying glass to this—count the dots and lines that gradate the nostrils and the edges of the facial bone; notice how the light is left on the top of the head by the stopping at its outline of the coarse touches which form the shadows under the leaves; examine it well, and then—I humbly ask of you—try to do a piece of it yourself! You clever sketcher—you young lady or gentleman of genius—you eye-glassed dilettante—you current writer of criticism royally plural,—I beseech you—do it yourself; do the merely etched outline yourself, if no more. Look you,—you hold your etching needle this way, as you would a pencil, nearly; and then,—you scratch with it! it is as easy as lying. Or if you think that too difficult, take an easier piece;—take either of the light sprays of foliage that rise against the fortress on the right, put your glass over them—look how their fine outline is first drawn, leaf by leaf; then how the distant rock is put in between, with broken lines, mostly stopping before they touch the leaf outline, and—again, I pray you, do it yourself; if not on that scale, on a larger. Go on into the hollows of the distant rock—traverse its thickets—number its towers—count how many lines there are in a laurel bush—in an arch—in a casement: some hundred and fifty, or two hundred, deliberately drawn lines, you will find, in every square quarter of an inch;—say three thousand to the inch,—each with skillful intent put in its place! and then consider what the ordinary sketcher's work must appear to the men who have been trained to this!
57. "But might not more have been done by three thousand lines to a square inch?" you will perhaps ask. Well, possibly. It may be with lines as with soldiers: three hundred, knowing their work thoroughly, may be stronger than three thousand less sure of their game. We shall have to press close home this question about numbers and purpose presently;—it is not the question now. Supposing certain results required,—atmospheric effects, surface textures, transparencies of shade, confusions of light,—more couldnotbe done with less. There are engravings of this modern school, of which, with respect to their particular aim, it may be said, most truly, they "cannotbe better done."
58. Whether an engraving should aim at effects of atmosphere, may be disputable (just as also whether a sculptor should aim at effects of perspective); but I do not raise these points to-day. Admit the aim—let us note the patience; nor this in engraving only. I have taken an engraving for my instance, but I might have taken any form of Art. I call upon all good artists, painters, sculptors, metal-workers, to bear witness with me in what I now tell the public in their name,—that the same Fortitude, the same deliberation, the same perseverance in resolute act—is needed to doanythingin Art that is worthy. And why is it, you workmen, that you are silent always concerning your toil; and mock at us in your hearts, within that shrine at Eleusis, to the gate of whichyou have hewn your way through so deadly thickets of thorn; and leave us, foolish children, outside, in our conceited thinking either that we can enter it in play, or that we are grander for not entering? Far more earnestly is it to be asked, why do youstoopto us as you mock us? If your secrecy were a noble one,—if, in that incommunicant contempt, you wrought your own work with majesty, whether we would receive it or not, it were kindly, though ungraciously, done; but now you make yourselves our toys, and do our childish will in servile silence. If engraving were to come to an end this day, and no guided point should press metal more, do you think it would be in a blaze of glory that your art would expire?—that those plates in the annuals, and black proofs in broad shop windows, are of a nobly monumental character,—"chalybe perennius"? I am afraid your patience has been too much like yonder poor Italian child's; and over that genius of yours, low laid by the Matin shore, if it expired so, the lament for Archytas would have to be sung again;—"pulveris exigui—munera." Suppose you were to shake off the dust again! cleanse your wings, like the morning bees on that Matin promontory; rise, in nobleimpatience, for there is such a thing: the Impatience of the Fourth Cornice.
"Cui buon voler, e giusto amor cavalca."
Shall we try, together, to think over the meaning of that Haste, when the May mornings come?
59. It is a wild March day,—the 20th; and very probably due course of English Spring will bring as wild a May-day by the time this writing meets anyone's eyes; but at all events, as yet the days are rough, and as I look out of my fitfully lighted window into the garden, everything seems in a singular hurry. The dead leaves; and yonder two living ones, on the same stalk, tumbling over and over each other on the lawn, like a quaint mechanical toy; and the fallen sticks from the rooks' nests, and the twisted straws out of the stable-yard—all going one way, in the hastiest manner! The puffs of steam, moreover, which pass under the wooded hills where what used to be my sweetest field-walk ends now, prematurely, in an abyss of blue clay; and which signify, in their silvery expiring between the successive trunks of wintry trees, that some human beings, thereabouts, are in a hurry as well as the sticks and straws, and, having fastened themselves to the tail of a manageable breeze, are being blown down to Folkestone.
60. In the general effect of these various passages and passengers, as seen from my quiet room, they look all very much alike. One begins seriously to question with one's self whether those passengers by the Folkestone train are in truth one whit more in a hurry than the dead leaves. The difference consists, of course, in the said passengers knowing where they are going to, and why; and having resolved to go there—which, indeed, as far as Folkestone, may, perhaps, properly distinguish them from the leaves: but will it distinguish them any farther? Do many of them know what they are going to Folkestone for?—what they are going anywhere for? and where, at last, by sum of all the days' journeys, of which thisglittering transit is one, they are going for peace? For if they know not this, certainly they are no more making haste than the straws are. Perhaps swiftly going the wrong way; more likely going no way—any way, as the winds and their own wills, wilder than the winds, dictate; to find themselves at last at the end which would have come to them quickly enough without their seeking.
61. And, indeed, this is a very preliminary question to all measurement of the rate of going, this "where to?" or, even before that, "are we going on at all?"—"getting on" (as the world says) on any road whatever? Most men's eyes are so fixed on the mere swirl of the wheel of their fortunes, and their souls so vexed at the reversed cadences of it when they come, that they forget to ask if the curve they have been carried through on its circumference was circular or cycloidal; whether they have been bound to the ups and downs of a mill-wheel or of a chariot-wheel.
That phrase, of "getting on," so perpetually on our lips (as indeed it should be), do any of us take it to our hearts, and seriously ask where we can get onto? That instinct of hurry has surely good grounds. It is all very well for lazy and nervous people (like myself for instance) to retreat into tubs, and holes, and corners, anywhere out of the dust, and wonder within ourselves, "what all the fuss can be about?" The fussy people might have the best of it, if they know their end. Suppose they were to answer this March or May morning thus:—"Not bestir ourselves, indeed! and the spring sun up these four hours!—and this first of May, 1865, never to come back again; and of Firsts of May in perspective, supposing ourselves to be 'nel mezzo del cammin,' perhaps some twenty or twenty-five to be, not without presumption, hoped for, and by no means calculated upon. Say, twenty of them, with their following groups of summer days; and though they may be long, one cannot make much more than sixteen hours apiece out of them, poor sleepy wretches that we are; for even if we get up at four, we must go to bed while the red yet stays from the sunset: and half the time we are awake, wemust be lying among haycocks, or playing at something, if we are wise; not to speak of eating, and previously earning whereof to eat, which takes time: and then, how much of us and of our day will be left for getting on? Shall we have a seventh, or even a tithe, of our twenty-four hours?—two hours and twenty-four minutes clear, a day, or, roughly, a thousand hours a year, and (violently presuming on fortune, as we said) twenty years of working life: twenty thousand hours to get on in, altogether? Many men would think it hard to be limited to an utmost twenty thousand pounds for their fortunes, but here is a sterner limitation; the Pactolus of time, sand, and gold together, would, with such a fortune, count us a pound an hour, through our real and serviceable life. If this time capital would reproduce itself! and for our twenty thousand hours we could get some rate of interest, if well spent? At all events, we will do something with them; not lie moping out of the way of the dust, as you do."
62. A sufficient answer, indeed; yet, friends, if you wouldmakea little less dust, perhaps we should all see our way better. But I am ready to take the road with you, if you mean it so seriously—only let us at least consider where we are now, at starting.
Here, on a little spinning, askew-axised thing we call a planet—(impertinently enough, since we are far more planetary ourselves). A round, rusty, rough little metallic ball—very hard to live upon; most of it much too hot or too cold: a couple of narrow habitable belts about it, which, to wandering spirits, must look like the places where it has got damp, and green-moldy, with accompanying small activities of animal life in the midst of the lichen. Explosive gases, seemingly, inside it, and possibilities of very sudden dispersion.
63. This is where we are; and roundabout us, there seem to be more of such balls, variously heated and chilled, ringed and mooned, moved and comforted; the whole giddy group of us forming an atom in a milky mist, itself another atom in a shoreless phosphorescent sea of such Volvoces and Medusæ.
Whereupon, I presume, one would first ask, have we any chance of getting off this ball of ours, and getting on to one of those finer ones? Wise people say we have, and that it is very wicked to think otherwise. So we will think no otherwise; but, with their permission, think nothing about the matter now, since it is certain that the more we make of our little rusty world, such as it is, the more chance we have of being one day promoted into a merrier one.
64. And even on this rusty and moldy Earth, there appear to be things which may be seen with pleasure, and things which might be done with advantage. The stones of it have strange shapes; the plants and the beasts of it strange ways. Its air is coinable into wonderful sounds; its light into manifold colors: the trees of it bring forth pippins, and the fields cheese (though both of these may be, in a finer sense, "to come"). There are bright eyes upon it which reflect the light of other eyes quite singularly; and foolish feelings to be cherished upon it; and gladdenings of dust by neighbor dust, not easily explained, but pleasant, and which take time to win. One would like to know something of all this, I suppose?—to divide one's score of thousand hours as shrewdly as might be. Ten minutes to every herb of the field is not much; yet we shall not know them all, so, before the time comes to be made grass of ourselves! Half an hour for every crystalline form of clay and flint, and we shall be near the need of shaping the gray flint stone that is to weigh upon our feet. And we would fain dance a measure or two before that cumber is laid upon them: there having been hitherto much piping to which we have not danced. And we must leave time for loving, if we are to take Marmontel's wise peasant's word for it, "Il n'y a de bon que c'a!" And if there should be fighting to do also? and weeping? and much burying? truly, we had better make haste.
65. Which means, simply, that we must lose neither strength nor moment. Hurry is not haste; but economy is, and rightness is. Whatever is rightly done stays with us, to support another right beyond, or higher up: whatever iswrongly done, vanishes; and by the blank, betrays what we would have built above. Wasting no word, no thought, no doing, we shall have speed enough; but then there is that farther question, what shall we do?—what we are fittest (worthiest, that is) to do, and what is best worth doing? Note that word "worthy," both of the man and the thing, for the two dignities go together. Isitworth the pains? Are we worth the task? The dignity of a man depends wholly upon this harmony. If his task is above him, he will be undignified in failure; if he is above it, he will be undignified in success. His own composure and nobleness must be according to the composure of his thought to his toil.
66. As I was dreaming over this, my eyes fell by chance on a page of my favorite thirteenth century psalter, just where two dragons, one with red legs, and another with green,—one with a blue tail on a purple ground, and the other with a rosy tail on a golden ground, follow the verse "Quis ascendet in montem Domini," and begin the solemn "Qui non accepit in vano animam suam." Who hath not lift up his soul unto vanity, we have it; and ελαβεν επἱ ματαἱω, the Greeks (not that I know what that means accurately): broadly, they all mean, "who has not received nor given his soul in vain," this is the man who can make haste, even uphill, the only haste worth making; and it must be up the right hill, too: not that Corinthian Acropolis, of which, I suppose, the white specter stood eighteen hundred feet high, in Hades, for Sisyphus to roll his fantastic stone up—image, himself, forever of the greater part of our wise mortal work.
67. Now all this time, whatever the reader may think, I have never for a moment lost sight of that original black line with which is our own special business. The patience, the speed, the dignity, we can give to that, the choice to be made of subject for it, are the matters I want to get at. You think, perhaps, that an engraver's function is one of no very high dignity;—does not involve a serious choice of work. Consider a little of it. Here is a steel point, and 'tis like Job's "iron pen"—and you are going to cut into steel with it, in amost deliberate way, as into the rock forever. And this scratch or inscription of yours will be seen of a multitude of eyes. It is not like a single picture or a single wall painting; this multipliable work will pass through thousand thousand hands, strengthen and inform innumerable souls, if it be worthy; vivify the folly of thousands if unworthy. Remember, also, it will mix in the very closest manner in domestic life. This engraving will not be gossiped over and fluttered past at private views of academies; listlessly sauntered by in corners of great galleries. Ah, no! This will hang over parlor chimney-pieces—shed down its hourly influence on children's forenoon work. This will hang in little luminous corners by sick beds; mix with flickering dreams by candlelight, and catch the first rays from the window's "glimmering square." You had better put something good into it! I do not know a more solemn field of labor than thatchamp d'acier. From a pulpit, perhaps a man can only reach one or two people, for that time,—even your book, once carelessly read, probably goes into a bookcase catacomb, and is thought of no more. But this; taking the eye unawares again and again, and always again: persisting and inevitable! where will you look for a chance of saying something nobly, if it is not here?
68. And the choice is peculiarly free; to you of all men most free. An artist, at first invention, cannot always choose what shall come into his mind, nor know what it will eventually turn into. But you, professed copyists, unless you have mistaken your profession, have the power of governing your own thoughts, and of following and interpreting the thoughts of others. Also, you see the work to be done put plainly before you; you can deliberately choose what seems to you best, out of myriads of examples of perfect Art. You can count the cost accurately; saying, "It will take me a year—two years—five—a fourth or fifth, probably, of my remaining life, to do this." Is the thing worth it? There is no excuse for choosing wrongly; no other men whatever have data so full, and position so firm, for forecast of their labor.
69. I put my psalter aside (not, observe, vouching for itsred and green dragons:—men lifted up their souls to vanity sometimes in the thirteenth as in the nineteenth century), and I take up, instead, a book of English verses, published—there is no occasion to say when. It is full of costliest engravings—large, skillful, appallingly laborious; dotted into textures like the dust on a lily leaf,—smoothed through gradations like clouds,—graved to surfaces like mother-of-pearl; and by all this toil there is set forth for the delight of Englishwomen, a series of the basest dreams that ungoverned feminine imagination can coin in sickliest indolence,—ball-room amours, combats of curled knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties, charities in costume,—a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish vanity—impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir, and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural veracity; the faces falsely drawn—the lights falsely cast—the forms effaced or distorted, and all common human wit and sense extinguished in the vicious scum of lying sensation.
And this, I grieve to say, is only a characteristic type of a large mass of popular English work. This is what we spend our Teutonic lives in; engraving with an iron pen in the rock forever; this, the passion of the Teutonic woman (as opposed to Virgilia), just as foxhunting is the passion of the Teutonic man, as opposed to Valerius.
70. And while we deliberately spend all our strength, and all our tenderness, all our skill, and all our money, in doing, relishing, buying, this absolute Wrongness, of which nothing can ever come but disease in heart and brain, remember that all the mighty works of the great painters of the world, full of life, truth, and blessing, remain to this present hour of the year 1865 unengraved! There literally exists no earnestly studied and fully accomplished engraving of any very great work, except Leonardo's Cena. No large Venetian picture has ever been thoroughly engraved. Of Titian's Peter Martyr, there is even no worthy memorial transcript but Le Febre's.The Cartoons have been multiplied in false readings; never in faithful ones till lately by photography. Of the Disputa and the Parnassus, what can the English public know? of the thoughtful Florentines and Milanese, of Ghirlandajo, and Luini, and their accompanying hosts—what do they yet so much as care to know?
"The English public will not pay," you reply, "for engravings from the great masters. The English public will only pay for pictures of itself; of its races, its rifle-meetings, its rail stations, its parlor-passions, and kitchen interests; you must make your bread as you may, by holding the mirror to it."
71. Friends, there have been hard fighting and heavy sleeping, this many a day, on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cause, as you suppose, of Freedom against slavery; and you are all, open-mouthed, expecting the glories of Black Emancipation. Perhaps a little White Emancipation on this side of the water might be still more desirable, and more easily and guiltlessly won.
Do you know what slavery means? Suppose a gentleman taken by a Barbary corsair—set to field-work; chained and flogged to it from dawn to eve. Need he be a slave therefore? By no means; he is but a hardly-treated prisoner. There is some work which the Barbary corsair will not be able to make him do; such work as a Christian gentleman may not do, that he will not, though he die for it. Bound and scourged he may be, but he has heard of a Person's being bound and scourged before now, who was not therefore a slave. He is not a whit more slave for that. But suppose he take the pirate's pay, and stretch his back at piratical oars, for due salary, how then? Suppose for fitting price he betray his fellow prisoners, and take up the scourge instead of enduring it—become the smiter instead of the smitten, at the African's bidding—how then? Of all the sheepish notions in our English public "mind," I think the simplest is that slavery is neutralized when you are well paid for it! Whereas it is precisely that fact of its being paid for which makes it complete. A man who has been sold by another, may be but half a slave or none; but the man who has sold himself! He is the accurately Finished Bondsman.
72. And gravely I say that I knownocaptivity so sorrowful as that of an artist doing, consciously, bad work for pay. It is the serfdom of the finest gifts—of all that should lead and master men, offering itself to be spit upon, and that for a bribe. There is much serfdom, in Europe, of speakers and writers, but they only sell words; and their talk, even honestly uttered, might not have been worth much; it will not be thought of ten years hence; still less a hundred years hence. No one will buy our parliamentary speeches to keep in portfolios this time next century; and if people are weak enough now to pay for any special and flattering cadence of syllable, it is little matter. Butyou, with your painfully acquired power, your unwearied patience, your admirable and manifold gifts, your eloquence in black and white, which people will buy, if it is good (and has a broad margin), for fifty guineas a copy—in the year 2000; to sell it all, ás Ananias his land, "yea, for so much," and hold yourselves at every fool's beck, with your ready points, polished and sharp, hasting to scratch whathewills! To bite permanent mischief in with acid; to spread an inked infection of evil all your days, and pass away at last from a life of the skillfulest industry—having done whatsoever your hand found (remuneratively) to do, with your might, and a great might, but with cause to thank God only for this—that the end of it all has at last come, and that "there is no device nor work in the Grave." One would get quit ofthisservitude, I think, though we reached the place of Rest a little sooner, and reached it fasting.
73. My English fellow-workmen, you have the name of liberty often on your lips; get the fact of it oftener into your business! talk of it less, and try to understand it better. You have given students many copy-books of free-hand outlines—give them a few of freeheartoutlines.
It appears, however, that you do not intend to help me withany utterance respecting these same outlines.[70]Be it so: I must make out what I can by myself. And under the influence of the Solstitial sign of June I will go backwards, or askance, to the practical part of the business, where I left it three months ago, and take up that question first, touching Liberty, and the relation of the loose swift line to the resolute slow one and of the etched line to the engraved one. It is a worthy question, for the open field afforded by illustrated works is tempting even to our best painters, and many an earnest hour and active fancy spend and speak themselves in the black line, vigorously enough, and dramatically, at all events: if wisely, may be considered. The French also are throwing great passion into theireaux fortes—working with a vivid haste and dark, brilliant freedom, which looked as if they etched with very energetic waters indeed—quite waters of life (it does not look so well, written in French). So we will take, with the reader's permission, for text next month, "Rembrandt, and strong waters."
74. The work I have to do in this paper ought, rightly, to have been thrown into the form of an appendix to the last chapter; for it is no link of the cestus of Aglaia we have to examine, but one of the crests of canine passion in the cestus of Scylla. Nevertheless, the girdle of the Grace cannot be discerned in the full brightness of it, but by comparing it with the dark torment of that other; and (in what place or form matters little) the work has to be done.
"Rembrandt Van Rhyn"—it is said, in the last edition of a very valuable work[72](for which, nevertheless, I could wish that greater lightness in the hand should be obtained by the publication of its information in one volume, and its criticism in another)—was "the most attractive and original of painters." It may be so; but there are attractions, and attractions. The sun attracts the planets—and a candle, night-moths; the one with perhaps somewhat of benefit to the planets;—but with what benefit the other to the moths, one would be glad to learn from those desert flies, of whom, one company having extinguished Mr. Kinglake's candle with their bodies, the remainder, "who had failed in obtaining this martyrdom, became suddenly serious, and clung despondingly to the canvas."
75. Also, there are originalities, and originalities. To invent a new thing, which is also a precious thing; to be struck by a divinely-guided Rod, and become a sudden fountain of life to thirsty multitudes—this is enviable. But to be distinct of men in an original Sin; elect for the initial letter of a Lie; the first apparent spot of an unknown plague; a Root of bitterness, and the first-born worm of a company, studying an original De-Composition,—this is perhaps not so enviable. And if we think of it, most human originality is apt to be of that kind. Goodness is one, and immortal; it may be received and communicated—not originated: but Evil is various and recurrent, and may be misbegotten in endlessly surprising ways.
76. But, that we may know better in what this originality consists, we find that our author, after expatiating on the vast area of the Pantheon, "illuminated solely by the small circular opening in the dome above," and on other similar conditions of luminous contraction, tells us that "to Rembrandt belongs the glory of having first embodied in Art, and perpetuated, these rare and beautiful effects of nature." Such effects are indeed rare in nature; but they are not rare, absolutely. The sky, with the sun in it, does not usually give the impression of being dimly lighted through a circular hole; but you may observe a very similar effect any day in your coal-cellar. The light is not Rembrandtesque on the current, or banks, of a river; but it is on those of a drain. Color is not Rembrandtesque, usually, in a clean house; but is presently obtainable of that quality in a dirty one. And without denying the pleasantness of the mode of progression which Mr. Hazlitt, perhaps too enthusiastically, describes as attainable in a background of Rembrandt's—"You stagger from one abyss of obscurity to another"—I cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of his darkness, and the dullness of his light. Glorious, or inglorious, the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim of the best painters to paint the noblest things theycan see by sunlight. It was the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he could see—by rushlight.
77. By rushlight, observe: material and spiritual. As the sun for the outer world; so in the inner world of man, that which "ερευνἁ ταμεἱα κοιλἱας"[73]—"the candle of God, searching the inmost parts." If that light within become but a more active kind of darkness;—if, abdicating the measuring reed of modesty for scepter, and ceasing to measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we can find, and make our soul's light into atallowcandle, and thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers—encumbered with its lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease—that we may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight of a divine Virgin—only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's ass;—that, having to paint the good Samaritan, we may see only in distance the back of the good Samaritan, and in nearness the back of the good Samaritan's dog;—that having to paint the Annunciation to the Shepherds, we may turn the announcement of peace to men, into an announcement of mere panic to beasts; and, in an unsightly firework of unsightlier angels, see, as we see always, the feet instead of the head, and the shame instead of the honor;—and finally concentrate and rest the sum of our fame, as Titian on the Assumption of a spirit, so we on the dissection of a carcass,—perhaps by such fatuous fire, the less we walk, and by such phosphoric glow, the less we shine, the better it may be for us, and for all who would follow us.
78. Do not think I deny the greatness of Rembrandt. In mere technical power (none of his eulogists know that power better than I, nor declare it in more distinct terms) he might, if he had been educated in a true school, have taken rank with the Venetians themselves. But that type of distinction between Titian's Assumption, and Rembrandt's Dissection, will represent for you with sufficient significance the manner of choice in all their work; only it should be associated withanother characteristic example of the same opposition (which I have dwelt upon elsewhere) between Veronese and Rembrandt, in their conception of domestic life. Rembrandt's picture, at Dresden, of himself, with his wife sitting on his knee, a roasted peacock on the table, and a glass of champagne in his hand, is the best work I know of all he has left; and it marks his speciality with entire decision. It is, of course, a dim candlelight; and the choice of the sensual passions as the things specially and forever to be described and immortalized out of his own private life and love, is exactly that "painting the foulest thing by rushlight" which I have stated to be the enduring purpose of his mind. And you will find this hold in all minor treatment; and that to the uttermost: for as by your broken rushlight you see little, and only corners and points of things, and those very corners and points ill and distortedly; so, although Rembrandt knows the human face and hand, and never fails in these, when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in an animal.
79. His landscape, and foreground vegetation, I mean afterwards to examine in comparison with Dürer's; but the real caliber and nature of the man are best to be understood by comparing the puny, ill-drawn, terrorless, helpless, beggarly skeleton in his "Youth Surprised by Death," with the figure behind the tree in Dürer's plate (though it is quite one of Dürer's feeblest) of the same subject. Absolutely ignorant of all natural phenomena and law; absolutely careless of all lovely living form, or growth, or structure; able only to render with some approach to veracity, what alone he had looked at with some approach to attention,—the pawnbroker's festering heaps of old clothes, and caps, and shoes—Rembrandt's execution is one grand evasion, and his temper the grim contemptof a strong and sullen animal in its defiled den, for the humanity with which it is at war, for the flowers which it tramples, and the light which it fears.
80. Again, do not let it be thought that when I call his execution evasive, I ignore the difference between his touch, on brow or lip, and a common workman's; but the whole school of etching which he founded, (and of painting, so far as it differs from Venetian work) is inherently loose and experimental. Etching is the very refuge and mask of sentimental uncertainty, and of vigorous ignorance. If you know anything clearly, and have a firm hand, depend upon it, you will draw it clearly; you will not care to hide it among scratches and burrs. And herein is the first grand distinction between etching and engraving—that in the etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton speed. There is, however, no real necessity for such a distinction; an etched line may have been just as steadily drawn, and seriously meant, as an engraved one; and for the moment, waiving consideration of this distinction, and opposing Rembrandt's work, considered merely as work of the black line, to Holbein's and Dürer's, as work of the black line, I assert Rembrandt's to be inherentlyevasive. You cannot unite his manner with theirs; choice between them is sternly put to you, when first you touch the steel. Suppose, for instance, you have to engrave, or etch, or draw with pen and ink, a single head, and that the head is to be approximately half an inch in height more or less (there is a reason for assigning this condition respecting size, which we will examine in due time): you have it in your power to do it in one of two ways. You may lay down some twenty or thirty entirely firm and visible lines, of which every one shall be absolutely right, and do the utmost a line can do. By their curvature they shall render contour; by their thickness, shade; by their place and form, every truth of expression, and every condition of design. The head of the soldier drawing his sword, in Dürer's "Cannon," is about half an inch high, supposing the brow to be seen. The chin is drawn with three lines, the lower lip with two, the upper, including the shadow from the nose, with five. Three separate the cheek from the chin, giving the principal points of character. Six lines draw the cheek, and its incised traces of care; four are given to each of the eyes; one, with the outline, to the nose; three to the frown of the forehead. None of these touches could anywhere be altered—none removed, without instantly visible harm; and their result is a head as perfect in character as a portrait by Reynolds.
81. You may either do this—which, if you can, it will generally be very advisable to do—or, on the other hand, you may cover the face with innumerable scratches, and let your hand play with wanton freedom, until the graceful scrabble concentrates itself into shade. You may soften—efface—retouch—rebite—dot, and hatch, and redefine. If you are a great master, you will soon get your character, and probably keep it (Rembrandt often gets it at first, nearly as securely as Dürer); but the design of it will be necessarily seen through loose work, and modified by accident (as you think) fortunate. The accidents which occur to a practiced hand are always at first pleasing—the details which can be hinted, however falsely, through the gathering mystery, are always seducing. You will find yourself gradually dwelling more and more on little meannesses of form and texture, and lusters of surface: on cracks of skin, and films of fur and plume. You will lose your way, and then see two ways, and then many ways, and try to walk a little distance on all of them in turn, and so, back again. You will find yourself thinking of colors, and vexed because you cannot imitate them; next, struggling to render distances by indecision, which you cannot by tone. Presently you will be contending with finished pictures; laboring at the etching, as if it were a painting. You will leave off, after a whole day's work (after many days' work if you choose to give them), still unsatisfied. For final result—if you are as great as Rembrandt—you will have most likely a heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,—instead of a face, a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every texture and form—ugly, assuredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, accidental, undelightful, ignoble success.
Undelightful; note this especially, for it is the peculiar character of etching that it cannot render beauty. You may hatch and scratch your way to picturesqueness or to deformity—never to beauty. You can etch an old woman, or an ill-conditioned fellow. But you cannot etch a girl—nor, unless in his old age, or with very partial rendering of him, a gentleman.
82. And thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of foul and vicious cities. A sensitive and imaginative youth, early driven to get his living by his art, has to lodge, we will say, somewhere in the by-streets of Paris, and is left there, tutorless, to his own devices. Suppose him also vicious or reckless, and there need be no talk of his work farther; he will certainly do nothing in a Düreresque manner. But suppose him self-denying, virtuous, full of gift and power—what are the elements of living study within his reach? All supreme beauty is confined to the higher salons. There are pretty faces in the streets, but no stateliness nor splendor of humanity; all pathos and grandeur is in suffering; no purity of nature is accessible, but only a terrible picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base concomitants. Huge walls and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but plastered with advertisement bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of massy streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque, indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white orchards, checked here by the Ile Notre Dame, to receive their nightly sacrifice, and after playing with it among their eddies, to give it up again, in those quiet shapes that lie on the sloped slate tables of the square-built Temple of the Death-Sibyl, who presides here over spray of Seine, as yonder at Tiber over spray of Anio. Sibylline, indeed, in her secrecy, and her sealing of destinies, by the baptism of the quick water-drops which fall on each fading face, unrecognized, nameless inthisBaptism forever. Wreathed thus throughout, that Paris town, with beauty, and with unseemly sin, unseemlier death, as a fiend-city with fair eyes; forever letting fall her silken raiment so far as that one may "behold her bosom and half her side." Under whose whispered teaching, and substitution of "Contes Drolatiques" for the tales of the wood fairy, her children of Imagination will do, what Gérôme and Gustave Doré are doing, and her whole world of lesser Art will sink into shadows of the street and of the boudoir-curtain, wherein the etching point may disport itself with freedom enough.[74]
83. Nor are we slack in our companionship in these courses. Our imagination is slower and clumsier than the French—rarer also, by far, in the average English mind. The only man of power equal to Doré's whom we have had lately among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily circumstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own; for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as resulting from my own teaching, I am more answerable than most men. Having spoken earnestly against painting without thinking, I now find our exhibitions decorated with works of students who think without painting; and our books illustrated by scratched wood-cuts, representing very ordinary people, who are presumed to be interesting in the picture, because the text tells a story about them. Of this least lively form of modern sensational work, however, I shall have to speak on other grounds; meantime, I am concerned only with its manner; its incontinence of line and method, associated with the slightness of its real thought, and morbid acuteness of irregular sensation; ungoverned all, and one of the external and slight phases of that beautiful Liberty which we are proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and shall presently, I suppose, when we have had enough of it here, proclaim also to the stars, with invitation to themoutof their courses.
84. "But you asked us for 'free-heart' outlines, and told us not to be slaves, only thirty days ago."[75]
Inconsistent that I am! so I did. But as there are attractions, and attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think. Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh—soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime—it is free also. You may choose which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now glorifying,—and of its opposite continence—which is the clasp and χρυσἑη περὁνι of Aglaia's cestus—we will try to find out something in next chapter.[76]