STATUES.

‘Has Earth a clodWhere man, the image of his God,Unscourged by Superstition’s rod,Should bend the knee?’

have an eternal significance. We are called upon to resist formalism by as potential reasons as those which impel to sincere devotion. It is evidenced in the best writings of the day, that the highest in man’s nature may be linked with the most ferocious and abject. Balfour of Burley is but the fanciful embodiment of an actual union between religious zeal and a thirst for blood. Blanco White’s memoirs indicate the possible variations of speculative belief in an honest and ardent mind; and true observation induced John Foster to write his able treatise onThe Objections of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion. ‘There is no denying,’ says a popular reviewer, ‘that there is a certain stiff, tough, clayish, agricultural, English nature, on which theaggressive divineproduces a visible and good effect.’ Father Marquette’s adventurous martyrdom, Pascal’s metaphysical acuteness, the rude courage of John Knox, the witch-chronicle of Mather, the magnetic power of Edward Irving,the wit that scintillated from Sydney Smith, the poetry of Heber, the ideal beauty of Buckminster’s style, and the virtuous charm of Berkeley, prove how the expositors of religion blend with professional life the essential characteristics of man, and how impossible it is to divide the office we are considering, from those qualities and conditions which belong essentially to the race. In the face of such diversity, before such acknowledged facts, how irrational is it to exempt the preacher from any law either of life or character; how unphilosophical and untrue to regard him in any other light than that of experience; and how unjust to imagine there is any occult virtue in ceremonial systems of faith, or the accident of vocation, whereby he derives any special authority unsustained by personal gifts and rectitude.

The problem we have suggested, of an antagonism between the theological profession, the office of priest, artificially held, and the manly instincts, has recently been illustrated by the criticisms on Carlyle’sLife of Sterling. In that work, it is lamented that the mental freedom and just development of a gifted, ingenuous, and aspiring soul were restrained and baffled by the vocation of priest; and to this view Churchmen indignantly protest, and accuse the biographer of infidelity. It is evident, however, that it was not religion but its formula, not truth but an institution, which he thought hampered and narrowed the legitimate spirit of his friend. There is that which commands profound respect in Carlyle’s recoil from the conventional; there is justice in his indignation at the attempt to link a true, loving, brave, and progressive mind to any wheel of social machinery. To keep apart from an organized mode of action is the instinct of the best natures,—not from pride, but self-respect. Of modern writers few have a better right to claim for literature an agency more effective. The press has, indeed, in a measure, superseded the pulpit. No intelligent observer of the signs of the timescan fail to perceive that as a means of influence, the two are at least equal. In the pages of journals, in the verses of poets, in the favourite books of the hour, we have homilies that teach charity and faith more eloquently than the conventional Sunday’s discourse; they come nearer to experience; they are more the offspring of earnest conviction, and therefore enlist popular sympathy. When we turn from such genuine pleadings and pictures to those offered by the unspiritual preacher,—how unreal do the last appear! It was once remarked by an auditor of a genial man, who gave a prescriptive emphasis to his sermons, quite foreign to his frank nature, that he seemed to feel that what he uttered was ‘important if true;’ and such is the impression not a few preachers leave on the listener’s mind. If we carefully note those within the sphere of our acquaintance, we find that many are either visibly oppressed or rendered artificial by their profession. It seldom harmoniously blends with their nature. They seem painfully conscious of a false relation to society, or manfully, and it may be recklessly, put aside the character, as if it were indeed a masquerade. Either course is a proof of incongruity; and in those cases where our confidence and affection are spontaneously yielded, is it not the qualities of the man that win and hold them?—his spiritual aptitude to, and not the fact of, his vocation?

In no profession do we find so many instances of a mistaken choice, and this even when its duties are respectably fulfilled. The candid preacher, when arrived at maturity, will not seldom confess with pain, that the logical skill of the advocate, the love of representing nature of the artist, the scientific skill of the physician, or the practical industry of the man of affairs, constituted the natural basis of his usefulness; and proved inadequate endowments in his actual vocation. Perhaps the great error is in prematurely deciding on a step so responsible. To bind a youth’s interests, reputation, and opinions to the priesthood, as isoften done by the undue exercise of authority and influence, at an impressible age, by Protestant not less than Catholic families, is a positive wrong; and the moral courage which repudiates what was unjustly assumed, is more deserving of honour than blame. Inefficiency, in such cases, is proverbial: ‘He talks like a parson,’ said Lord Carteret of Sherlock, ‘and consequently is used to talk to people that do not mind him.’ A clergyman, in conversing with a gifted layman, used the phrase ‘bornpreacher.’ ‘I do not believe there is such a thing,’ replied the former, ‘for it implies a born hearer, which is a being whose existence is incompatible with my idea of the goodness of the Creator.’ Occasionally we see delightful exceptions to such an erroneous choice; men of firm yet gentle souls, deep convictions, and sustained elevation, whose talents not less than the spirit they are of, whose natural demeanour, habitual temper, and constitutional sympathies, designate them for the sacred office. We listen to their ministrations without misgiving, accept their counsel, rise on the wings of their prayer, respond to their appeals, and rejoice in their holiness—as a true and a blest incentive and consolation. We ordain them with our hearts, for the idea of the preacher is lost in that of the brother.

In these instances, the normal conditions of the office are realized, the boundaries of sect forgotten, and the legitimate idea of a minister to the religious sympathies practically made apparent. Such a preacher was Fenelon, in whose life, aspect, and writings the love of God and man were exhibited, with such pure consistency, that his name is a spell which invokes all that is sacred in the associations of humanity. The blandishments of a court, the rudeness of soldiers, the ignorance of peasants, were alike chastened by his presence. Neither persecution, high culture, nor the gifts of fortune, for a moment disturbed his holy self-possession. He disarmed prejudice, envy, intrigue, and violence, by the tranquil influence of the spirit he was of.Ecclesiastical power, ceremony, tradition, and literary fame were but the incidental accessories of his career. The principles of Christianity and the temper of its genuine disciple so predominated in his actions, speech, manners, writings, and in his very tones and expression of countenance, that every heart, by the instinct of its best affections, recognized his spiritual authority. The man thoroughly vindicated the office; therefore the courtier at Versailles and the rustic of Cambray held him in equal reverence.

In Madame Guyon, Anne Hutcheson, and Hannah More, we see the religious sentiment and the instinct of proselytism in connection with the idiosyncrasies of female character, rendered more affecting by its tenderness, or losing in efficient dignity by the weakness of the sex. A beautiful example of the natural preacher, unmodified by the paraphernalia of the office, is given in Wirt’s description of the Blind Preacher, while its original identity with scholarship and philosophy is singularly illustrated in the career of Abelard; and Molière’sTartuffeis but the dramatic embodiment of its extreme actual perversion at those periods when the form, by a gradual process of social corruption, has completely superseded the reality, and cant and hypocrisy are allowed to pass for truth and emotion. All that is peculiar in themodus operandiof sects testifies to the constant adaptation of the office to occasion: thus the itinerant episcopacy of the Methodists, the attractive temples of the Catholics, the time-hallowed liturgy of the Church of England, the immersing fonts of the Baptists, the plain language and prescriptive uniformity of the Quakers, and the literary culture of the Unitarians, appeal to certain tastes, feelings, or associations, which, although independent of the religious sentiment, greatly tend to the impressiveness of its outward manifestation upon different classes of persons. A spiritual tendency is characteristic of Swedenborgians; an absence of the sense of beauty is observable in the Friends; the superstitious element is the usual trait of Romanists;conservatism prevails among Episcopalians; and a progressive spirit and broad sympathies usually distinguish liberal Christians. To a bigot this diversity is offensive; to a philosopher it is the result of an inevitable and beneficent law. An American poet has aptly described the scene which a Protestant city presents on a Sabbath morning, when its streets are filled with the diverging streams of a population, each moving toward its respective place of worship, in obedience to this law of individual faith.

The word ‘skeleton’ as applied to the outline of sermons is very significant, for this is the only feature they have in common when vital; and yet how different the manner in which they are clothed with life! Sometimes it is logic, sometimes enthusiasm; now the eloquence of the heart, and now the ingenuity of the head that creates the animating principle; in one instance the beauty of style, and in another the force of conviction or the glow of sympathy; and there are cases where only grace of manner, melody of voice, and the magnetism of the preacher’s temperament and delivery impart to his words their effect; for every grade of rhetorical power, from the refinements of artificial study to the gush of irresistible feeling, has scope in the pulpit; there is no sacred charm in that rostrum except what its occupant brings; its possible scale includes elocutionary tricks, and the most disinterested and unconscious utterance; mediocrity lisps there its commonplace truisms, and devotional genius breathes its holy oracles; it is the medium of complacent formulas as well as of inspired truth.

The ancient philosophers and the modern essayists often apply wisdom to life in the manner of the best sermonizers; and as Christianity has infused its spirit into literature, this has become more apparent. Seneca and Epictetus as moralists, and Plato in psychological speculation, anticipated many of the sentiments that now have a religious authority. Rousseau, in as far as he was true to humanity, Montaigne to the extent he justly interprets the world, Bacon in thedegree he indicates the approaches to universal truth, Saint Pierre when awaking the sentiment of beauty as revealed in Nature, Shakspeare by the memorable development of the laws of character, Dante as the picturesque limner of the material faith of the middle ages, Richter in his beautiful exposition of human sentiment,—all exhibit a phase or element of the preacher, and in the writings of Milton and Chateaubriand it breaks forth with a still more direct emphasis. Carlyle and Coleridge, Isaac Taylor, Wordsworth, Lamb, and many other effective modern writers, are among the most influential of lay preachers. And this unprofessional teaching, this priesthood of nature, has multiplied with the progress of society, so that every community has its father confessors, its sisters of charity, its gifted interpreters and eloquent advocates; while literature, even in forms the most profane, continually emulates the sacred function, yielding great lessons, exciting holy sentiment, and demonstrating pure faith. Indeed it is characteristic of the age, that the technical is becoming merged in the æsthetic; as culture extends, the distinctive in pursuit and office loses its prominence. Lamb jocosely told Coleridge he never heard him do anything but preach; and there is scarcely a favourite among the authors of the day that, in some way, does not hallow his genius by consecrating it to an interpretation or sentiment which, in its last analysis, is religious.

In these considerations may be found a partial explanation of that diminution of individual agency in the priesthood to which we have referred. The modern religious teachers also, as we have seen, have not the same extent of ignorance to vanquish as the old divines. The line of demarcation between ecclesiastical polity and Christian truth is more evident to the multitude; and it is now felt as never before, that ‘a heart of deep sympathies solves all theological questions in the flame of its love and justice.’ Hence the comparative indifference to controversy; andthe recognition of the primal fact—so truly stated by the same reflective writer—that ‘spiritual insight, moral elevation, rich sympathies, are the tokens whereby the divinely-ordained are signalized.’[45]

The practical inference is, that never before was the obligation of personal responsibility in spiritual interests, on the part of the laity, so apparent, nor that of a thorough integrity in the preacher. To be ‘clear in his great office’—to rely on absolute gifts and essentials of character—to cleave to simplicity and truth, and keep within the line of honest conviction, is now his only guarantee, not only of self-respect, but of usefulness and honour. Organization, form, tact, theological acquirement, theprestigeof traditional importance, are of little efficacy. The scientific era—the reaction to first causes—the universal and intense demand for the real—the exposure of delusions—the test of wide intelligence and fearless inquiry—the jealousy of mental freedom—the multiplied sources of devotional sentiment—the earnestness of the age—all invoke him to repudiate the machinery, the historical badge, the conventional resources of his title—nay, to lose, if possible, his title itself—and incarnate only the everlasting principles, laws, and sentiments, by virtue of which alone he may hope for inspiration or claim authority.

‘And if it be Prometheus stole from HeavenThe fire which we endure, it was repaidBy him to whom the energy was given,Which this poetic marble hath arrayedWith an eternal glory.’Byron.

Thereis as absolute an instinct in the human mind for the definite, the palpable, and the emphatic, as there is for the mysterious, the versatile, and the elusive. With some, method is a law, and taste severe in affairs, costume, exercise, social intercourse, and faith. The simplicity, directness, uniformity, and pure emphasis or grace of Sculpture have analogies in literature and character; the terse despatch of a brave soldier, the concentrated dialogue of Alfieri, some proverbs, aphorisms, and poetic lines, that have become household words, puritanic consistency, silent fortitude, are but so many vigorous outlines, and impress us by virtue of the same colourless intensity as a masterpiece of the statuary. How sculpturesque is Dante, even in metaphor, as when he writes,—

‘Ella non ci diceva alcuna cosa;Ma lasciavane gir, solo guardando,A guisa di leon quando si posa.’

Nature, too, hints the art, when her landscape tints are covered with snow, and the forms of tree, rock, and mountain are clearly defined by the universal whiteness. Death, in its pale, still, fixed image,—always solemn, sometimesbeautiful,—would have inspired primeval humanity to mould and chisel the lineaments of clay. Even New Zealanders elaborately carve their war-clubs; and from the ‘graven images’ prohibited by Decalogue as objects of worship, through the mysterious granite effigies of ancient Egypt, the brutal anomalies in Chinese porcelain, the gay and gilded figures on a ship’s prow,—whether emblems of rude ingenuity, tasteless caprice, retrospective sentiment, or embodiments of the highest physical and mental culture, as in the Greek statues,—there is no art whose origin is more instructive and progress more historically significant. The vases of Etruria are the best evidence of her degree of civilization; the designs of Flaxman on Wedgwood ware redeem the economical art of England; the Bears at Berne and the Wolf in the Roman Capitol are the most venerable local insignia; the carvings of Gibbons, in old English manor-houses, outrival all the luxurious charms of modern upholstery; Phidias is a more familiar element in Grecian history than Pericles; the moral energy of the old Italian republics is more impressively shadowed forth and conserved in the bold and vigorous creations of Michael Angelo than in the political annals of Macchiavelli; and it is the massive, uncouth sculptures, half buried in sylvan vegetation, which mythically transmit the ancient people of Central America.

We confess a faith in, and a love for, the ‘testimony of the rocks,’—not only as interpreted by the sagacious Scotchman, as he excavated the ‘old red sandstone,’ but as shaped into forms of truth, beauty, and power by the hand of man through all generations. We love to catch a glimpse of these silent memorials of our race, whether as Nymphs half shaded at noonday with summer foliage in a garden, or as Heroes gleaming with startling distinctness in the moonlit city square; as the similitudes of illustrious men gathered in the halls of nations and crowned with a benignant fame, or as prone effigies on sepulchres, for everproclaiming the calm without the respiration of slumber, so as to tempt us to exclaim, with the enamoured gazer on the Egyptian queen, when the asp had done its work,—

‘She looks like sleep,As she would catch another AntonyIn her strongtoil of grace.’

Although Dr. Johnson undervalued sculpture, partly because of an inadequate sense of the beautiful, and partly from ignorance of its greatest trophies, he expressed unqualified assent to its awe-inspiring influence in ‘the monumental caves of death,’ as described by Congreve. Sir Joshua truly declares that ‘all arts address themselves to the sensibility and imagination;’ and no one thus alive to the appeal of sculpture, will marvel that the infuriated mob spared the statues of the Tuileries at the bloody climax of the French Revolution; that a ‘love of the antique,’ knit in bonds of lifelong friendship Winckelmann and Cardinal Albani; that among the most salient of childhood’s memories should be Memnon’s image and the Colossus of Rhodes; that an imaginative girl of exalted temperament died of love for the Apollo Belvidere, and that Carrara should win many a pilgrimage because its quarries have peopled earth with grace.

To a sympathetic eye there are few more pleasing tableaux than a gifted sculptor engaged in his work. How absorbed he is!—standing erect by the mass of clay,—with graduated touch moulding into delicate undulations or expressive lines the inert mass; now stepping back to see the effect, now bending forward, almost lovingly, to add a master indentation or detach a thin layer; and so, hour after hour, working on, every muscle in action, each perception active, oblivious of time, happy in the gradual approximation, under patient and thoughtful manipulation, of what was a dense heap of earth, to a form of vital expression or beauty.

Much has been said and written of the limits of sculpture; but it is the sphere, rather than the art itself, which isthus bounded; and one of its most glorious distinctions, like that of the human form and face, which are its highest subject, is the vast possible variety within what seems, at first thought, to be so narrow a field. That the same number and kind of limbs and features should, under the plastic touch of genius, have given birth to so many and totally diverse forms, memorable for ages, and endeared to humanity, is in itself an infinite marvel, which vindicates, as a beautiful wonder, the statuary’s art from the more Protean rivalry of pictorial skill. If we call to mind even a few of the sculptured creations which are ‘a joy for ever,’ even to retrospection, haunting by their pure individuality the temple of memory, permanently enshrined in heartfelt admiration as illustrations of what is noble in man and woman, significant in history, powerful in expression, or irresistible in grace,—we feel what a world of varied interest is hinted by the very name of Sculpture. Through it the most just and clear idea of Grecian culture is revealed. The solemn mystery of Egyptian, and the grand scale of Assyrian, civilization are best attested by the same trophies. How a Sphinx typifies the land of the Pyramids and all its associations, mythological, scientific, natural, and sacred,—its reverence for the dead, and its dim and portentous traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh’s palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of mediæval piety and patience exist than the elaborate and grotesque carvings of Albert Dürer’s day? The colossal Brahma in the temple of Elephanta, near Bombay, is the visible acme of Asiatic superstition. And can an illustration of the revival of art in the fifteenth century, so exuberant, aspiring, and sublime, be imagined, to surpass the Day and Night, the Moses, and other statues of Angelo? But such general inferences are less impressive than the personal experience of every European traveller with the least passion for the beautiful or reverence for genius. Is there any sphere of observation and enjoyment, to such a one, more prolificof individual suggestions than this so-called limited art? From the soulful glow of expression in the inspired countenance of the Apollo, to the womanly contours so exquisite in the armless figure of the Venus de Milo,—from the aërial posture of John of Bologna’s Mercury, to the inimitable and firm dignity in the attitude of Aristides in the Museum of Naples,—from the delicate lines which teach how grace can chasten nudity in the Goddess of the Tribune at Florence, to the embodied melancholy of Hamlet in the brooding Lorenzo of the Medici Chapel,—from the stone despair, the frozen tears, as it were, of all bereaved maternity, in the very bend of Niobe’s body and yearning gesture, to theabandongleaming from every muscle of the Dancing Faun,—from the stern brow of the Knife-grinder, and the bleeding frame of the Gladiator, whereon are written for ever the inhumanities of ancient civilization, to the triumphant beauty, and firm, light, enjoyable aspect of Dannecker’s Ariadne,—from the unutterable joy of Cupid and Psyche’s embrace, to the grand authority of Moses,—how many separate phases of human emotion ‘live in stone’! What greater contrast to eye or imagination, in our knowledge of facts, and in our consciousness of sentiment, can be exemplified, than those so distinctly, memorably, and gracefully moulded in the apostolic figures of Thorwaldsen, the Hero and Leander of Steinhaüser, the lovely funereal monument, inspired by gratitude, which Rauch reared to Louise of Prussia, Chantrey’s Sleeping Children, Canova’s Lions in St. Peter’s, the bas-reliefs of Ghiberti on the Baptistery doors at Florence, and Gibson’s Horses of the Sun?

The last time Heine went out of doors, before succumbing to his fearful malady, he says: ‘With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and almost sank down as I entered that magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her feet I lay long and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. The goddess looked compassionately onme, but at the same time disconsolately, as if she would say: Dost thou not see that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?’

Have you ever strolled from the inn at Lucerne, on a pleasant afternoon, along the Zurich road, to the old General’s garden, where stands the colossal lion designed by Thorwaldsen, to keep fresh the brave renown of the Swiss guard who perished in defence of the royal family of France during the massacre of the Revolution? Carved from the massive sandstone, the majestic animal, with the fatal spear in his side, yet loyal in his vigil over the royal shield, is a grand image of fidelity unto death. The stillness, the isolation, the vivid creepers festooning the rocks, the clear mirror of the basin, into which trickle pellucid streams, reflecting the vast proportions of the enormous lion, the veteran Swiss, who acts ascicerone, the adjacent chapel with its altar-cloth wrought by one of the fair decendants of the Bourbon king and queen for whom these victims perished, the hour, the memories, the admixture of Nature and Art, convey a unique impression, in absolute contrast with such white effigies, for instance, as in the dusky precincts of Santa Croce droop over the sepulchre of Alfieri, or with the famous bronze boar in the Mercato Nuovo of Florence, or the ethereal loveliness of that sweet scion of the English nobility, moulded by Chantrey in all the soft and lithe grace of childhood, holding a contented dove to her bosom.

Even as the subject of taste, independently of historical diversities, sculpture presents every degree of the meretricious, the grotesque, and the beautiful,—more emphatically, because more palpably, than is observable in painting. The inimitable Grecian standard is an immortal precedent; the mediæval carvings embody the rude Teutonic truthfulness; where Canova provoked comparison with the antique, as in the Perseus and Venus, his more gross ideal is painfully evident. How artificial seems Bernini in contrast withAngelo! How minutely expressive are the terra cotta images of Spain! What a climax of absurdity teases the eye in the monstrosities in stone which draw travellers in Sicily to the eccentric nobleman’s villa, near Palermo! Who does not shrink from the French allegory, and horrible melodrama, of Roubillac’s monument to Miss Nightingale, in Westminster Abbey? How like Horace Walpole to dote on Ann Conway’s canine groups! We actually feel sleepy as we examine the little black marble Somnus of the Florence Gallery, and electrified with the first sight of the Apollo, and won to sweet emotion in the presence of Nymphs, Graces, and the Goddess of Beauty, when, shaped by the hand of genius, they seem the ethereal types of that

‘Common clay ta’en from the common earth,Moulded by God and tempered by the tearsOf angels to the perfect form of woman.’

Calm and fixed as is the natural language of Sculpture, it is the artistic illustration of life’s normal activity and character in the economy not less than in the ideal and heroic phase. ‘Our statues,’ says one of the quaint personages of Richter’sTitan, ‘are no idle, dawdling citizens, but all drive a trade. Such as are caryates hold up houses; and heathen water-gods labour at the public fountains, and pour out water into the pitchers of the maidens. Such as are angels bear up baptismal vessels.’

Yet the distinctive element in the pleasure afforded by sculpture is tranquillity,—a quiet, contemplative delight; somewhat of awe chastens admiration; a feeling of peace hallows sympathy; and we echo the poet’s sentiment,—

‘I feel a mighty calmness creepOver my heart, which can no longer borrowIts hues from chance or change,—those children of to-morrow.’

It is this fixedness and placidity, conveying the impression of fate, death, repose, or immortality, which render sculpture so congenial as commemorative of the departed. Even quaint wooden effigies, like those in St. Mary’s Church atChester, with the obsolete peaked beards, ruffs, and broadswords, accord with the venerable associations of a mediæval tomb; while marble figures, typifying Grief, Poetry, Fame, or Hope, brooding over the lineaments of the illustrious dead, seem, of all sepulchral decorations, the most apt and impressive. We remember, after exploring the plain of Ravenna on an autumn day, and rehearsing the famous battle in which the brave young Gaston de Foix fell, how the associations of the scene and story were defined and deepened as we gazed on the sculptured form of a recumbent knight in armour, preserved in the academy of the old city; it seemed to bring back and stamp with brave renown for ever the gallant soldier who so long ago perished there in battle. In Cathedral and Parthenon, under the dome of the Invalides, in the sequestered parish church or the rural cemetery, what image so accords with the sad reality and the serene hope of humanity, as the adequate marble personification on sarcophagus and beneath shrine, in mausoleum or on turf-mound?

‘His palms enfolded on his breast,There is no other thought express’dBut long disquiet merged in rest.’

In truth, it is for want of comprehensive perception that we take so readily for granted the limited scope of this glorious art. There is in the Grecian mythology alone a remarkable variety of character and expression, as perpetuated by the statuary; and when to her deities we add the athletes, charioteers, and marble portraits, a realm of diverse creations is opened. Indeed, to the average modern mind, it is the statues of Grecian divinities that constitute the poetic charm of her history; abstractly, we regard them with the poet:—

‘Their gods? what were their gods?There’s Mars, all bloody-haired; and Hercules,Whose soul was in his sinews; Pluto, blackerThan his own hell; Vulcan, who shook his hornsAt every limp he took; great Bacchus rodeUpon a barrel; and in a cockle-shellNeptune kept state; then Mercury was a thief;Juno a shrew; Pallas a prude, at best;And Venus walked the clouds in search of lovers;Only great Jove, the lord and thunderer,Sat in the circle of his starry powerAnd frowned “I will!” to all.’

Not in their marble beauty do they thus ignobly impress us,—but calm, fair, strong, and immortal. ‘They seem,’ wrote Hazlitt, ‘to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration. In their faultless excellence, they appear sufficient to themselves.’

In the sculptor’s art, more than on the historian’s page, lives the most glorious memory of the classic past. A visit to the Vatican by torchlight endears even these poor traditional deities for ever.

On lofty ceilings vivid frescoes glow,Auroras beam,The steeds of Neptune through the waters go,Or Sibyls dream.As in the flickering torchlight shadows weavedIllusions wild,Methought Apollo’s bosom slightly heaved,And Juno smiled.Aërial Mercuries in bronze upspring,Dianas fly,And marble Cupids to the Psyches clingWithout a sigh.

The absence of complexity in the language and intent of sculpture is always obvious in the expositions of its votaries. In no class of men have we found such distinct and scientific views of Art. One lovely evening in spring we stood with Bartolini beside the corpse of a beautiful child. Bereavement in a foreign land has a desolation of its own, and the afflicted mother desired to carry home a statue of her loved and lost. We conducted the sculptor to the chamber of death, that he might superintend the casts from the body.No sooner did his eyes fall upon it, than they glowed with admiration and filled with tears. He waved the assistants aside, clasped his hands, and gazed spell-bound upon the dead child. Its brow was ideal in contour, the hair of wavy gold, the cheeks of angelic outline. ‘How beautiful!’ exclaimed Bartolini; and drawing us to the bedside, with a mingled awe and intelligence, he pointed out how the rigidity of death coincided, in this fair young creature, with the standard of Art;—the very hands, he declared, had stiffened into lines of beauty; and over the beautiful clay we thus learned, from the lips of a venerable sculptor, how intimate and minute is the cognizance this noble art takes of the language of the human form. Greenough would unfold by the hour the exquisite relation between function and beauty, organization and use, tracing therein a profound law and an illimitable truth. No more genial spectacle greeted us in Rome than Thorwaldsen at his Sunday-noon receptions;—his white hair, kindly smile, urbane manners, and unpretending simplicity, gave an added charm to the wise and liberal sentiments he expressed on Art, reminding us, in his frank eclecticism, of the spirit in which Humboldt cultivated science, and Sismondi history. Nor less indicative of this clear apprehension was the thorough solution we have heard Powers give, over the mask taken from a dead face, of the problem, how its living aspect was to modify its sculptured reproduction; or the original views expressed by Palmer as to the treatment of the eyes and hair in marble.

Appropriate and inspiring as are statues as memorials of character, in no department of art is there more need of a pure and just sense of the appropriate than in the choice of subject, locality, and treatment in statuary embellishment. Many greatly-endeared human benefactors cannot thus be wisely or genially celebrated. Of late years there has been a mania on the subject; and even popular sentiment recognized the impropriety of setting up a statue in the marketplace, of pious, retiring Izaak Walton.

Shelley used to say that a Roman peasant is as good a judge of sculpture as the best academician or anatomist. It is this direct appeal, this elemental simplicity, which constitutes the great distinction and charm of the art. There is nothing evasive and mysterious; in dealing with form and expression through features and attitude, average observation is a reliable test. The same English poet was right in declaring that the Greek sculptors did not find their inspiration in the dissecting-room; yet upon no subject has criticism displayed greater insight on the one hand and pedantry on the other, than in the discussion of these verychefs-d’œuvreof antiquity. While Michael Angelo was at Rome when the Laocoön was discovered, hailed it as ‘the wonder of Art,’ and scholars identified the group with a famous one described by Pliny, Canova thought that the right arm of the father was not in its right position, and the other restorations in the work have all been objected to. Goëthe recognized a profound sagacity in the artist. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘we try to place the bite in some different position, the whole action is changed, and we find it impossible to conceive one more fitting; the situation of the bite renders necessary the whole action of the limbs.’ And another critic says, ‘In the group of the Laocoön, the breast is expanded and the throat contracted to show that the agonies that convulse the frame are borne in silence.’ In striking contrast with such testimonies to the scientific truth to Nature in Grecian Art, was the objection I once heard an American backwoods mechanic make to this celebrated work. He asked why the figures were seated in a row on a dry-goods box, and declared that the serpent was not of a size to coil round so small an arm as the child’s without breaking its vertebræ. So disgusted was Titian with the critical pedantry elicited by this group, that, in ridicule thereof, he painted a caricature,—three monkeys writhing in the folds of a little snake.

Few statues at Rome excite the imagination, apart fromintrinsic beauty, like that of Pompey, at whose base, tradition says, ‘great Cæsar fell.’ It was discovered lying across the boundary line of two estates, and claimed by both proprietors. Shrewd Cardinal Spada decided the head belonged to one, and the body to another. It was decapitated, and sold in fragments for a small sum, and by this device was added to his famous collection, by the wily churchman.

Yet, despite the jargon of connoisseurship, against which Byron, while contemplating the Venus de Medici, utters so eloquent an invective, sculpture is a grand, serene, and intelligible art,—more so than architecture and painting,—and, as such, justly consecrated to the heroic and the beautiful in man and history. It is pre-eminently commemorative. How the old cities of Europe are peopled to the imagination, as well as the eye, by the statues of their traditional rulers or illustrious children, keeping, as it were, a warning sign, or a sublime vigil, silent, yet expressive, in the heart of busy life and through the lapse of ages! We could never pass Duke Cosmo’s imposing effigy in the old square of Florence, without the magnificent patronage and the despotic perfidy of the Medicean family being revived to memory with intense local association,—nor note the ugly mitred and cloaked papal figures, with hands extended, in the mockery of benediction, over the beggars in the piazzas of Romagna, without Ranke’s frightful picture of church abuses reappearing, as if to crown these brazen forms with infamy. There was always a gleam of poetry—however sad—on the most foggy day, in the glimpse afforded from our window, in Trafalgar Square, of that patient horseman, Charles the Martyr. How alive old Neptune sometimes looked, by moonlight, in Rome, as we passed his plashing fountain. And those German poets—Goëthe, Schiller, and Jean Paul,—what to modern eyes were Frankfort, Stuttgart, and Baireuth, unconsecrated by their endeared forms? The most pleasant association Versailles yielded us of the Bourbon dynasty was that inspired by Jeanne d’Arc, graceful inher marble sleep, as sculptured by Marie d’Orléans; and the most impressive token of Napoleon’s downfall we saw in Europe was his colossal image intended for the square of Leghorn, but thrown permanently on the sculptor’s hands by the waning of his proud star. The statue of Heber, to Christian vision, hallows Calcutta. The Perseus of Cellini breathes of the months of artistic suspense, inspiration, and experiment so graphically described in that clever egotist’s memoirs. One feels like blessing the grief-bowed figures at the tomb of the Princess Charlotte, so truly do their attitudes express our sympathy with the love and the sorrow her name excites. Would not Sterne have felt a thrill of complacency, had he beheld his tableau of the Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby so genially embodied by Ball Hughes? What more spirited symbol of prosperous conquest can be imagined than the gilded horses of St. Mark’s? How natural was Michael Angelo’s exclamation, ‘March!’ as he gazed on Donatello’s San Giorgio, in the Church of San Michele,—one mailed hand on a shield, bare head, complete armour, and the foot advanced, like a sentinel who hears the challenge, or a knight listening for the charge! Tenerani’s Descent from the Cross, in the Torlonia Chapel, outlives in remembrance the brilliant assemblies of that financial house. The outlines of Flaxman, essentially statuesque, seem alone adequate to illustrate to the eye the great mediæval poet, whose verse seems often cut from stone in the quarries of infernal destiny. How grandly sleep the lions of Canova at Pope Clement’s tomb!

A census of the statues of the world, past and present, would indicate an enormous marble population: in every Greek and Roman house, temple, public square, cemetery, these effigies abounded. According to Pliny the number of memorable statues in Athens exceeded three thousand; the number brought to Rome from conquered provinces was so great that the record seems incredible; add to these the countless statues we know to have been destroyed, theinnumerable fragmentary images encountered in Italy, and the variety of modern works—from those which people the cathedral roof to those which adorn private galleries and favourite studios,—and the mind is bewildered by the extent not less than the beauty of the products of the chisel.

We have sometimes wondered that some æsthetic philosopher has not analyzed the vital relation of the arts to each other, and given a popular exposition of their mutual dependence. Drawing from the antique has long been an acknowledged initiation for the limner; and Campbell, in his terse description of the histrionic art, says that therein ‘verse ceases to be airy thought, and sculpture to be dumb.’ How much of their peculiar effects did Talma, Kemble, and Rachel owe to the attitudes, gestures, and drapery of the Grecian statues! Kean adopted the ‘dying fall’ of General Abercrombie’s figure in St. Paul’s as the model of his own. Some of the memorable scenes and votaries of the drama are directly associated with the sculptor’s art,—as, for instance, the last act ofDon Giovanni, wherein the expressive music of Mozart breathes a pleasing terror in connection with the spectral nod of the marble horseman; and Shakspeare has availed himself of this art, with beautiful wisdom, in that melting scene where remorseful love pleads with the motionless heroine of theWinter’s Tale,—

‘Her natural posture!Chide me, dear stone, that I may say, indeed,Thou art Hermione; or rather thou art she,In thy not chiding: for she was as tenderAs infancy and grace.’

Garrick imitated to the life, inAbel Drugger, the vacant stare peculiar to Nollekens, the sculptor; and Colley Cibber’s father was a devotee of the chisel, and adorned Chatsworth with freestone Sea-Nymphs.

In view of the great historical value, comparative authenticity, and possible significance and beauty of busts, this department of sculpture has a peculiar interest and charm.The most distinct idea we have of the Roman emperors, even in regard to their individual characters, is derived from their busts at the Vatican and elsewhere. The benignity of Trajan, the animal development of Nero, and the classic vigour of young Augustus, are best apprehended through these memorable effigies which Time has spared and Art transmitted. And a similar permanence and distinctness of impression associate most of our illustrious moderns with their sculptured features; the ironical grimace of Voltaire is perpetuated by Houdon’s bust; the sympathetic intellectuality of Schiller by Dannecker’s; Handel’s countenance is familiar through the elaborate chisel of Roubillac; Nollekens moulded Sterne’s delicate and unimpassioned but keen physiognomy, and Chantrey the lofty cranium of Scott. Who has not blessed the rude but conscientious artist who carved the head of Shakspeare, preserved at Stratford? How quaintly appropriate to the old house in Nuremberg is Albert Dürer’s bust over the door! Our best knowledge of Alexander Hamilton’s aspect is obtained from the expressive marble head of him by that ardent republican sculptor, Ceracchi. It was appropriate for Mrs. Damer, the daughter of a gallant field-marshal, to portray in marble, as heroic idols, Fox, Nelson, and Napoleon. We were never more convinced of the intrinsic grace and solemnity of this form of ‘counterfeit presentment’ than when exploring the Baciocchipalazzoat Bologna. In the centre of a circular room, lighted from above, and draped as well as carpeted with purple, stood on a simple pedestal the bust of Napoleon’s sister, thus enshrined after death by her husband. The profound stillness, the relief of this isolated head against a mass of dark tints, and its consequent emphatic individuality, made the sequestered chamber seem a holy place, where communion with the departed, so spiritually represented by the exquisite image, appeared not only natural, but inevitable. Our countryman, Powers, has eminently illustrated the possible excellence of this branchof Art. In mathematical correctness of detail, unrivalled finish of texture, and with these, in many cases, the highest characterization, busts from his hand have an absolute artistic value, independent of likeness, like a portrait by Vandyke or Titian. When the subject is favourable, his achievements in this regard are memorable, and fill the eye and mind with ideas of beauty and meaning undreamed of by those who consider marble portraits as wholly imitative and mechanical. Was there ever a human face which so completely reflected inward experience and individual genius as the bust which haunts us throughout Italy, broods over the monument in Santa Croce, gazes pensively from library niche, seems to awe the more radiant images of boudoir and gallery, and sternly looks melancholy reproach from the Ravenna tomb?

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