Henry Holliday, who has of late devoted himself largely to decorative tasks, seems in these works to be thejuste-milieubetween Burne-Jones and Leighton. And the youngest representative of this group tinged with religious and romantic feelings isMarie Spartali-Stillman, who lives in Rome and paints as a rule pictures from Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, after the fashion of Rossetti.
Others, who turned to the treatment of antique subjects, were led by these themes more towards the Idealism of the Cinquecento as regards the form of their work; and in this way they lost the severe stamp of the pre-Raphaelites.
In these daysWilliam Blake Richmond, in particular, no longer shows any trace of having once belonged to the mystic circle of Oxonians. The Ariadne which he painted in the old days was a lean and tall woman with fluttering black mantle, casting up her arms in lamentation and gazing out of those deep, gazelle-like eyes which Burne-Jones gave his Vivien. Even the scheme of colour was harmonised in the bronze, olive tone which marked the earliest works of Burne-Jones. But soon afterwards his views underwent a complete revolution in Italy. Influenced by Alma Tadema in form, and by the French in colour, he drew nearer to the academic manner, until he became, at length, a Classicist without any salient peculiarity. The allegory “Amor Vincit Omnia” is characteristic of this phase of his art. Aphrodite, risen from her bath, is standing naked in a Grecian portico, through which a purple sea is visible. Her maidens are busied in dressing her; and they are, one and all, chaste and noble figures of that classic grace and elegant fluency of line which Leighton usually lends to his ideal forms. In a picture which became known in Germany through the International Exhibition of 1891, Venus, a clear and white figure, floats down with stately motion towards Anchises. It is only in the delicate pictures of children which have been his chief successes of late years that he is still fresh and direct. Girls with thick hair of ablonde cendrée, finely moulded lips, and large gazelle-like eyes full of sensibility, are seen in these works dreamily seated in white or blue dresses against a red or a blue curtain. And the æsthetic method of painting, which almost suggests pastel work in its delicacy, is in keeping with the ethereal figures and the bloom of colour.
Walter Cranehas been far more successful in uniting the pre-Raphaelite conception with a sentiment for beauty formed upon the antique, Burne-Jones’s “paucity of flesh and plenitude of feeling” with a measured nobility of form. Born in Liverpool in 1845, he received his first impressions of art at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1857, where he saw Millais’ “Sir Isumbras at the Ford.” The chivalrous poetry of this master became the ideal ofhis youth, and it rings clearly throughout his first pictures, exhibited in 1862. One of these has as its subject “The Lady of Shalott” approaching the shore of her mysterious island in a boat, and the other St. George slaying the dragon. Meanwhile, however, he had come to know Walker, through W. J. Linton, the wood-engraver, for whom he worked from 1859 to 1862, and the former led him to admire the beauty of the sculptures of the Parthenon. After this he passed from romantic to antique subjects, and there is something notably youthful, a fresh bloom as of old legends, in these compositions, which recall the sculpture of Phidias. “The Bridge of Life,” belonging to the year 1875, was like an antique gem or a Grecian bas-relief. At the Paris World Exhibition of 1878 he had a “Birth of Venus,” noble and antique in composition, and of a severity of form which suggested Mantegna. The suave and poetic single figures which he delights in painting are at once Greek and English: girls, with branches of blossom, in white drapery falling into folds, and enveloping their whole form while indicating every line of the body. His “Pegasus” might have come straight from the frieze of the Parthenon. “The Fleeting Hours” at once recalls Guido Reni’s “Aurora” and Dürer’s apocalyptic riders.
Later he turned to decorative painting, like all the representatives of the pre-Raphaelite group. He is one of the most original designers for industrial work in tapestry, next to Morris the most influential leader of the English arts and crafts, and he has collaborated in founding that modern naturalistic tendency of style which will be the art of the future. His designs are always based upon naturalistic motives—the English type of womanhood and the English splendour of flowers. There always predominates a sensitive relationship between the æsthetic character of the forms and their symbolical significance. He always adapts an object of nature so that it may correspond in style with the material in which he works. The way in which he makes use of the noblest models of antiquity and of the Renaissance, and yet immediately transposes them into an English key of sentiment and into available modern forms, is entirely peculiar. And last, but not least, he is a marvellous illustrator. Every one went wild with delight at the close of the sixties over the appearance of his first children’s books,The Faerie Queene,The Little Pig who went to Market, andKing Luckiboy, the pictures of which were soon displayed upon all patterns for embroidery. And they were followed by others: after 1875 he publishedTell me a Story,The First of May—a Fairy Masque,The Sirens Three,Echoes of Hellas, and so forth. The two albumsThe Baby’s BouquetandThe Baby’s Operaof 1879 are probably the finest of them all.
In spite of their childish subjects, the drawings of Walter Crane have such a monumental air that they have the effect of “grand painting.” Without imitation he reproduces spontaneously the grace and character of the primitive Florentines. Some of his plates recall “The Dream of Polifilo,” and might bear the monogram of Giovanni Bellini. They owe their origin to a profound Germanic sentiment mingled with pagan reminiscences; they are an almost Grecian and yet English art, where fancy like a foolish, dreamy child plays with a brilliant skein of forms and colours.
That great artistGeorge Frederick Wattsstands quite apart as a personality in himself. In point of substance he is divided from others by not leaning upon poets, but by inventing independent allegories for himself; and in point of form by courting neither the Quattrocento nor the Roman Cinquecento, but rather following the Venice of the later Renaissance. Instead of the marble precision of Squarcione or Mantegna, what predominates in his work is something soft and melting, which might recall Correggio, Tintoretto, or Giorgione, were it not that there is a cooler grey, a subdued light fresco tone in Watts, in place of the Venetian glory of colour.
As a man, Watts was one of those artists who are only to be found in England—an artist who, from his youth upwards, has been able to live for his art without regard to profit. Born in London in the year 1820, he left the Academy after being a pupil there for a brief period, and began to visit the Elgin Room in the British Museum. The impression made upon him by the sculptures of the Parthenon was decisive for his whole life. Not merely are numerous plastic works due to his study of them, but several of his finest paintings. When he was seventeen he exhibited his first pictures, which were painted very delicately and with scrupulous pains; and in 1843 he took part in the competition for the frescoes of the Houses of Parliament, amongst which the representation of St. George and the Dragon was from his hand. With the proceeds of the prize which he received at the competition he went to Italy, and there he came to regard the great Venetians Titian and Giorgione as his kin and his contemporaries. The pupil of Phidias became the worshipper of Tintoretto. In Italy he produced “Fata Morgana,” a picture of a warrior vainly catching at the airy white veil of a nude female figure which floats past. This work already displays him as an accomplished artist, though it is wanting in the large, Classical tranquillity of his later paintings. He returned home with plans demanding more than human energy. Like the Frenchman Chenavard, he cherished the purpose of representing the history of the world in a series of frescoes, which were to adorn the walls of a building specially adapted for the purpose. “Chaos,” “The Creation,” “The Temptation of Man,” “The Penitence,” “The Death of Abel,” and “The Death of Cain” were the earliest pictures which he designed for the series. It was through fresco painting alone, as he believed, that it was possible to school English art to monumental grandeur, nobleness, and simplicity. But it was not possible for him to remain long upon this path in England, where painting has but little space accorded to it upon the walls of churches, while in other public buildings decoration is not in demand. Moreover, it is doubtful whether Watts would have achieved anything great in this province of art. At any rate, a work which he executed for the dining-hall at Lincoln’s Inn—an assembly of the lawgivers of all times from Moses down to EdwardI—is scarcely more than a mixture of Raphael’s “School of Athens” and the “Hemicycle” of Delaroche. In magnificent allegories in the form of oil-paintings he first found the expression of his individuality. Like Turner, Watts did not paint pictures for sale. Yet he has lent one or other of his pictures to almost every public exhibition. A whole room is devoted to him in the Tate Gallery. But to know his work thoroughly one had to go to his house. His studio in Little Holland House contained almost all his important creations, and was visited by the public upon Saturday and Sunday afternoons as freely as if it were a museum.
As a landscape painter Watts is a visionary like Turner, though in addition to the purely artistic effect of his pictures he always endeavoured to awaken remoter feelings and ideas of some kind or another. His landscape “Corsica” reveals a grey expanse, with very slight vibrations of tone which suggest that out to sea a distant island is emerging from the mist. His “Mount Ararat,” a picture entirely filled with the play of light blue tones, represents a number of barren rocky cones bathed in the intense blue of a pure transparent starry night. Above the highest peak there is one star sparkling more brilliantly than the others. In his “Deluge: the Forty-first Day,” he attempted to depict, after an interpretation of his own, the power “with which light and heat, dissipating the darkness and dissolving the multitude of the waters into mist and vapour, give new life to perished nature.” What is actually placed before the eye is a delicate symphony of colours which would have delighted Turner: wild, agitated sea, clouds gleaming like liquid gold, and mist behind which the sun rises in a magical glow, like a red ball of fire.
In his portraits he is earnest and sincere. Just as fifty years ago David d’Angers devoted half a lifetime to getting together a portrait gallery of famous contemporaries, so to Watts belongs the glory of having really been the historian of his time. The collection of portraits, many of which are to be seen in the National Portrait Gallery, comprises about forty likenesses, all of them half-length pictures, all of them upon the same scale of size, all of them representing very famous men. Amongst the poets comprised in this gallery of genius are Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, William Morris, and Sir Henry Taylor; amongst prose-writers, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Lecky, Motley, and Leslie Stephen; amongst statesmen, Gladstone, Sir Charles Dilke, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Salisbury, Lord Shaftesbury, Lord Lyndhurst, and Lord Sherbrooke; amongst the leaders of the clergy, Dean Stanley, Dean Milman, Cardinal Manning, and Dr. Martineau;amongst painters, Rossetti, Millais, Leighton, Burne-Jones, and Calderon; and amongst notable foreigners, Guizot, Thiers, Joachim the violinist, and many others. In the matter of technique Watts is excelled by many of the French. His portraits have something heavy, nor are they eminent either for softness of modelling, or for that momentary and animated effect peculiar to Lenbach. But few portraits belonging to the nineteenth century have the same force of expression, the same straightforward sureness of aim, the same grandeur and simplicity. Before each of the persons represented one is able to say, That is a painter, that a poet, and that a scholar. All the self-conscious dignity of a President of the Royal Academy is expressed in the picture of Leighton, and his look is as cold as marble; while the eyes of Burne-Jones seem mystically veiled, as though they were gazing into the past. Indeed, the way in which Watts grasps his characters is masterly beyond conception. Amongst the old painters Tintoretto and Moroni might be compared with him most readily, while Van Dyck is the least like him of all.
In opposition to the poetic fantasy of Burne-Jones dallying with legendary lore, an element of brooding thought is characteristic of the large compositions of Watts, a meditative absorption in ideas which provoke the intellect to further activity by their mysterious allegorical suggestions. Just as he makes an approach to the old Venetians in external form, he is divided from them in the inward burden of his work by a severity and hardiness characteristic of the Northern spirit, a predominance of idea seldom met with amongst Southern masters, and a profoundly sad way of thought in which one sees the stamp of the nineteenth century. Apart from the purely artistic effect of his work, he tried to make his pictures serve as a stimulus to deeper thought and meditation: “The end of art,” he writes, “must be the exposition of some weighty principle of spiritual significance, the illustration of a great truth.”
“The Spirit of Christianity,” the only one of his works which has a religious tone, displays a youth throned upon the clouds, with children nestling at his feet. His powerful head is bent upwards, and his right hand opened wide. In “Orpheus and Eurydice” he has chosen the moment when Orpheus turns round to behold Eurydice turning pale and sinking to the earth, to be once more swallowed by Hades. The lyre drops from his hands, and with a gesture of despair he draws the form of his wife to his heart in a last, eternal embrace. “Artemis and Endymion” is a scene in which a tall female figure in silvery shining vesture bends over the sleeping shepherd, throwing herself into the curve of a sickle.
But, as a rule, he neither makes use of Christian nor of ancient ideas, but embodies his own thoughts. In “The Illusions of Life,” a picture belonging to the year 1847, beautiful, dreamy figures hover over a gulf, spreading at the verge of existence. At their feet lie the shattered emblems of greatness and power, and upon a small strip of the earth hanging over an abyss those illusions are visible which have not yet been destroyed: Glory, in the shapeof a knight in harness, chases the bubble of resounding fame; Love is symbolised by a pair who are tenderly embracing; Learning, by an old man poring over manuscripts in the dusk; Innocence, by a child grasping at a butterfly. “The Angel of Death” is a picture of a winged and mighty woman throned at the entrance of a way which leads to eternity. Upon her knees there rests, covered with a white cloth, the corpse of a new-born child. Men and women of every station lay reverently down at the feet of the angel the symbols of their dignity and the implements of their earthly toil.
“Love and Death” represents the two great sovereigns of the world wrestling together for a human life. With steps which have a mysterious majesty, pallid Death draws near, demanding entrance at the door of a house, whilst Love, a slight, boyish figure with bright wings, places himself in the way; but with one great, irresistible gesture the mighty genius of Death sweeps the shrinking child to one side. In another picture, “Love and Life,” the genius of Love, in the form of a slim, powerful youth, helps poor, weak, clinging Life, a half-grown, timid, faltering girl, to clamber up the stony path of a mountain, over which the sun rises golden. “Hope” is a picture inwhich a tender spirit, bathed in the blue mist, sits upon the globe, blindfold, listening in bliss to the low sound vibrating from the last string of her harp. “Mammon” is embodied by Watts in a coarse and bloated satyr brutally setting his heel upon a youth and a young girl, as upon a footstool.
In 1893, when the committee of the Munich Exhibition were moved by the writings of Cornelius Gurlitt to have some of these works sent over to Germany, a certain disappointment was felt in artistic circles. And any one who is accustomed to gauge pictures by their technique is justified in missing the genuine pictorial temperament in Watts. The sobriety of his scheme of colour, his preference for subdued tones, his distaste for all “dexterity” and freedom from all calculated refinement, are not in accord with the desires of our time. Even his sentiment is altogether opposed to that which predominates in the other New Idealists. Burne-Jones and Rossetti found sympathy because their repining lyricism, their psychopathic subtlety, their wonderful mixture of archaic simplicity anddécadent hautgoût, stand in direct touch with the present. Watts’ pictures seem cold and wanting in temperament because he made no appeal to the vibrating life of the nerves.
But the same sort of criticism was written by the younger generation in Germany, seventy years ago, on the works of Goethe, which have, none the less, remained fresher than those of Schlegel and Tieck. What is modern is not always the same as what is eternally young. And if one endeavours, disregarding the current of the age, to approach Watts as though he were an old master, one feels an increasing sense of the probability that amongst all the New Idealists of the present he has, next to Boecklin, the best prospect of becoming one. In spite of all its independence of spirit, the art of Burne-Jones has an affected mannerism in its outward garb. The sentiment of it is free, but the form is confined in the old limits. And it is not impossible that later generations, to whom his specifically modern sentiment will appeal more and more faintly, may one day rank him, on account of his archaism in drawing, as much amongst the eclectics as Overbeck and Führich are held to be at the present time. But that can never happen to Watts. His works are the expression of an artist who is as little dependent upon the past as upon the momentary tendencies of the present. His articulation of form has nothing in common with the lines of beauty of the antique, or the Quattrocento, or the Cinquecento. It is a thing created by himself and to himself peculiar. He needs no erudition, and no attributes and symbols borrowed from the Renaissance, to body forth his allegories. With him there begins a new power of creating types; and his figure of Death—that tall woman, clad in white, with hollow cheeks, livid face, and lifeless sunken eyes—is no less cogent than the genius with the torch reversed or the burlesque skeleton of the Middle Ages. Moreover, there is in his works a trace of profundity and simple grandeur which stands alone in our own period. It is precisely our more sensitive nervous system which divides us from the old painters, and has generally given the artistic productions of our day a disturbed,capricious, restless, and overstrained character, making them inferior to those of the old masters.
Watts is, perhaps, the only painter who can bear comparison with them in every respect. Here is a man who has been able to live in himself far away from the bustle of exhibitions, a man who worked when he was old as soundly and freshly as when he was young, a man, also, who is always simple in his art, lucid, earnest, grandiose, impressive, and of monumental sublimity. Though he shows no trace of imitation he might have come straight from the Renaissance, so deep is his sense of beauty, so direct and so condensed his power of giving form to his ideas. And amongst living painters I should find it impossible to name a single one who could embody such a scene as that of “Love and Death” so calmly, so entirely without rhetorical gestures and all the tricks of theatrical management. There is the mark of style about everything in Watts, and it is no external and borrowed style, but one which is his own, a style which a notable man, a thinker and a poet, has fashioned for the expression of his own ideas. That is what makes him a master of contemporary painting and of the painting of all times. And that is what will, perhaps, render him, in the eyes of later generations, one of the greatest men of our time.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE NEW IDEALISM IN FRANCE AND GERMANY
A similarchange of taste occurred in France. Just as the Impressionists had held modernity alone in high honour, so now awoke the longing after the faded lustre of a bygone age of beauty. The younger generation in literature began to do homage to their spiritual ancestors not in Zola but in Charles Baudelaire, that abstracter of the quintessence; and similarly in the province of art there came to the fore two of the older masters who until then had been relegated to the background.
In pictorial artGustave Moreauis equivalent to Charles Baudelaire. Certain of the strange and fascinating poems in theFleurs du Malstrike alone the same note of sentiment as the tortured, subtilised, morbid, but mysterious and captivating creations of Moreau; and his figures, like those of Baudelaire, live in a mysterious world, and stimulate the spirit like eternal riddles. Every one of his works stands in need of a commentary; every one of them bears witness to a profound and peculiar activity of mind, and every one of them is full of intimate reveries. Every agitation of his inward spirit takes shape in myths of hieratical strangeness, in mysterious hallucinations, which he sets in his pictures like jewels. He gives ear to dying strains, rising faintly, inaudible to the majority of men. Marvellous beings pass before him, fantastic and yet earnest; forms of legendary story hover through space upon strange animals; a fabulous hippogriff bears him far away to Greece and the East, to vanished worlds of beauty. Upon the journey he beholds Utopias, beholds the Fortunate Islands, and visits all lands, borne upon the pinions of a dream. An age which went wild over Cabanel and Bouguereau could not possibly be in sympathy with him. The Naturalists, also, looked upon him as a singular being; it was much as if an Indian magician whose robe shone in all the hues of the rainbow had suddenly made his appearance at a ball, amongst men in black evening dress. It is only since the mysterious smile of Leonardo’s feminine figures has once more drawn the world beneath its spell that the spirit of Moreau’s pictures has become a familiar thing. Even his schooling was different from that of his contemporaries. He was the only pupil of that strange artist Théodore Chassériau, and Chassériau had directed him to the study of Bellini, Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, and all those enchanting primitive artists whose enchanting female figures are seen to move through mysterious black and blue landscapes. He was then seized with an enthusiasmfor the hieratical art of India. And he was also affected by old German copper-engraving, old Venetian pottery, painting upon vases and enamel, mosaics and niello work, tapestries and old Oriental miniatures. His exquisite and expressive style, which, at a time when the flowing Cinquecento manner was in vogue, made an unpleasant effect by its archaic angularity, was the result of the fusion of these elements.
When he appeared, the special characteristic of French art was its seeking after violent agitations of the spirit,émotions fortes. The spirit was to be roused by stormy vehemence, as a relaxed system is braced by massage. But the generation at the close of the nineteenth century wanted to be soothed rather than stirred by painting. It could not endure shrill cries, loud, emphatic speech, or vehement gestures. It desired subdued and refined emotions, and Moreau’s distinction is that he was the first to give expression to this wearydécadenthumour. In his work a complete absence of motion has taken the place of the striding legs, the attitudes of the fencing-master, the arms everlastingly raised to heaven, and the passionately distorted faces which had reigned in French painting since David. He makes spiritual expression his starting-point, and not scenic effect; he keeps, as it were, within the laws which rule over classical sculpture, where vehemence was only permitted to intrude from the period of decline, from the Pergamene reliefs, the Laocoön, and the Farnese Bull. Everything bears the seal of sublime peace; everything is inspired by inward life and suppressed passion. Even when the gods fight there are no mighty gestures; with a mere frown they can shake the earth like Zeus.
His spiritual conception of the old myths is just as peculiar as his grave articulation of form; it is a conception such as earlier generations could not have, one which alone befits the spiritual condition of the close of the nineteenth century. During the most recent decades archæological excavations and scientific researches have widened and deepened our conceptions of the old mythology in a most unexpected manner. Beside the laughter of the Grecian Pan we hear the sighs and behold the convulsions of Asia, in her anguish bearing gods, who perish young like spring flowers, in the loving arms of Oriental goddesses. We have heard of chryselephantine statues covered with precious stones from top to bottom; and we know the graceful terra-cotta figures of Tanagra. Before there was a knowledge of the Tanagra statuettes no archæologist could have believed that the Eros of Hesiod was such a charming, wayward little rascal. Before the discovery of the Cyprus statues no artist would have ventured to adorn a Grecian goddess with flowers, pins for the head, and a heavy tiara. Prompted by these discoveries, Moreau has been swayed by strangely rich inspirations. He is said to have worked in his studio as in a tower opulent with ivory and jewels. He has a delight in arraying the figures of his legends in the most costly materials, as the discoveries at Cyprus give him warrant for doing, in painting their robes in the deepest and most lustrous hues, and in being almost too lavish in his mannerof adorning their arms and breasts. Every figure of his is a glittering idol, enveloped in a dress of gold brocade embroidered with precious stones. His love of ornamentation is even extended to his landscapes. They are improbable, far too fair, far too rich, far too strange to exist in the actual world, but they are in close harmony with the character of these sumptuously clad figures which wander in them like the mystic and melancholy shapes of a dream. The capricious generation that lived in the Renaissance occasionally handled classical subjects in this manner, but there is the same difference between Filippino Lippi and Gustave Moreau as there is between Botticelli and Burne-Jones: the former, like Shakespeare in theMidsummer Night’s Dream, transformed the antique into a blithe and fantastic fairy world, whereas that fire of yearning romance which once flamed from poor Hölderlin’s poet heart burns in the pictures of Moreau.
His “Orpheus” is one of his most characteristic and beautiful works. He has not borrowed the composition from antique tragedy. The drama is over. Orpheus has been torn asunder by the Mænads, and the limbs of the poet lie scattered over the icy fields of the hyperborean lands. His head, borne upon his lyre now for ever mute, has been cast upon the shore of Erebus. Nature seems to sleep in mysterious peace. Around there is nothing to be seen but still waters and pallid light, nothing to be heard but the tone of a small shrill flute, played by a barbarian shepherd sitting on the cliff. A Thracian girl, whose hair is adorned with a garland, and whose look is earnest, has taken up the head of the singer and regards it long and quietly. Is it merely pity that is in her eyes? A romantic Hellenism, a profound melancholy underlies the picture, and the old story closes with a cry of love. In his “Œdipus and the Sphinx” of 1864, and his “Heracles” of 1878, he treated battle scenes, the heroic struggle between man and beast, and in these pictures, also, there is no violence, no vehemence, no movement. In a terrible silence the two antagonists exchange looks in his “Œdipus and the Sphinx,” while their breath mingles. Like a living riddle, the winged creature gazes upon the stranger, but the youth with his long locks stands so composedly before her that the spectator feels that he must know the decisive word.
In “Helen upon the Walls of Troy” the figure of the enchantress, as she stands there motionless, clad in a robe glittering with brilliant stones and diamonds like a shrine, is seen to rise against the blood-red horizon as though it were a statue of gold and ivory. Like a queen of spades, she holds in her hand a large flower. Heaps of bodies pierced with arrows lie at her feet. But she has no glance of pity for the dying whose death-rattle greets her. Her wide, apathetic eyes are fixed upon vacancy. She sees in the gold of the sunset the smoke ascending from the Grecian camp. She will embark in the fair ship of Menelaus, and return in triumph to Hellas, where new love shall be her portion. And the looks of the old men fasten upon her in admiration. “It is fitting that the Trojans and the Achæans fight for such a woman.” Helen in her blond voluptuous beauty is transformed beneaththe hands of Moreau into Destiny stalking over ground saturated with blood, into the Divinity of Mischief—a divinity that, without knowing it, poisons everything that comes near her, or that she sees or touches.
In his “Galatea” Moreau’s love of jewels and enamel finds its highest triumph. Galatea’s grotto is one large, glittering casket. Flowers made from the sun, and leaves from the stars, and branches of coral stretch forth their boughs and open their cups. And as the most brilliant jewel of all, there rests in the holy of holies the radiant form of the sleeping Galatea, a kind of Greek Susanna, watched by the staring, adamantine eye of Polyphemus.
And just as he bathes these Grecian forms in the dusk of a profound romantic melancholy, so in Moreau’s pictures the figures of the Bible are tinged with a shade of Indian Buddhism, a pantheistic mysticism which places them in a strange modern light. In his “David” he represents in a quiet and peaceful way the entry of a human soul into Nirvana. The aged king sits dreaming upon his gorgeous throne, and an angel watches in shining beauty beside this phantom, the flame of whose life is slowly sinking. A curious light falls upon him from the sky. The light of the evening horizon shines faint between the pillars, and the spectator feels that it is the end of a long day. His pictures of 1878 dealing with Salome, in their strange sentiment—suggestive of an opium vision—are like a paraphrase of Heine’s poem inAtta Troll. In a sombre hall supported by mighty pillars, through which coloured lamps and stupefying pastil-burners shed a blue and red light, sits Herod the king, half asleep with hasheesh, wrapped in silk, and motionless as a Hindu idol. His face is pale and gloomy, and his throne is like a crystal confessional chair, fashioned with all the riches of the world. Two women lean at the foot of a pillar. One of them touches the strings of a lute, and a small panther yawns near a vessel of incense. Upon the floor of variegated mosaics flowers lie strewn. Salome advances. Tripping upon her toes aslightly as a figure in a dream, she begins to dance, holding a tremulous lotus-flower in her hand. A shining tiara is upon her head; her body is adorned with all the jewels which the dragons guard in the veins of the earth. Faster and faster and with a more voluptuous grace she twists and stretches her splendid limbs; but of a sudden she starts and presses her hand to her heart: she has seen the executioner as he smote the head of John from the body.—In the midst of an Oriental paradise, the body of the Baptist lies in the grass; the head has been set upon a charger, and Salome, like a bloodthirsty tigress, watches it with looks of ardent, famished love.
Different as they seem in technique, there are many points of contact between the visionary Gustave Moreau andPuvis de Chavannes, the original and fascinating creator of the decorative painting of the nineteenth century. Where one indulges in detail, the other resorts to simplification; where the former is opulent the latter is ascetic; and yet they are associated through inward sympathy.
Puvis de Chavannes is the Domenico Ghirlandajo of the nineteenth century. The most eminent mural works which have been achieved in France owe their existence to him. Wall-paintings from his hand may be found above the staircase of the museums of Amiens, Marseilles, and Lyons, in the Paris Panthéon and the new Sorbonne, in the town-halls of Poitiers and many other French towns—pictures which it is difficult to describe in detail, through the medium of pedestrian prose. The two works with which he opened the decorative series in the museum of Amiens in 1861 are entitled “Bellum” and “Concordia.” In the former warriors are riding over a monotonous plain. Two smoking pillars, the gloomy witnesses to sorrow and devastation, cast their dark shadows over the still fields, whilst here and there burning mills rise into the sombre sky like torches. In “Concordia,” the counterpart to this work, there are women plucking flowers, and naked youths urging on their horses amid a luxuriant grove of laurel. In the Paris Panthéon he painted, between 1876 and 1878, “The Girlhood of St. Geneviève.”A laughing spring landscape, filled with the blitheness of May, spreads beneath the bright sky of the Isle de France. Calm figures move in it, men and women, children and greybeards. A bishop lays his hand upon the head of a young shepherdess; sailors are coming ashore from their barks. “The Grove sacred to the Arts and Muses” comes first in the decoration of the Lyons Museum. Upon one side is a thick forest, dark and profound, and upon the other the horizon is fringed by violet-blue hills and a large lake reflecting the bluish atmosphere; in the foreground are green meadows, where the flowers gleam like stars, and trees standing apart, oaks and firs, their strong, straight stems rising stiffly into the sky. At the foot of a pillared porch strange figures lie by the shore or stand erect amid the pale grass, one with her arm pointing upwards, another musing with her hand resting upon her chin, a third unrolling a parchment. Athletic youths are bringing flowers and winding garlands. The “Vision of Antiquity” and “Christian Inspiration” complete the series. The former of these pictures brings the spectator into Attica. Locked by a simple landscape of hills the blue sea is rippling, and bright islands rise from its bosom, while a clear sky sheds its full light from above. Trees and shrubs are growing here and there. A shepherd is playing upon the pan-pipes, goats are grazing, and five female figures, some of them nude, the others clothed, caress tame peacocks in the tall grass or lean against a parapet, breathing in the fresh, cool air. Farther back, at the foot of a height, is a young woman, holding herself erect like a statue, as she talks with a youth, whilst in the distance at the verge of the sea a spectral cavalcade, like that in Phidias’ frieze of the Parthenon, gallops swiftly by. In the counterpart, “Christian Inspiration,” a number of friars who are devoted to art are gathered together in theportico of an abbey church. The walls are embellished with naïve frescoes in the style of the Siennese school. One of the monks who is working on the pictures has alighted from the ladder and regards the result of his toil with a critical air. Lilies are blooming in a vase upon the ground. Outside, beyond the cloister wall, the flush of evening sheds its parting light over a lonely landscape, whence dark cypresses rise into the air, straight as a lance. In the decoration of the Sorbonne the object was to suggest all the lofty purposes to which the place has been dedicated upon the wall of the great amphitheatre used for the solemn sessions of the faculty, and facing the statues of the founders. Puvis de Chavannes did this by displaying a throne in a sacred grove, a throne upon which a grave matron arrayed in sombre garments is sitting in meditation. This is the old Sorbonne. Two genii at her side bring palm-branches and crowns as offerings in honour of the famous minds of the past. Around are standing manifold figures arrayed in the costumes which were assigned to the arts and sciences in Florence at the time of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. From the rock upon which they are set there bursts the living spring from which youth derives knowledge and new power. A thick wood divides this quiet haunt, consecrated to the Muses, from the rush and the petty trifles of life. In a painting entitled “Inter Artes et Naturam,” over the staircase of the museum of Rouen, artists musing over the ruins of mediæval buildings are seen lying in the midst of a Norman landscape, beneath apple-trees whose branches are weighed down by their burden of fruit; upon the other side of the picture there is a woman holding a child upon her knees, whilst another woman is trying to reach a bough laden with fruit, and a group of painters look on enchanted with the grace of her simple, harmonious movement.
Puvis de Chavannes is not a virtuoso in technique; for a Frenchman, indeed, he is almost clumsy, and is sure in very little of the work of his hand,—in fact, it is quite possible that a later age will not reckon him among the great painters. But what it can never forget is that after aperiod of lengthy aberrations he restored decorative art in general to its proper vocation.
Before his time what was good in the so-called monumental painting of the nineteenth century was usually not new, but borrowed from more fortunate ages, and what was new in it, the narrative element, was not good, or at least not in good taste. When Paolo Veronese produced his pictures in the Doge’s Palace or Giulio Romano his frescoes in the Sala dei Giganti in Mantua, neither of them thought of the great mission of instructing the people or of patriotic sentiments; they wanted to achieve an effect which should be pictorial, festal, and harmonious in feeling. The task of painters who were entrusted with the embellishment of the walls of a building was to waken dreams and strike chords of feeling, to summon a mood of solemnity, to delight the eye, to uplift the spirit. What they created was decorative music, filling the mansion with its august sound as the solemn notes of an organ roll through a church. Their pictures stood in need of no commentary, no exertion of the mind, no historical learning. But the painting which in the nineteenth century did duty upon official occasions and was encouraged by governments for the sake of its pedagogical efficiency was not permitted to content itself with this general range of sentiment; it had to lay on the colours more thickly, and to appeal to the understanding rather than to sentiment. Descriptive prose took the place of lyricism.
Puvis de Chavannes went back to the true principle of the old painters by renouncing any kind of didactic intention in his art. In the Panthéon of Paris, when the eye turns to the works of Puvis deChavannes after beholding all the admirable panels with which the recognised masters of the flowing line have illustrated the temple of St. Geneviève, when it turns from St. Louis, Clovis, Jeanne d’Arc, and Dionysius Sanctus to “The Girlhood of St. Geneviève,” it is as if one laid aside a prosy history of the world to read theEcloguesof Virgil.
In the one case there are archæological lectures, stage scenery, and histrionic art; in the other, simple poetry and lyrical magic, a marvellous evocation from the distant past of that atmosphere of legend which banishes the commonplace. His art would express nothing, would represent nothing; it would only charm and attune the spirit, like music heard faintly from the distance. His figures perform no significant actions; nor are any learned attributes employed in their characterisation, such as were introduced in Greece and at the Renaissance. He does not paint Mars, Vulcan, and Minerva, but war, work, and peace. In translating the wordbelluminto the language of painting in the Museum of Amiens he did not need academical Bellonas, nor sword-cuts, nor knightly suits of armour, nor fluttering standards. A group of mourning and stricken women, warlike horsemen, and a simple landscape sufficed him to conjure up the drama of war in all its terrible majesty. And he is as far from gross material heaviness as from academical sterility. The reapers toiling in his painting entitled “Summer” are modern in their movements and in their whole appearance, and yet they belong to no special time and seem to have been wafted into a world beyond; they are beings who might have lived yesterday, or, for the matter of that, a thousand years ago. The whole of existence seems in Puvis de Chavannes like a day without beginning or end, a day of Paradise, unchangeable and eternal. And very simple means sufficed him to attain this transcendental effect: like Millet, he generalises what is individual, and tempers what is presented in nature; antique nudity is associated in an unforced manner with modern costume; a designed simplicity,which has nothing of the academical painting of the nude, is expressed in the handling of form. Even his landscape he constructs upon its elementary forms, and by means of its essential, expressive features. But by a certain concordance of lines, by a distinct rhythm of form, he compasses a sentiment which is grave and solemn or idyllic.
The Quattrocentisti, especially Ghirlandajo, were his models in this epical simplicity, and beside Baudry, the deft and spirited decorator of the most modernised High Renaissance style, he has the effect of a primitive artist risen from the grave. His pictures have an archaic bloom—something sacerdotal, if you will, something seraphic and holy. Often one fancies that one recognises the influence of old tapestries, to say nothing of Fra Angelico, but one is at a loss to give the model copied. And what places him like Moreau in sharp opposition to the old masters is that, instead of their sunny, smiling blitheness, he too is under the sway of that heavy melancholy spirit which the close of the nineteenth century first brought into the world.
When he, a countryman of Flandrin and Chenavard, began his career under Couture over half a century ago, the world did not understand his pictures. People blamed the poverty of his palette, asserted that he was too simple and restricted in his methods of colouring, and he was called a Lentenpainter,un peintre de carême, whose dull eye noted nothing in nature except ungainly lines and uniformly grey tones. Women were especially unfavourable to him, taking his lean figures as a personal insult to themselves. Moreover, the calm and immobility of his figures were censured, and when he exhibited his earliest pictures in 1854, at the same time as those of Courbet, he was calledun fou tranquille, just as the latter was christenedun fou furieux. In later years it was precisely through these two qualities, his grandiose quietude and his “anæmic” painting, that he brought the world beneath his spell, and diverted French art into a new course.
As his landscapes know nothing of agitated clouds, nor abruptness nor the strife of the elements, so his figures avoid all oratorical vehemence. They are eternally young, free from brutal passions, lost in oblivion. Let him conjure up old Hellas or the quiet life of the cloister, over figures and landscapes there always rests a tender sentiment of consecration and dreamy peace; no violent gesture and no loud tone disturb that harmony of feeling by any vehement action.
Nor does the colour admit any discord in the large harmony. It is exceedingly soft and light, although subdued; it has that faint, deadened indecisiveness to be seen in faded tapestries or vanishing frescoes. Tender and delicate in its chalky grey unity, which banishes reality and creates a world of dreams, it is spread around the shadowy figures. It is impossible to imagine his pictures without this light so pure and yet veiled, this silvery, transparent air, impregnated with the breath of the Divine, as Plato would say; it is impossible to imagine them without the delicate tones of these pale green, pale rose-coloured, and pale violet dresses, which are as delicate as fading flowers, and without this flesh-tint, which lends a phantomlike and unearthly appearance to his figures. It is all like a melody pitched in the high, finely touched, and tremulous tones of a violin; it invites a mood which is at once blithe and sentimental, happy and sad, banishes all earthly things into oblivion, and carries one into a distant, peaceful, and holy world.
“Mon cœur est en repos, mon âme est en silence,Le bruit lointain du monde expire en arrivant,Comme un son éloigné qu’affaiblit la distance,À l’oreille incertaine apporté par le vent.J’ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie;Je viens chercher vivant le calme du Léthé:Beaux lieux, soyez pour moi ces bords où l’on oublie;L’oubli seul désormais est ma félicité.D’ici je vois la vie, à travers un nuage,S’évanouir pour moi dans l’ombre du passé...L’amitié me trahit, la pitié m’abandonne,Et, seul, je descends le sentier de tombeaux.Mais la nature est là qui t’invite et qui t’aime;Plonge-toi dans son sein qu’elle t’ouvre toujours;Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même,Est le même soleil se lève sur tes jours.”
“Mon cœur est en repos, mon âme est en silence,
Le bruit lointain du monde expire en arrivant,
Comme un son éloigné qu’affaiblit la distance,
À l’oreille incertaine apporté par le vent.
J’ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie;
Je viens chercher vivant le calme du Léthé:
Beaux lieux, soyez pour moi ces bords où l’on oublie;
L’oubli seul désormais est ma félicité.
D’ici je vois la vie, à travers un nuage,
S’évanouir pour moi dans l’ombre du passé...
L’amitié me trahit, la pitié m’abandonne,
Et, seul, je descends le sentier de tombeaux.
Mais la nature est là qui t’invite et qui t’aime;
Plonge-toi dans son sein qu’elle t’ouvre toujours;
Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même,
Est le même soleil se lève sur tes jours.”
It was not long before the doctrine of the two souls inFaustwas exemplified in Germany also: from the fertile manure of Naturalism there sprang the blue flower of a new Romanticism. In Germany there had once lived Albrecht Dürer, the greatest and most profound painter-poet of all time; and there, too, even in an unpropitious age that genial visionary Moritz Schwind succeeded in flourishing. When the period of eclectic imitation had been overcome by Naturalism, was it not fitting that artists should once more attempt to embody the world of dreams beside that of actual existence, and beside tangible reality to give shape to the unearthly foreboding which fills the human heart with the visions and the cravings of fancy? In thatage of hope arose the cult ofBoecklin, and Germany began to honour in him who had been so long blasphemed the founder of a new and ardently desired art.
Burne-Jones, Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Arnold Boecklin make up the four-leaved clover of modern Idealism. To future generations they will bear witness to the sentiment of Europe at the close of the nineteenth century. All four are more or less of the same age; they all four began their work in the beginning of the fifties; and they were all different from their contemporaries and from those who had gone before them. They embodied the spirit of the future. Boecklin had gone through a process of change as little as the others. His spirit was so rich that it comprised a century in itself, and leads us now towards the century to come. He was the contemporary of Schwind, he is our own contemporary, and he will be the contemporary of those who come after us. And it were as impossible to derive his art from that of any previous movement as to explain how he, our greatest visionary, came to be born in Basle, the most prosaic town in Europe.
His father was a merchant there, and he was born in the year 1827. In 1846 he went to Schirmer in Düsseldorf, and upon Schirmer’s advice repairedto Brussels, where he copied the old Dutch masters in the gallery. By the sale of some of his works he acquired the means of travelling to Paris. He passed through the days of the Revolution of June in 1848, studied the pictures in the Louvre, and returned home after a brief stay to perform his military duties. In the March of 1850, when he was three-and-twenty, he went to Rome, where he entered the circle of Anselm Feuerbach; and in 1853 he married a Roman lady. In the following year he produced the decorative pictures in which he represented the relations of man to fire; these had been ordered for the house of a certain Consul Wedekind in Hanover, but were sent back as being “bizarre.” In 1856 he betook himself—rather hard up for money—to Munich, where he exhibited in the Art Union “The Great Pan,” which was bought by the Pinakothek. Paul Heyse was the medium of his making the acquaintance of Schack. And in 1858 he was appointed a teacher at the Academy of Weimar, by the influence of Lenbach and Begas. During this time he produced “Pan startling a Goat-herd” in the Schack Gallery, and “Diana Hunting.” After three years he was again in Rome, and painted there “The Old Roman Tavern,” “The Shepherd’s Plaint of Love,” and “The Villa by the Sea.” In 1866 he went to Basle to complete the frescoes over the staircase of the museum, and in 1871 he was in Munich, where “The Idyll of the Sea” was exhibited amongst other things. In 1876 he settled in Florence, in 1886 at Zürich. From 1895 until the day of his death, January 16, 1901, he lived like a patriarch of art in his country house on the ridge of Fiesole.
Any one who would interpret a theory based upon the idea that an artist is the result of influences might, while he is about it, speak of Boecklin’s apprentice period in Düsseldorf and Schirmer’s biblical landscapes. That “harmonious blending of figures with landscape,” which is the leading note in Boecklin’s work, was of course from the days of Claude Lorraine and Poussin the essence of the so-called historical landscape which found its principal representatives at a later period in Koch, Preller, Rottmann, Lessing, and Schirmer. Yet Boecklin is not the disciple of these masters, but stands at the very opposite pole of art. The art of all these men was merely a species of historical painting. Old Koch read the Bible, Æschylus, Ossian, Dante, and Shakespeare; found in them such scenes as Noah’s thank-offering, Macbeth and the witches, or Fingal’s battle with the spirit of Loda; and sought amid the Sabine hills, in Olevano and Subiaco, for sites where these incidents might have taken place. Preller made theOdysseythe basis of his artistic creation, chose out of it moments where the scene might be laid in some landscape, and found in Rügen, Norway, Sorrento, and the coast of Capri the elements of nature necessary to his epic. Rottmann worked upon hexameters composed by King Ludwig, and adhered in the views he painted to the historical memories attached to the towns of Italy. Lessing sought inspiration in Sir Walter Scott, for whose monks and nuns he devised an appropriately sombre and mysterious background. Schirmer illustrated the Books of Moses by placingthe figures in Schnorr’s Picture Bible in Preller’s Odyssean landscape. Whether they were Classicists appealing to the eye by the architecture of form, or Romanticists addressing the spirit by the “mood” in their landscapes, it was common to all these painters that they set out from a literary or historical subject. They gave an exact interpretation of the actions prescribed by their authors, surrounding the figures with fictitious landscapes, corresponding in general conception to one’s notion of the surroundings of heroes, patriarchs, or hermits. Their pictures are historical incidents with a stage-setting of landscape.
In Boecklin all this is reversed. Landscape painter he is in his very essence, and he is, moreover, the greatest landscape painter of the nineteenth century, at whose side even the Fontainebleau group seem one-sided specialists. Every one of the latter had a peculiar type of landscape, and a special hour in the day which appealed to his feelings more distinctly than any other. One loved spring and dewy morning, another the clear, cold day, another the threatening majesty of the storm, the flashing effects of sportive sunbeams, or the evening after sunset, when colours fade from view. But Boecklin is as inexhaustible as infinite nature herself. In one place he celebrates the festival of spring with its burden of beauty: it is ushered in by snowdrops, and greeted with joy by the veined cups of the crocus; yellow primroses and blue violets merrily nod their heads, and a hundred tiny mountain streams leap precipitately into the valley to announce the coming of spring. In another, nature shines and blooms and chimes, and breathes her balm in all the colours of summer. Tulips freaked with purple rise at the side of paths; flowers in rows of blue, white, and yellow—hyacinths, daisies, gentians, anemones, and snapdragon—fill the sward in hordes; and down in the valley blow the narcissus in dazzling myriads, loading the air with an overpowering perfume. But, beside such lovely idylls, he has painted with puissant sublimityas many complaining elegies and tempestuous tragedies. Here, the sombre autumnal landscapes, with their tall black cypresses, are lashed by the rain and the howling storm. There, lonely islands or grave, half-ruined towers, tangled with creepers, rise dreamily from a lake, mournfully hearkening to the repining murmur of the waves; and there, in the midst of a narrow rocky glen, a rotten bridge hangs over a fearful abyss. Or a raging storm, beneath the might of which the forests bow, blusters round a wild mountain land which rises from a blue-black lake. Boecklin has painted everything: the graceful and heroic, the solitude and the waste, the solemnly sublime and the darkly tragic, passionate agitation and demoniacal fancy, the strife of foaming waves and the eternal rest of rigid masses of rock, the wild uproar of the sky and the still peace of flowery fields. The compass of his moods is as much greater than that of the French Classicists as Italy is greater than Fontainebleau.
For Italy is Boecklin’s home as a landscape painter, and the moods of nature there are more in number than Poussin ever painted. Grave and sad and grandiose is the Roman Campagna, with the ruins of the street of sepulchres, and the grey and black herds of cattle looking mournfully over the brown pastures. Hidden like the Sleeping Beauty lie the Roman villas in his pictures, in their sad combination of splendour and decay, of life and death, of youth and age. Behind weather-beaten grotto-wells and dark green nooks of yew, white busts and statues gleam like phantoms. From lofty terraces the water in decaying aqueducts trickles down with a monotonous murmur into still pools, where bracken and withered shrubs overgrown with ivy are reflected. Huge cypresses of the growth of centuries stand gravely in the air, tossing their heads mournfully when the wind blows. Then at a bound we are at Tivoli, and the whole scenery is changed. Great fantastic rocks rise straight into the air, luxuriantly mantled by ivy and parasitic growths; trees and shrubs take root in the clefts; the floods of the Anio plunge headforemost into the depths with a roar of sound, like a legion of demons thunder-stricken by some higher power. Then comes Naples, with its glory of flowers and its moods of evening glowing in deep ruby. Blue creepers twine round the balustrades of castles; hedges of monthly roses veil the roads, and oranges grow large amid the dark foliage. Farther away he paints the Homeric world of Sicily, with its crags caressed or storm-beaten by the wave, its blue grottoes, and its deep glowing splendours of changing colour. Or he represents the inland landscape of Florence with its soft graceful lines of hill, its fields and flowers, buds and blossoms, and its numbers of white dreaming villas hidden amid rosy oleanders and standing against the blue sky with a brightness almost dazzling.
Boecklin has no more rendered an exact portrait of the scenery of Italy than the Classic masters of France sought to represent in a photographic way districts in the forest of Fontainebleau. His whole life, like theirs, was a renewed and perpetual wooing of nature. As a boy he looked down from his attic in Basle upon the heaving waters of the Rhine. When he was in Rome, in 1850, he wandered daily in the Campagna to feast his eyes upon its grave lines and colours. After a few years in Weimar he gave up his post to gather fresh impressions in Italy. And the moods with which he was inspired by nature and the phenomena he observed were stored in his mind as though in a great emporium. Then his imagination went through another stage. That “organic union of figures and landscape” which the representatives of “heroic landscape” had surmised and endeavoured to attain by a reasoned method through the illustration of passages in poetry took place in Boecklin by the force of intuitive conception. The mood excited in him by a landscape is translated into an intuition of life.
In many pictures, particularly those of his earlier period, the ground-tone given by the landscape finds merely a faint echo in small accessory figures. In such pictures he stands more or less on a level withDreber, that master who died in Rome in 1875, and was forgotten in the history of German art more swiftly than ought to have been the case. Franz Dreber was not one of those Classicists dispersed over the face of Europe, men who were content with setting heroic actions in the midst of noble landscapes in the fashion of Preller; on the contrary, he was the lyricist of this movement, the first man who did not touch the epical material of old myths in a manner that was merely scholarly and illustrative, but developed his picture from the original note of landscape. In his pictures nature laughs with those who are glad, mourns with those who weep, sheds her light upon the joyful, and envelops tortured spirits in storm and the terror of thunder. If the golden age is to be represented, the scene is a soft summer landscape, where everything breathes peace and innocence and bliss. And the life of those who inhabit this happy region runs by in blissful peace also. Fair women and children rest upon the meadow, and gather fruits and pluck roses. If he paints Ulysses upon the shore of the sea, looking with yearning towards his distant home, a dull, sultry haze of noon broods over the district, wide and grey like the hero’s yearning. A spring landscape of sunny blitheness, withbutterflies sipping at the blossoms of the trees and sunbeams sportively dallying on the sea, are the surroundings of the picture where Psyche is crowned by Eros. And if Prometheus is represented chained to the rock and striving to burst his fetters, all nature fights the fight of the Titan. Lurid clouds move swiftly through the sky, ghostly flashes of lightning quiver, and a wild tempest rakes the mountains.
In Boecklin’s earlier pictures the accessory figures are placed in close relation with the landscape in a manner entirely similar. The mysterious keynote of sentiment in nature gives the theme of the scene represented. In the picture called “The Penitent,” in the Schack Gallery, a hermit is kneeling half-naked before the cross of the Saviour upon the slope of a steep mountain. Troops of ravens fly screaming above his head, and a strip of blue sky shines with an unearthly aspect between the trees, which are bent into wild shapes. The character of the scene is terribly severe, and severe and heavy is the misery in the heart of the man chastising himself with the scourge in his hand as he kneels there in prayer. A deep melancholy rests over the picture named “The Villa by the Sea.” The failing waves break gently on the shore with a mournful whisper, the wind utters its complaint blowing through the cypresses, and a few sunbeams wander coyly over the deep grey of the sky. At the socle of a niche a young woman dressed in black stands, and, with her head resting upon her hand, looks out of deeply veiled eyes over the moving tide. In “The Spring of Love” the landscape vibrates in lyrically soft and flattering chords. The budding splendour of blossoms covers the trees luxuriantly, and a rivulet ripples over the laughing grassy balk. A young man touches the strings of a lyre and sings; and, joining in his song, a maiden stands beside him leaning against a bush laden with blossom. In “The Walk to Emmaus” the ground-tone is given by a grave evening landscape. The storm ruffles the tops of the great trees, and chases across the sky the heavy clouds, over which strange evening lights are flitting. All nature trembles in shivering apprehension. “Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.”
But Boecklin’s great creations reach a higher level. Having begun byextending the lyrical mood of a landscape to his figures, he finally succeeded in peopling nature with beings which seem the final condensation of the life of nature itself, the tangible embodiment of that spirit of nature whose cosmic action in the water, the earth, and the air, he had glorified in one of his youthful works, the frescoes of the Basle Museum. In such pictures he has no forerunners whatever in the more recent history of art. His principle of creation rests, it might be said, upon the same overwhelming feeling for nature which brought forth the figures of Greek myth. When the ancient Greek stood before a waterfall he gave human form to what he saw. His eye beheld the outlines of beautiful nude women, nymphs of the spot, in the descending volume of the cascade; its foam was their fluttering hair, and in the rippling of the water and spattering froth he heard their bold splashing and their laughter. The elemental sway of nature, the secret interweaving of her forces took shape in plastic forms—
“Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken,Alles eines Gottes Spur ...Diese Höhen füllten Oreaden,Eine Dryas lebt in jedem Baum,Aus dem Urnen lieblicher NajadenSprang der Ströme Silberschaum.Jener Lorbeer wand sich einst um Hilfe,Tantals Tochter schweigt in diesem Stein,Syrinx Klage tönt aus jenem Schilfe,Philomelas Schmerz aus diesem Hain.”
“Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken,
Alles eines Gottes Spur ...
Diese Höhen füllten Oreaden,
Eine Dryas lebt in jedem Baum,
Aus dem Urnen lieblicher Najaden
Sprang der Ströme Silberschaum.
Jener Lorbeer wand sich einst um Hilfe,
Tantals Tochter schweigt in diesem Stein,
Syrinx Klage tönt aus jenem Schilfe,
Philomelas Schmerz aus diesem Hain.”
The beings which live in Boecklin’s pictures owe their origin to a similar action of the spirit. He hears trees, rivers, mountains, and universal nature whisper as with human speech. Every flower, every bush, every flame, the rocks, the waves, and the meadows, dead and without feeling as they are to the ordinary eye, have to his mind a vivid existence of their own; and in the same way the old poet conceived the lightning as a fiery bird and the clouds as the flocks of heaven. The stones have a voice, white walls lengthen like huge phantoms, the bright lights of the houses upon a mountain declivity at night change into the great eyes with which the spirit of the fell glares fixedly down; legions of strange beings circle and whir round in the fantastic region. In his imagination every impression of nature condenses itself into figures that may be seen. As a dragon issues from his lair to terrify travellers in the gloom of a mountain ravine, and as the avenging Furies rise in the waste before a murderer, so in the still brooding noon, when a shrill tone is heard suddenly and without a cause, the Grecian Pan lives once again for Boecklin—Pan, who startles the goat-herd from his dream by an eerie shout, and then whinnies in mockery at the terrified fugitive. The cool, wayward splashing element of water takes shape as a graceful nymph, shrouded in a transparent water-blue veil, leaning upon her welling urn as she listens dreamily to the song of a bird. The fine mists which rise from the fountain-head become embodied as a row of merry children, whose vaporous figures floathazily through the shining clouds of spring. The secret voices that live amid the silence of the wood press round him, and the phantom born of the excited senses becomes a ghostly unicorn advancing with noiseless step, and bearing upon his back a maiden of legendary story dressed in a white garment. In the thundercloud lying over the broad summit of a mountain and abundant in blessing rain he sees the huge body of the giant Prometheus, who brought fire from heaven and lies fettered to the mountain top, spreading over the landscape like a cloud. The form of Death stumbling past cloven trees in rain and tempest, as he rides his pale horse, appears to him in a waste and chill autumnal region, where stands a ruined castle in lurid illumination. A sacred grove, lying in insular seclusion and fringed with venerable old trees that rise straight into the air, rustling as they bend their heads towards each other, is peopled, as at a word of enchantment, with grave priestly figures robed in white, which approach in solemn procession and fling themselves down in prayer before the sacrificial fire. The lonely waste of the sea is not brought home to him with sufficient force by a wide floor of waves, with gulls indolently flying beneath a low and leaden sky; so he paints a flat crag emerging from the waves, and upon its crest, over which the billows sweep, the shy dwellers of the sea bathe in the light. Naiads and Tritons assembled for a gamesome ride over the sea typify the sportive hide-and-seek of the waves. Yet there is nothing forced, nothing merely ingenious, nothing literary in these inventions. The figures are not placed in nature with deliberate calculation: they are an embodied mood of nature; they are children of the landscape, and no mere accessories.