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BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART
HOGARTH excepted, can we produce any one painter within
the last fifty years, or since the humour of exhibiting began,
that has treated a story imaginatively? By this we mean, upon
whom his subject has so acted, that it has seemed to direct him -- not
to be arranged by him? Any upon whom its leading or
collateral points have impressed themselves so tyrannically , that
he dared not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a revelation?
Any that has imparted to his compositions, not merely so much
truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness, but that
individualising property, which should keep the subject so treated
distinct in feature from every other subject, however similar, and
to common apprehensions almost identical; so as that we might
say, this and this part could have found an appropriate place in no
other picture in the world but this? Is there anything in modern
art -- we will not demand that it should be equal -- but in any way
analogous to what Titian has effected, in that wonderful bringing
together of two times in the "Ariadne," in the National Gallery?
Precipitous, with his reeling Satyr rout about him, repeopling and
re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk with a new fury
beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in fire, fire-like flings himself at
the Cretan. This is the time present. With this telling of the
story an artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly proud.
Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw no further. But from
the depths of the imaginative spirit Titian has recalled past time,
and laid it contributory with the present to one simultaneous
effect. With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of his
followers, made lucid with the presence and new offers of a god, --
as if unconscious of Bacchus, or but idly casting her eyes as upon
some unconcerning pageant -- her soul undistracted from Theseus --
Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore, in as much heart-silence,
and in almost the same local solitude, with which she awoke at
daybreak to catch the forlorn last glances of the sail that bore
away the Athenian.
Here are two points miraculously co-uniting; fierce society, with
the feeling of solitude still absolute; noon-day revelations, with
the accidents of the dull grey dawn unquenched and lingering;
the present Bacchus, with the past Ariadne; two stories, with
double Time; separate, and harmonising. Had the artist made
the woman one shade less indifferent to the God; still more, had
she expressed a rapture at his advent, where would have been the
story of the mighty desolation of the heart previous? merged in
the insipid accident of a flattering offer met with a welcome acceptance.
The broken heart for Theseus was not lightly to be pieced
up by a God.
We have before us a fine rough print, from a picture by Raphael
in the Vatican. It is the Presentation of the new-born Eve to
Adam by the Almighty. A fairer mother of mankind we might
imagine, and a goodlier sire perhaps of men since born. But
these are matters subordinate to the conception of the situation,
displayed in this extraordinary production. A tolerably
modern artist would have been satisfied with tempering certain
raptures of connubial anticipation, with a suitable acknowledgement
to the Giver of the blessing, in the countenance of the first bridegroom;
something like the divided attention of the child (Adam
was here a child man) between the given toy, and the mother who
had just blest it with the bauble. This is the obvious, the first-sight
view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade, considering
the awful presence they were in, would have taken care to subtract
something from the expression of the more human passion, and to
heighten the more spiritual one. This would be as much as an
exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset House to last
year's show, has been encouraged to look for. It is obvious to
hint at a lower expression, yet in a picture, that for respects of
drawing and colouring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible
within these art-fostering walls, in which the raptures should be as
ninety-nine, the gratitude as one, or perhaps Zero! By neither the
one passion nor the other has Raphael expounded the situation of
Adam. Singly on his brow sits the absorbing sense of wonder
at the created miracle. The moment is seized by the intuitive
artist, perhaps not self-conscious of his art, in which neither of
the conflicting emotions moment how abstract -- have had
time to spring up, or to battle for indecorous mastery. -- We have
seen a landscape of a justly admired neoteric, in which he aimed at
delineating a fiction, one of the most severely beautiful in antiquity
-- the gardens of the Hesperides. To do Mr. ----- justice, he bad
painted laudable orchard, with fitting seclusion, and a veritable
dragon (of which a Polypheme by Poussin is somehow a fac-simile
for the situation), looking over into the world shut out backwards,
so that none but a "still-climbing Hercules" could hope to catch
a peep at the admired Ternary of Recluses. No conventual porter
could keep his keys better than this custos with the "lidless eye"
He not only sees that none do intrude into that Privacy, but, as
clear as daylight, that none but Hercules aut Diabolus by any
manner of means can. So far all is well. We have absolute
solitude here or nowhere. Ab extra the damsels are snug enough.
But here the artist's courage seems to have failed him. He began
to pity his pretty charge, and, to comfort the irksomeness, has
peopled their solitude with a bevy of fair attendants, maids of
honour, or ladies of the bed-chamber, according to the approved
etiquette at a court of the nineteenth century; giving to the whole
scene the air of a fete champetre, if we will but excuse the absence
of the gentlemen. This is well, and Watteauish. But what is become
of the solitary mystery-the
Daughters three,
That sing around the golden tree ?
This is not the way in which Poussin would have treated this
subject.
The paintings or rather the stupendous architectural designs, of
a modern artist, have been urged as objections to the theory of our
motto. They are of a character, we confess, to stagger it. His
towered structures are of the highest order of the material sublime.
Whether they were dreams, or transcripts of some elder
workmanship -- Assyrian ruins old -- restored by this mighty artist,
they satisfy our most stretched and craving conceptions of
the glories of the antique world. It is a pity that they were
ever peopled. On that side, the imagination of the artist halts,
and appears defective. Let us examine the point of the story
in the "Belshazzar's Feast." We will introduce it by an apposite
anecdote.
The court historians of the day record, that at the first dinner
given by the late King (then Prince Regent) at the Pavilion, the
following characteristic frolic was played off. The guests were
select and admiring; the banquet profuse and admirable; the
lights lustrous and oriental; the eye was perfectly dazzled with
the display of plate, among which the great gold salt-cellar,
brought from the regalia in the Tower for this especial purpose,
itself a tower! stood conspicuous for its magnitude. And now
the Rev. * * * * the then admired court Chaplain, was proceeding
with the grace, when, at a signal given, the lights were suddenly
overcast, and a huge transparency was discovered, in which glittered
in golden letter-
"Brighton--Earthquake--Swallow-up-alive!"
Imagine the confusion of the guests; the Georges and garters,
jewels, bracelets, moulted upon the occasion! The fans dropt, and
picked up the next morning by the sly court pages. Mrs. Fitzwhat's-her-name
fainting, and the Countess of * * * * holding the
smelling bottle, till the good-humoured Prince caused harmony to
be restored by calling in fresh candles, and declaring that the
whole was nothing but a pantomime hoax, got up by the ingenious
Mr. Farley, of Covent Garden, from hints which his Royal Highness
himself had furnished! Then imagine the infinite applause
that followed, the mutual rallyings, the declarations that "they
were not much frightened," of the assembled galaxy.
The point of time in the picture exactly answers to the appearance
of the transparency in the anecdote. The huddle, the flutter,
the bustle, the escape, the alarm, and the mock alarm; the prettinesses
heightened by consternation; the courtier's fear which was
flattery, and the lady's which was affectation; all that we may
conceive to have taken place in a mob of Brighton courtiers,
sympathising with the well-acted surprise of their sovereign all
this, and no more, is exhibited by the well-dressed lords and ladies
in the Hall of Belus. Just this sort of consternation we have seen
among a flock of disquieted wild geese at the report only of a gun
having gone off!
But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety for the preservation
of their persons,such as we have witnessed at a theatre,
when a slight alarm of fire has been given -- an adequate exponent
of a supernatural terror? the way in which the finger of God,
writing judgments, would have been met by the withered conscience
There is a human fear, and a divine fear. The one is
disturbed, restless, and bent upon escape. The other is bowed
down, effortless, passive. When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz,
in the visions of the night, and the hair of his flesh stood up, was
it in the thoughts of the Temanite to ring the bell of his chamber,
or to call up the servants? But let us see in the text what there
is to justify all this huddle of vulgar consternation.
From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar had made
a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the
thousand. The golden and silver vessels are gorgeously enumerated,
with the princes, the king's concubines, and his wives. Then
follows --
"In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and
wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of
the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that
wrote. Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts
troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosened, and his
knees smote one against another."
This is the plain text. By no hint can it be otherwise inferred,
but that the appearance was solely confined to the fancy of Belshazzar,
that his single brain was troubled. Not a word is spoken
of its being seen by any else there present, not even by the queen
herself, who merely undertakes for the interpretation of the phenomenon,
as related to her, doubtless, by her husband. The lord
are simply said to he astonished; i.e. at the trouble and the
change of countenance in their sovereign. Even the prophet does
not appear to have seen the scroll, which the king saw. He recalls
it only, as Joseph did the Dream to the King of Egypt. "Then
was the part of the hand sent from him [the Lord] and this
writing was written." He speaks of the phantasm as past.
Then what becomes of this needless multiplication of the miracle?
this message to a royal conscience, singly expressed -- for it was
said, "thy kingdom is divided," simultaneously impressed upon
the fancies of a thousand courtiers, who were implied in it neither
directly nor grammatically?
But admitting the artist's own version of the story, and that the
sight was seen also by the thousand courtiers -- let it have been
visible to all Babylon -- the knees of Belshazzar were shaken, and
his countenance troubled, even so would the knees of every man in
Babylon, and their countenances, as of an individual man, been
troubled; bowed, bent down, so they would have remained, stupor-fixed,
with no thought of struggling with that inevitable judgment.
Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to be shown in
every picture. The eye delightedly dwells upon the brilliant
individualities in a "Marriage at Cana," by Veronese, or Titian, to
the very texture and colour of the wedding garments, the ring
glittering upon the bride's fingers, the metal and fashion of the
wine pots; for at such seasons there is leisure and luxury to be
curious. But in a "day of judgment," or in a "day of lesser
horrors yet divine," at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the
immediate scene, as the actual eye of an agent or patient in the
immediate scene would see, only in masses and indistinction. Not
only the female attire and jewelry exposed to the critical eye of
the fashion, as minutely as the dresses in a lady's magazine, in the
criticised picture,-- but perhaps the curiosities of anatomical science,
and studied diversities of posture in the falling angels and sinners
of Michael Angelo, -- have no business in their great subjects.
There was no leisure of them.
By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting got at their
true conclusions; by not showing the actual appearances, that is,
all that was to be seen at any given moment by an indifferent eye,
but only what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing or
suffering of some portentous action. Suppose the moment of the
swallowing up of Pompeii. There they were to be seen -- houses,
columns, architectural proportions, differences of public and private
buildings, men and women at their standing occupations, the diversified
thousand postures, attitudes, dresses, in some confusion truly,
but physically they were visible. But what eye saw them at that
eclipsing moment, which reduces confusion to a kind of unity, and
when the senses are upturned from their proprieties, when sight
and hearing are a feeling only? A thousand years have passed,
and we are at leisure to contemplate the weaver fixed standing
at his shuttle, the baker at his oven, and to turn over with
antiquarian coolness the pots and pans of Pompeii.
"Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeah, and thou, Moon, in the
valley of Ajalon." Who, in reading this magnificent Hebraism,
in his conception, sees aught but the heroic son of Nun, with
the out-stretched arm, and the greater and lesser light obsequious?
Doubtless there were to be seen hill and dale, and chariots and
horsemen, on open plain, or winding by secret defiles, and all the
circumstances and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would have
been conscious of this array at the interposition of the synchronic
miracle? Yet in the picture of this subject by the artist of the
"Belshazzar's Feast" no ignoble work either -- the marshalling and
landscape of the war is everything, the miracle sinks into an anecdote
of the day; and the eye may "dart through rank and file
traverse" for some minutes, before it shall discover, among his
armed followers, which is Joshua! Not modern art alone, but
ancient, where only it is to be found if anywhere, can be detected
erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The world
has nothing to show of the preternatural in painting, transcending
the figure of Lazarus bursting his grave-clothes in the great picture
at Angerstein's. It seems a thing between two beings.
A ghastly horror at itself struggles with newly apprehending
gratitude at second life bestowed. It cannot forget that it was
a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a body. It has to tell of
the world of spirits. Was it from a feeling, that the crowd of
half-impassioned by-standers, and the still more irrelevant herd of
passers-by at a distance, who have not heard or but faintly have
been told of the passing miracle, admirable as the are in design
and hue -- for it is a glorified work -- do not respond adequately to
the action -- that the single figure of the Lazarus has been attributed
to Michael Angelo, and the mighty Sebastian unfairly
robbed of the fame of the greater half of the interest? Now
that there were not indifferent passers-by within actual scope of
the eyes of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound of it
had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would be hardihood to
deny; but would they see them? or can the mind in the conception
of it admit of such unconcerning objects? can it think of
them at all? or what associating league to the imagination can
there be between the seers, and the seers not, of a presential
miracle?
Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of a Dryad, we
will ask whether, in the present low state of expectation, the patron
would not, or ought not to be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked
figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks? Disseat those woods,
and place the same figure among fountains, and falls of pellucid
water, and you have a -- Naiad! Not so in a rough print we
have seen after Julio Romano, we think -- for it is long since --
there, by no process, with mere change of scene, could the figure
have reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, fantastic, yet
with a grace of her own, beautiful in convolution and distortion,
linked to her connatural tree, co-twisting with its limbs her
own, till both seemed either -- these, animated branches; those,
disanimated members -- yet the animal and vegetable lives sufficiently
kept distinct -- his Dryad lay -- -an approximation of two
natures, which to conceive, it must be seen; analogous to, not
the same with, the delicacies of Ovidian transformations.
To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial comprehension,
the most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness.
The large eye of genius saw in the meanness of present
subjects their capabilities of treatment from their relations to some
and Past or Future. How has Raphael -- we must still linger
about the Vatican -- treated the humble craft of the ship-builder,
in his "Building of the Ark?" It is in that scriptural series, to
which we have referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old
graphic sketches of them which we possess, seem to be of a higher
and more poetic grade than even the Cartoons. The dim of sight
are the timid and the shrinking. There is a cowardice in modern
art. As the Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge's friend made the prophetic
guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of
Michael Angelo collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and
Cornuto; so from this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it would
instinctively turn away, as from one incapable of investiture with
any grandeur. The dock-yards at Woolwich would object derogatory
associations. The depot at Chatham would he the mote and
the beam in its intellectual eye. But not to the nautical preparations
in the shipyards of Civita Vecchia did Raphael look for
instructions, when he imagined the Building of the Vessel that
was to be conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned
mankind. In the intensity of the action, he keeps ever out of
sight the meanness of the operation. There is the Patriarch, in
calm forethought, and with holy prescience, giving directions.
And there are his agents -- the solitary but sufficient Three
hewing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a
Demiurgus; under some instinctive rather than technical guidance;
giant-muscled; every one a Hercules, or liker to those
Vulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns under Mongibello
wrought in fire -- Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmon,
So work the workmen that should repair a world!
Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with pictorial
objects. In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly every
thing, the unseen qualities as nothing. Othello's color -- the
infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff -- do they haunt
us perpetually in the reading? or are they obtruded upon our
conceptions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration
at the respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character?
But in a picture Othello is always a Blackamoor; and the other
only Plump Jack. Deeply corporealised and enchained hopelessly
in the grovelling fetters of externality, must be the mind, to
which, in its better moments, the image of the high-souled, high-intelligenced
Quixote -- the errant Star of Knighthood, made more
tender by eclipse -- has never presented itself, divested from the
unhallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the
heels of Rosinante. That man has read his book by halves; he
has laughed mistaking his author's purport, which was -- tears. The
artist that pictures Quixote (and it is in this degrading point that
he is every season held up at our Exhibitions) in the shallow hope
of exciting mirth, would have joined the rabble at the heels of his
starved steed. We wish not to see that counterfeited, which we
would not have wished to see in the reality. Conscious of the
heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on hearing that his
withered person was passing, would have stepped over his threshold
to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, an the "strange bedfellows
which misery brings a man acquainted with?" Shade of
Cervantes! who in thy Second Part could put into the mouth of
thy Quixote those high aspirations of a super-chivalrous gallantry,
where he replies to one of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he
would spoil their pretty net-works, and inviting him to be a guest
with them, in accents like these: "Truly, fairest Lady, Actaeon
was not more astonished when he saw Diana bathing herself at the
fountain, than I have been in beholding your beauty: I commend
the manner of your pastime, and thank you for your kind offers;
and, if I may serve you, so I may be sure you will be obeyed, you
may command me: for my profession is this, To shew myself thankful,
and a doer of good to all sorts of people, especially of the rank
that your person shows you to be; and if those nets, as they take
up but a little piece of ground, should take up the whole world, I
would seek out new worlds to pass through, rather than break
them: and (he adds,) that you may give credit to this my exaggeration,
behold at least he that promiseth you this, is Don
Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath come to your
hearing." Illustrious Romancer! were the "fine frenzies," which
possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this
Second Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving
Men? to be monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of
great men? Was that pitiable infirmity, which in thy First Part
misleads him, always from within, into half-ludicrous, but more
than half-compassionable and admirable errors, not infliction enough
from heaven, that men by studied artifices must devise and practise
upon the humour, to inflame where they should soothe it? Why,
Goneril would have blushed to practise upon the abdicated king
at this rate, and the she-wolf Regan not have endured to play the
pranks on his fled wits, which thou hast made thy Quixote
suffer in Duchesses' halls, and at the hands of that unworthy nobleman.*
In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most
consummate artist in the Book way that the world hath yet seen,
to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the
character without relaxing; so as absolutely that they shall suffer
no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever
obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh; or not,
rather, to indulge a contrary emotion? Cervantes, stung, perchance,
by the relish with which his Reading Public had received
the fooleries of the man, more to their palates than the generosities
of the master, in the sequel let his pen run riot, lost the harmony
and the balance, and sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his
contemporaries. We know that in the present day the Knight has
fewer admirers than the Squire. Anticipating, what did actually
happen to him -- as afterwards it did to his scarce inferior follower,
the Author of "Guzman de Alfarache "-that some less knowing
hand would prevent him by a spurious Second Part: and judging,
that it would be easier for his competitor to out -- bid him in the
comicalities, than in the romance, of his work, he abandoned his
Knight, and has fairly set up the Squire for his Hero. For what
else has he unsealed the eyes of Sancho; and instead of that twilight
state of semi-insanity -- the madness at secondhand -- the contagion,
caught from a stronger mind infected -- that war between native
cunning, and hereditary deference, with which he has hitherto
accompanied his master -- two for a pair almost -- does he substitute
a downright Knave, with open eyes, for his own ends only following
a confessed Madman; and offering at one time to lay, if not
actually laying hands upon him! From the moment that Sancho
loses his reverence, Don Quixote is become a -- treatable lunatic.
Our artists handle him accordingly.
* Yet from this Second Part, our cried-up pictures are mostly selected; the
waiting-women with beards, &c.
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