On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2)

ART.
V.
THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA

 
"Ποικἱλον ὡ ἑνι πἁντα τετεὑχαταιοὑδἑ σε φημἱ
Απρηκτὁν γε νἑεσθαι ου τι φρεσἱ μενοινἁϛ"
 

(Hom. Il. xiv. 220-21.)

PREFATORY. ⁶²

25. Not many months ago, a friend, whose familiarity with both living and past schools of Art rendered his opinion of great authority, said casually to me in the course of talk, "I believe we have now as able painters as ever lived; but they never paint as good pictures as were once painted." That was the substance of his saying; I forget the exact words, but their tenor surprised me, and I have thought much of them since. Without pressing the statement too far, or examining it with an unintended strictness, this I believe to be at all events true, that we have men among us, now in Europe, who might have been noble painters, and are not; men whose doings are altogether as wonderful in skill, as inexhaustible in fancy, as the work of the really great painters; and yet these doings of theirs are not great. Shall I write the commonplace that rings in sequence in my ear, and draws on my hand—"are not Great, for they are not (in the broad human and ethical sense) Good"? I write it, and ask forgiveness for the truism, with its implied uncharitableness of blame; for this trite thing is ill understood and little thought upon by any of us, and the implied blame is divided among us all; only let me at once partly modify it, and partly define.

26. In one sense, modern Art has more goodness in it than ever Art had before. Its kindly spirit, its quick sympathy with pure domestic and social feeling, the occasional seriousness of its instructive purpose, and its honest effort to grasp the reality of conceived scenes, are all eminently "good," as compared with the insane picturesqueness and conventional piety of many among the old masters. Such domestic painting, for instance, as Richter's in Germany, Edward Frere's in France, and Hook's in England, together with such historical and ideal work as–perhaps the reader would be offended with me were I to set down the several names that occur to me here, so I will set down one only, and say—as that of Paul de la Roche; such work, I repeat, as these men have done, or are doing, is entirely good in its influence on the public mind; and may, in thankful exultation, be compared with the renderings of besotted, vicious, and vulgar human life perpetrated by Dutch painters, or with the deathful formalism and fallacy of what was once called "Historical Art." Also, this gentleness and veracity of theirs, being in part communicable, are gradually learned, though in a somewhat servile manner, yet not without a sincere sympathy, by many inferior painters, so that our exhibitions and currently popular books are full of very lovely and pathetic ideas, expressed with a care, and appealing to an interest, quite unknown in past times. I will take two instances of merely average power, as more illustrative of what I mean than any more singular and distinguished work could be. Last year, in the British Institution, there were two pictures by the same painter, one of a domestic, the other of a sacred subject. I will say nothing of the way in which they were painted; it may have been bad, or good, or neither: it is not to my point. I wish to direct attention only to the conception of them. One, "Cradled in his Calling," was of a fisherman and his wife, and helpful grown-up son, and helpless new-born little one; the two men carrying the young child up from the shore, rocking it between them in the wet net for a hammock, the mother looking on joyously, and the baby laughing. The thought was pretty and good, and one might go on dreaming over it long—not unprofitably. But the second picture was more interesting. I describe it only in the circumstances of the invented scene—sunset after the crucifixion. The bodies have been taken away, and the crosses are left lying on the broken earth; a group of children have strayed up the hill, and stopped beside them in such shadowy awe as is possible to childhood, and they have picked up one or two of the drawn nails to feel how sharp they are. Meantime a girl with her little brother—goat-herds both—have been watering their flock at Kidron, and are driving it home. The girl, strong in grace and honor of youth, carrying her pitcher of water on her erect head, has gone on past the place steadily, minding her flock; but her little curly-headed brother, with cheeks of burning Eastern brown, has lingered behind to look, and is feeling the point of one of the nails, held in another child's hand. A lovely little kid of the goats has stayed behind to keep him company, and is amusing itself by jumping backwards and forwards over an arm of the cross. The sister looks back, and, wondering what he can have stopped in that dreadful place for, waves her hand for the little boy to come away.

I have no hesitation in saying that, as compared with the ancient and stereotyped conceptions of the "Taking down from the Cross," there is a living feeling in that picture which is of great price. It may perhaps be weak, nay, even superficial, or untenable—that will depend on the other conditions of character out of which it springs—but, so far as it reaches, it is pure and good; and we may gain more by looking thoughtfully at such a picture than at any even of the least formal types of the work of older schools. It would be unfair to compare it with first-rate, or even approximately first-rate designs; but even accepting such unjust terms, put it beside Rembrandt's ghastly white sheet, laid over the two poles at the Cross-foot, and see which has most good in it for you of any communicable kind.

27. I trust, then, that I fully admit whatever may, on due deliberation, be alleged in favor of modern Art. Nay, I have heretofore asserted more for some modern Art than others were disposed to admit, nor do I withdraw one word from such assertion. But when all has been said and granted that may be, there remains this painful fact to be dealt with,—the consciousness, namely, both in living artists themselves and in us their admirers, that something, and that not a little, is wrong with us; that they, relentlessly examined, could not say they thoroughly knew how to paint, and that we, relentlessly examined, could not say we thoroughly know how to judge. The best of our painters will look a little to us, the beholders, for confirmation of his having done well. We, appealed to, look to each other to see what we ought to say. If we venture to find fault, however submissively, the artist will probably feel a little uncomfortable: he will by no means venture to meet us with a serenely crushing "Sir, it cannot be better done," in the manner of Albert Dürer. And yet, if it could not be better done, he, of all men, should know that best, nor fear to say so; it is good for himself, and for us, that he should assert that, if he knows that. The last time my dear old friend William Hunt came to see me, I took down one of his early drawings for him to see (three blue plums and one amber one, and two nuts). So he looked at it, happily, for a minute or two and then said, "Well, it's very nice, isn't it? I did not think I could have done so well." The saying was entirely right, exquisitely modest and true; only I fear he would not have had the courage to maintain that his drawing was good, if anybody had been there to say otherwise. Still, having done well, he knew it; and what is more no man ever does do well without knowing it: he may not know how well, nor be conscious of the best of his own qualities; nor measure, or care to measure, the relation of his power to that of other men, but he will know that what he has done is, in an intended, accomplished, and ascertainable degree, good. Every able and honest workman, as he wins a right to rest, so he wins a right to approval,—his own if no one's beside; nay, his only true rest is in the calm consciousness that the thing has been honorably done—συνεἱδησιϛ οτι καλὁν. I do not use the Greek words in pedantry, I want them for future service and interpretation; no English words, nor any of any other language, would do as well. For I mean to try to show, and believe I can show, that a simple and sure conviction of our having done rightly is not only an attainable, but a necessary seal and sign of our having so done; and that the doing well or rightly, and ill or wrongly, are both conditions of the whole being of each person, coming of a nature in him which affects all things that he may do, from the least to the greatest, according to the noble old phrase for the conquering rightness, of "integrity," "wholeness," or "wholesomeness." So that when we do external things (that are our business) ill, it is a sign that internal, and, in fact, that all things, are ill with us; and when we do external things well, it is a sign that internal and all things are well with us. And I believe there are two principal adversities to this wholesomeness of work, and to all else that issues out of wholeness of inner character, with which we have in these days specially to contend. The first is the variety of Art round us, tempting us to thoughtless imitation; the second our own want of belief in the existence of a rule of right.

28. I. I say the first is the variety of Art around us. No man can pursue his own track in peace, nor obtain consistent guidance, if doubtful of his track. All places are full of inconsistent example, all mouths of contradictory advice, all prospects of opposite temptations. The young artist sees myriads of things he would like to do, but cannot learn from their authors how they were done, nor choose decisively any method which he may follow with the accuracy and confidence necessary to success. He is not even sure if his thoughts are his own; for the whole atmosphere round him is full of floating suggestion: those which are his own he cannot keep pure, for he breathes a dust of decayed ideas, wreck of the souls of dead nations, driven by contrary winds. He may stiffen himself (and all the worse for him) into an iron self-will, but if the iron has any magnetism in it, he cannot pass a day without finding himself, at the end of it, instead of sharpened or tempered, covered with a ragged fringe of iron filings. If there be anything better than iron—living wood fiber—in him, he cannot be allowed any natural growth, but gets hacked in every extremity, and bossed over with lumps of frozen clay;—grafts of incongruous blossom that will never set; while some even recognize no need of knife or clay (though both are good in a gardener's hand), but deck themselves out with incongruous glittering, like a Christmas-tree. Even were the style chosen true to his own nature, and persisted in, there is harm in the very eminence of the models set before him at the beginning of his career. If he feels their power, they make him restless and impatient, it may be despondent, it may be madly and fruitlessly ambitious. If he does not feel it, he is sure to be struck by what is weakest or slightest of their peculiar qualities; fancies that this is what they are praised for; tries to catch the trick of it; and whatever easy vice or mechanical habit the master may have been betrayed or warped into, the unhappy pupil watches and adopts, triumphant in its ease:—has not sense to steal the peacock's feather, but imitates its voice. Better for him, far better, never to have seen what had been accomplished by others, but to have gained gradually his own quiet way, or at least with his guide only a step in advance of him, and the lantern low on the difficult path. Better even, it has lately seemed, to be guideless and lightless; fortunate those who, by desolate effort, trying hither and thither, have groped their way to some independent power. So, from Cornish rock, from St. Giles's Lane, from Thames mudshore, you get your Prout, your Hunt, your Turner; not, indeed, any of them well able to spell English, nor taught so much of their own business as to lay a color safely; but yet at last, or first, doing somehow something, wholly ineffective on the national mind, yet real, and valued at last after they are dead, in money;—valued otherwise not even at so much as the space of dead brick wall it would cover; their work being left for years packed in parcels at the National Gallery, or hung conclusively out of sight under the shadowy iron vaults of Kensington. The men themselves, quite inarticulate, determine nothing of their Art, interpret nothing of their own minds; teach perhaps a trick or two of their stage business in early life—as, for instance, that it is good where there is much black to break it with white, and where there is much white to break it with black, etc., etc.; in later life remain silent altogether, or speak only in despair (fretful or patient according to their character); one who might have been among the best of them,⁶³ the last we heard of, finding refuge for an entirely honest heart from a world which declares honesty to be impossible, only in a madness nearly as sorrowful as its own;—the religious madness which makes a beautiful soul ludicrous and ineffectual; and so passes away, bequeathing for our inheritance from its true and strong life, a pretty song about a tiger, another about a bird-cage, two or three golden couplets, which no one will ever take the trouble to understand,—the spiritual portrait of the ghost of a flea,—and the critical opinion that "the unorganized blots of Rubens and Titian are not Art." Which opinion the public mind perhaps not boldly indorsing, is yet incapable of pronouncing adversely to it, that the said blots of Titian and Rubens are Art, perceiving for itself little good in them, and hanging them also well out of its way, at tops of walls (Titian's portrait of Charles V. at Munich, for example; Tintoret's Susannah, and Veronese's Magdalen, in the Louvre), that it may have room and readiness for what may be generally termed "railroad work," bearing on matters more immediately in hand; said public looking to the present pleasure of its fancy, and the portraiture of itself in official and otherwise imposing or entertaining circumstances, as the only "Right" cognizable by it.

29. II. And this is a deeper source of evil, by far, than the former one, for though it is ill for us to strain towards a right for which we have never ripened it is worse for us to believe in no right at all. "Anything," we say, "that a clever man can do to amuse us is good; what does not amuse us we do not want. Taste is assuredly a frivolous, apparently a dangerous gift; vicious persons and vicious nations have it; we are a practical people, content to know what we like, wise in not liking it too much, and when tired of it, wise in getting something we like better. Painting is of course an agreeable ornamental Art, maintaining a number of persons respectably, deserving therefore encouragement, and getting it pecuniarily, to a hitherto unheard-of extent. What would you have more?" This is, I believe, very nearly our Art-creed. The fact being (very ascertainably by anyone who will take the trouble to examine the matter), that there is a cultivated Art among all great nations, inevitably necessary to them as the fulfillment of one part of their human nature. None but savage nations are without Art, and civilized nations who do their Art ill, do it because there is something deeply wrong at their hearts. They paint badly as a paralyzed man stammers, because his life is touched somewhere within; when the deeper life is full in a people, they speak clearly and rightly; paint clearly and rightly; think clearly and rightly. There is some reverse effect, but very little. Good pictures do not teach a nation; they are the signs of its having been taught. Good thoughts do not form a nation; it must be formed before it can think them. Let it once decay at the heart, and its good work and good thoughts will become subtle luxury and aimless sophism; and it and they will perish together.

30. It is my purpose, therefore, in some subsequent papers, with such help as I may anywise receive, to try if there may not be determined some of the simplest laws which are indeed binding on Art practice and judgment. Beginning with elementary principle, and proceeding upwards as far as guiding laws are discernible, I hope to show, that if we do not yet know them, there are at least such laws to be known, and that it is of a deep and intimate importance to any people, especially to the English at this time, that their children should be sincerely taught whatever arts they learn, and in riper age become capable of a just choice and wise pleasure in the accomplished works of the artist. But I earnestly ask for help in this task. It is one which can only come to good issue by the consent and aid of many thinkers; and I would, with the permission of the Editor of this Journal, invite debate on the subject of each paper, together with brief and clear statements of consent or objection, with name of consenter or objector; so that after courteous discussion had, and due correction of the original statement, we may get something at last set down, as harmoniously believed by such and such known artists. If nothing can thus be determined, at least the manner and variety of dissent will show whether it is owing to the nature of the subject, or to the impossibility, under present circumstances, that different persons should approach it from similar points of view; and the inquiry, whatever its immediate issue, cannot be ultimately fruitless.

Chapter I. ⁶⁴

31. Our knowledge of human labor, if intimate enough, will, I think, mass it for the most part into two kinds—mining and molding; the labor that seeks for things, and the labor that shapes them. Of these the last should be always orderly, for we ought to have some conception of the whole of what we have to make before we try to make any part of it; but the labor of seeking must be often methodless, following the veins of the mine as they branch, or trying for them where they are broken. And the mine, which we would now open into the souls of men, as they govern the mysteries of their handicrafts, being rent into many dark and divided ways, it is not possible to map our work beforehand, or resolve on its directions. We will not attempt to bind ourselves to any methodical treatment of our subject, but will get at the truths of it here and there, as they seem extricable; only, though we cannot know to what depth we may have to dig, let us know clearly what we are digging for. We desire to find by what rule some Art is called good, and other Art bad: we desire to find the conditions of character in the artist which are essentially connected with the goodness of his work: we desire to find what are the methods of practice which form this character or corrupt it; and finally, how the formation or corruption of this character is connected with the general prosperity of nations.

32. And all this we want to learn practically: not for mere pleasant speculation on things that have been; but for instant direction of those that are yet to be. My first object is to get at some fixed principles for the teaching of Art to our youth; and I am about to ask, of all who may be able to give me a serviceable answer, and with and for all who are anxious for such answer, what arts should be generally taught to the English boy and girl,—by what methods,—and to what ends? How well, or how imperfectly, our youth of the higher classes should be disciplined in the practice of music and painting?—how far, among the lower classes, exercise in certain mechanical arts might become a part of their school life?—how far, in the adult life of this nation, the Fine Arts may advisably supersede or regulate the mechanical Arts? Plain questions these, enough; clearly also important ones; and, as clearly, boundless ones—mountainous—infinite in contents—only to be mined into in a scrambling manner by poor inquirers, as their present tools and sight may serve.

33. I have often been accused of dogmatism, and confess to the holding strong opinions on some matters; but I tell the reader in sincerity, and entreat him in sincerity to believe, that I do not think myself able to dictate anything positive respecting questions of this magnitude. The one thing I am sure of is, the need of some form of dictation; or, where that is as yet impossible, at least of consistent experiment, for the just solution of doubts which present themselves every day in more significant and more impatient temper of interrogation.

Here is one, for instance, lying at the base of all the rest—namely, what may be the real dignity of mechanical Art itself? I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown iron-stone out of the ground, and forge it into That! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile—a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! What would the men who thought out this—who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfill this task to the utmost of their will—feel or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of water-color, which I cannot manage, into an imperfect shadow of something else—mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them?

34. But as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is sure to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves me shuddering in real physical pain for some half minute following; and assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse, who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by stokers' fingers; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education. Then it cannot but occur to me to inquire how far this modern "pneuma," Steam, may be connected with other pneumatic powers talked of in that old religious literature, of which we fight so fiercely to keep the letters bright, and the working valves, so to speak, in good order (while we let the steam of it all carefully off into the cold condenser), what connection, I say, this modern "spiritus," in its valve-directed inspiration, has with that more ancient spiritus, or warm breath, which people used to think they might be "born of." Whether, in fine, there be any such thing as an entirely human Art, with spiritual motive power, and signal as of human voice, distinct inherently from this mechanical Art, with its mechanical motive force, and signal of vulture voice. For after all, this shrieking thing, whatever the fine make of it may be, can but pull or push, and do oxen's work in an impetuous manner. That proud king of Assyria, who lost his reason, and ate oxen's food, would he have much more cause for pride, if he had been allowed to spend his reason in doing oxen's work?

35. These things, then, I would fain consult about, and plead with the reader for his patience in council, even while we begin with the simplest practical matters; for raveled briers of thought entangle our feet, even at our first step. We would teach a boy to draw. Well, what shall he draw?—Gods, or men, or beasts, or clouds, or leaves, or iron cylinders? Are there any gods to be drawn? any men or women worth drawing, or only worth caricaturing? What are the æsthetic laws respecting iron cylinders; and would Titian have liked them rusty, or fresh cleaned with oil and rag, to fill the place once lightened by St. George's armor? How can we begin the smallest practical business, unless we get first some whisper of answer to such questions? We may tell a boy to draw a straight line straight, and a crooked one crooked; but what else?

And it renders the dilemma, or multilemma, more embarrassing, that whatever teaching is to be had from the founders and masters of art is quite unpractical. The first source from which we should naturally seek for guidance would, of course, be the sayings of great workmen; but a sorrowful perception presently dawns on us that the great workmen have nothing to say. They are silent, absolutely in proportion to their creative power. The contributions to our practical knowledge of the principles of Art, furnished by the true captains of its hosts, may, I think, be arithmetically summed by the O of Giotto: the inferior teachers become didactic in the degree of their inferiority; and those who can do nothing have always much to advise.

36. This however, observe, is only true of advice direct. You never, I grieve to say, get from the great men a plain answer to a plain question; still less can you entangle them in any agreeable gossip, out of which something might unawares be picked up. But of enigmatical teaching, broken signs and sullen mutterings, of which you can understand nothing, and may make anything;—of confused discourse in the work itself, about the work, as in Dürer's Melancolia;—and of discourse not merely confused, but apparently unreasonable and ridiculous, about all manner of things except the work,—the great Egyptian and Greek artists give us much: from which, however, all that by utmost industry may be gathered, comes briefly to this,—that they have no conception of what modern men of science call the "Conservation of forces," but deduce all the force they feel in themselves, and hope for in others, from certain fountains or centers of perpetually supplied strength, to which they give various names: as, for instance, these seven following, more specially:—

1. The Spirit of Light, moral and physical, by name the "Physician-Destroyer," bearing arrows in his hand, and a lyre; pre-eminently the destroyer of human pride, and the guide of human harmony. Physically, Lord of the Sun; and a mountain Spirit, because the sun seems first to rise and set upon hills.

2. The Spirit of helpful Darkness—of shade and rest. Night the Restorer.

3. The Spirit of Wisdom in Conduct, bearing, in sign of conquest over troublous and disturbing evil, the skin of the wild goat, and the head of the slain Spirit of physical storm. In her hand, a weaver's shuttle, or a spear.

4. The Spirit of Wisdom in Arrangement; called the Lord or Father of Truth: throned on a four-square cubit, with a measuring-rod in his hand, or a potter's wheel.

5. The Spirit of Wisdom in Adaptation; or of serviceable labor: the Master of human effort in its glow; and Lord of useful fire, moral and physical.

6. The Spirit, first of young or nascent grace, and then of fulfilled beauty: the wife of the Lord of Labor. I have taken the two lines in which Homer describes her girdle, for the motto of these essays: partly in memory of these outcast fancies of the great masters: and partly for the sake of a meaning which we shall find as we go on.

7. The Spirit of pure human life and gladness. Master of wholesome vital passion; and physically, Lord of the Vine.

37. From these ludicrous notions of motive force, inconsistent as they are with modern physiology and organic chemistry, we may, nevertheless, hereafter gather, in the details of their various expressions, something useful to us. But I grieve to say that when our provoking teachers descend from dreams about the doings of Gods to assertions respecting the deeds of Men, little beyond the blankest discouragement is to be had from them. Thus, they represent the ingenuity, and deceptive or imitative Arts of men, under the type of a Master who builds labyrinths, and makes images of living creatures, for evil purposes, or for none; and pleases himself and the people with idle jointing of toys, and filling of them with quicksilver motion; and brings his child to foolish, remediless catastrophe, in fancying his father's work as good, and strong, and fit to bear sunlight, as if it had been God's work. So, again, they represent the foresight and kindly zeal of men by a most rueful figure of one chained down to a rock by the brute force and bias and methodical hammer-stroke of the merely practical Arts, and by the merciless Necessities or Fates of present time; and so having his very heart torn piece by piece out of him by a vulturous hunger and sorrow, respecting things he cannot reach, nor prevent, nor achieve. So, again, they describe the sentiment and pure soul-power of Man, as moving the very rocks and trees, and giving them life, by its sympathy with them; but losing its own best-beloved thing by mere venomous accident: and afterwards going down to hell for it, in vain; being impatient and unwise, though full of gentleness; and, in the issue, after as vainly trying to teach this gentleness to others, and to guide them out of their lower passions to sunlight of true healing Life, it drives the sensual heart of them, and the gods that govern it, into mere and pure frenzy of resolved rage, and gets torn to pieces by them, and ended; only the nightingale staying by its grave to sing. All which appearing to be anything rather than helpful or encouraging instruction for beginners, we shall, for the present, I think, do well to desire these enigmatical teachers to put up their pipes and be gone; and betaking ourselves in the humblest manner to intelligible business, at least set down some definite matter for decision, to be made a first stepping-stone at the shore of this brook of despond and difficulty.