Art - 5. The Cestus Of Aglaia - Chapter 5

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_ ART V. THE CESTUS OF AGLAIA CHAPTER V.[71]

74. The work I have to do in this paper ought, rightly, to have been thrown into the form of an appendix to the last chapter; for it is no link of the cestus of Aglaia we have to examine, but one of the crests of canine passion in the cestus of Scylla. Nevertheless, the girdle of the Grace cannot be discerned in the full brightness of it, but by comparing it with the dark torment of that other; and (in what place or form matters little) the work has to be done.

"Rembrandt Van Rhyn"--it is said, in the last edition of a very valuable work[72] (for which, nevertheless, I could wish that greater lightness in the hand should be obtained by the publication of its information in one volume, and its criticism in another)--was "the most attractive and original of painters." It may be so; but there are attractions, and attractions. The sun attracts the planets--and a candle, night-moths; the one with perhaps somewhat of benefit to the planets;--but with what benefit the other to the moths, one would be glad to learn from those desert flies, of whom, one company having extinguished Mr. Kinglake's candle with their bodies, the remainder, "who had failed in obtaining this martyrdom, became suddenly serious, and clung despondingly to the canvas."

75. Also, there are originalities, and originalities. To invent a new thing, which is also a precious thing; to be struck by a divinely-guided Rod, and become a sudden fountain of life to thirsty multitudes--this is enviable. But to be distinct of men in an original Sin; elect for the initial letter of a Lie; the first apparent spot of an unknown plague; a Root of bitterness, and the first-born worm of a company, studying an original De-Composition,--this is perhaps not so enviable. And if we think of it, most human originality is apt to be of that kind. Goodness is one, and immortal; it may be received and communicated--not originated: but Evil is various and recurrent, and may be misbegotten in endlessly surprising ways.

76. But, that we may know better in what this originality consists, we find that our author, after expatiating on the vast area of the Pantheon, "illuminated solely by the small circular opening in the dome above," and on other similar conditions of luminous contraction, tells us that "to Rembrandt belongs the glory of having first embodied in Art, and perpetuated, these rare and beautiful effects of nature." Such effects are indeed rare in nature; but they are not rare, absolutely. The sky, with the sun in it, does not usually give the impression of being dimly lighted through a circular hole; but you may observe a very similar effect any day in your coal-cellar. The light is not Rembrandtesque on the current, or banks, of a river; but it is on those of a drain. Color is not Rembrandtesque, usually, in a clean house; but is presently obtainable of that quality in a dirty one. And without denying the pleasantness of the mode of progression which Mr. Hazlitt, perhaps too enthusiastically, describes as attainable in a background of Rembrandt's--"You stagger from one abyss of obscurity to another"--I cannot feel it an entirely glorious speciality to be distinguished, as Rembrandt was, from other great painters, chiefly by the liveliness of his darkness, and the dullness of his light. Glorious, or inglorious, the speciality itself is easily and accurately definable. It is the aim of the best painters to paint the noblest things they can see by sunlight. It was the aim of Rembrandt to paint the foulest things he could see--by rushlight.

77. By rushlight, observe: material and spiritual. As the sun for the outer world; so in the inner world of man, that which "[Greek: ereuna tameua koilias]"[73]--"the candle of God, searching the inmost parts." If that light within become but a more active kind of darkness;--if, abdicating the measuring reed of modesty for scepter, and ceasing to measure with it, we dip it in such unctuous and inflammable refuse as we can find, and make our soul's light into a _tallow_ candle, and thenceforward take our guttering, sputtering, ill-smelling illumination about with us, holding it out in fetid fingers--encumbered with its lurid warmth of fungous wick, and drip of stalactitic grease--that we may see, when another man would have seen, or dreamed he saw, the flight of a divine Virgin--only the lamplight upon the hair of a costermonger's ass;--that, having to paint the good Samaritan, we may see only in distance the back of the good Samaritan, and in nearness the back of the good Samaritan's dog;--that having to paint the Annunciation to the Shepherds, we may turn the announcement of peace to men, into an announcement of mere panic to beasts; and, in an unsightly firework of unsightlier angels, see, as we see always, the feet instead of the head, and the shame instead of the honor;--and finally concentrate and rest the sum of our fame, as Titian on the Assumption of a spirit, so we on the dissection of a carcass,--perhaps by such fatuous fire, the less we walk, and by such phosphoric glow, the less we shine, the better it may be for us, and for all who would follow us.

78. Do not think I deny the greatness of Rembrandt. In mere technical power (none of his eulogists know that power better than I, nor declare it in more distinct terms) he might, if he had been educated in a true school, have taken rank with the Venetians themselves. But that type of distinction between Titian's Assumption, and Rembrandt's Dissection, will represent for you with sufficient significance the manner of choice in all their work; only it should be associated with another characteristic example of the same opposition (which I have dwelt upon elsewhere) between Veronese and Rembrandt, in their conception of domestic life. Rembrandt's picture, at Dresden, of himself, with his wife sitting on his knee, a roasted peacock on the table, and a glass of champagne in his hand, is the best work I know of all he has left; and it marks his speciality with entire decision. It is, of course, a dim candlelight; and the choice of the sensual passions as the things specially and forever to be described and immortalized out of his own private life and love, is exactly that "painting the foulest thing by rushlight" which I have stated to be the enduring purpose of his mind. And you will find this hold in all minor treatment; and that to the uttermost: for as by your broken rushlight you see little, and only corners and points of things, and those very corners and points ill and distortedly; so, although Rembrandt knows the human face and hand, and never fails in these, when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in an animal.

79. His landscape, and foreground vegetation, I mean afterwards to examine in comparison with Duerer's; but the real caliber and nature of the man are best to be understood by comparing the puny, ill-drawn, terrorless, helpless, beggarly skeleton in his "Youth Surprised by Death," with the figure behind the tree in Duerer's plate (though it is quite one of Duerer's feeblest) of the same subject. Absolutely ignorant of all natural phenomena and law; absolutely careless of all lovely living form, or growth, or structure; able only to render with some approach to veracity, what alone he had looked at with some approach to attention,--the pawnbroker's festering heaps of old clothes, and caps, and shoes--Rembrandt's execution is one grand evasion, and his temper the grim contempt of a strong and sullen animal in its defiled den, for the humanity with which it is at war, for the flowers which it tramples, and the light which it fears.

80. Again, do not let it be thought that when I call his execution evasive, I ignore the difference between his touch, on brow or lip, and a common workman's; but the whole school of etching which he founded, (and of painting, so far as it differs from Venetian work) is inherently loose and experimental. Etching is the very refuge and mask of sentimental uncertainty, and of vigorous ignorance. If you know anything clearly, and have a firm hand, depend upon it, you will draw it clearly; you will not care to hide it among scratches and burrs. And herein is the first grand distinction between etching and engraving--that in the etching needle you have an almost irresistible temptation to a wanton speed. There is, however, no real necessity for such a distinction; an etched line may have been just as steadily drawn, and seriously meant, as an engraved one; and for the moment, waiving consideration of this distinction, and opposing Rembrandt's work, considered merely as work of the black line, to Holbein's and Duerer's, as work of the black line, I assert Rembrandt's to be inherently _evasive_. You cannot unite his manner with theirs; choice between them is sternly put to you, when first you touch the steel. Suppose, for instance, you have to engrave, or etch, or draw with pen and ink, a single head, and that the head is to be approximately half an inch in height more or less (there is a reason for assigning this condition respecting size, which we will examine in due time): you have it in your power to do it in one of two ways. You may lay down some twenty or thirty entirely firm and visible lines, of which every one shall be absolutely right, and do the utmost a line can do. By their curvature they shall render contour; by their thickness, shade; by their place and form, every truth of expression, and every condition of design. The head of the soldier drawing his sword, in Duerer's "Cannon," is about half an inch high, supposing the brow to be seen. The chin is drawn with three lines, the lower lip with two, the upper, including the shadow from the nose, with five. Three separate the cheek from the chin, giving the principal points of character. Six lines draw the cheek, and its incised traces of care; four are given to each of the eyes; one, with the outline, to the nose; three to the frown of the forehead. None of these touches could anywhere be altered--none removed, without instantly visible harm; and their result is a head as perfect in character as a portrait by Reynolds.

81. You may either do this--which, if you can, it will generally be very advisable to do--or, on the other hand, you may cover the face with innumerable scratches, and let your hand play with wanton freedom, until the graceful scrabble concentrates itself into shade. You may soften--efface--retouch--rebite--dot, and hatch, and redefine. If you are a great master, you will soon get your character, and probably keep it (Rembrandt often gets it at first, nearly as securely as Duerer); but the design of it will be necessarily seen through loose work, and modified by accident (as you think) fortunate. The accidents which occur to a practiced hand are always at first pleasing--the details which can be hinted, however falsely, through the gathering mystery, are always seducing. You will find yourself gradually dwelling more and more on little meannesses of form and texture, and lusters of surface: on cracks of skin, and films of fur and plume. You will lose your way, and then see two ways, and then many ways, and try to walk a little distance on all of them in turn, and so, back again. You will find yourself thinking of colors, and vexed because you cannot imitate them; next, struggling to render distances by indecision, which you cannot by tone. Presently you will be contending with finished pictures; laboring at the etching, as if it were a painting. You will leave off, after a whole day's work (after many days' work if you choose to give them), still unsatisfied. For final result--if you are as great as Rembrandt--you will have most likely a heavy, black, cloudy stain, with less character in it than the first ten lines had. If you are not as great as Rembrandt, you will have a stain by no means cloudy; but sandy and broken,--instead of a face, a speckled phantom of a face, patched, blotched, discomfited in every texture and form--ugly, assuredly; dull, probably; an unmanageable and manifold failure ill concealed by momentary, accidental, undelightful, ignoble success.

Undelightful; note this especially, for it is the peculiar character of etching that it cannot render beauty. You may hatch and scratch your way to picturesqueness or to deformity--never to beauty. You can etch an old woman, or an ill-conditioned fellow. But you cannot etch a girl--nor, unless in his old age, or with very partial rendering of him, a gentleman.

82. And thus, as farther belonging to, and partly causative of, their choice of means, there is always a tendency in etchers to fasten on unlovely objects; and the whole scheme of modern rapid work of this kind is connected with a peculiar gloom which results from the confinement of men, partially informed, and wholly untrained, in the midst of foul and vicious cities. A sensitive and imaginative youth, early driven to get his living by his art, has to lodge, we will say, somewhere in the by-streets of Paris, and is left there, tutorless, to his own devices. Suppose him also vicious or reckless, and there need be no talk of his work farther; he will certainly do nothing in a Duereresque manner. But suppose him self-denying, virtuous, full of gift and power--what are the elements of living study within his reach? All supreme beauty is confined to the higher salons. There are pretty faces in the streets, but no stateliness nor splendor of humanity; all pathos and grandeur is in suffering; no purity of nature is accessible, but only a terrible picturesqueness, mixed with ghastly, with ludicrous, with base concomitants. Huge walls and roofs, dark on the sunset sky, but plastered with advertisement bills, monstrous-figured, seen farther than ever Parthenon shaft, or spire of Sainte Chapelle. Interminable lines of massy streets, wearisome with repetition of commonest design, and degraded by their gilded shops, wide-fuming, flaunting, glittering, with apparatus of eating or of dress. Splendor of palace-flank and goodly quay, insulted by floating cumber of barge and bath, trivial, grotesque, indecent, as cleansing vessels in a royal reception room. Solemn avenues of blossomed trees, shading puppet-show and baby-play; glades of wild-wood, long withdrawn, purple with faded shadows of blood; sweet windings and reaches of river far among the brown vines and white orchards, checked here by the Ile Notre Dame, to receive their nightly sacrifice, and after playing with it among their eddies, to give it up again, in those quiet shapes that lie on the sloped slate tables of the square-built Temple of the Death-Sibyl, who presides here over spray of Seine, as yonder at Tiber over spray of Anio. Sibylline, indeed, in her secrecy, and her sealing of destinies, by the baptism of the quick water-drops which fall on each fading face, unrecognized, nameless in _this_ Baptism forever. Wreathed thus throughout, that Paris town, with beauty, and with unseemly sin, unseemlier death, as a fiend-city with fair eyes; forever letting fall her silken raiment so far as that one may "behold her bosom and half her side." Under whose whispered teaching, and substitution of "Contes Drolatiques" for the tales of the wood fairy, her children of Imagination will do, what Gerome and Gustave Dore are doing, and her whole world of lesser Art will sink into shadows of the street and of the boudoir-curtain, wherein the etching point may disport itself with freedom enough.[74]

83. Nor are we slack in our companionship in these courses. Our imagination is slower and clumsier than the French--rarer also, by far, in the average English mind. The only man of power equal to Dore's whom we have had lately among us, was William Blake, whose temper fortunately took another turn. But in the calamity and vulgarity of daily circumstance, in the horror of our streets, in the discordance of our thoughts, in the laborious looseness and ostentatious cleverness of our work, we are alike. And to French faults we add a stupidity of our own; for which, so far as I may in modesty take blame for anything, as resulting from my own teaching, I am more answerable than most men. Having spoken earnestly against painting without thinking, I now find our exhibitions decorated with works of students who think without painting; and our books illustrated by scratched wood-cuts, representing very ordinary people, who are presumed to be interesting in the picture, because the text tells a story about them. Of this least lively form of modern sensational work, however, I shall have to speak on other grounds; meantime, I am concerned only with its manner; its incontinence of line and method, associated with the slightness of its real thought, and morbid acuteness of irregular sensation; ungoverned all, and one of the external and slight phases of that beautiful Liberty which we are proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and shall presently, I suppose, when we have had enough of it here, proclaim also to the stars, with invitation to them _out_ of their courses.

84. "But you asked us for 'free-heart' outlines, and told us not to be slaves, only thirty days ago."[75]

Inconsistent that I am! so I did. But as there are attractions, and attractions; originalities, and originalities, there are liberties, and liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free, I think. Lost, yonder, amidst bankless, boundless marsh--soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless, among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime--it is free also. You may choose which liberty you will, and restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty, which men are now glorifying,--and of its opposite continence--which is the clasp and [Greek: chrusee perone] of Aglaia's cestus--we will try to find out something in next chapter.[76]

FOOTNOTES:

[71] _Art Journal_, vol. iv., pp. 177-8. June 1865.--ED.

[72] Wornum's "Epochs of Painting." I have continual occasion to quarrel with my friend on these matters of critical question; but I have deep respect for his earnest and patient research, and we remain friends--on the condition that I am to learn much from him, and he (though it may be questionable whose fault that is) nothing from me.

[73] Prov. xx, 27.

[74] As I was preparing these sheets for press, I chanced on a passage in a novel of Champfleury's, in which one young student is encouraging another in his contest with these and other such evils;--the evils are in this passage accepted as necessities; the inevitable deadliness of the element is not seen, as it can hardly be except by those who live out of it. The encouragement, on such view, is good and right; the connection of the young etcher's power with his poverty is curiously illustrative of the statements in the text, and the whole passage, though long, is well worth such space as it will ask here, in our small print.

"Cependant," dit Thomas, "on a vu des peintres de talent qui etaient partis de Paris apres avoir expose de bons tableaux et qui s'en revenaient classiquement ennuyeux. C'est done la faute de l'enseignement de l'Academie."

"Bah!" dit Gerard, "rien n'arrete le developpement d'un homme puisqu'il comprend l'art, pourquoi ne fait-il pas d'art?"

"Parce qu'il gagne a peu pres sa vie en faisant du commerce."

"On dirait que tu ne veux pas me comprendre, toi qui as justement passe par la. Comment faisais-tu quand tu etais compositeur d'une imprimerie?"

"Le soir," dit Thomas, "et le matin en hiver, a partir de quatre heures, je faisais des etudes a la lampe pendant deux heures, jusqu'au moment ou j'allais a l'atelier."

"Et tu ne vivais pas de la peinture?"

"Je ne gagnais pas un sou."

"Bon!" dit Gerard; "tu vois bien que tu faisais du commerce en dehors de l'art et que cependant tu etudiais. Quand tu es sorti de l'imprimerie comment as-tu vecu?"

"Je faisais cinq ou six petites aquarelles par jour, que je vendais, sous les arcades de l'Institut, six sous piece."

"Et tu en vivais; c'est encore du commerce. Tu vois done que ni l'imprimerie, ni les petits dessins, a cinq sous, ni la privation, ni la misere ne t'ont empeche d'arriver."

"Je ne suis pas arrive."

"N'importe, tu arriveras certainement. . . . Si tu veux d'autres exemples qui prouvent que la misere et les autres pieges tendus sous nos pas ne doivent rien arreter, tu te rappelles bien ce pauvre garcon dont vous admiriez les eaux-fortes, que vous mettiez aussi haut que Rembrandt, et qui aurait ete lion, disiez-vous, s'il n'avait tant souffert de la faim. Qu'a-t-il fait le jour ou il lui est tombe un petit heritage du ciel?"

"Il est vrai," dit Thomas, embarrasse; "qu'il a perdu tout son sentiment."

"Ce n'etait pas cependant une de ces grosses fortunes qui tuent un homme, qui le rendent lourd, fier et insolent: il avait juste de quoi vivre, six cents francs de rentes, une fortune pour lui, qui vivait avec cinq francs par mois. Il a continue a travailler; mais ses eaux-fortes n'etaient plus supportables; tandis qu'avant, il vivait avec un morceau de pain et des legumes; alors il avait du talent. Cela, Thomas, doit te prouver que ni les mauvais enseignements, ni les influences, ni la misere, ni la faim, ni la maladie, ne peuvent corrompre une nature bien douee. Elle souffre; mais trouve moi un grand artiste qui n'ait pas souffert. Il n'y a pas un seul homme de denie heureux depuis que l'humanite existe."

"J'ai envie," dit Thomas, "de te faire cadeau d'une jolie cravate."

"Pourquoi?" dit Gerard.

"Parce que tu as bien parle."

[75] See _ante_, p. 343, Sec. 73.--ED.

[76] Chapter VI., which is here omitted, having been already reprinted in _The Queen of the Air_ (Sec.Sec. 142-159), together with the last paragraph (somewhat altered) of the present chapter. After the publication of Chapter VI. the essays were discontinued until January 1866.--ED.

 
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