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Beside Still Waters, a fiction by Arthur C. Benson |
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Chapter 34. Pictorial Art--Hand And Soul--Turner... |
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_ Chapter XXXIV. Pictorial Art--Hand and Soul--Turner--Raphael--Secrets of Art Hugh's professional life had given him little opportunity for indulging artistic tastes. He had been very fond as a boy of sketching, especially architectural subjects; it had trained his powers of observation; but there had come a time when, as a young man, he had deliberately laid his sketching aside. The idea in his mind had been that if one desired to excel in any form of artistic expression, one must devote all one's artistic faculty to that. He had been conscious of a certain diffuseness of taste, a love of music and a love of pictorial art being both strong factors in his mind; but he was also dimly conscious that he matured slowly; that he had none of the facile grasp of difficult things which characterised some of his more able companions; his progress was always slow, and he arrived at mastery through a long wrestling with inaccuracy and half knowledge; his perception was quick, but his grasp feeble, while his capacity for forgetting and losing his hold on things was great. He therefore made a deliberate choice in the matter, guided, he now felt, rather by a kind of intuition than by any very definite principle, and determined to restrict his artistic energies to a single form of art. His father, he remembered, had remonstrated with him, and had said that by giving up sketching he was sacrificing a great resource of recreation and amusement. He had no answer at the time to the criticism, but it seemed to him that he knew his own mind in the matter, and that as he could not hope, he thought, to attain to any real excellence in draughtsmanship, it had better be cut off altogether, and his energies, such as they were--he knew that the spring was not a copious one--confined to a more definite channel. As life went on, and as time became more and more precious, as his literary work more and more absorbed him, he drew away from the artistic region; in his early years of manhood he had travelled a good deal, and the seeing of pictures had always been part of the programme; but his work became heavier, and the holidays had tended more and more to be spent in some quiet English retreat, where he could satisfy his delight in nature, and re-read some of the old beloved books. A certain physical indolence was also a factor, an indolence which made wandering in a picture-gallery always rather a penance; but he contrived at intervals to go and look at pictures in London in a leisurely way, both old and new; and he had one or two friends who possessed fine works of art, which could be enjoyed calmly and quietly. He was aware that he was losing some catholicity of mind by this--but he knew his limitations, and more and more became aware that his constitutional energy was not very great, and needed to be husbanded. He was quite aware that he was not what would be called a cultivated person, that his knowledge both of art and music was feeble and amateurish; but he saw, or thought he saw, that people of wide cultivation often sacrificed in intensity what they gained in width; and as he became gradually aware that the strongest faculty he possessed was the literary faculty, he saw that he could not hope to nourish it without a certain renunciation. He had no taste for becoming an expert or a connoisseur; he had not the slightest wish to instruct other people, or to arrive at a technical and professional knowledge of art. He was content to leave it to be a rare luxury, a thing which, when the opportunity and the mood harmonised, could open a door for him into a beautiful world of dreams. He was quite aware that he often liked what would be called the wrong things; but what he was on the look-out for in art was not technical perfection or finished skill, but a certain indefinable poetical suggestion, which pictures could give him, when they came before him in certain moods. The mood, indeed, mattered more than the picture; moreover it was one of the strangest things about pictorial art, that the work of certain artists seemed able to convey poetical suggestion, even when the poetical quality seemed to be absent from their own souls. He knew a certain great artist well, who seemed to Hugh to be an essentially materialistic man, fond of sport and society, of money, and the pleasures that money could buy, who spoke of poetical emotion as moonshine, and seemed frankly bored by any attempt at the mystical apprehension of beautiful things, who could yet produce, by means of his mastery of the craft, pictures full of the tenderest and loveliest emotion and poetry. Hugh tried hard to discern this quality in the man's soul, tried to believe that it was there, and that it was deliberately disguised by a pose of bluff unaffectedness. But he came to the conclusion that it was not there, and that the painter achieved his results only by being able to represent with incredible fidelity the things in nature that held the poetical quality. On the other hand he had a friend of real poetical genius, who was also an artist, but who could only produce the stiffest and hardest works of art, that had no quality about them except the quality of tiresome definiteness. This was a great mystery to Hugh; but it ended eventually, after a serious endeavour to appreciate what was approved by the general verdict to be of supreme artistic value, in making him resolve that he would just follow his own independent taste, and discern whatever quality of beauty he could, in such art as made an appeal to him. Thus he was not even an eclectic; he was a mere amateur; he treated art just as a possible vehicle of poetical suggestion, and allowed it to speak to him when and where it could and would. He had moreover a great suspicion of conventionality in taste. A man of accredited taste often seemed to him little more than a man who had the faculty of admiring what it was the fashion to admire. Hugh had been for a short time under the influence of Ruskin, and had tried sincerely to see the magnificence of Turner, and to loathe the artificiality of Claude Lorraine. But when he arrived at his more independent attitude, he found that there was much to admire in Claude; that exquisite golden atmosphere, suffusing a whole picture with an evening glow, enriching the lavish foreground, and touching into romantic beauty headland after headland, that ran out, covered with delicate woodland, into the tranquil lake; those ruinous temples with a quiet flight of birds about them; the mysterious figures of men emerging from the woods on the edges of the water, bent serenely on some simple business, had the magical charm; and then those faint mountains closing the horizon, all rounded with the golden haze of evening, seemed to hold, in their faintly indicated heights and folds, a delicate peace, a calm repose, as though glad just to be, just to wait in that reposeful hour for the quiet blessing of waning light, the sober content so richly shed abroad. It was not criticism, Hugh thought, to say that it was all impossibly combined, falsely conceived. It was not, perhaps, a transcript of any one place or one hour; but it had an inner truth for all that; it had the spirit of evening with its pleasant weariness, its gentle recollection, its waiting for repose; or it had again the freshness of the morning, the vital hope that makes it delightful to rise, to cast off sleep, to go abroad, making light of the toil and heat that the day is to bring. And then, in studying Turner, he learnt to see that, lying intermingled with all the power and nobility of much of his work, there was a displeasing extravagance, a violence, a faultiness of detail, an exaggeration that often ruined his pictures. Neither he nor Claude were true to life; but there was an insolence sometimes about Turner's variation from fact, which made him shudder. How he seemed sometimes, in his pictures of places familiar to Hugh--such, for instance, as the drawing of Malham Cove--to miss, by his heady violence, all the real, the essential charm of the place. Nature was not what Turner depicted it; and he did not even develop and heighten its beauty, but substituted for the real charm an almost grotesque personal mannerism. Turner's idea of nature seemed to Hugh often purely theatrical and melodramatic, wanting in restraint, in repose. The appeal of Turner seemed to him to be constantly an appeal to childish and unperceptive minds, that could not notice a thing unless it was forced upon them. Some of the earlier pictures indeed, such as that of the frost-bound lane, with the boy blowing on his fingers, and the horses nibbling at the stiff grass, with the cold light of the winter's dawn coming slowly up beyond the leafless hedge, seemed to him to be perfectly beautiful; but the Turner of the later period, the Turner so wildly upheld by Ruskin, seemed to Hugh to have lost sight of nature, in the pleasure of constructing extravagant and fantastic schemes of colour. The true art seemed to Hugh not to be the art that trumpets beauty aloud, and that drags a spectator roughly to admire; but the art that waits quietly for the sincere nature-lover, and gives a soft hint to which the soul of the spectator can add its own emotion. To Hugh it was much a matter of mood. He would go to a gallery of ancient or modern art, and find that there many pictures had no message or voice for him; and then some inconspicuous picture would suddenly appeal to him with a mysterious force--the pathetic glance of childish eyes, or an old face worn by toil and transfigured by some inner light of hopefulness; or a woodland scene, tree-trunks rising amid a copse; or the dark water of a sea-cave, lapping, translucent and gem-like, round rock ledges; or a reedy pool, with the chimneys of an old house rising among elms hard by: in a moment the mood would come upon him, and he would feel that a door had been opened for his spirit into a place of sweet imaginings, of wistful peace, bringing to him a hope of something that might assuredly be, some deep haven of God where the soul might float upon a golden tide. One day, for instance, two old line-engravings of Italian pictures which he had inherited, and which hung in his little library, gave him this sense; he had known them ever since he was a child, and they had never spoken to him before. Had they hung all these years patiently waiting for that moment? One was "The Betrothal of the Virgin," by Raphael, where the old bearded priest in his tiara, with his robes girt precisely about him, casts an inquiring look on the pair, as Joseph, a worn, majestic figure, puts the ring on the Virgin's finger. Some of it was hard and formal enough; the flowers on Joseph's rod might have been made of china; the slim figure of the disappointed suitor, breaking his staff, had an unpleasing trimness; and the companions of the Virgin were models of feeble serenity. But the great new octagonal temple in the background,--an empty place it seemed--for the open doors gave a glimpse of shadowy ranges--the shallow steps, the stone volutes, the low hills behind, with the towered villa--even the beggars begging of the richly dressed persons on the new-laid pavement--all these had a sudden appeal for him. The other picture was the "Communion of Jerome," by Domenichino--a stiff, conventional design enough. The cherubs hanging in air might have been made of wax or even metal--there was no aerial quality about them--they cumbered the place! But the wistful look of the old worn saint, kneeling so faintly, so wearily, the pure lines of the shrine, the waxlights, the stiff robes of the priest, the open arch showing an odd, clustered, castellated house, rising on its steep rocks among dark brushwood, with a glimmering pool below, and mysterious persons drawing near--it all had a tyrannical effect on Hugh's mind. Probably a conventional critic would have spoken approvingly of the Raphael and disdainfully enough of the Domenichino--but the point to Hugh was not in the art revealed, but in the association, the remoteness, the suggestiveness of the pictures. The faults of each were patent to him; but something in that moment shone through; one looked through a half-open door, and saw some beautiful mystery being celebrated within, something that one could not explain or analyse, but which was none the less certainly there. Thus art became to Hugh, like nature, an echoing world that lay all about him, which could suddenly become all alive with constraining desire and joy. There was a scientific apprehension of both nature and art possible, no doubt. The very science that lay behind art had a suggestiveness of its own; that again had its own times for appeal. But Hugh felt that here again he must realise his limitations, and that life, to be real, must be a constant resisting of diffuse wanderings in knowledge and perception. That his own medium was the medium of words, and that his task was to discern their colour and weight, their significance, whether alone or in combination; that he must be able to upraise the jointed fabric of thought, like a framework of slim rods of firm metal, not meant to be seen or even realised by the reader, but which, when draped with the rich tapestry of words, would lend shape and strong coherence to the whole. All other art must simply minister light and fragrance; it might be studied, indeed, but easily and superficially; not that it would not be better, perhaps, if he could have approached other arts with penetrating insight; but he felt that for himself, with his limitations, his feebleness, his faltering grasp, nothing must come between him and his literary preoccupation. The other arts might feed his soul indeed, but he could not serve them. He found that he took great delight, and was always at ease, in the company of musicians and painters, because he could understand and interpret their point of view, their attitude of mind; while on the other hand he could approach them with the humility, the perceptive humility, which the artist desires as an atmosphere; he did not know enough about the technical points to controvert and differ, while he knew enough to feel inspired by the tense feeling of secrets, understood and practised, which were yet hidden from ordinary eyes. Art, then, and music became for Hugh as a sweet and remote illustration of his own consecration--and indeed there were moments when, wearied by his own strenuous toil, ploughing sadly through the dreary sands of labour, that must close at intervals round the feet of the serious craftsman, the sight of a picture hanging perhaps in a room full of cheerful company, or the sound of music--a few bars rippling from an open window, or stealing in faint gusts from the buttressed window of a church lighted for evensong--came to him like a sacred cup, carried in the hovering hands of a ministering angel, revealing to him the delicate hidden joy of beauty of which he had almost lost sight in his painful hurrying to some appointed end. _Hinc lucem et pocula sacra_, said the old motto of Cambridge. The light was clear enough, and led him forward, as it led the pilgrim of old, shining across a very wide field. But the holy refreshment that was tendered him upon the way, this was the blessed gift of those other arts which he dared not to follow, but which he knew held within themselves secrets as dear as the art which in his loneliness he pursued. _ |
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