now in all the impunity of conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles
and sentimentalisms, performing great things, teaching good things,
you are set up as one of the lights of the
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world:—Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out of your hand,
and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a face? “Off, off
ye lendings!” O God! how much wiser, as well as better, not to study
how to seem, but how to be! How much wiser and better, not to have
to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand
unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine;
not to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who
“shall pluck out the heart of your mystery,” and shall anatomise you,
and deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard of morals and
manners in Queen Victoria’s reign!
In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative passages
on character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies
in the novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No
woman resents his Rebecca—inimitable Becky!—no woman but feels
and acknowledges with a shiver the completeness of that wonderful
and finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish
inane Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the
author’s own words when speaking of ‘Tom Jones:’—“I can’t say that
I think Amelia a virtuous character. I can’t say but I think Mr.
Thackeray’s evident liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that
the great humourist’s moral sense was blunted by his life, and that
here in art and
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ethics there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we
are to admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable.”
Laura, in ‘Pendennis,’ is a yet more fatal mistake. She is drawn with
every generous feeling, every good gift. We do not complain that she
loves that poor creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her
childhood. She grew up with that love in her heart; it came between
her and the perception of his faults; it is a necessity indivisible from
her nature. Hallowed, through its constancy, therein alone would lie
its best excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless to that
first affection; Laura, waked up to the appreciation of a far more
manly and noble nature, in love with Warrington, and then going back
to Pendennis, and marrying him! Such infirmity might be true of some
women, but not of such a woman as Laura; we resent the
inconsistency, the indelicacy of the portrait.
And then Lady Castlewood,—so evidently a favourite of the author,
what shall we say of her? The virtuous woman, par excellence, who
“never sins and never forgives,” who never resents, nor relents, nor
repents; the mother, who is the rival of her daughter; the mother, who
for years is the confidante of a man’s delirious passion for her own
child, and then consoles him by marrying him herself! O Mr.
Thackeray! this will never do! such women may
275
exist, but to hold them up as examples of excellence, and fit objects
of our best sympathies, is a fault, and proves a low standard in ethics
and in art. “When an author presents to us a heroine whom we are
called upon to admire, let him at least take care that she is
admirable.” If in these, and in some other instances, Thackeray has
given us cause of offence, in the lectures we may thank him for some
amends: he has shown us what he conceives true womanhood and
true manliness ought to be; so with this expression of gratitude, and a
far deeper debt of gratitude left unexpressed, I close his book, and
say, good night!
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Notes on Art.
96.
S
ometimes, in thoughtful moments, I am struck by those beautiful
analogies between things apparently dissimilar—those awful
approximations between things apparently far asunder—which many
people would call fanciful and imaginary, but they seem to bring all
God’s creation, spiritual and material, into one comprehensive whole;
they give me, thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that over
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whelming unity which we call the universe, the multitudinous ONE.
Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art, as conceived by the
Greeks, and unsurpassed in its purity and beauty, lay in considering
well the characteristics which distinguish the human form from the
brute form; and then, in rendering the human form, the first aim was
to soften down, or, if possible, throw out wholly, those characteristics
which belong to the brute nature, or are common to the brute and the
man; and the next, to bring into prominence and even enlarge the
proportions of those manifestations of forms which distinguish
humanity; till, at last, the human merged into the divine, and the God
in look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.
Let us now suppose this broad principle which the Greeks applied to
form, ethically carried out, and made the basis of all education—the
training of men as a race. Suppose we started with the general axiom
that all propensities which we have in common with the lower animals
are to be kept subordinate, and so far as is consistent with the truth of
nature refined away; and that all the qualities which elevate, all the
aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are to be cultivated and
rendered more and more prominent, till at last the human being, in
faculties as well as form, approaches the God-like—I only say—
suppose?—
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—
Again: it has been said of natural philosophy (Zoology) that in order to
make any real progress in the science, as such, we must more and
more disregard differences, and more and more attend to the
obscured but essential conditions which are revealed in
resemblances, in the constant and similar relations of primitive
structure. Now if the same principle were carried out in theology, in
morals, in art, as well as in science, should we not come nearer to the
essential truth in all?
97.
“T
here is an instinctive sense of propriety and reality in every mind; and
it is not true, as some great authority has said, that in art we are
satisfied with contemplating the work without thinking of the artist. On
the contrary, the artist himself is one great object in the work. It is as
embodying the energies and excellences of the human mind, as
exhibiting the efforts of genius, as symbolising high feeling, that we
most value the creations of art; without design the representations of
art are merely fantastical, and without the thought of a design act
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ing upon fixed principles in accordance with a high standard of
goodness and truth, half the charm of design is lost.”
98.
“A
rt, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, is
the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is,
therefore, the power of humanising nature, of infusing the thoughts
and passions of man into everything which is the object of his
contemplation. Colour, form, motion, sound, are the elements which it
combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea.”
This is Coleridge’s definition:—Art then is nature, humanised; and in
proportion as humanity is elevated by the interfusion into our life of
noble aims and pure affections will art be spiritualised and moralised.
99.
I
f faith has elevated art, superstition has everywhere debased it.
280
100.
Goethe observes that there is no patriotic art and no patriotic
science—that both are universal.
There is, however, national art, but not national science: we say
“national art,” “natural science.”
101.
“V
erse is in itself music, and the natural symbol of that union of passion
with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry
as contradistinguished from history civil or natural.”— Coleridge.
In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse is to prose—a more
harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.
281
102.
S
ubjects and representations in art not elevated nor interesting in
themselves, become instructive and interesting to higher minds from
the manner in which they have been treated; perhaps because they
have passed through the medium of a higher mind in taking form.
This is one reason, though we are not always conscious of it, that the
Dutch pictures of common and vulgar life give us a pleasure apart
from their wonderful finish and truth of detail. In the mind of the artist
there must have been the power to throw himself into a sphere above
what he represents. Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been
something far better than a sot; Ostade something higher than a
boor; though the habits of both led them into companionship with sots
and boors. In the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a depth
of feeling and observation which remind me of the humour of
Goldsmith; and Teniers, we know, was in his habits a refined
gentleman; the brilliant elegance of his pencil contrasting with the
grotesque vulgarity of his subjects. To a thinking mind, some of these
Dutch pictures of character are full of material for thought, pathetic
even where least sympathetic: no doubt, because of a latent
sympathy with the artist, apart from his subject.
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103.
C
oleridge says,—“Every human feeling is greater and larger than the
exciting cause.” (A philosophical way of putting Rochefoucauld’s
neatly expressed apophthegm: “Nous ne sommes jamais ni si
heureux ni si malheureux que nous l’imaginons.”) “A proof,” he
proceeds, “that man is designed for a higher state of existence; and
this is deeply implied in music, in which there is always something
more and beyond the immediate expression.”
But not music only, every production of art ought to excite emotions
greater and thoughts larger than itself. Thoughts and emotions which
never perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were anticipated,
never were intended by him—may be strongly suggested by his work.
This is an important part of the morals of art, which we must never
lose sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit, but for good and
for evil.
Goethe (in the Dichtung und Wahrheit) describes the reception of
Marie Antoinette at Strasbourg, where she passed the frontier to enter
her new kingdom. She was then a lovely girl of sixteen. He
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relates that on visiting before her arrival the reception room on the
bridge over the Rhine, where her German attendants were to deliver
her into the hands of the French authorities, he found the walls hung
with tapestries representing the ominous story of Jason and Medea—
of all the marriages on record the most fearful, the most tragic in its
consequences. “What!” he exclaims, his poetical imagination struck
with the want of moral harmony, “was there among these French
architects and decorators no man who could perceive that pictures
represent things,—that they have a meaning in themselves,—that
they can impress sense and feeling,—that they can awaken
presentiments of good or evil?” But, as he tells us, his exclamations
of horror were met by the mockery of his French companions, who
assured him that it was not everybody’s concern to look for
significance in pictures.
These self-same tapestries of the story of Jason and Medea were
after the Restoration presented by Louis XVIII. to George IV., and at
present they line the walls of the Ball-room in Windsor Castle. We
might repeat, with some reason, the question of Goethe; for if
pictures have a significance, and speak to the imagination, what has
the tragedy of Jason and Medea to do in a ball-room?
Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that works
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of art speak to the feelings and the conscience, and can awaken
associations tending to good and evil, by some strange inconsistency
places art and artists out of the sphere of morals. He speaks
somewhere with contempt and ridicule of those who take their
conscience and their morality with them to an opera or a picture
gallery. Yet surely he is wrong. Why should we not? Are our
conscience and our morals like articles of dress which we can take off
and put on again as we fancy it convenient or expedient?—shut up in
a drawer and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or a gallery of
art? or are they not rather a part of ourselves—our very life—to
graduate the worth, to fix the standard of all that mingles with our life?
The idea that what we call taste in art has something quite distinctive
from conscience, is one cause that the popular notions concerning
the productions of art are abandoned to such confusion and
uncertainty; that simple people regard taste as something forensic,
something to be learned, as they would learn a language, and
mastered by a study of rules and a dictionary of epithets; and they
look up to a professor of taste, just as they would look up to a
professor of Greek or of Hebrew. Either they listen to judgments
lightly and confidently promulgated with a sort of puzzled faith and a
surrender of their own moral sense, which are pitiable;
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as if art also had its infallible church and its hierarchy of dictators!—or
they fly into the opposite extreme, and seeing themselves deceived
and misled, fall away into strange heresies. All from ignorance of a
few laws simple in their form, yet infinite in their application;— natural
laws we must call them, though here applied to art.
In my younger days I have known men conspicuous for their want of
elevated principle, and for their dissipated habits, held up as arbiters
and judges of art; but it was to them only another form of epicurism
and self-indulgence; and I have seen them led into such absurd and
fatal mistakes for want of the power to distinguish and to generalise,
that I have despised their judgment, and have come to the conclusion
that a really high standard of taste and a low standard of morals are
incompatible with each other.
104.
“T
he fact of the highest artistic genius having manifested itself in a
polytheistic age, and among a people whose moral views were
essentially degraded, has, we think, fostered the erroneous notion
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that the sphere of art has no connection with that of morality. The
Greeks, with penetrative insight, dilated the essential characteristics
of man’s organism as a vehicle of superior intelligence, while their
intense sympathy with physical beauty made them alive to its most
subtle manifestations; and reproducing their impressions through the
medium of art, they have given birth to models of the human form,
which reveal its highest possibilities, and the excellence of which
depends upon their being individual expressions of ideal truth. Thus,
too, in their descriptions of nature, instead of multiplying insignificant
details, they seized instinctively upon the characteristic features of
her varying aspects, and not unfrequently embodied a finished picture
in one comprehensive and harmonious word. In association with their
marvellous genius, however, we find a cruelty, a treachery, and a
licence which would be revolting if it were not for the historical interest
which attaches to every genuine record of a bygone age. Their low
moral standard cannot excite surprise when we consider the
debasing tendency of their worship, the objects of their adoration
being nothing more than their own degraded passions invested with
some of the attributes of deity. Now, among the modifications of
thought introduced by Christianity, there is perhaps none more
pregnant with important results than the harmony which it
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has established between religion and morality. The great law of right
and wrong has acquired a sacred character, when viewed as an
expression of the divine will; it takes its rank among the eternal
verities, and to ignore it in our delineations of life, or to represent sin
otherwise than as treason against the supreme ruler, is to retain in
modern civilisation one of the degrading elements of heathenism.
Conscience is as great a fact of our inner life as the sense of beauty,
and the harmonious action of both these instinctive principles is
essential to the highest enjoyment of art, for any internal dissonance
disturbs the repose of the mind, and thereby shatters the image
mirrored in its depths.”— A. S.
105.
“M
ais vous autres artistes, vous ne considerez pour la plupart dans les
œuvres que la beauté ou la singularité de l’exécution, sans vous
pénétrer de l’idée dont cet œuvre est la forme; ainsi votre intelligence
adore souvent l’expression d’un sentiment que votre cœur
repousserait s’il en avait la conscience.”— George Sand.
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106.
L
avater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet
bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only
the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual, the shape
of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping
the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually
characteristic.
What then shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted the hands of his
men and women, not from individual nature, but from a model hand—
his own very often?—and every one who considers for a moment will
see in Van Dyck’s portraits, that, however well painted and elegant
the hands, they in very few instances harmonise with the
personalité;—that the position is often affected, and as if intended for
display,—the display of what is in itself a positive fault, and from
which some little knowledge of comparative physiology would have
saved him.
There are hands of various character; the hand to catch, and the
hand to hold; the hand to clasp, and
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the hand to grasp. The hand that has worked or could work, and the
hand that has never done anything but hold itself out to be kissed,
like that of Joanna of Arragon in Raphael’s picture.
Let any one look at the hands in Titian’s portrait of old Paul IV.:
though exquisitely modelled, they have an expression which reminds
us of claws; they belong to the face of that grasping old man, and
could belong to no other.
107.
M
ozart and Chopin, though their genius was differently developed,
were alike in some things: in nothing more than this, that the artistic
element in both minds wholly dominated over the social and practical,
and that their art was the element in which they moved and lived,
through which they felt and thought. I doubt whether either of them
could have said, “D’abord je suis homme et puis je suis artiste;”
whereas this could have been said with truth by Mendelsohn and by
Litzst. In Mendelsohn the enormous creative power was modified by
the intellect
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and the conscience. Litzst has no creative power.
Liszt has thus drawn the character of Chopin:—“Rien n’était plus pur
et plus exalté en même temps que ses pensées; rien n’était plus
tenace, plus exclusif, et plus minutieusement dévoué que ses
affections. Mais cet être ne comprenait que ce qui était identique à
lui-même:—le reste n’existait pour lui que comme une sorte de rêve
fâcheux, auquel il essayait de se soustraire en vivant au milieu du
monde. Toujours perdu dans ses rêveries, la réalité lui deplaisait.
Enfant il ne pouvait toucher à un instrument tranchant sans se
blesser; homme il ne pouvait se trouver en face d’un homme différent
de lui, sans se heurter contre cette contradiction vivante.”
“Ce qui le préservait d’un antagonisme perpétuel c’était l’habitude
volontaire et bientôt invétérée de ne point voir, de ne pas entendre ce
qui lui deplaisait: en général sans toucher à ses affections
personelles, les êtres qui ne pensaient pas comme lui devenaient à
ses yeux comme des espèces de fantômes; et comme il était d’une
politesse charmante, on pouvait prendre pour une bienveillance
courtoise ce qui n’était chez lui qu’un froid dédain—une aversion
insurmontable.”
108.
T
he father of Mozart was a man of high and strict religious principle.
He had a conviction—in his
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case more truly founded than is usual—that he was the father of a
great, a surpassing genius, and consequently of a being unfortunate
in this, that he must be in advance of his age, exposed to error, to
envy, to injustice, to strife; and to do his duty to his son demanded
large faith and large firmness. But because he did estimate this
sacred trust as a duty to be discharged, not only with respect to his
gifted son, but to the God who had so endowed him; so, in spite of
many mistakes, the earnest straightforward endeavour to do right in
the parent seems to have saved Mozart’s moral life, and to have
given that completeness to the productions of his genius, which the
harmony of the moral and creative faculties alone can bestow.
“The modifying power of circumstances on Mozart’s style, is an
interesting consideration. Whatever of striking, of new or beautiful he
met with in the works of others left its impression on him; and he
often reproduced these efforts, not servilely,