The Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories and Fantasies by Mrs. Jameson - HTML preview

is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste

may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more

and more.

140.

A

rtists are interesting to me as men. Their work, as the product of

mind, should lead us to a knowledge of their own being; else, as I

have often said and written, our admiration of art is a species of

atheism. To forget the soul in its highest manifestation is like

forgetting God in his creation.

141.

“L

es images peints du corps humain, dans les figures où domine par

trop le savoir anatomique, en révèlant trop clairement à l’homme les

secrets de sa

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structure, lui en découvrent aussi par trop ce qu’on pourrait appeler le

point de vue matériel, ou, si l’on veut, animal.”

This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have sometimes thought that

his very materialism, so grand, and so peculiar in character, may

have arisen out of his profound religious feeling, his stern morality, his

lofty conceptions of our mortal, as well as immortal destinies. He

appears to have beheld the human form only in a pure and sublime

point of view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation, fearfully

and wondrously constructed, for the spirit of man,—

“The outward shape,

And unpolluted temple of the

mind.”

This is the reason that Michal-Angelo’s materialism affects us so

differently from that of Rubens. In the first, the predominance of form

attains almost a moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of

flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness. Michal-Angelo

believed in the resurrection of THE BODY, emphatically; and in his

Last Judgment the dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty

to suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben’s picture of the same

subject (at Munich) the bodily presence of resuscitated life is

revolting, reminding us of the text of St. Paul—“Flesh and blood shall

not inherit the kingdom of God.” Both pictures are

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æsthetically false, but artistically miracles, and should thus be

considered and appreciated.

I have never looked on those awful figures in the Medici Chapel

without thinking what stupendous intellects must inhabit such

stupendous forms—terrible in their quietude; but they are

supernatural, rather than divine.

“Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir

fremde;

Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Zürnender, wie ist Dein Gott!”

John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beautiful essay “Michael-

Angelo, a Poet,” says truly that “Dante worshipped the philosophy of

religion, and Michael-Angelo adored the philosophy of art.” The

religion of the one and the art of the other were evolved in a strange

combination of mysticism, materialism, and moral grandeur. The two

men were congenial in character and in genius.

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A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE.

AND ON CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN HISTORY AND POETRY CONSIDERED

AS SUBJECTS OF MODERN ART.

1848.

I Should begin by admitting the position laid down by Frederick

Schlegel, that art and nature are not identical. “Men,” he says,

“traduce nature, who falsely give her the epithet of artistic;” for though

nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend all nature.

Nature, in her sources of pleasures and contemplation is infinite; and

art, as her reflection in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in

her powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of art and its

capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side.

Nature herself, the infinite,

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has circumscribed the bounds of finite art; the one is the divinity; the

other, the priestess. And if poetic art in the interpreting of nature

share in her infinitude, yet in representing nature through material,

form, and colour, she is,—oh, how limited!

If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of limitation as

determined as the musical scale, narrowest of all are the limitations of

sculpture, to which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place; and it

is in regard to sculpture, we find most frequently those mistakes

which arise from a want of knowledge of the true principles of art.

Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the limitations of the art

of sculpture as to the management of the material in giving form and

expression; its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection of the

complex and conventional; its bounded capabilities as to choice of

subject; must we also admit, with some of the most celebrated critics

of art, that there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek? And that

every deviation from pure Greek art must be regarded as a

depravation and perversion of the powers and subjects of sculpture? I

do not see that this follows.

It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the term of its

development. In so far as regards the

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principles of beauty and execution, it can go no farther. We may

stand and look at the relics of the Parthenon in awe and in despair;

we can do neither more, nor better. But we have not done with Greek

sculpture. What in it is purely ideal, is eternal; what is conventional, is

in accordance with the primal conditions of all imitative art. Therefore

though it may have reached the point at which development stops,

and though its capability of adaptation be limited by necessary laws;

still its all-beautiful, its immortal imagery is ever near us and around

us; still “doth the old feeling bring back the old names,” and with the

old names, the forms; still, in those old familiar forms we continue to

clothe all that is loveliest in visible nature; still, in all our associations

with Greek art—

“’Tis Jupiter who brings whate’er is great,

And Venus who brings every thing that’s

fair.”

That the supreme beauty of Greek art—that the majestic significance

of the classical myths—will ever be to the educated mind and eye as

things indifferent and worn out, I cannot believe.

But on the other hand it may well be doubted whether the

impersonation of the Greek allegories in the purest forms of Greek art

will ever give intense pleasure to the people, or ever speak home

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to the hearts of the men and women of these times. And this not from

the want of an innate taste and capacity in the minds of the masses—

not because ignorance has “frozen the genial current in their souls”—

not merely through a vulgar preference for mechanical imitation of

common and familiar forms; but from other causes not transient—not

accidental. A classical education is not now, as heretofore, the only

education given; and through an honest and intense sympathy with

the life of their own experience, and through a dislike to vicious

associations, though clothed in classical language and classical

forms, thence is it that the people have turned with a sense of relief

from gods and goddesses, Ledas and Antiopes, to shepherds and

shepherdesses, groups of Charity, and young ladies in the character

of Innocence,—harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the same

relation to classical sculpture that Watts’s hymns bear to Homer and

Sophocles.

Classical attainments of any kind are rare in our English sculptors;

therefore it is, that we find them often quite familiar with the

conventional treatment and outward forms of the usual subjects of

Greek art, without much knowledge of the original poetical

conception, its derivation, or its significance; and equally without any

real appreciation of the idea of which the form is but the vehicle.

Hence they do

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not seem to be aware how far this original conception is capable of

being varied, modified, animated as it were, with an infusion of fresh

life, without deviating from its essential truth, or transgressing those

narrow limits, within which all sculpture must be bounded in respect

to action and attitude. To express character within these limits is the

grand difficulty. We must remember that too much value given to the

head as the seat of mind, too much expression given to the features

as the exponents of character, must diminish the importance of those

parts of the form on which sculpture mainly depends for its effect on

the imagination. To convey the idea of a complete individuality in a

single figure, and under these restrictions, is the problem to be solved

by the sculptor who aims at originality, yet feels his aspirations

restrained by a fine taste and circumscribed by certain inevitable

associations.

It is therefore a question open to argument and involving

considerations of infinite delicacy and moment, in morals and in art,

whether the old Greek legends, endued as they are with an

imperishable vitality derived from their abstract youth, may not be

susceptible of a treatment in modern art analogous to that which they

have received in modern poetry, where the significant myth, or the

ideal character, without losing its classic grace, has been

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animated with a purer sentiment, and developed into a higher

expressiveness. Wordsworth’s Dion and Laodomia; Shelley’s version

of the Hymn to Mercury; Goethe’s Iphigenia; Lord Byron’s

Prometheus; Keats’s Hyperion; Barry Cornwall’s Proserpina; are

instances of what I mean in poetry. To do the same thing in art,

requires that our sculptors should stand in the same relation to

Phidias and Praxiteles, that our greatest poets bear to Homer or

Euripides; that they should be themselves poets and interpreters, not

mere translators and imitators.

Further, we all know, that there is often a necessity for conveying

abstract ideas in the forms of art. We have then recourse to allegory;

yet allegorical statues are generally cold and conventional and

addressed to the intellect merely. Now there are occasions, in which

an abstract quality or thought is far more impressively and intelligibly

conveyed by an impersonation than by a personification. I mean, that

Aristides might express the idea of justice; Penelope, that of conjugal

faith; Jonathan and David (or Pylades and Orestes), friendship;

Rizpah, devotion to the memory of the dead; Iphigenia, the voluntary

sacrifice for a good cause; and so of many others; and such figures

would have this advantage, that with the significance of a symbol they

would combine all the powers of a sympathetic reality.

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HELEN.

I

have never seen any statue of Helen, ancient or modern. Treated in

the right spirit, I can hardly conceive a diviner subject for a sculptor. It

would be a great mistake to represent the Greek Helen merely as a

beautiful and alluring woman. This, at least, is not the Homeric

conception of the character, which has a wonderful and fascinating

individuality, requiring the utmost delicacy and poetic feeling to

comprehend, and rare artistic skill to realise. The oft-told story of the

Grecian painter, who, to create a Helen, assembled some twenty of

the fairest models he could find, and took from each a limb or a

feature, in order to compose from their separate beauties an ideal of

perfection,—this story, if it were true, would only prove that even

Zeuxis could make a great mistake. Such a combination of

heterogeneous elements would be psychologically and artistically

false, and would never give us a Helen.

She has become the ideal type of a fatal, faithless, dissolute woman;

but according to the Greek myth,

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she is predestined,—at once the instrument and the victim of that fiat

of the gods which had long before decreed the destruction of Troy,

and her to be the cause. She must not only be supremely beautiful,—

“a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most divinely fair!”—but as

the offspring of Zeus (the title by which she is so often designated in

the Iliad), as the sister of the great twin demi-gods Castor and Pollux,

she should have the heroic lineaments proper to her Olympian

descent, touched with a pensive shade; for she laments the

calamities which her fatal charms have brought on all who have loved

her, all whom she has loved:—

“Ah! had I died ere to these shores I

fled,

False to my country and my nuptial

bed!”

She shrinks from the reproachful glances of those whom she has

injured; and yet, as it is finely intimated, wherever she appears her

resistless loveliness vanquishes every heart, and changes curses into

blessings. Priam treats her with paternal tenderness; Hector with a

sort of chivalrous respect.

“If some proud brother eyed me with

disdain,

Or scornful sister with her sweeping train,

Thy gentle accents softened all my pain;

Nor was it e’er my fate from thee to find

A deed ungentle or a word unkind.”

Helen, standing on the walls of Troy, and looking sadly over the battle

plain, where the heroes of her

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forfeited country, her kindred and her friends, are assembled to fight

and bleed for her sake, brings before us an image full of melancholy

sweetness as well as of consummate beauty. Another passage in

which she upbraids Venus as the cause of her fault—not as a mortal

might humbly expostulate with an immortal, but almost on terms of

equality, and even with bitterness,—is yet more characteristic. “For

what,” she asks, tauntingly, “am I reserved? To what new countries

am I destined to carry war and desolation? For what new lover must I

break a second vow? Let me go hence! and if Paris lament my

absence, let Venus console him, and for his sake ascend the skies no

more!” A regretful pathos should mingle with her conscious beauty

and her half-celestial dignity; and, to render her truly, her Greek

elegance should be combined with a deeper and more complex

sentiment than Greek art has usually sought to express.

I am speaking here of Homer’s Helen—the Helen of the Iliad, not the

Helen of the tragedians—not the Helen who for two thousand years

has merely served “to point a moral;” and an artist who should think

to realise the true Homeric conception, should beware of counterfeits,

for such are abroad.2

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There is a wild Greek myth that it was not the real Helen, but the

phantom of Helen, who fled with Paris, and who caused the

destruction of Troy; while Helen herself was leading, like Penelope, a

pattern life at Memphis. I must confess I prefer the proud humility, the

pathetic elegance of Homer’s Helen, to such jugglery.

It may flatter the pride of virtue, or it may move our religious

sympathies, to look on the forlorn abasement of the Magdalene as

the emblem of penitence; but there are associations connected with

Helen—“sad Helen,” as she calls herself, and as I conceive the

character,—which have a deep tragic significance; and surely there

are localities for which the impersonation of classical art would be

better fitted than that of sacred art.

I do not know of any existing statue of Helen. Nicetas mentions

among the relics of ancient art destroyed when Constantinople was

sacked by the Latins in 1202, a bronze statue of Helen, with long hair

flowing to the waist; and there is mention of an Etruscan figure of her,

with wings (expressive of her celestial origin, for the Etruscans gave

all their gods and demi-gods wings): in Müller I find these two only.

There are likewise busts; and the story of Helen, and the various

events of her life, occur perpetually on the antique gems, bas-reliefs,

and painted vases. The most frequent subject is her

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abduction by Paris. A beautiful subject for a bas-relief, and one I

believe not yet treated, would be Helen and Priam mourning over the

lifeless form of Hector; yet the difficulty of preserving the simple

sculptural treatment, and at the same time discriminating between

this and other similar funereal groups, would render it perhaps a

better subject for a picture, as admitting then of such scenery and

accessories as would at once determine the signification.

PENELOPE. ALCESTIS. LAODAMIA.

Statues of Penelope and Helen might stand in beautiful and

expressive contrast; but it is a contrast which no profane or prosaic

hand should attempt to realise. Penelope is all woman in her

tenderness and her truth; Helen, half a goddess in the midst of error

and remorse.

Nor is Penelope the only character which might stand as a type of

conjugal fidelity in contrasted companionship with Helen: Alcestis,

who died for

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her husband; or, better still, Laodamia, whose intense love and

longing recalled hers from the shades below, are susceptible of the

most beautiful statuesque treatment; only we must bear in mind that

the leading motif in the Alcestis is duty, in the Laodamia, love.

I remember a bas-relief in the Vatican, which represents Hermes

restoring Protesilaus to his mourning wife. The interview was granted

for three hours only; and when the hero was taken from her a second

time, she died on the threshhold of her palace. This is a frequent and

appropriate subject for sarcophagi and funereal vases. But there

exists, I believe, no single statue commemorative of the wife’s

passionate devotion.

The modern sculptor should penetrate his fancy with the sentiment of

Wordsworth’s Laodamia.

While the pen is in my hand I may remark that two of the stanzas in

the Laodamia have been altered, and, as it seems to me, not

improved, since the first edition. Originally the poem opened thus:

“With sacrifice, before the rising morn

Perform’d, my slaughter’d lord have I

required;

And in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn,

Him of the infernal Gods have I desired:

Celestial pity I again implore;

Restore him to my sight—great Jove,

restore!”

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Altered thus, and comparatively flat:—

“With sacrifice before the rising morn

Vows have I made, by fruitless hope

inspired;

And from the infernal Gods, mid shades

forlorn

Of night, my slaughtered lord have I

required:

Celestial pity I again implore;

Restore him to my sight—great Jove,

restore!”

In the early edition the last stanza but one stood thus:—

“Ah! judge her gently who so deeply loved!

Her who, in reason’s spite, yet without

crime,

Was in a trance of passion thus removed;

Delivered from the galling yoke of time,

And these frail elements,—to gather

flowers

Of blissful quiet ’mid unfading bowers!”

In the later editions thus altered, and, to my taste, spoiled:—

“By no weak pity might the Gods be

moved;

She who thus perish’d not without the

crime

Of lovers that in Reason’s spite have

loved,

Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime

Apart from happy ghosts, that gather

flowers

Of blissful quiet ’mid unfading bowers.”

Altered, probably, because Virgil has introduced the shade of

Laodamia among the criminal and unhappy lovers,—an instance of

extraordinary bad taste in the Roman poet; whatever may have been

her faults, she surely deserved to be placed in better company than

Phædra and Pasiphäe. Wordsworth’s

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intuitive feeling and taste were true in the first instance, and he might

have trusted to them. In my own copy of Wordsworth I have been

careful to mark the original reading in justice to the original Laodamia.

HIPPOLYTUS. NEOPTOLEMUS.

I have never met with a statue, ancient or modern, of Hippolytus; the

finest possible ideal of a Greek youth, touched with some individual

characteristics which are peculiarly fitted for sculpture. He is a hunter,

not a warrior; a tamer of horses, not a combatant with spear and

shield. He should have the slight, agile build of a young Apollo, but

nothing of the God’s effeminacy; on the contrary, there should be an

infusion of the severe beauty of his Amazonian mother, with that

sedateness and modesty which should express the votary and

companion of Diana;

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while, as the fated victim of Venus, whom he had contemned, and of

his stepmother Phædra, whom he had repulsed, there should be a

kind of melancholy in his averted features. A hound and implements

of the chase would be the proper accessories, and the figure should

be undraped, or nearly so.

A sculptor who should be tempted to undertake this fine, and, as I

think, untried subject—at least as a single figure—must begin by

putting Racine out of his mind, whose “Seigneur Hippolyte” makes

sentimental love to the “Princesse Aricie,” and must penetrate his

fancy with the conception of Euripides.

I find in Schlegel’s “Essais littéraires,” a few lines which will assist the

fancy of the artist, in representing the person and character of

Hippolytus.

“Quant à l’Hippolyte d’Euripide il a une teinte si divine que pour le

sentir dignement il faut, pour ainsi dire, être initié dans les mystères

de la beauté, avoir respiré l’air de la Grèce. Rappelez vous ce que

l’antiquité nous a transmis de plus accompli parmi les images d’une

jeunesse héroïque, les Dioscures de Monte-Cavallo, le Méléagre et

l’Apollon du Vatican. Le caractère d’Hippolyte occupe dans la poësie

à peu près la même place que ces statues dans la sculpture.” “On

peut remarquer dans plusieurs beautés idéales de l’antique que les