Chapter VII: Part 7

The question which, we scarcely know how, has thus been started within us, and which, (like all similar questions) develops itself almost automatically in our mind, without much volition and merely a vague feeling of discomfort, until it have finally taken shape and left our consciousness for the limbo of decided points, this question is simply: What are the relations between the character of the work of art and the character of the artist who creates it? To what extent may we infer from the peculiar nature of the one the peculiar nature of the other? Such, if we formulate it, is the question, and the answer thereunto seems obvious: that as the peculiarity of the fruit depends, _caeteris paribus_, upon the peculiarity of the tree (itself due in part to soil and temperature and similar external circumstances), so also must the peculiarity of the spiritual product be due to the peculiarities of the spiritual whole of which it is born. And thus, in inverted order of ideas, the definite character of the fruit proves the character of the tree, the result argues the origin: there must exist a necessary relation between the product and that which has produced. If then we find a definite quality in the works of an artist, we have a right to suppose that corresponding qualities existed in the artist himself: if the picture, or symphony, or poem be noble, and noble moreover with a special sort of nobility, then noble also, and noble with that special sort of nobility must be the artistic organism, the artist, by whom it was painted, or composed or written. And this once granted (which we cannot help granting), we must inevitably conclude that the man Perugino, who painted those wonderful intense types of complete renunciation of the world, could not in reality have been the worldly, unconscientious atheist described by Vasari. So, at least, it would seem. But tarry awhile. We have decided on analogy, and by a sort of instinct of cause and effect, that the work must correspond in its main qualities with the main qualities of the artist, of the artistic organism by which it is produced. Mark what we have said: of the artist, or artistic organism. Now what is this artistic organism, this artist? An individual, a man, surely? Yes, and no. The artist and the man are not the same: the artist is only part of the man; how much of him, depends upon the art in which he is a worker. The work is produced by the man, but not by the whole of him; only by that portion which we call the artist; and how much that portion is, what relation it bears to the whole man, we can ascertain by asking ourselves what faculties are required for the production of a work of art. And thus we soon get to a new question. The faculties required for the production of a work of art may be divided into two classes; those which directly and absolutely produce it, and those which are required to enable the production to take place without interference from contrary parts of the individual nature. These secondary qualities, merely protective as it were, are the moral qualities common, in greater or less degree, to all workers: concentration, patience, determination, desire of improvement; they are not artistic in themselves, and are not more requisite to the artist than to the thinker, or statesman, or merchant, or soldier, to preserve his very different mental powers from the disturbing influence of laziness, or fickleness, or any more positive tendencies, vices or virtues, which might interfere with the development of his talents. And of these purely protective qualities only so much need exist as the relative strength of the artistic faculty and of the unartistic tendencies of the individual require in order that the former be protected from the latter; and thus it comes that where the artistic endowment has been out of all proportion large, as in the case of such a man as Rossini, it has been able to produce the most excellent work without much of what we should call moral fibre: the man was lazy and voluptuous, but he was, above all, musical; it was easier for him to be musically active than to be merely dissipated and inactive: the artistic instincts were the strongest, and were passively followed. When these moral qualities, merely protective and secondary in art, are developed beyond the degree requisite for mere protection of the artistic faculties (a degree small in proportion to the magnitude of the artistic instinct), they become ruling characteristics of the whole individual nature, and influence all the actions of the man as distinguished from the artist: they make him as inflexible in the pursuit of the non-artistic aims of life as in that of mere excellence in his own art. The timorous and slothful Andrea del Sarto is quite as complete an artist as the eager and inquisitive Lionardo da Vinci; but, whereas Andrea's activity stops short at the limits of his powers of painting, the increasing laboriousness and never satisfied curiosity of Lionardo extend, on the contrary, to all manner of subjects quite disconnected with his real art. When once the glorious fresco of the Virgin, seated like a happier Niobe, by the mealsack, has been properly finished in the cloister of the Servites, Andrea goes home and crouches beneath the violence of his wife, or to the tavern to seek feeble consolation. But when, after never-ending alterations and additional touches, Lionardo at length permits Paolo Giocondo to carry home the portrait of his dubious, fascinating wife, he sets about mathematical problems or chemical experiments, offers to build fortresses for Caesar Borgia, manufactures a wondrous musical instrument like the fleshless skull of a horse and learns to play thereon, or writes treatises on anatomy: there is in him a desire, a capacity for work greater than even his subtle and fantasticating style of art can ever fully employ. Such are the non-artistic qualities required, merely as protectors from interference, for the production of a work of art: the same these, whatever the art, as they are the same if, instead of art, we consider science, or commerce, or any other employment. The artistic, the really directly productive qualities, differ of course according to the art to which the work belongs, differ not only in nature but also in number. For there are some arts in which the work is produced by a very small number of faculties; others where it requires a very complex machine, which we call a whole individuality: and here we find ourselves back again before our original question, to what extent the personality of an artist influences the character of his work. We have got back to the anomaly typified by Perugino; back to it, and as completely without an answer to the problem as we were on starting. We have been losing our time, going round and round a question merely to find ourselves at our original starting-point. Not so: going round the question indeed, but in constantly narrowing circles, which will dwindle, let us hope, till we find ourselves on the only indivisible centre, which is the solution of the problem. For there are many questions which are like the towns of this same Umbria of Perugino: built upon the brink of a precipice, walled round with a wall of unhewn rock, seeming so near if we look up at them from the ravine below, and see every roof, and cypress-tree, and pillared balcony; but which we cannot approach by scaling the unscalable, sheer precipice, but must slowly wind round from below, circling up and down endless undulations of vineyard and oakwood, coming for ever upon a tantalising glimpse of towers and walls, for ever seemingly close above us, and yet forever equally distant; till at last, by a sharp turn of the gradually ascending road, we find ourselves before the unexpected gates of the city. And thus we have approached a little nearer to the solution of the question. We have, in our wanderings, left behind one part of the ground. We have admitted that the work of art is produced not by the man, but merely by that portion of him which we call the artist; we have even dimly foreseen that the case may be that in one art the artist, that is to say, the art-producing organism, comprises nearly the whole of the mere individual: that the artistic part is very nearly the complete human whole. Now, in order to approach nearer our final conclusion, namely, whether the man Perugino could have painted those saints and those angels had he really been the mercenary atheist of Vasari, we must set afresh to examine what, in the various arts, are the portions of an individual necessary to constitute the mere artist, that is to say, the producer of a work of art.

But stop again. Are we quite sure that we know what we mean when we say "a work of art?" Are we quite sure that we may not, without knowing it, be talking of two things under one name? Surely not: when we apply the word to one of Perugino's archangels, we certainly refer to one whole object. So far, certainly, we mean (let us put it in the crudest way) a certain amount of colour laid on to a canvas in such a manner, and with such arrangements of tints and shadows, that it presents to our eyes and mind a certain form, a form which we define, from its resemblance to other forms made out of flesh and bone, the face and body of a young man; a form which, owing to certain constitutional peculiarities and engrained habits of our mind, we also declare to a given extent beautiful. This form, moreover, distinctly recalls to our mind real forms which experience has taught us to associate with the idea of moral purity, self-forgetfulness, piety; simply because we have noticed or been told since our infancy that persons with such bodily aspects are usually pure, self-forgetful and pious; because, without our knowing it, thousands of painters have accustomed us by giving us such forms as the portraits of saints to consider this physical type as distinctly saintly. This perception, that the form into which the colours on Perugino's canvas have been combined is such as we are accustomed to think of in connection with saintliness, immediately awakens in our mind a whole train of associations: we not merely see with our physical eyes the combination of colours and lines constituting the form, but with our mental eyes we rapidly and half unconsciously glance over all the occupations, aspirations, habits of such a creature as we conceive this form to belong to. We not merely see the delicate, thin, pale lips, thrown back head and neck, and the wide-opened, dilated, greyish eyes; we imagine in our mind the vague delights after which those lips are thirsting as the half-closed pale flowers thirst for the rain-drops, the ecstasy of fulfilled hope which makes the veins of the neck pulse and the head fall back in weariness of inner quivering; the confused glory of heaven after which those wide-opened eyes are straining; while our bodily sight is resting on the mere coloured surface of Perugino's picture, our mental sight is wandering across all the past and future of this strange being whose bodily semblance the artist has suddenly thrust upon us. All this is what we vaguely think of when we speak of a work of art. Perhaps we can so little disentangle our impressions and our fancies that their combination may thus be treated as a unity. But this unity is a dualism: the mere colour arrangement constituting the form which we see with our bodily eyes, and with our bodily eyes find beautiful, is one half; and the whole moral apparition, conjured up by association and imagination, is the other. And, as far as so infinitely interwoven a dualism can be divided, coarsely, and leaving or taking too much on one side or the other, we can divide this dual existence into that which has been given to us by the artist, the visible, material form; and that which association, recollection, fancy, has been added by ourselves to the artist's work. Of this dualism, therefore, of impression and fancy, only that portion of the work of art which is absolutely visible and concrete; the form, whether it exist in combined colour and shadow, or marble mass, as in the plastic arts, or in partially combined and partially successive sounds, as in music, only this form is really given by the artist, is that which, with reference to his productive power, we can call the work of art. He may, it is true, have deliberately chosen that form which should lead us to such associations of ideas, but in so far he has been acting not as the artist, but as a sort of foreshadowed spectator or listener; he has, before taking up his own work with the mere material, visible, tangible, audible realities of the art, stepped into the place to be occupied by ourselves, and foreseen, by his knowledge of the effects which he can produce, by his experience of what associations are awakened by each of his various forms, the imaginative activities which his yet unfinished work will call for in those who see or hear it. But he will, in so doing, be deliberately or unconsciously leaving his own work, forestalling ours: nay, the artist who says to himself, "Now I will paint a soul in a condition of ecstasy," is in reality transforming himself into the customer who would enter his workshop and say, "Paint me a figure such as your experience tells you suggests to beholders the idea of religious enthusiasm; copy the features of any religious enthusiast of your acquaintance, or put together such dispersed features as seem to you indicative of that temper of mind." All this, while the real artistic work has not begun; for that begins when the artist first places before his easel the model for his archangel: either the delicate, hectic, little girlish novice-boy, or the distinct outline of the armed young angel existing in his mind and requiring only to be printed off into concrete existence. Thus, in our examination of the amount of an artist's personality which can go into his work, we must remember that this work is merely the externally existing, definite, finite form, and not the ideas of emotions which, by the power of association, that form may awaken in ourselves. What the artist gives is merely the arrangement of lines and colours in a given manner, which may, as in painting, resemble an already existing natural object; or, as in architecture and pattern decoration, resemble no already existing natural object; the arrangement of sounds which may, as in a dramatic air, recall the inflexions proper to a given emotion, or, as in a formal fugue, recall no emotional inflexions whatever. This, and not any train of thoughts awakened by this possibly but not necessarily existing resemblance to an already known natural object, or to an already known sort of emotional voice inflexion, is what is given by the artist, and this is artistic form, the absolutely, objectively existing work of art. And now we may examine what mental faculties, in the various arts, are required for the production of this work: what portions of the whole individual man are included or excluded in that smaller, more limited individual whom we call the artist. Let us investigate the point by a sort of experiment: by stripping away, one by one, those qualities of an ideal individual which are not necessary for the production of the various kinds of artistic work; let us separate and afterwards, if need be, select and reunite the qualities which are required and those which are not required to make up a poet, a painter, a sculptor, or a musician.

And first we must create our ideal man, who contains within him the stuff of every kind of artist, the faculties of producing every kind of artistic work. First, a word about this ideal man, and about the manner in which he differs from other men. He differs in completeness, in balance, in intensity. For almost every one of us has some mental faculty so imperfectly developed that we may say that it does not exist: it exists indeed, and perhaps not without a certain necessary effect, but as with a single solitary instrument in a powerful orchestra of dozens of every other kind of instruments, this effect is not consciously perceived. And the faculties which we do possess are rarely of very remarkable strength and intensity: we have enough of them for our ordinary wants of life, but not necessarily more. Our sense of hearing is sufficient to distinguish the voice of one friend from another, but not always sufficient to be able to enjoy music, still less often to perform, least often of all to compose. And similarly with every other mental faculty: most men can follow a simple argument, some a more complex one, but few can reason out unaided a complicated proposition. Now the creative degree in any faculty is the most intense in its development. The painter is the man who receives the largest number of most delicately complete visional impressions; the musician the man who receives the largest number of most delicately complete audible impressions: to the painter everything is a shape, a colour; to the musician everything is a sound; the whole universe, to the thinker, is but a concatenation of logical propositions. Thus, our ideal man must, at starting, possess every higher faculty, developed to the most intense degree, and every one of them developed equally: for out of him is to be made every kind of artist. Here, then, we have our ideal man: he possesses in the highest degree, and in the most perfect balance, all the emotional, logical, and perceptive powers of the mind; he is, if you choose, the abstract creature (never existing, and never, alas! to exist), the all beautiful, all powerful, perfect fiction, which we call _humanity_; and with him is our work. He is perfectly balanced, he is a mere abstraction: for these two reasons he is, so far, inactive; we cannot, with the best will in the world, imagine his doing anything as long as he can do everything: he will, in all probability, merely passively enjoy. Before he can create, we must alter him. And he is to create, remember, not as a statesman or a handicraftsman, but as an artist: he is to deal not with realities, but with fictions; he is not to touch our material interests, he is merely to evoke for us a series of phantom sights or sounds, of phantom men and women. Therefore, our first act must be to diminish, by at least a half, all the practical sides of his nature, so that no practical activities divert him from his purely ideal field. So that it be for him infinitely more natural to think, to feel, to imitate, to combine impressions, than to be of any immediate use in the world; so that the mere employment of his powers be his furthest aim, without thinking what effect that employment will have upon the real condition of himself or of others. This much we have done: we have obtained a creature whose interest is never purely practical. But this will not suffice. We must diminish by at least a quarter his mere logical powers, thus rendering him far more inclined to view things as concrete, living manifestations, than as logical abstractions. This has served to prevent his being diverted into metaphysic or scientific speculations: there is now no longer any fear of his becoming a psychologist instead of a poet, a mathematician or physicist instead of a painter or a composer: things now interest him no longer for their practical bearing, nor for their abstract meaning: he cares for them not as forces, nor as ideas, but as forms, as visions. And this time we have, as it were, rough-hewn our artist. But what artist? He is, it is true, mainly attracted by the mere contemplation of things apart from practical or scientific interests, but he is equally attracted by all sorts of visions: he receives every kind of impression. This time, again, he will, from perfect balance, remain inactive. We must throw his faculties a little into disorder, we must, at random, diminish here in order (relatively) to increase there: let us, for instance, diminish by a trifle his faculty for manipulating colours or masses of stone, his faculty for conceiving sounds in succession and in combination; let us, in short, make it a little difficult for him to be a painter or sculptor or musician.

What will he be, this first made artist of ours? this creature, clipped in all the mere practically scientific instincts, only that his whole intense personality may be given more completely, more absolutely to the world of artistic phantoms? Before breaking up this huge psychological snow-man, this ungainly monster roughly moulded into caricature shape by awkward removing of material here and adding on there, before dashing it back into the limbo of used up and unformed similes, let us ask ourselves what artist he vaguely resembles: what is the artist thus formed, it would seem, of a mere intense human being; of all the faculties of our nature, only more subtle and powerful, and working not in the world of practical realities, nor of abstract truths, but in that of imaginary forms? The answer comes instinctively, unhesitatingly to all of us: this universal artist, this artistic organism which contains the whole intensified individual, is the poet. Nay: why call him poet? why reserve this supreme place of artist not of colours or sounds, but of spoken emotion, and perception, and action, for the man whose words are grouped into metrical shape? Is it this metrical shape, this mere enveloping form perceived merely by the ear, this monotonous, rudimentary music, so paltry by the side of the musician's real music, is it this which requires for its production that wondrous combination of faculties, that whole intensified human individuality? For those same faculties, that same intensified individuality, will act and bear fruit in the man who lets his words drift on, unmetrical, in mere spoken manner. And yet he shall be accounted less, and shall cede to the other, who can measure his words into verses, and couple them into rhyme. Surely there is injustice in this. Wherefore, I pray you, should you, my friend, my beloved little child poet, with the keen eyes and eager lips of Keats, who sit (in fancy at least) here by my side on the rough wall overlooking the orchard ravine at Perugia, drowsily listening (as poets listen to prose) to our discussion, wherefore should you, the poet, be worth more than I, the prose writer, merely inasmuch as you are the one and I am the other? Why be surrounded, even in my eyes, by a sort of ideal halo; why pointed out by my own secret instinct as the artist? All this must be mere folly, prejudice, dried old forms of thought handed down from the days when poets were priests and lawgivers and prophets, when their very credit depended upon their not being solely what you modern poets are; all this is a mere historic myth, in which the world continues foolishly to believe, letting itself be told from generation to generation, till the idea has become engrained in its mode of thinking, that the poet is a special creature, a thing of finer mould, in whose life, and movements, and feelings it expects something different from the rest of humanity; in whose eyes it seeks a dim reflection, in whose voice a distant echo of the colours and sounds of that fairyland out of which he has come as a changeling into the world of realities. Infatuation and injustice. But no! mankind at large is right in its ideas, but as it usually is, without knowing why it has them: right in giving instinctively this place of artist of the merely suggested, as distinguished from the absolutely seen or heard forms of other arts, to the poet alone. For the poet is, in the kingdom of words, the real, complete artist. The artistic external form which he gives to his creations removes them out of the domain of the practically useful, or the scientifically interesting. This metrical setting enables the poet to show a part, to make perfect the tiniest thing; to give complete significance, complete beauty, and eternal life to a perception, an emotion, an image which cannot be expanded beyond the fourteen lines of a sonnet; while the poor prose writer, reduced to being a mere smith or mechanist, can do nothing with any stray gem he may cut, knows not how to set it, and is forced in despair to stick it clumsily into some unwieldy utensil or implement, some pot out of which to drink knowledge, or some shield to ward off disaster. The prose writer is for ever being driven to seek employment outside the land of pure art. Therefore, the poet is truly the exclusive artist in words; or rather the exclusive artist in words must needs become the poet; if the man feel that he cannot hammer wearily at some clumsy ornamented piece of furniture, some bastard of artistic uselessness and practical utility, that he cannot write histories, or ethical disquisitions or psychological studies (waxworks of spiritual pathology, technically called novels), in order to bury in them the delicate artistic fragments which he spontaneously produces; then that man will assuredly learn the manner of making metrical settings; that man, that word artist will infallibly become a poet: nay, he is one. Thus, the poet is in reality the artist who suggests emotions, and actions, and sights, and sounds, as the painter is the artist who shows coloured shapes, and the musician the artist who creates forms made of sounds. The poet, therefore, is the artist into whose work there enters, or can enter, the greatest number of fragments of his whole personality: for his works are made up of all that which his nature perceives and evolves and desires: of the forests and fields, and sea and skies which have printed their likenesses on his mind; of the faces and movements of the men and women whom he has known, nay, of whom once perhaps, only once in his life, he has caught a never forgotten glimpse; of the events which have taken place before his eyes, or of which he has been told; of the emotions and passions which he has felt hidden in himself or seen burst out in others; of all that he can see, feel, hear, conceive, imagine. He is the man who assimilates most, initiates most, perceives most of all that passes within and without him, and unites it all in a homogeneous outer shape: nothing for him is waste: not the hard, scaly first shoot of the reed, pale green, which catches his feet as he walks on the riverside, across the grass, half sere, half renovated by spring; not the scent of first raindrops on the upturned mould of the fields; not the sentence read at random in a book opened by accident; not the sudden, never-recurring look in the eyes of one beloved; not the base appetite which he has hidden away, trampled back out of sight of his own consciousness; not the preposterous ideal which his vanity may have shown him for one second; not anything, however small or however large, however common or however rare, not anything inanimate or feeling, not anything in life or in death, not anything which can be seen, or heard, or felt, or understood, which may not be moulded by the poet into some form which will have meaning and charm, and eternal value for all men. The poet is the man who receives a greater number of more intense impressions than any other man; he is, of all creatures, the most sensitive in the whole of his being; for the whole of his being is at once the raw material, and the forming mechanism of the work of art. This is the ideal, the universal poet, the type: of him every individual poet represents a limited portion, and is a fresh repartition of faculties, a fresh combination and proportion of material and mechanism, due to the accident of race, of time, of birth, of education. The typical poet assimilates and reproduces everything; and each fragment of this type, each individual, differs from every other individual in that which is assimilated and reproduced by him: the one feels more, the other sees more, the third imagines more; and each feels, sees, and imagines, according to what external things have been put within reach of his feelings, his sight, his fancy. As, therefore, the typical poet is the whole type of humanity affording material and acting as manipulative apparatus to produce the work of art, so also the individual poet is the individual man, moulding into shape all the qualities which are strongest in his nature. All the qualities, let us however mark, which are indisputedly dominant; often, therefore, only the better, and in only the lowest tempers the worst. For, remembering what we noticed about moral faculties of will which protect the artistic workings from the interference of other parts of our nature, we may see that it must often happen that a noble spirit may be able to keep out of his mere abstract creations those baser instincts (which though recognized with shame) he is unable to subdue in practice; his works show him as he would desire himself to be, as he, alas! has not the strength to be in reality; let us not, therefore, complain of those who are unable to live up to their conceptions, for they have given to us their better part, and kept for themselves, with bitterness and shame, their worse.

The poet, therefore, is the artist into whose work there enters the greatest proportion of his individual nature; if he be flippant in temper his works cannot be earnest; if he be impure his writings cannot be actively pure; the distinctive features of his nature must be reflected in his work, since his work is made out of and by his nature. Now let us proceed. We had constructed a sort of typical giant, promising all the powers and qualities of all humanity; and this, by the gradually stripping away of some of these human powers, we had reduced to the condition of typical poet. Now let us continue our work. Of course there are kinds of poetry which form links with other intellectual work; and to obtain these we must remove such faculties as do not enter into them: separate from the artist those qualities which belong only to the man. There is first of all that great poetical anomaly the drama, for which, it would seem, that less of the writer's own personality is required than for any other form; for the dramatist stands half way between the artist and the psychologist; he can obtain innumerable varieties of character and feeling merely by his reasoning powers, not by any personal experience. He is a sort of synthetic metaphysician, who can construct the saint, the villain, the simpleton, the knave, not out of anything within himself, but out of the very elements of these characters which he has obtained by analysis; hence it is that, while we can from their works reconstruct the character of poets like Milton, or Wordsworth, or Leopardi, or Musset, we remain wholly ignorant of the personality of Shakespeare; he cannot be all that he shows us, and in the doubt he remains none of it at all. Let us put aside therefore this anomalous artist, and continue stripping away some of the purely emotional characters of our typical colossus. We shall soon meet the last and simplest form of poet--the mere describer; of his aspirations and emotions we know but little; we know only of his tastes, his preferences for certain sights and sounds. He cares for the sea, or the woods, or the fields, or the skies; he is very near being a mere thing of eyes and ears. Yet not wholly; for he perceives not only the colour and movement of the waves, but their sound, their briny scent; he perceives not only the green and tawny tints of leaves and moss, he hears the crackling of the brushwood, the rustling of the boughs, the confused hum of bees, the faint murmur of waters; nay, in the waves and in the woods he perceives something more, vague resemblances to other things; vague expressions of mood and feeling which, when the waters rush in, make his heart leap; when the grey light steals in among the branches, sends a sadness throughout him. Nay, in this artist, in this simplest, least human sort of poet, there remains yet an infinite amount of the human individuality, of its passions and desires. Let us tear away, throw aside this last amount of human feeling, reduce our typical artist to mere intense powers of seeing. Shall we still have wherewith to obtain any work at all? will this rarified, simplified mentality be much above a mere feelingless optic machine? Let us see. Here we have a creature out of which we have removed as much as possible of all human qualities: a creature which can perceive with infinite keenness and reproduce with the most perfect exactitude, every little subtle line and tint and shadow which escapes other men; a creature whose delicate perception vibrates with delight at every harmonious combination, and writhes, as if it would shatter to atoms, at every displeasing mixture of lines or colours. A living and most sensitive organism which feels, thinks everything as form and colour, fostered with the utmost care by other such organisms, themselves nurtured into intensity more intense than that with which they were born; for ever put in contact with the visual objects which are, let us remember, the air it breathes, the food it assimilates until this visual organism becomes beyond compare perfect in its power of perceiving and reproducing. Then, imagine this abstract being, this quivering thing of sight, placed in the midst of a country of austere, delicate lines, and solemn yet diaphanous tints; among the undulating fields and oakwoods, beneath the pearly sky of Umbria; imagine that before it are placed, as the creatures most precious and lovely, the creatures whose likeness must for ever be copied in all its intensity, youths, young women, old men, delicate and emaciate with solitude and maceration, with eyes grown dilated and bright from straining to see the glorious visions, the celestial day-dreams which flit across their mind; with lips grown tremulous and eager with passionate longing for constantly expected, never-coming bliss; always alone, inactive, with listless limbs and workless hands, in the bare, unadorned cell or oratory; or if, coming forth, walking through the streets, passing through the crowd (giving way with awe), erect, self-engrossed, seeing and hearing nothing around, like one entranced. Let us imagine this organism, thus perfect for perceiving and reproducing all that it sees, for ever in the presence of such lines and colours, such faces and figures as these; and then let us ask ourselves what this quite abstract, unhuman power will produce, what this artist, who is completely divested of all that which belongs merely to the man, would paint. What would that be, that work thus produced? What save those delicate, wan angels and saints and apostles, standing in solitary contemplation and ecstasy, those scarcely embodied souls, raised beyond the bounds of time and space, concentrated, absorbed in longing for heavenly perfection? And if this subtle visual organism, nurtured among these sights, should happen to be lodged in the same body with a sordid, base, cynical temper, can it be altered thereby? Surely not. The eye has seen, the hand has reproduced--seen and reproduced that which surrounds them--and inevitably, fatally, although eye and hand belonged to the man "who placed all his hopes in the good things of fortune, into whose porphyry brain no idea of good could enter, who for money would have concluded any evil bargain," the work thus produced by this commonplace, grasping atheist, Peter Perugino, must be the ideal of all purely devotional art. He was an atheist and a cynic, but he was a great painter, and lived in Umbria, in the country of sweet and austere hills and valleys, in the country whose moral air was still scented by the "flowerets of St. Francis."

This is the end of our long wandering up and down, round and round, the question of artistic personality, even as we must wander up and down, round and round, before we can reach any of these strange Umbrian towns. And, as after long journeying, when we enter the city, and find that that which seemed a castle, a grand, princely town, all walled and towered and battlemented, is in reality only a large, rough village, with blackened houses and fissured church steeples, a place containing nothing of any interest: so also in this case, when we have finally reached our paltry conclusion that this painter of saints was no saint himself, we must admit to ourselves that to arrive at this conclusion was scarcely our real object; even as while travelling through this country of Perugino we make our guide confess that what, in all this expedition, we were meant to see and enjoy, was not the paltry, deceptive hill-top village, but the sere-brown oakwoods, tinged russet by the sun, the grey olive hills through which we have slowly ascended, and the glimpses of undulating grey-green country and distant wave-blue mountains which we have had at every new turn of our long and up-hill road.

RUSKINISM.

THE WOULD-BE STUDY OF A CONSCIENCE

I give a place to the following pages, because, for all the difference of form, this essay is of the same sort, has had the same kind of origin, as the so seemingly incongruous studies with which it is bound up. For this also is the rough putting together of notes made at various times and in various phases of study; it is a series of self-questionings and answers, of problems, perhaps only half-formulated and half-solved, which have arisen round one man, one artist, one art philosophy, even as in the adjoining essays they have arisen around some one statue, or song, or picture; self-questionings and problems, these present ones, not of aesthetic right and wrong suggested by a given work of art, but of moral fitness and unfitness suggested by the doubts, the divisions, the mistakes, by the comprehension (or, if you prefer, the misapprehension) of the conscience of perhaps the greatest and strangest artist of our days.

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John Ruskin stands quite isolated among writers on art. His truths and his errors are alike of a far higher sort than the truths and errors of his fellow-workers: they are truths and errors not of mere fact, nor of mere reasoning, but of tendency, of moral attitude; and his philosophy is of far greater importance than any other system of aesthetics, because it is not the philosophy of the genius, evolution or meaning of any art or of all art, but the philosophy of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of all and every art. In the case of every other writer on art the evils due to a false system are, in proportion to the great interests of our lives and of the life around, but very paltry evils: the evils of misconceiving the relations between various masters and various schools, and the causes of various artistic phenomena; the evils of misappreciating a work or a form of art, of preferring an inferior picture, or statue or piece of music, to a superior one; the evils of buying fluttering St. Theresas of Bernini rather than noble goddesses of Scopas; of ornamenting our houses with plaster dragons, grimacing toothless masks, and meagre lines of lintel and clumsy agglomerations of columns, rather than with the leaf and flower moulding, the noble arches and dainty cornices of mediaeval art; the evils in short of not understanding quite well or of not appreciating quite correctly. Very important evils within the limited sphere of our artistic interests, and which we must not neglect to eradicate; but evils such as cannot deeply trouble our whole nature, or seriously damage our whole lives. Such is the case with the aesthetic systems, with the truths and errors of men like Winckelmann, Lessing, Hegel, or Taine; but it is not so with the aesthetic system of Ruskin. For the theories of all other writers on art deal only with the meaning and value of one work or school of art compared with another work or school; they deal only with the question how much of our liking or disliking should we give to this art or to that; they are all true or false within the region allotted to art. But the theories of Ruskin deal with the comparative importance of artistic concerns and the other concerns of our lives: they deal with the problem, how much of our thoughts and our energies we have a right to give to art, and for what reasons we may give any portion of them: it deals with the question of the legitimacy not of one kind of artistic enjoyment more than another, but of the enjoyment of art at all.

The question may at first sight seem futile from its very magnitude: unnecessary because it has so long been answered. In the first moment many of us may answer with contempt that the thinking men and women of to-day are not ascetics of the Middle Ages, nor utilitarians of the 18th century, nor Scotch Calvinists, that they should require to be taught that beauty is neither sinful nor useless, that enjoyment of art is not foul self-indulgence nor childish pastime. And so at first it seems. The thinking men and women of our day are not any of these things, and do not require to be answered these questions. But though these scruples and doubts no longer trouble us, we, in our nineteenth century, are yet not entirely at peace in our hearts. For, just in proportion as the old religious faith is dying out, we are feeling the necessity to create a new; as the old vocations of belief are becoming fewer and further between, the new vocations of duty are becoming commoner; as the old restrictions of the written law are melting away, so there appears the new restriction of the unwritten law, the law of our emancipated conscience; and the less we go to our priests, the more do we go to our own inner selves to know what we may do and what we should sacrifice: with our daily growing liberty, grows and must grow, to all the nobler among us, our responsibility. Nay, the more we realise that we have but this one brief life wherein to act and to expiate, the more earnestly do we ask ourselves to what use we should put the little that is vouchsafed us. And thus it comes to pass that there exist among us many who, seeing the evil around them, seeing the infinitude of falsehood which requires to be dispelled and of pain which requires to be alleviated, and of injustice which requires to be destroyed, must occasionally pause and ask themselves what right they have to give all, or any, of their limited time and thought and energy to the mere enjoyment of the beautiful, when there exists on all sides evil which it seems to require unlimited effort to quell. Many there must be, and every day more, who are harried by their love of art and their sense of duty, who daily ask themselves the question which first arose, nearly forty years ago, in the mind of John Ruskin; and which, settled by false answers, has recurred to him ever and anon, and has shaken and shattered the very system which was intended to answer it for ever.

John Ruskin has been endowed as have been very few men as an artist, a critic, and a moralist; in the immense chaotic mass, the constantly altered and constantly propped up ruins of an impossible system, which constitute the bulk of his writings, he has taught us more of the subtle reasons of art, he has reproduced with his pen more of the beauty of physical nature, and he has made us feel more profoundly the beauty of moral nature, than has, perhaps, been done separately by any critic, or artist, or moralist of his day. He has possessed within himself two very perfect characters, has been fitted out for two very noble missions:--the creation of beauty and the destruction of evil; and of these two halves each has been warped; of these two missions each has been hampered; warped and hampered by the very nobility of the man's nature: by his obstinate refusal to compromise with the reality of things, by his perpetual resistance to the evidence of his reason, by his heroic and lamentable clinging to his own belief in harmony where there is discord, in perfection where there is imperfection. There are natures which cannot be coldly or resignedly reasonable, which, despite all possible demonstration, cannot accept evil as a necessity and injustice as a fact; which must believe their own heart rather than their own reason; and when we meet such natures, we in our cold wisdom must look upon them with pity, perhaps, and regret, but with admiration and awe and envy. Such a nature is that of John Ruskin. He belongs, it is true, to a generation which is rapidly passing away; he is the almost isolated champion of creeds and ideas which have ceased even to be discussed among the thinking part of our nation; he is a believer not only in Good and in God, but in Christianity, in the Bible, in Protestantism; he is, in many respects, a man left far behind by the current of modern thought; but he is, nevertheless, and unconsciously, perhaps, to himself, the greatest representative of the highly developed and conflicting ethical and aesthetical nature which is becoming more common in proportion as men are taking to think and feel for themselves; his is the greatest example of the strange battles and compromises which are daily taking place between our moral and our artistic halves; and the history of his aspirations and his errors is the type of the inner history of many a humbler thinker and humbler artist around us.

When, nearly forty years ago, Ruskin first came before the world with the wonderful book--wonderful in sustained argument and description, and in obscure, half crazy, half prophetic utterances--called _Modern Painters_, it was felt that a totally new power had entered the region of artistic analysis. It was not the subtle sympathy with line and curve, with leaf and moulding, nor the wondrous power of reproducing with mere words the depths of sky and sea, the radiancies of light and the flame and smoulder of cloud; it was not his critical insight nor his artistic faculty which drew to him at once the souls of a public so different, in its universality, from the small eclectic bands which surround other aestheticians; it was the feeling, in all who read his books, that this man was giving a soul to the skies and seas; that he was breathing human feeling into every carved stone and painted canvas; that he was bidding capital and mosaic, nay, every rudest ornament hewn by the humblest workman, to speak to men with the voice of their own heart; that for the first time there had been brought into the serene and egotistic world of art the passion, the love, and the wrath of righteousness. He came into it as an apostle and a reformer, but as an apostle and a reformer strangely different from Winckelmann and Schlegel, from Lessing and Goethe. For, while attacking the architecture of Palladio and the painting of Salvator Rosa; while expounding the landscapes of Turner and the churches of Verona, he was not merely demolishing false classicism and false realism, not merely vindicating a neglected artist or a wronged school: he was come to sweep usurping evil out of the kingdom of art, and to reinstate as its sole sovereign no human craftsman, but God himself.

God or Good: for to Ruskin the two words have but one meaning. God and Good must receive the whole domain of art; it must become the holy of holies, the temple and citadel of righteousness. To do this was the avowed mission of this strange successor, haughty and humble, and tender and wrathful, of the pagan Winckelmann, of the coldly serene Goethe. How came John Ruskin by this mission, or why should his mission differ so completely from that of all his fellows? Why should he insist upon the necessity of morally sanctifying art, instead of merely aesthetically reforming it? Why was it not enough for him that artistic pleasure should be innocent, without trying to make it holy? Because, for Ruskin's nature, compounded of artist and moralist, artistic engagement was a moral danger, a distraction from his duty--for Ruskin was not the mere artist, who, powerless outside his art, may, because he can only, give his whole energies to it; he was not the mere moralist who, indifferent to art, can give it a passing glance without interrupting for a moment his work of good; he felt himself endowed to struggle for righteousness and bound to do so, and he felt himself also irresistibly attracted by mere beauty. To the moral nature of the man this mere beauty, which threatened to absorb his existence, became positively sinful; while he knew that evil was raging without requiring all his energies to quell it, every minute, every thought diverted from the cause of good was so much gain for the cause of evil; innocence, mere negative good, there could not be, as long as there remained positive evil. Thus it appeared to Ruskin. This strange knight-errant of righteousness, conscious of his heaven endowed strength, felt that during every half-hour of delay in the Armida's garden of art, new rootlets were being put forth, new leaves were being unfolded by the enchanted forest of error which overshadowed and poisoned the earth, and which it was his work to hew and burn down; that every moment of reluctant farewell from the weird witch of beauty meant a fresh outrage, an additional defiling of the holy of holies to rescue which he had received his strong muscle and his sharp weapons. Thus, refusing to divide his time and thoughts between his moral work and his artistic, Ruskin must absolutely and completely abandon the latter; if art seemed to him not merely a waste of power, but an absolute danger for his nobler side, there evidently was no alternative but to abjure it for ever. But a man cannot thus abandon his own field, abjure the work for which he is specially fitted; he may mortify, and mutilate and imprison his body, but he cannot mortify or mutilate his mind, he cannot imprison his thoughts. John Ruskin was drawn irresistibly towards art because he was specially organised for it. The impossible cannot be done: nature must find a vent, and the artistic half of Ruskin's mind found its way of eluding the apparently insoluble difficulty: his desire reasoned, and his desire was persuaded. A revelation came to him: he was neither to compromise with sin nor to renounce his own nature. For it struck him suddenly that this irresistible craving for the beautiful, which he would have silenced as a temptation of evil, was in reality the call to his mission; that this domain of art, which he had felt bound to abandon, was in reality the destined field for his moral combats, the realm which he must reconquer for God and for Good. Ruskin had considered art as sinful as long as it was only negatively innocent: by the strange logic of desire he made it positively righteous, actively holy; what he had been afraid to touch, he suddenly perceived that he was commanded to handle. He had sought for a solution of his own doubts, and the solution was the very gospel which he was to preach to others; the truth which had saved him was the truth which he must proclaim. And that truth, which had ended Ruskin's own scruples, was that the basis of art is moral; that art cannot be merely pleasant or unpleasant, but must be lawful or unlawful, that every legitimate artistic enjoyment is due to the perception of moral propriety, that every artistic excellence is a moral virtue, every artistic fault is a moral vice; that noble art can spring only from noble feeling, that the whole system of the beautiful is a system of moral emotions, moral selections, and moral appreciation; and that the aim and end of art is the expression of man's obedience to God's will, and of his recognition of God's goodness.