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The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 by Various

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864




Ideal form was to the Greeks the highest result, the success of the
universe. The end of Art was conceived as Nature's end as well, whether
actually attained or not. Nor was this preference of certain forms
arbitrary, but it followed the plain indications written on every
particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever is means only,
not showing any individuality, or end within itself. A handful of earth
is definable only by its chemical or physical properties, which do not
distinguish it, but confound it with other things. By itself it is only
so much phosphate or silicate, and can come to be something only in a
foreign organism, a plant or an animal. In form is seen the dawning of
individuality, and just as the thing rises in the scale the principle of
form becomes dominant. The handful of earth is sufficiently described by
the chemist's formula,--these ingredients make this substance. But an
organic body cannot be so described. The chemist's account of sugar, for
instance, is C^{6} H^{10} O^{5}. But if we ask what starch is, we have,
again, C^{6} H^{10} O^{5},--and the cellular tissue of plants, also, is
the same. These things, then, as far as he knows, are identical.
Evidently, he is beyond his depth, and the higher we go in the scale the
less he has to say to the purpose,--the separate importance of the
material ingredients constantly decreasing, and the importance of their
definite connection increasing, as the reference to an individual centre
predominates over helpless gravitation. First, aggregation about a
centre, as in the crystal,--then, arrangement of the parts, as upper,
under, and lateral, as in the plant,--then, organization of these into
members. Form is the self-assertion of the thing as no longer means
only; this makes its attractiveness to the artist. The root of his
delight in ideal form is that it promises some finality amid the endless
maze of matter. But this higher completeness, which is beauty, whether
it happen to exist or not, is never the immediate aim of Nature. It is
everywhere implied, but nowhere expressed; for Nature is unwearied in
producing, but negligent of the product. As soon as the end seems
anywhere about to be attained, it is straightway made means again to
something else, and so on forever. The earth and the air hasten to
convert themselves into a plant, the flower into fruit, the fruit into
flesh, and the animal at last to die and give back again to the air and
the earth what they have transmitted to him. Whatever beauty a thing has
is by the way, not as the end for which it exists, and so it is left to
be baffled and soiled by accident. This is the "jealousy of the gods,"
that could not endure that anything should exist without some flaw of
imperfection to confess its mortal birth.

The world is full of beauty, but as it were hinted,--as in the tendency
to make the most conspicuous things the most beautiful, as flowers,
fruits, birds, the insects of the sunshine, the fishes of the surface,
the upper side of the leaf; and perhaps more distinctly (in accordance
with Lord Bacon's suggestion that "Nature is rather busy not to err,
than in labor to produce excellency") in the tendency to hide those that
are ugly, as toads, owls, bats, worms, insects that flee the light, the
fishes of the bottom, the intestines of animals. But these are hints
only, and Nature, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, will sometimes introduce "not
ugliness only, but ugliness in the wrong place." Were beauty the aim, it
should be most evident in her chief products; whereas it is in things
transient, minute, subordinate,--flowers, snow-flakes, the microscopic
details of structure,--that it meets us most invariably, rather than in
the higher animals or in man. Nor in man does it keep pace with his
civilization, but obeys laws that belong to the lower regions of his
nature.

This ambiguity of every fact in Nature comes from the difficulty of
detecting its true connection. There is reality _there_, even in blight
and corruption; something is forwarded, only perhaps not the thing
before us,--as the virtue of the compost-heap appears not in it, but in
the rose-bed. The artist cannot forego a jot of reality, but the obvious
facts are not this, any more than the canvas and the pigment are the
picture. The prose of every-day life is reality in fragments,--the Alps
split into paving-stones,--Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due
connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur
is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's
power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved,
more or less of their vital relations.

Art is not to be blamed for idealizing, for this is only completing what
Nature begins. But the completion of the design is also its limitation.
It is final to the artist as well as to the theme, and cannot yield to
further expansion. In Nature there is no such pretence of finality, and
so her work, though never complete, is never convicted of defect. Her
circuits are never closed; she does not aim to cure the defect in the
thing, but in something else. Each in turn she abandons, and appeals to
a future success, which never is, but always about to be. The reason is,
that the scope of each is wider than immediately appears. It is not
simple completeness that is aimed at, but ascent to higher levels, so
that the consummation it demands, if granted, would cut it off from more
vital connections elsewhere. The ideal of the crystal seems to be
clearness and regularity, but better things are in store for it. It must
become opaque and shapeless in order to be fitted for higher
transformations. The leaf must be cramped to make the flower. Homer's
heroes must hoe potatoes and keep shop before the higher civilization of
the race can be reached.

The Greek ideal is an endeavor to ignore the imperfections of natural
existence. The ideal life is to be rich, strong, powerful, eloquent,
high-born, famous. It was a glorification of the earthly, not by
transcending, but by keeping its limitations out of sight. But this is
only making the limitation essential and irrevocable, so that it infects
the ideal also, which in this very avoidance submits to recognize it.
The statue is not _less_, but more, a thing than the natural body. Life
is not mere exclusion of decay, but organization of it, so that the fury
of corruption passes into fresh vital power. It is a cycle of changes,
the type and show of which are the circulation, constantly removing
effete particles and building up new, and therein giving its hue to the
flesh. But sculpture supposes the current checked, and one aspect fit to
stand for all the rest. The statue is not only a particle, but an
isolated particle, and must first of all divert attention from its
fragmentariness. Mr. Garbett has remarked that plants should not be
copied in sculpture, because the plant is not seen entire, but is partly
hidden in the ground. But the point is not the being seen or not, but
the suggestion of incompleteness. The same remark applies to animals,
and even to man, unless his relations to the world, as an individual
among individuals, can be kept out of sight.

But the finite thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant
perfection is atrophy,--as some poisons are said to kill by arresting
the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the
expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that
these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The
chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,--or, as Plato says, the human to
become godlike by taking away here and adding there,--but remains a
radical incongruity of Nature, never to be escaped from. It brings death
and dissolution to the fair shapes of the earlier world,--for the
worship of form is justified only so long as the mind thinks forms and
not ideas.

The statue may embody an infinite meaning, but to the artist form and
meaning are one. It is not a sentiment that he puts into this shape, but
it is the shape itself that inspires him. The symbolism of Greek Art was
the discovery of a later age. We know what is meant by Circe and Athene,
but Homer did not. It was thus only that the Greek mind could grasp
ideas,--this is the thoroughly _artistic_ character of that people.
Their philosophers were always outlaws. What excited the rage of the
Athenians against Socrates was his endeavor to detach religion from the
images of the gods. When it comes to comparisons between meaning and
expression, as adequate or inadequate, it is evident their unity is
gone;--the meaning is first, and the expression only adjunct or
illustration. It did not impair the sacredness of the Greek deities that
they were the work of the poets and sculptors. But the second Nicene
Council forbade as impious any images of Christ as God, and allowed only
his human nature to be represented,--a strange decree, if the Church had
realized its own doctrine, that the humanity of Christ is as real as his
divinity. But the meaning is, that the finite is not there to stand for
the infinite, but only to indicate it negatively and indirectly,--that
its glory is not to persist in its finiteness, not to hold on to its
form, but to be transformed. The figure of Thersites would be very
unsuitable for Achilles, but is suitable enough for a saint; it was a
pardonable exaggeration to make it even more suitable.

The hero is now the saint; the ideal life a life of poverty, humility,
weakness, labor,--to be long-suffering, to despise and forsake the
world. The present life, the heaven of Achilles, is now Hades, the
forced abode of phantoms having no reality but what is given to them by
religion, and the Hades of the Greek the only true and substantial
world. The new church fled the light of the sun, and sought impatiently
to bury itself in the tomb. The Roman catacombs were not the mere refuge
of a persecuted sect,--their use as places of worship continued long
after such need had ceased. But "among the graves" they found the point
nearest to the happy land beyond, and the silence and the darkness made
it easier to ignore for the few miserable moments that yet remained the
vain tumult of the surface. In such a mood the beauty of the outward
could awaken no delight, but only suspicion and aversion. Not the earth
and its glories, but the fading of these before the unseen and eternal,
was the only possible inspiration of Art. The extreme of this direction
we see in the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, but it has never
completely died out. Gibbon tells us of a Greek priest who refused to
receive some pictures that Titian had painted for him, because they were
too real:--"Your scandalous figures," said he, "stand quite out from the
canvas; they are as bad as a group of statues." It is a tenderness
towards the idea, lest it should be dishonored by actuality. Matter is
gross, obscure, evil, an obstacle to spirit,--and material existence
tolerable only as momentary, vanishing, and, as it were, under constant
protest, and with the suspicion that the Devil has a hand in it. It
belongs especially to the Oriental mind, and its logical result is the
Buddhist heaven of annihilation.

The defect of this view is not that it is too ideal, but that it is not
ideal enough. It is an incomplete idealism that through weakness of
faith does not hold fast its own point of view, and so does not dispose
of matter, but leaves it outside, as negation, obstacle. The body is
allowed to exist, but remains in disgrace and reduced to the barest
indication. But it is honoring matter far too much to allow that it can
be an obstacle. It is no obstacle, for it is _nothing_ of itself.
Rightly understood, this contempt of the body is directed only against
the false emphasis placed upon single aspects or manifestations. It is a
feeling that the true ideal is not thus shut up in a forced exception,
as if it were the subtilized product of a distillation whereby the
earthly is to be purged of its dross; but that it is the all-pervading
reality, which the finite can neither hinder nor help, but only obey,
which death and corruption praise, which establishes itself through
imperfection and transience.

Gibbon, speaking of the Iconoclasts, says,--"The Olympian Jove, created
by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a
philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were
faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last degeneracy
of taste and genius." Such comparisons mistake the point. These are not
parallel attempts, but opposed from the outset. The "Catholic image" was
a declaration that the problem cannot be solved in that way. An early
legend relates, that a painter, undertaking to copy his Christ from a
statue of Jove, had his hand suddenly withered. The attempt is accused
because of the pretence it makes to coordinate body and spirit, Nature
and God,--as if one configuration of matter were more godlike than
another. The figure of the god claims to complete what Nature has
_partly_ done. But now the world is seen to be not merely the product of
Mind working upon Matter, but the Creation of God out of nothing,--thus
altogether His, in one part as much as in another. The only conceivable
separateness, antagonism, is that of the sinful Will, setting itself up
in its vanity; this it must be that arrogates to itself the ability to
_represent_ its Creator.

The Christian image is without form or comeliness,--rejects all outward
graces, seemingly glories in abasement and deformity, fearing only to
attribute to Matter some value of its own.

Henceforth the connection is no longer at arm's-length, as of the
workman and the material. Resistance to limitation is changed into
joyful acceptance; for it is not in the limitation, but in the
resistance, that the misery of earth consists. The quarrel with
imperfection is over. The finite shall neither fortify itself in its
finiteness, nor seek to abolish it, but only make it the willing
instrument of universal ends. Thus the true self first exists, and no
longer needs to be extenuated or apologised for.

The key-note of all this is contained in those verses of the "Dies
Irae,"--

"Quaerens _me_ sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus;
Tantus labor non sit cassus."

Here we have in its compactest expression the difference between this
age and the classic: that I, the vilest of sinners, am the object of
God's highest care,--not the failure and mistake I seem, not the slag
and refuse of Nature's working, but the object of this most stupendous
mystery of the Divine economy. It is no purification or idealizing that
is needed,--any such attempt must be abomination,--but a new birth of
the self, by devotion of it to the purpose for which it was made.

The astounding discovery is slowly realized, and the statement of it
difficult, from the need to distinguish between the true self and the
false, and to declare that this importance belongs to the individual in
virtue of his spiritual nature alone. The sainthood of the saint is not
to be confounded with his personality. What have his virtues to do with
his gown and shoes? what, indeed, with his natural disposition, as
courageous, irascible, avaricious? The difficulty is pervading, not to
be avoided; every aspect of him reveals only what is external, dies from
him daily, and, if isolated, has already lost its meaning. It is only in
his work, in his connection with the world, that we see him truly.
Accordingly, the statue becomes the group, and the group a member of a
series, a cycle in which each is incomplete without the rest. The
classic ideal is shivered into fragments, all to be taken together to
make up the meaning. Of the hundreds of statues and reliefs that
surround the great Northern cathedrals, (Didron counts eighteen hundred
upon the outside of Chartres,--nine thousand in all, carved or painted,
inside and outside,) each has its appointed place in the sacred _epos_
in stone that unfolds about the building from left to right of the
beholder the history of the world from the Creation to the Judgment, and
subordinated in parallel symbolism the daily life of the community,
whatever occupied and interested men,--their virtues and vices, trades
and recreations, the seasons and the elements, jokes, even, and sharp
hits at the great and at the clergy, scenes from popular romances, and
the radicalism of Reynard the Fox,--in short, all that touched the mind
of the age, an impartial reflex of the great drama of life, wherein all
exists alike to the glory of God.

It is not the glory of earth that is here celebrated. M. Didron says the
statues which the mob pulled down from the churches, at the first French
Revolution, as the images of their kings, were the kings and heroes of
the Old Testament. Had they known this, it might not have saved the
statues, but it shows how wide a gulf separated these men from their
fathers, that their hands were not held by some instinct that here was
the first hint of the fundamental idea of Democracy,--the sovereign
importance of man, not as powerful, wise, beautiful, not in virtue of
any chance advantage of birth, but in virtue of his religious nature, of
the infinite possibilities he infolds.

The need to indicate that the source of value is not the accident of
Nature, but Nature redeemed, regenerated by spirit, that all values are
moral values, led to a certain abstractness of treatment,--on one side
qualities to be embodied, on the other figures to receive them, so that
the character seems adventitious, detachable, not thoroughly at one with
the form. For instance, the fiends in the Orvieto Inferno are not terror
embodied, as the Jove of Phidias embodied dignity and command; but the
terrific is accumulated on the outside of them, as tusks, claws, etc.
One can easily believe that the ancient sculptors, had it been lawful,
could have put more horror into the calm features of a Medusa than is
contained in all this apparatus and grimace. The concreteness of the
antique, the form and meaning existing only for each other, is gone; the
union is _occasional_ only, and needs to be certified and kept up afresh
on every new occasion. The form must assert itself, must show itself
alive and quick, not the dead sign of a meaning that has fled. It would
have been a poor compliment to a Greek sculptor to say that his work was
life-like; he might answer with the classically disposed visitor of the
Elgin marbles in Haydon's anecdote,--"Like life! Well, what of that?" He
meant it for something much better. But during the Middle Ages this is
constantly the highest encomium. Amid the utmost rudeness of conception
and of execution, we see the first trace of awakening Art in the
unmistakable effort to indicate that the figures are alive; and in the
cathedral-sculpture of the best time this is still a leading
characteristic. Even the single statues have for their outlines curves
of contrary flexure, expressing motion; they seem to wave in the air,
and their faces to glow with passing emotion. The animals are often
uncouth, but the more life-like; a turn of the head or of the eye, a
restless, unbalanced attitude, brings us nearer to the actual living
creature than the magnificent repose of the antique lions and
eagles,--as if they did not trust to our recognizing their character,
but were prepared to demonstrate it with beak and claws. Even in the
plants, though strictly conventionalized, it is the freedom and spring
of their lines that more than anything else characterizes them and
defies copying.

The world of matter, being no longer endowed with independent reality,
is no longer felt as a contamination incurred by the idea in its descent
into existence. The discrepancy is not final, so that the supremacy of
the spirit is not shown by resistance, but by taking it to heart,
carrying it out, and thereby overcoming it. In a Crucifixion of the
twelfth century, Life is figured on one side crowned and victorious, and
on the other Death overcome and slain. The finiteness of the finite is
not the barrier, but the liberation, of the infinite.

But the statue remains stone; this unmeaning emphasis of weight and
bulk, though diminished, is not to be got rid of. The life that
sculpture can give is superficial and abstract, does not penetrate and
possess the work; it is still the petrifaction of an instant, that does
not instantly pass away, but remains as a contradiction to the next. It
is the struggle against this fixity that gives to the sculpture of the
Renaissance its aspect of unrest, of disdain of the present, of endless
unsatisfied search. Hence the air of conflict that we see in Giovanni
Pisano, and still more in later times,--the sculptor going to the edge
of what the stone will allow, and beyond it, and, still unsatisfied,
seeking through all means to indicate a yet unexecuted possibility. It
is this that seethes in those strange, intense, unearthly figures of
Donatello's, wasted as by internal fire,--the rage for an expression
that shall at the same time declare its own insufficiency.

All that is done only makes the failure more evident. The fixity
continues, and is only deepened into contortion and grimace. What we see
is the effort alone. Hence in modern statues the uneasy,
self-distrustful appeal to the spectator, in place of the lofty
indifference of the antique. In Michel Angelo the same striving to
indicate something in reserve, not expended, led to the exaggerated
emphasis of certain parts, (as the length of the neck, depth of the
eye-sockets, etc.,) and of general muscularity,--a show of _force_, that
gave to the Moses the build of a Titan, and to the Christ of the Last
Judgment the air of a gladiator. Michel Angelo often seems immersed in
mere anatomy and academic _tours de force_, especially in his later
works. He seems to see in the subject only a fresh problem in attitude,
foreshortening, muscular display,--and this not only where he invents,
but also where he borrows,--sometimes most strangely overlooking the
sentiment; as in the figure of Christ, which he borrows from Orcagna and
the older painters, even to the position of the arms, but with the
touching gesture of reproof perverted into a savage menace; or in the
Expulsion, taken almost line for line from Masaccio, but with the
infinite grief expressed in Adam's figure turned into melodrama by
showing his face.

It was not for the delight of the eye, nor from over-reverence of the
matter-of-fact. He despised the copying of models, as the makeshift of
ignorance. His profound study of anatomy was not for greater accuracy of
imitation, but for greater license of invention. Of grace and
pleasingness he became more and more careless, until he who at twenty
had carved the lovely angel of S. Domenico, came at last to make all his
men prize-fighters and his women viragos. It is clear that we nowhere
get his final meaning,--that he does not fairly get to his theme at all,
but is stopped at the outset, and loses himself in the search for a
mode of expression more adequate to that "immense beauty" ever present
to his mind,--so that the matter in hand occupies him only in its
superficial aspects. What he sought on all hands, in his endless
questioning of the human frame, his impatience of drapery, the furious
haste to reach the live surface, and the tender modulation of it when it
is reached, was to make the flesh itself speak and reveal the soul
present at all points alike and at once. Nothing could have satisfied
him but to impart to the marble itself that omnipresence of spirit of
which animal life furnishes the hint. In this Titanic attempt the means
were in open and direct contradiction to the end. It was a violation of
the wise moderation of Sculpture, whose rigid and colorless material
pointedly declines a rivalry it could not sustain. Else why not color
the stone? The hue of flesh is the most direct assertion of life, but at
the same time a direct negative to that totality and emphasis of the
particular shape on which Sculpture relies. The color of the flesh comes
from its transparency to the circulation,--the eternal flux of matter
coming to the surface in this its highest form. It is the display in
matter itself of what its true nature is,--not to resist, but to embody
change,--to reduce itself to mere appearance, and be taken up without
residuum in the momentary manifestation, and then at once give place to
fresh manifestations.

That the earlier practice of coloring statues was given up just when the
need would seem to be the greatest shows its incompatibility with the
fundamental conditions of the art. In the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries statues were still painted and gilded. Afterwards, color is
restricted to parts not directly affected by the circulation, the hair
and the eyes; and at last, when Sculpture is given over to pictorial
effect and is about to yield entirely to Painting, it is wholly
relinquished. Evidently it was felt that to color a statue in imitation
of flesh would only enforce the fact that it is stone.

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