Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878», sayfa 9

The French "impressionalist" clique, similar in spirit to these Englishmen, though less outré in practice, is not by any means of so great importance in France as they are in England. It has more than once been remarked in England that the old-fashioned amateur—patron and critic, kenner—is dying out, and that his modern substitute must not only choose, but experiment—not only admire, but be admired. This spirit, spreading through a nation, will not make it a nation of artists, but will make the nation's artists amateurs. No critic, no amateur, is more loath to try his own hand than the one who most deeply and rightly appreciates the skill of others, and the rare and God-given and difficult nature of that skill. The confusion of amateur with professional work lowers the standard, so there will be every year fewer to tell the mass of the nation that most useful of truths—how earnest a thing is true art, and how rare a native appreciation of its truest worth.

There is no place where the interest excited by national art is so widespread, where the exhibitions are so crowded, where they so regulate times and seasons, annual excursions to and departures from town, as in England. Yet there is no place where the interest in art seems to a stranger so factitious, so much a matter of fashion and custom, of instinctive following of chance-appointed bell-wethers. It would scarcely be a matter of surprise if the whole thing should collapse through some pin-thrust of rival interest or excitement, and next year's exhibition be a desert, next year's artists paint their theories and their souls for unregarding eyes, or rather for unheeding brains. Have we not an apology for such a suggestion in the history of the rage for Gothic architecture, so thoroughly demonstrated in every possible theoretical and philosophical way to be the only proper style for Englishmen present or future, so devotedly and exclusively followed for a while by the profession, only to be suddenly abandoned for its fresher rivals, the so-called styles of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne?

In the throngs that flocked to the opening of the Royal Academy, waiting hours before the doors were opened, fighting and struggling for a foothold on the stairs, eager to be the first to see, though there were weeks of opportunities ahead—in the rare recurrence through the hum of the vast criticising crowd of a word of technical judgment or sober artistic criticism—it was easy to recognize the same spirit that confuses morality with chair-legs, that finds a knocker more "sincere" and "right" than a door-bell, that insists as upon a vital necessity that the heads of all nails should be visible and that all lines should be straight, and would as soon have a shadow on its conscience as in the pattern of wall-paper. Nowhere was decorative art so non-existent a few years ago as in England—nowhere is it so universally dwelt upon to-day. Yet it is easy to see how entirely the revival is a child of theory and books and teachers and rules—how little owing to a spontaneous development of art-instinct in the people, a spontaneous desire for more beauty in their surroundings, a spontaneous knowledge of how it is best to be obtained.

The literary and un-painterlike—if I may use such an awkward term—nature of English art is shown perhaps more forcibly in its critics than in artists or public. One is especially struck in reading criticisms of whatever grade with the excessive prominence given to the artist's personality. The work of this year is judged not so much by its excellence as by comparison with the work of last year. A–'s pictures, and B–'s and C–'s and D–'s, are interesting and valuable mainly as showing A–'s improvement, or B–'s falling off, or C–'s unexpected change of theme, or D–'s fine mind and delicate sensibilities.

Mr. Ruskin is without doubt the most remarkable of English critics, and summarizes so many opposite theories and tendencies that his pages may in some sort be taken as an epitome of the whole matter. It would be impossible to abstract from their great bulk any consecutive or consistent system of thought or precept. His influence has been mainly by isolated ideas of more or less truth and value. It is impossible here to analyze his work. Such is the mixed tissue of his woof that the captive princess who was set to sort a roomful of birds' feathers had scarcely a harder task than one who should try to separate and classify his threads, some priceless and steady, some rotten, false, misleading. Morals, manners, religion, political economy, are mixed with art in every shape—art considered theoretically and technically, historically, philosophically and prophetically. Various as are his views on these varying subjects, on no one subject even do they remain invariable. Yet such is the charm of his style, delightfully sarcastic, and eloquent as a master's brush, so vividly is each idea presented in itself, that, each idea being enjoyed as it comes, all seem at first of equal value. We realize neither the fallacy of many taken singly nor the conflict of all taken together. His points are often cleverly and faithfully put, and our attention is so riveted on this cleverness and faithfulness that we take for granted the rightness of his deductions, slovenly, illogical or false though they may be. What we most remark in his books is how the purely artistic element in his nature—of a very high grade and very true instincts—is dwarfed of full development and stunted of full results by the theorizing literary bent which he has in common with his time and people. In theorizing even on truly-felt and clearly-stated facts, in explaining their origin and unfolding their effects, his guidance is least valuable. We may more safely ask him what than why. His influence on English art has been great at the instant: whether it will be permanent is doubtful. At one time it was said that without having read his books one could tell by an inspection of the Royal Academy walls what Mr. Ruskin had written in the past year. Now, the most notable exponents of his teaching, whether consciously so or not, are on the one hand the shining lights of the Grosvenor Gallery—hierophants of mysticism and allegory and symbolism and painted souls and moral beauty expressed in the flesh, copying Ruskin's Botticelli line for line, forgetting that what was naïveté in him, and in him admirable, because all before him had done so much less well, becomes to-day in them the direst affectation, is reprehensible in them because many before them have done so much better. On the other hand, we have a naturalistic throng which follows Mr. Ruskin's precepts when he overweights the other side of the scale and says that art should "never exist alone, never for itself," never except as "representing a true"—defined as actually-existing—"thing or decorating a useful thing;" when he declares that every attempt by the imagination to "exalt or refine healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it." Mr. Ruskin bade men "go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing;" and Mr. Hamerton was literally obeying him when he exiled himself for five years in a hut on an island in a bleak Scotch lake to learn faithfully to portray the shores of that single lake. Was it thus that Titian studied in his youth, and learned how, years after in Venice, to paint the chestnuts and the hills of Cadore a thousand-fold more artistically and more truly, because more abstractly and more ideally, than could all the "pre-Raphaelite" copyists of to-day? Thus we see the two extremes of Mr. Ruskin's teaching—see him at one time exalting imagination and feeling over the pictorial part of art, at another degrading art into the servilest copying.

Observers may disagree as to whether these cognate things—self-consciousness in the artist, æsthetic philosophizing in the critic, and the taste for a literary rather than a pictorial value in the public—are on the increase or on the decrease in the various centres of art. Annual exhibitions—a significant illustration of our high-pressure life in art as in other things—would seem to tend toward deepening these faults. Attention must be attracted at all hazards, and the greater the number of exhibitors and the average attractiveness of their canvases the greater becomes the temptation to shine, not by excellence, but by eccentricities of treatment, or, still more, by the factitious interest of a "telling" subject. Is it due, perhaps, to this constant desire for notoriety on the part of the artist, and for more and more excitement on the part of the public, that in all modern schools, landscape art, as less possibly influenced by such a state of things, stands ahead of the art which has humanity for its subject? It is scarcely possible to find in France to-day a figure-painter who is a Daubigny, still less a Jules Dupré. Next to these unquestionably stand such animal-painters as Bonheur and Troyon; and it would be hard among the youngest file of artists to find a figure-painter who in his line should rival Van Marcke in his. In England also landscape ranks ahead, and it is perhaps in comparing it with French landscape that the difference between the schools is most truly though not most glaringly displayed. Even here, and in the allied fields of animal-painting, the desire for l'anecdote creeps in, and Landseer with all his talent often prostitutes his brush in the attempt to make his brutes the centre of dramatic action, and forces into them semi-human characteristics in order to extract from them tales or ideas of human interest. It was not thus that Veronese painted dogs or Franz Snyders his lions and boars—not thus that the Greeks have put the horse into art. Nor, to take the best contemporary comparison, is it thus that Barye's bronzes are designed.

Landscape brings us inevitably to Turner. The most highly gifted of all English artists, past or present, his genius was hardly a logical outcome of the contemporary spirit of his nation. We have no right to say this of an artist, no right to call him anomalous, while we are still in doubt as to whether he may be only the advance-guard of a new national art, the herald of a new avatar. But when he with his generation dies, when another generation develops and bears fruit, and a third is beginning to blossom, and he still seems anomalous, it is fair to hold him exceptional in his country's art, rather than characteristic thereof. Together with wonderful endowments of eye and hand, and a prodigious power of work, Turner's earlier works show us an unconscious development and a healthy oblivion of his own personality. But later the fatal modern fever entered his blood, ending in something very like delirium. From a painter he became a theorist, contaminated by a rush of criticism alike indiscriminate in praise and injudicious in blame. We shall see the baleful effects of modern methods if we look, in the wonderful series at the National Gallery, first at the pictures painted when Turner was an artist thinking of painting, then to those done when he was a self-conscious experimentalist thinking of Turner—Turner worshipped by Ruskin, Turner sick with envy of the Dutchmen and defiance of Claude.

I have but a line to give to the one or two other men of abnormally splendid gifts whom this century has seen. Henri Regnault's extraordinary talent was extinguished almost at the first spark, and it is beyond prophecy to tell what it might have produced. His eccentricities seem to have been quite genuine, due to an overflow of power rather than to posing or grimace. His love of his art, his passion for color, were almost frantic in their intensity, but sincere. A certain exaggerated phrase of his is but the protest of reaction against the literary painting, the erudite and philosophical art, of his time. "La vie," he cries, "étant courte, il faut peindre tant qu'on a des yeux. Donc on ne doit pas les fatiguer à lire des stupides journaux." A crude way of putting the idea that to be an artist one needs but art.

Another wonderful talent is Hans Makart. Such an eye for color, it is quite safe to say, has not been born since Veronese. Had he been born at Venice among his peers, forced to work instead of experiment, outvied instead of foolishly extolled, surrounded by artists to surpass him if he tripped for a single instant, instead of critics to laud his most glaring faults and amateurs to pay thousands for his spoiled paper, we should have had another name to use as explanatory of genius. As it is, he is, according to present indications, utterly spoiled. Only those who know how he can draw if he will, how he has painted—portraits best, perhaps—when he would, are vexed beyond endurance by the folly and the carelessness and the sins he chooses to give us. It has been said that Raphael Mengs was a born genius spoiled by the coldness, the pseudo-classicism, the artificiality and eclecticism of the eighteenth century. A companion portrait is Hans Makart, ruined by the amateurishness, the rhapsodizing, the theorizing, the morbid self-consciousness of the nineteenth.

The so-called Spanish school of to-day is as yet too new for us to see exactly whither it tends. Its passion for glaring, metallic, aniline compound tints—tints that "scream," to use a French phrase—its horror of all shade and depth and of pure and simple colors, are, however, most certainly unhealthy. It is a diseased eye that in the desire for violent color loses all memory of chiaroscuro.

I have left till now unnoticed the contemporary Netherland artists, though their works are perhaps more entirely satisfactory than those of either of the three schools we have discussed. But their characteristics are less markedly distinct, less available for comparison, and can be best noted and appraised by a previously-gained knowledge of the peculiarities of English, French and German painting. The Belgian school is most closely allied to the French, and in technique is often its equal. In landscape and cattle-painting the types are similar, while Belgian figure-painting gains by the lack of the element which a French critic notes when he says modern art has become mondain—surtout demi-mondain. Nowhere does contemporary art seem so healthy and sane, so sure of itself, so consonant with the best nature and gifts of the people, as in the Netherlands: nowhere are its ideals so free from morbidness, affectation or sentimentality. Is it perhaps that in the studios of Amsterdam, in the great school of Antwerp, even in the galleries of Brussels, one is somewhat out of the wildest stream of modern life—less driven to analysis and theorizing and self-consciousness than in London, Paris or Munich? Whatever is cause, whatever effect, the Netherland school shows two things side by side—the least measure of self-consciousness, and the soundest contemporary painting: if not the most effective, it is, I think, the most full of promise. There seems to be forming the most healthy national soil for the development of future genius.

In conclusion, it may be noted that we in America, whose art is just beginning even to strive, are subjected to a somewhat strange cross-fire of influences. Lineally the children of England, we are spiritually and by temperament in many things her opposites. Our taste in art seems to turn resolutely away from her. For each hundred of French and score of German pictures that comes to us, how many come from England? What can one who has not crossed the sea learn of English pictures from our private collections and picture-dealers' shops? Was not all we knew prior to the Exhibition of 1876 gleaned from Vernon Gallery plates and Turner's Rogers or Rivers of France? But while our dealers and students and millionaires throng the studios of Paris and Munich, and our eyes are being daily educated to demand above all things technique, our brains are constantly being worked upon by a stream of art-literature from England. Taste pulls us one way—identity of English speech, with consequent openness to English ideas, pulls us the other. Pictures preach one thing, books another. Our boy who has worked in Paris comes home to try to realize Ruskin. Both influences are too new, and our art is as yet too unsteady, for any one to guess as to the ultimate result. One thing only can be unreservedly inculcated: Let us shun self-analyzation, self-consciousness, morbidness, affectation, attitudinizing. Let us look ahead as little as possible, keeping our eyes on our brushes and on the world of beauty around us. One thing only can with safety be predicted: If we are, or are to be, a people of artists, creative or appreciative as the case may be, we shall learn whatever of technique the world has to teach us, and shall improve upon it, and we shall perhaps digest the small measure of theory for which we have appetites left. But if we are not artists, actual or future, technique will be impossible, and will seem undesirable. We shall greedily fill our stomachs with the wind of art-philosophy, shall work with the reason instead of with the eye and the fingers, shall symbolize our aspirations, our theorizings, our souls and our consciences, and fondly dream we are painting pictures. Or we shall copy with a hopeless effort after literalness the first face or weed we meet, and call the imperfect, mechanical result a work of art.

M. G. Van Rensselaer.

THREE WATCHES

 
I sat in the silence, in moonlight that gathered and glowed
Far over the field and the forest with tender increase:
The low, rushing winds in the trees were like waters that flowed
From sources of passionate joy to an ocean of peace.
And I watched, and was glad in my heart, though the shadows were deep,
Till one came and asked me: "Say, why dost thou watch through the
night?"
And I said, "I am watching my joy. They who sorrow may sleep,
But the soul that is glad cannot part with one hour of delight."
 
 
Again in the silence I watched, and the moon had gone down;
The shadows were hidden in darkness; the winds had passed by;
The midnight sat throned, and the jewels were bright in her crown,
For stars glimmered softly—oh softly!—from depths of the sky.
And I sighed as I watched all alone, till again came a voice:
"Ah! why dost thou watch? Joy is over, and sorrow is vain."
And I said, "I am watching my grief. Let them sleep who rejoice,
But the spirit that loves cannot part with one hour of its pain."
 
 
Once more I sat watching, in darkness that fell like a death—
The deep solemn darkness that comes to make way for the dawn:
I looked on the earth, and it slept without motion or breath,
And blindly I looked on the sky, but the stars were withdrawn.
And the voice spoke once more: "Cease thy watching, for what dost
thou gain?"
But I said, "I am watching my soul, to this darkness laid bare.
Let them sleep to whom love giveth joy, to whom love giveth pain,
But the soul left alone cannot part with one moment of prayer."
 

Marion Couthouy.

SISTER SILVIA

Monte Compatri is one of the eastern outlying peaks of the Alban Mountains, and, like so many Italian mountains, has its road climbing to and fro in long loops to a gray little city at the top. This city of Monte Compatri is a full and busy hive, with solid blocks of houses, and the narrowest of streets that break now and then into stairs. For those old builders respected the features of a landscape as though they had been the features of a face, and no more thought of levelling inequalities of land than of shaving down or raising up noses. When a man had a house-lot in a hollow, he built his house there, and made Steps to go down to it: his neighbor, who owned a rocky knoll, built his house at the top, and made stairs to go up to it. Moreover, if the land was a bit in the city, the house was made in the shape of it, and was as likely to have corners in obtuse or acute as in right angles.

The inhabitants of Monte Compatri have two streets of which they are immensely proud—the Lungara, which wriggles through the middle of the town, and the Giro, which makes the entire circuit of the town, leaving outside only the rim of houses that rise from the edge of the mountain, some of them founded on the natural rock, others stretching roots of masonry far down into the earth.

One of these houses on the Giro had for generations been in the possession of the Guai family. One after another had held it at an easy rent from Prince Borghese, the owner of the town. The vineyard and orchard below in the Campagna they owned, and from those their wealth was derived. For it was wealth for such people to have a house full of furniture, linen and porcelain—where, perhaps, a connoisseur might have found some rare bits of old china—besides having a thousand scudi in bank.

In this position was the head of the family when he died, leaving a grown-up son and daughter, and his wife about to become a mother for the third time.

"Pepina shall have her portion in money, since she is to marry soon," the father said. "Give her three hundred scudi in gold and a hundred in pearls. The rest of the money shall be for my wife to do as she likes with. For the little one; when it shall come, Matteo shall put in the bank every year thirty scudi, and when it shall be of age, be it girl or boy, he shall divide the land equally with it."

So said Giovanni Guai, and died, and his wife let him talk uncontradicted, since it was for the last time. They had lived a stormy life, his heavy fist opposed to her indefatigable tongue, and she contemplated with silent triumph the prospect of being left in possession of the field. Besides, would he not see afterward what she did—see and be helpless to oppose? So she let him die fancying that he had disposed of his property.

"The child is sure to be a girl," she said afterward, "and I mean her to be a nun. The land shall not be cut up. Matteo shall be a rich man and pile up a fortune. He shall be the richest man in Monte Compatri, and a girl shall not stand in his way."

Nature verified the mother's prophecy and sent a little girl. Silvia they called her, and, since she was surely to be a nun, she grew to be called Sister Silvia by everybody, even before she was old enough to recognize her own name.

The house of the Guai, on its inner wall, opened on the comparatively quiet Giro. From the windows and door could be heard the buzz and hum of the Lungara, where everybody—men, women, children, cats and dogs—were out with every species of work and play when the sun began to decline. This was the part of the house most frequented and liked by the family. They could see their neighbors even when they were at work in their houses, and could exchange gossip and stir the polenta at the same time. The other side of the house they avoided. It was lonely and it was sunny. For Italians would have the sun, like the Lord, to be for ever knocking at the door and for ever shut out. It must shine upon their outer walls, but not by any means enter their windows.

As years passed, however, there grew to be one exception in this regard. Sister Silvia loved not the town with its busy streets, nor the front windows with their gossiping heads thrust out or in. She had her own chamber on the Campagna side, and there she sat the livelong day with knitting or sewing, never going out, except at early morning to hear mass. There her mother accompanied her—a large, self-satisfied woman beside a pallid little maiden who never raised her eyes. Or, if her mother could not go, Matteo stalked along by her side, and with his black looks made everybody afraid to glance her way. Nobody liked to encounter the two black eyes of Matteo Guai. It was understood that the knife in his belt was sharp, and that no scruple of conscience would stand between him and any vengeance he might choose to take for any affront he might choose to imagine.

After mass, then, and the little work her mother permitted the girl to do for health's sake, Silvia sat alone by her window and looked out on the splendor which her eyes alone could appreciate. There lay the Campagna rolling and waving for miles and miles around, till the Sabines, all rose and amethyst, hemmed it in with their exquisite wall, and the sea curved a gleaming sickle to cut off its flowery passage, or the nearer mountains stood guard, almost covered by the green spray it threw up their rocky sides. She sat and stared at Rome while her busy fingers knit—at the wonderful city where she was one day to go and be a nun, where the pope lived and kings came to worship him. In the morning light the Holy City lay in the midst of the Campagna like her mother's wedding-pearls when dropped in a heap on their green cushion; and Silvia knelt with her face that way and prayed for a soul as white, for she was to be the spouse of Christ, and her purity was all that she could bring Him as a dowry. But when evening came, and that other airy sea of fine golden mist flowed in from the west, and made a gorgeous blur of all things, then the city seemed to float upward from the earth and rise toward heaven all stirring with the wings of its guardian angels, and Silvia would beg that the New Jerusalem might not be assumed till she should have the happiness of being in it.

But there was a lovely view nearer than this visionary one, though the little nun seldom looked at it. If she should lean from her window she would see the mountain-side dropping from the gray walls of her home, with clinging flowery vines and trees growing downward, while the olives and grapevines of the Campagna came to meet them, setting here and there a precarious little garden halfway up the steep. Just under her window an almost perpendicular path came up, crept round the walls and entered the town. But no one ever used this road now, for a far wider and better one had been constructed at the other side of the mountain, and all the people came up that way when the day's work was over in the Campagna.

One summer afternoon Silvia's reveries were broken by her mother's voice calling her: "Silvia, come and prepare the salad for Matteo."

It was an extraordinary request, but the girl went at once without question. She seized upon every opportunity to practise obedience in preparation for that time when her life would be made up of obedience and prayer.

Her mother was sitting by one of the windows talking with Matteo, who had just came up from the Campagna. He had an unsocial habit of eating alone, and, as he ate nothing when down in the vineyard, always wanted his supper as soon as he came up. The table was set for him with snow-white cloth and napkin, silver knife, fork and spoon, a loaf of bread and a decanter of golden-sparkling wine icy cold from the grotto hewn in the rock beneath the house; and he was just eating his minestra of vegetables when his sister came in. At the other end of the long table was a head of crisp white lettuce lying on a clean linen towel, and two bottles—one of white vinegar, the other of oil as sweet as cream and as bright as sunshine. Monte Compatri had no need to send to Lucca for oil of olives while its own orchards dropped such streams of pure richness.

The room was large and dingy. The brick floor had never known other cleansing than sprinkling and sweeping, the yellow-washed walls had become with time a pale, mottled brown, the paint had disappeared under a fixed dinginess which the dusting-brush alone could not remove, and the glass of the windows had never been washed except by the rain. Yet, for all that, the place had an air of cleanliness. For though these people do not clean their houses more than they clean their yards, yet their clothing and tables and beds are clean. Plentiful white linen, stockings like snow, and bright dishes and metals give a look of freshness and show well on the dim background. Heavy walnut presses, carved and black with age, stood against the walls, drinking-glasses and candlesticks sparkled on a dark bureau-top, there was a bright picture or two, and the sunlighted tinware of a house at the other side of the street threw a cluster of tiny rays like a bouquet of light in at the window. Silvia received these sun-blossoms on her head when she placed herself at the lower end of the table. She pushed the sleeves of her white sack back from her slim white arms, and began washing the lettuce-leaves in a bowl of fresh water and breaking them in the towel. The leaves broke with a fine snap and dropped in pieces as stiff as paper into a large dark-blue plate of old Japanese ware. A connoisseur in porcelain would have set such a plate on his drawing-room wall as a picture.

"How does Claudio work?" the mother asked of her son.

"He works well," Matteo replied. "He is worth two of our common fellows, if he is educated."

"Nevertheless, I should not have employed him," the mother said. "He has disobeyed and disappointed his parents, and he should be punished. They meant him to be a priest, and raked and scraped every soldo to educate him. Now, just when he is at the point of being able to repay them, he makes up his mind that he has no vocation for the priesthood, and breaks their hearts by his ingratitude. It is nonsense to set one's will up so and have such scruples. Obedience is vocation enough for anything. There should be a prison where parents could put the children who disobey them."

The Sora Guai spoke sternly, and looked as if she would not have hesitated to put a refractory child in the deepest of dungeons.

"He was a fool, but he earns his money," Matteo responded, and, drawing a plate of deliciously fried frogs toward him, began to gnaw them and throw the bones on the floor.

Silvia gave him the salad, and poured wine and water into the tumbler for him, while his mother went to the kitchen for a dish of fricasseed pigeons.

"There's no onion in the salad," Matteo grumbled when she came back.