Literary and General Lectures and Essays

THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART 6

Much attention has been excited this year by the alleged fulfilment of a prophecy that the Papal power was to receive its death-blow—in temporal matters, at least—during the past year 1848.  For ourselves, we have no more faith in Mr. Fleming, the obsolete author, who has so suddenly revived in the public esteem, than we have in many other interpreters of prophecy.  Their shallow and bigoted views of past history are enough to damp our faith in their discernment of the future.  It does seem that people ought to understand what has been, before they predict what will be.  History is “the track of God’s footsteps through time;” it is in His dealings with our forefathers that we may expect to find the laws by which He will deal with us.  Not that Mr. Fleming’s conjecture must be false; among a thousand guesses there ought surely to be one right one.  And it is almost impossible for earnest men to bend their whole minds, however clumsily, to one branch of study without arriving at some truth or other.  The interpreters of prophecy therefore, like all other interpreters, have our best wishes, though not our sanguine hopes.  But, in the meantime, there are surely signs of the approaching ruin of Popery, more certain than any speculations on the mystic numbers of the Revelation.  We should point to recent books—not to books which merely expose Rome, that has been done long ago, usque ad nauseam—but to books which do her justice: to Mr. Maitland’s “Dark Ages;” Lord Lindsay’s “Christian Art;” and last, but not least, to the very charming work of Mrs. Jameson, whose title heads this review.  In them, and in a host of similar works in Germany, which Dr. Wiseman’s party hail as signs of coming triumph, we fancy we see the death-warrant of Romanism; because they prove that Rome has nearly done her work—that the Protestants are learning the lesson for the sake of which Providence has so long borne with that monstrous system.  When Popery has no more truth to teach us, but not till then, will it vanish away into its native night.

We entreat Protestant readers not to be alarmed at us.  We have not the slightest tendency toward the stimulants of Popery, either in their Roman unmixed state, or in their diluted Oxford form.  We are, with all humility, more Protestant than Protestantism itself; our fastidious nostril, more sensitive of Jesuits than even those of the author of “Hawkstone,” has led us at moments to fancy that we scent indulgences in Conduit-street Chapel, and discern inquisitors in Exeter Hall itself.  Seriously, none believe more firmly than ourselves that the cause of Protestantism is the cause of liberty, of civilisation, of truth; the cause of man and God.  And because we think Mrs. Jameson’s book especially Protestant, both in manner and intention, and likely to do service to the good cause, we are setting to work herein to praise and recommend it.  For the time, we think, for calling Popery ill names is past; though to abstain is certainly sometimes a sore restraint for English spirits, as Mrs. Jameson herself, we suspect, has found; but Romanism has been exposed and refuted triumphantly, every month for centuries, and yet the Romish nations are not converted; and too many English families of late have found, by sad experience, that such arguments as are in vogue are powerless to dissuade the young from rushing headlong into the very superstitions which they have been taught from their childhood to deride.  The truth is, Protestantism may well cry: “Save me from my friends!”  We have attacked Rome too often on shallow grounds, and finding our arguments weak, have found it necessary to overstate them.  We have got angry, and caught up the first weapon which came to hand, and have only cut our own fingers.  We have very nearly burnt the Church of England over our heads, in our hurry to make a bonfire of the Pope.  We have been too proud to make ourselves acquainted with the very tenets which we exposed, and have made a merit of reading no Popish books but such as we were sure would give us a handle for attack, and not even them without the precaution of getting into a safe passion beforehand.  We have dealt in exaggerations, in special pleadings, in vile and reckless imputations of motive, in suppressions of all palliating facts.  We have outraged the common feelings of humanity by remaining blind to the virtues of noble and holy men because they were Papists, as if a good deed was not good in Italy as well as in England.  We have talked as if God had doomed to hopeless vileness in this world and reprobation in the next millions of Christian people, simply because they were born of Romish and not of Protestant fathers.  And we have our reward; we have fared like the old woman who would not tell the children what a well was for fear they should fall into one.  We see educated and pious Englishmen joining the Romish communion simply from ignorance of Rome, and have no talisman wherewith to disenchant them.  Our medicines produce no effect on them, and all we can do is, like quacks, to increase the dose.  Of course, if ten boxes of Morison’s pills have killed a man, it only proves that—he ought to have taken twelve of them.  We are jesting, but, as an Ulster Orangeman would say, “it is in good Protestant earnest.”

In the meantime some of the deepest cravings of the human heart have been left utterly unsatisfied.  And be it remembered, that such universal cravings are more than fancies; they are indications of deep spiritual wants, which, unless we supply them with the good food which God has made for them, will supply themselves with poison—indications of spiritual faculties, which it is as wicked to stunt or distort by mis-education as it is to maim our own limbs or stupefy our understanding.  Our humanity is an awful and divine gift; our business is to educate it throughout—God alone must judge which part of it shall preponderate over the rest.  But in the last generation—and, alas! in this also—little or no proper care has been taken of the love for all which is romantic, marvellous, heroic, which exists in every ingenuous child.  Schoolboys, indeed, might, if they chose, in play-hours, gloat over the “Seven Champions of Christendom,” or Lemprière’s gods and goddesses; girls might, perhaps, be allowed to devour by stealth a few fairy tales, or the “Arabian Nights;” but it was only by connivance that their longings were satisfied from the scraps of Moslemism, Paganism—anywhere but from Christianity.  Protestantism had nothing to do with the imagination—in fact, it was a question whether reasonable people had any; whether the devil was not the original maker of that troublesome faculty in man, woman, and child.  Poetry itself was, with most parents, a dram, to be given, like Dalby’s Carminative, as a pis-aller, when children could not possibly be kept quiet by Miss Edgeworth or Mrs. Mangnall.  Then, as the children grew up, and began to know something of history and art, two still higher cravings began to seize on many of them, if they were at all of deep and earnest character: a desire to associate with religion their new love for the beautiful, and a reverence for antiquity; a wish to find some bond of union between themselves and the fifteen centuries of Christianity which elapsed before the Reformation.  They applied to Protestant teachers and Protestant books, and received too often the answer that the Gospel had nothing to do with art—art was either Pagan or Popish; and as for the centuries before the Reformation, they and all in them belonged utterly to darkness and the pit.  As for the heroes of early Christianity, they were madmen or humbugs; their legends, devilish and filthy puerilities.  They went to the artists and literary men, and received the same answer.  The medieval writers were fools.  Classical art was the only art; all painters before the age of Raphael superstitious bunglers.  To be sure, as Fuseli said, Christianity had helped art a little; but then it was the Christianity of Julio and Leone—in short, of the worst age of Popery.

These falsehoods have worked out their own punishment.  The young are examining for themselves, and finding that we have deceived them, a revulsion in their feelings has taken place, similar to that which took place in Germany some half-century ago.  They are reading the histories of the Middle Ages, and if we call them barbarous—they will grant it, and then quote instances of individual heroism and piety, which they defy us or any honest man not to admire.  They are reading the old legends, and when we call them superstitious—they grant it, and then produce passages in which the highest doctrines of Christianity are embodied in the most pathetic and noble stories.  They are looking for themselves at the ante-Raphaellic artists, and when we tell them that Fra Angelico’s pictures are weak, affected, ill-drawn, ill-coloured—they grant it, and then ask us if we can deny the sweetness, the purity, the rapt devotion, the saintly virtue, which shines forth from his faces.  They ask us how beautiful and holy words or figures can be inspired by an evil spirit.  They ask us why they are to deny the excellence of tales and pictures which make men more pure and humble, more earnest and noble.  They tell us truly that all beauty is God’s stamp, and that all beauty ought to be consecrated to his service.  And then they ask us: “If Protestantism denies that she can consecrate the beautiful, how can you wonder if we love the Romanism which can?  You say that Popery created these glorious schools of art; how can you wonder if, like Overbeck, “we take the faith for the sake of the art which it inspired?”

To all which, be it true or false (and it is both), are we to answer merely by shutting our eyes and ears tight, and yelling “No Popery!” or are we to say boldly to them: “We confess ourselves in fault; we sympathise with your longings; we confess that Protestantism has not satisfied them; but we assert that the only cause is, that Protestantism has not been true to herself; that Art, like every other product of the free human spirit, is her domain and not Popery’s; that these legends, these pictures, are beautiful just in as far as they contain in them the germs of those eternal truths about man, nature, and God, which the Reformation delivered from bondage; that you can admire them, and yet remain thorough Protestants; and more, that unless you do remain Protestants, you will never enter into their full beauty and significance, because you will lose sight of those very facts and ideas from which they derive all their healthy power over you”?

These thoughts are not our own; they are uttered all over England, thank God! just now, by many voices and in many forms; if they had been boldly spoken during the last fifteen years, many a noble spirit, we believe, might have remained in the Church of its fathers which has now taken refuge in Romanism from the fruits of mis-education.  One great reason why Romanism has been suffered to drag on its existence is, we humbly think, that it might force us at last to say this: We have been long learning the lesson; till we have learnt it thoroughly Romanism will exist, and we shall never be safe from its allurements.

These thoughts may help to explain our opening sentences, as well as the extreme pleasure with which we hail the appearance of Mrs. Jameson’s work.

The authoress has been struck, during her examination of the works of Christian artists, with the extreme ignorance which prevails in England on the subjects which they portray.

We have had (she says, in an introduction, every word of which we recommend as replete with the truest Christian philosophy)—

Inquiries into the Principles of Taste, treatises on the Sublime and Beautiful, Anecdotes of Painting, and we abound in antiquarian essays on disputed pictures and mutilated statues; but up to a late period any inquiry into the true spirit and significance of works of art, as connected with the history of religion and civilisation, would have appeared ridiculous or, perhaps, dangerous.  We should have had another cry of “No Popery!” and Acts of Parliament prohibiting the importation of saints and Madonnas.—P. xxi.

And what should we have gained by it, but more ignorance of the excuses for Popery, and, therefore, of its real dangers?  If Protestantism be the truth, knowledge of whatsoever kind can only further it.  We have found it so in the case of classical literature.  Why should we strain at a gnat and swallow a camel?  Our boys have not taken to worshipping Jupiter and Juno by reading about them.  We never feared that they would.  We knew that we should not make them pagans by teaching them justly to admire the poetry, the philosophy, the personal virtues of pagans.  And, in fact, the few who since the revival of letters have deserted Christianity for what they called philosophic heathenism, have in almost every case sympathised, not with the excellences, but with the worst vices of the Greek and Roman.  They have been men like Leo X. or the Medici, who, ready to be profligates under any religion, found in heathenism only an excuse for their darling sins.  The same will be the fruits of a real understanding of the medieval religion.  It will only endanger those who carried already the danger in themselves, and would have fallen into some other snare if this had been away.  Why should we fancy that Protestantism, like the Romanism which it opposes, is a plant that will not bear the light, and can only be protected at the expense of the knowledge of facts?  Why will we forgot the great spiritual law which Mrs. Jameson and others in these days are fully recognising, that “we cannot safely combat the errors of any man or system without first giving them full credit for whatever excellences they may retain”?  Such a course is the true fruit of that free spirit of Protestantism which ought to delight in recognising good to whatever party it may belong; which asserts that every good gift and perfect gift comes directly from above, and not through the channel of particular formularies or priesthoods; which, because it loves faith and virtue, for their own sakes, and not as mere parts of a “Catholic system,” can recognise them and delight in them wherever it finds them.

Upon these creations of ancient art (as Mrs. Jameson says) we cannot look as those did for whom they were created; we cannot annihilate the centuries which lie between us and them; we cannot in simplicity of heart, forget the artist in the image he has placed before us, nor supply what may be deficient in his work through a reverentially excited fancy.  We are critical, not credulous.  We no longer accept this polytheistic form of Christianity; and there is little danger, I suppose, of our falling again into the strange excesses of superstition to which it led.  But if I have not much sympathy with modern imitations of medieval art, still less can I sympathise with that narrow puritanical jealousy which holds the monuments of a real and earnest faith in contempt: all that God has permitted to exist once in the past should be considered as the possession of the present; sacred for example or warning, and held as the foundation on which to build up what is better and purer.—Introd. p. xx.

Mrs. Jameson here speaks in the name of a large and rapidly-increasing class.  The craving for religious art, of which we spoke above, is spreading far and wide; even in dissenting chapels we see occasional attempts at architectural splendour, which would have been considered twenty years ago heretical or idolatrous.  And yet with all this there is, as Mrs. Jameson says, a curious ignorance with regard to the subject of medieval art, even though it has now become a reigning fashion among us.

We have learned, perhaps, after running through half the galleries and churches in Europe, to distinguish a few of the attributes and characteristic figures which meet us at every turn, yet without any clear idea of their meaning, derivation, or relative propriety.  The palm of victory, we know, designates the martyr, triumphant in death.  We so far emulate the critical sagacity of the gardener in “Zeluco,” that we have learned to distinguish St. Laurence by his gridiron, and St. Catherine by her wheel.  We are not at a loss to recognise the Magdalene’s “loose hair and lifted eye,” even when without her skull and her vase of ointment.  We learn to know St. Francis by his brown habit, and shaven crown, and wasted ardent features; but how do we distinguish him from St. Anthony, or St. Dominick?  As for St. George and the Dragon—from the St. George of the Louvre—Raphael’s—who sits his horse with the elegant tranquillity of one assured of celestial aid, down to him “who swings on a sign-post at mine hostess’s door”—he is our familiar acquaintance.  But who is that lovely being in the first blush of youth, who, bearing aloft the symbolic cross, stands with one foot on the vanquished dragon?  “That is a copy after Raphael.”  And who is that majestic creature holding her palm-branch, while the unicorn crouches at her feet?  “That is the famous Moretto at Vienna.”  Are we satisfied?  Not in the least! but we try to look wiser and pass on.

In the old times, the painters of these legendary scenes and subjects could always reckon securely on certain associations and certain sympathies in the minds of the spectators.  We have outgrown these associations, we repudiate these sympathies.  We have taken these works from their consecrated localities, in which they once held each their dedicated place, and we have hung them in our drawing-rooms and our dressing-rooms, over our pianos and our sideboards, and now what do they say to us?  That Magdalene weeping amid her hair, who once spoke comfort to the soul of the fallen sinner,—that Sebastian, arrow-pierced, whose upward ardent glance, spoke of courage and hope to the tyrant-ridden serf—that poor tortured slave to whose aid St. Mark comes sweeping down from above—can they speak to us of nothing save flowing lines, and correct drawing, and gorgeous colour?  Must we be told that one is a Titian, the other a Guido, the third a Tintoret, before we dare to melt into compassion or admiration? or the moment we refer to their ancient religious signification and influence, must it be with disdain or with pity?  This, as it appears to me, is to take not a rational, but rather a most irrational, as well as a most irreverent, view of the question: it is to confine the pleasure and improvement to be derived from works of art within very narrow bounds; it is to seal up a fountain of the richest poetry, and to shut out a thousand ennobling and inspiring thoughts.  Happily there is a growing appreciation of these larger principles of criticism as applied to the study of art.  People look at the pictures which hang round their walls, and have an awakening suspicion that there is more in them than meets the eye—more than mere connoisseurship can interpret; and that they have another, a deeper significance than has been dreamed of by picture dealers and picture collectors, or even picture critics.—Introd. xxiii.

On these grounds Mrs. Jameson treats of the Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art.  Her first volume contains a general sketch of the legends connected with angels, with the scriptural personages, and the primitive fathers.  Her second, the histories of most of “those sainted personages who lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the first ages of Christianity, and whose real history, founded on fact or tradition, has been so disfigured by poetical embroidery that they have in some sort the air of ideal beings.”  Each story is followed by a series of short but brilliant criticisms on those pictures in which the story has been embodied by painters of various schools and periods, and illustrated by numerous spirited etchings and woodcuts, which add greatly to the value and intelligibility of the work.  A future volume is promised which shall contain the “legends of the monastic orders, and the history of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, considered merely in their connection with the revival and the development of the fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries”—a work which, if it equal the one before us, will doubtless be hailed by those conversant with that wonderful phase of human history as a valuable addition to our psychologic and æsthetic literature.