Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878

CHAPTER LIII.

AFTERWARD

There is little more to write. Four years, with their varying seasons, their endless procession of events, their multitude of joys and sorrows, have passed since Sissy died. Her place in the world, which seemed so blank and strange in its first vacancy, is closed up and lost in the crowding occupations of our ordinary life. She is not forgotten, but she has passed out of the light of common day into the quiet world of years gone by, where there is neither crowd nor haste, but soft shadows and shadowy sunshine, and time for every tender memory and thought. Even Aunt Harriet's sorrow is patient and subdued, and she sees her darling's face, with other long-lost faces, softened as in a gentle dream. She looks back to the past with no pain of longing. At seventy-eight she believes that she is nearer to those she loves by going forward yet a little farther. Nor are these last days sad, for in her loneliness Godfrey Hammond persuaded her to come to him, and she is happy in her place by his fireside. He is all that is left to her, and she is wrapped up in him. Nothing is good enough for Godfrey, and he says, with a smile, that she would make the planets revolve round him if she could. It is very possible that if she had her will she might attempt some little rearrangement of that kind. Her only fear is lest she should ever be a burden to him. But that will never be. Godfrey likes her delicate, old-fashioned ways and words, and is glad to see the kind old face which smiled on him long ago when he was a lad lighted up with gentle pleasure in his presence now. When he bids her good-night he knows that she will pray before she lies down, and he feels as if his home and he were the better for those simple prayers uttered night and morning in an unbroken sequence of more than seventy years. There is a tranquil happiness in that house, like the short, golden days of a St. Martin's summer or the November blooming of a rose.

In the February after Sissy's death Godfrey went to Rookleigh for a day, to be present at a wedding in the old church where the bridegroom had once lingered idly in the hot summer-time and pictured his marriage to another bride. That summer afternoon was not forgotten. Percival, standing on the uneven pavement above the Shadwells' vault, remembered his vision of Sissy's frightened eyes even while he uttered the words that bound him to Judith Lisle. But those words were not the less true because the thought of Sissy was hidden in his heart for ever.

Since that day Percival has spent almost all his time abroad, leading such a life as he pictured long ago, only the reality is fairer than the day-dream, because Judith shares it with him. Together they travel or linger as the fancy of the moment dictates. Percival does not own a square yard of the earth's surface, and therefore he is at liberty to wander over it as he will. He is conscious of a curious loneliness about Judith and himself. They have no child, no near relations: it seems as if they were freed from all ordinary ties and responsibilities. His vague aspirations are even less definite than of old; yet, though his life follows a wandering and uncertain track, fair flowers of kindliness, tolerance and courtesy spring up by that wayside. Judith and he do not so much draw closer day by day as find ever new similarity of thought and feeling already existing between them. His heart turns to her as to a haven of peace; all his possibilities of happiness are in her hands; he rests in the full assurance that neither deed nor word of hers can ever jar upon him; in his darker moods he thinks of her as clear, still sunlight, and he has no desire apart from her. Yet when he looks back he doubts whether his life can hold another moment so supreme in love and anguish as that moment when he looked into Sissy's eyes for the last time and knew himself forgiven.

SOME ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY ART

The art of the present day succeeds to the art of past centuries not immediately nor by an insensible gradation. It is preceded by an interval of absolute deadness in matters artistic. Sixty years ago art in almost every branch was a sealed book to the majority of even well-educated persons, and contentedly contemplated by them as such. All love for it, with all knowledge of its history and all desire for its development, was for a generation or two confined to a few professed followers and a few devoted patrons, the mass of mankind thinking of it not at all. But slowly a revival came in the main centres of civilization—not much sooner in one than in another, though somewhat differently in each. In Germany we see it beginning with the famous Teutonic colony at Rome, reverent in spirit, cautious in method, severe in theory, restrained in style—culminating, on the one hand, in the academic pietism of Overbeck, on the other in the deliberate majesty of Cornelius. In France the new life begins with the successors of David, strenuous, impetuous, jealous and innovating, Ingres and outline waging deadly battle with color and Delacroix. In England architectural enthusiasm gave the first impulse, the "Gothic Revival" becoming the basis of all subsequent work.

If, before noting the points of difference between one branch and another of this modern art, we try to find the characteristics in which these branches resemble one another, and by which they collectively are distinguished from earlier developments, we find the most prominent one to be self-consciousness—not necessarily self-conceit, but the inward consciousness that they are, and the endeavor to realize just what they are. With these comes, when the art is conscientious, a desire to discover the noblest goal and to formulate the best methods of reaching it. Some, casting the horoscope for this struggling art of ours, find in these facts a great discouragement, believing that the vital germ of art is spontaneity—believing that there cannot again be a genuine form of art until there arise a fresh race of artists, unfed by the mummy-wheat of tradition, unfettered by the cere-cloths of criticism. Others, more sanguine, believe that spontaneity has done all it can, and that its place is in the future to be worthily filled by a wide eclecticism. Let us inquire what testimony as to the value of spontaneity and the influence of self-consciousness in art may be gathered from the methods and results of the past, and what from a contrast between the different contemporary schools in their methods and their results. Painting, as most prominently before our eyes and minds just now, will principally concern us.

To the making of every work of art go three things and no more—the material worked upon, the hand that works, and the intellect or imagination which guides that hand. When the proportion is perfect between the three, the work of art is perfect of its kind. But in the different kinds of art the necessary proportion is not the same. In music, for example, the medium is at its lowest value, the imagination at its highest. In architecture, on the other hand, material is most important. Musicians use the vibration of string and atmosphere, sculptors use bronze and marble, painters use color and canvas, poets use rhythm and rhyme, as vehicles to express their ideas. The architect's ideas are for the sake of his material. He takes his material as such, and embellishes it with his ideas—creates beauty merely by disposing its masses and enriching its surface. But in all and each of these processes, whether mind predominate or matter, there comes in as a further necessary factor the actual technical manipulation. Poetic visions and a noble mother-tongue do not constitute a man a poet if he cannot treat that language nobly according to the technique of his art. Nor, though Ariel sing in his brain and the everlasting harp of the atmosphere wait for him, is he a musician if he have not a sensitive ear and a knowledge of counter-point. More notably yet does the hand—and in this as a technical term I include the other bodily powers which go to form technical skill,—more notably yet does the hand come in play with the painter. Here the material is little, the imagination mighty indeed, but less overwhelming than with poet and musician; but the technique, the God-given and labor-trained cunning of retina and wrist, how all-important! often how all-sufficing!

In all criticism it is necessary first to reflect which of these three factors—intellectual power, physical endowment or propitious material—is most imperious. When we find this factor most perfectly developed, and the others, though subordinate, neither absent nor stunted, we shall find the art nearest to perfection. And the conditions of race and climate and society which most helpfully develop that factor without injuring the others are the conditions which will best further that art. And the critic who lays most stress on that factor, and is content to miss, if necessary, though noting the loss, a certain measure of the other two in order more entirely to gain the one that is vitalest, is the critic whose words are tonic. And he who, blending the province of the arts, calling them all with vagueness "art," exalts and demands the same factor first in all of them, must be detrimental, no matter how great his sincerity and his knowledge.

Before weighing any contemporary thing in the balance let us mark out in the past some standards of comparison. For it is useless to speculate upon theoretical methods if we can discover the actual methods employed by those whose art, if not ideally perfect, is yet so far beyond our present power as to be quite perfectly ideal. It needs no discussion to prove that to find the utmost that has been actually accomplished by human endeavor we must turn in sculpture and in language to Greece, in music to Germany, in architecture to Greece or to mediæval Europe as our taste may pull, and in painting to the Italians.

The primary conception of art in its productive energy is as a certain inspiration. How did that inspiration work in those whom we acknowledge to have received it in fullest measure? If we think a moment we shall say, "Involuntarily"—by a sort of possession rather than a voluntary intellectual effort. The sculpture of the Greeks, their tragedies and their temples, were all wrought simply, without effort, without conscious travailing, by a natural evolution, not by a potent egg-hatching process of instructive criticism and morbid self-inspection and consulting of previous models, native and foreign. Architectural motives were gathered from Egypt and the East, from Phoenicia and Anatolia, but they were worked in as material, not copied as patterns; and the architecture is as original as if no one had ever built before. Phidias and Praxiteles and the rest shaped and chiselled, aiming at perfection no doubt, trying to do their best, but without troubling themselves as to what that best "ought" to be. Criticism was rife in Athens of all places, but it was a criticism of things existing, not of things problematically desirable. Statue and temple-front were criticised, not sculptor and architect—surely not sculpture and architecture in the abstract. Not sculptors and architects, that is, when the question was of their works. The men came in for their share of criticism, but on a different count. Theseus and Athene were judged as works of art, not as lame though interesting revelations of Phidias's soul. And be sure no faintest sin of the chisel was excused on the plea that Phidias meant more than he could express, and so bungled in the expression. Nor was the plea advanced that such bungling after the infinite was better than simple perfection in the attainable. An artist was called upon to be an artist, not a poet nor a philosopher nor a moralist. When Plato confounded them all in a splendid confusion of criticism the fruit-time had gone by. There was left but to expatiate on the hoard which summer had bequeathed, or to speculate, if he chose, on the possible yield of a future and most problematical year.

In the rich Italian summer one sees the same thing. Men paint because they must—because put at anything else they come back to art as iron to the magnet. Not because art is lovely, nor because to be an artist is a desirable or a noble or a righteous thing, but because they are artists born, stamped, double-dyed, and, kick as they might, they could be nothing else—if not artists creative, yet artists critical and appreciative. Truly, they think and strive over their art, write treatises and dogmas and speculations, vie with and rival and outdo each other. But it is their art they discuss, not themselves, not one another—technical methods, practical instruction, questions of pigment and model and touch, of perspective and chiaroscuro and varnish, not psychological æsthetics, biographical and psychical explanations as to facts of canvas and color. What is done is what is to be criticised. What can be done technically is what should be done theoretically, and what cannot be done with absolute and perfect technical success is out of the domain of art once and for ever. As the Greek did not try to carve marble eyelashes, so no Venetian tried to put his conscience on a panel. All Lionardo could see of Mona Lisa's soul he might paint, not all he could feel of Lionardo's. Mr. Ruskin himself quotes Dürer's note that Raphael sent him his drawings, not to show his soul nor his theories, but simply seine Hand zu weisen—to prove his touch. In Raphael's touch was implied Raphael's eye, and those two made the artist Raphael.

Nothing strikes one more in these men than the oblivion of self in their work. Only one of the first-rank men was self-conscious, and he, the most mighty as a man, is by no means the first as an artist. And even Michael Angelo had not the self-consciousness of to-day: it requires a clique of commentators and a brotherhood of artists equally infected to develop that. But just so far as he tried to put his mighty self into his work, just so far he failed of artistic perfection; and not every one is Michael Angelo to make even failure beautifully colossal. In architecture, which in his day was already a dead art to be galvanized, not alive and manly like the art of the painter, his self-consciousness shows most strongly and his failure is most conspicuous. Here he did not create, but avowedly composed—set himself deliberately to study the past and to decide what was best for the future. And upon none but him rests the blame of having driven out of the semi-unconscious, semi-original Renaissance style what elements of power it had, and sent it reeling down through two centuries crazed with conceit and distorted with self-inspection.