Earthwork Out Of Tuscany

M >> Maurice Hewlett >> Earthwork Out Of Tuscany

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"Who was this youth, sir?" asked Master Peter, in a hurry.

"It was plainly some young noble of your State," said I, "but for his name
I know nothing, for he told me nothing." I added this quickly, because I
could see our friend was keen enough for all his coat of unconcern, and I
feared the whip by-and-bye for Imola's thin shoulders. But I knew quite
well who the boy was. Imola went lightly away without any sign of twitter.
I turned to Master Peter again.

"In this matter of boils and pearls," I began, "I would not deny but you
are in the right, and yet there is this to be said. The Greeks of whose
painting, truly, we have next to nothing. In all the work of theirs known
to us did what lay before them as well as ever they could. They stayed not
to theorise over this axiom and that, that formula and this. They said
rather, 'You wish for the presentment of a man with a boil on his leg?
Well.' And they produced both man and boil."

"Why yes, yes," broke in my friend, "that is plain enough. But apart from
this, that you are talking of sculpture to me who do but paint, you should
know very well that your Greek copied no single boil, no, nor no probable
boil, but, as it were, the summary and perfect conclusion of ail possible
boils."

"_To Pithanon?_ Yes; I admit it. For Aristotle says as much."

"Right so do I, in my degree and by my art," said Perugino; "and without
knowing anything of Aristotle save that he was wise."

"Your pardon, my brave Vannucci," I said, "but you have admitted the
opposite of this. Did you not hint to the deputation that you would give
Saint Roch no boils? And have you ever let creep into your pieces the
semblance of so much as a pimple? Remember, I know your _Sebastian_;
and know also Il Sodoma's, which he made as a banner for the Confraternity
of that famous Saint In Camollia."

"I seek the essence of fact," he replied; "which, believe me, never lay in
the displacement of an arrow-point; no, nor in the head of a boil. Bazzi
is a sensualist: as his palate grows stale he whets it by stronger meat;
thinks to provoke appetite by disgust; would draw you on by a nasty
inference, as a dog by his hankering after faecal odours. What nearness to
Art in his plumpy boy stuck with arrows like a skewered capon? Causes nuns
to weep, hey? and to dream dreams, hey? Nature would do that cleanlier;
and waxwork more powerfully! Form, my good sir, Form is your safeguard.
Lay hold on Form; you are as near to Essence as may be here below. Art
works for the rational enlargement of the fancy, not the titillation of
sense. And Invention is the more sacred the closer it apes the scope of
the divine plan. And this much, at least, of the Grecian work I have
learned, that it will never lick vulgar shoes, nor fawn to beastly eyes.
It is a stately order, a high pageant, a solemn gradual, wherein the
beholder will behold just so much as he is prepared, by litany and fasting
and long vigil, to receive. No more and no less."

"Aristotle again," said I, "with his 'continual slight novelty.' No fits
and starts."

"I have told you before I know nothing of the man," said Perugino, vexed,
it appeared, at such wounding of his vanity to be new; "let me tell you
this. There are fellows abroad who dub me dunce and dull-head. The young
Buonarroti, forsooth, who mistakes the large for the great, quantity for
quality; who in the indetermined pretends to see the mysterious. Mystery,
quotha! Mystery may be in an astrologer's horoscope, in a diagram. Mystery
needs no puckered virago, nor bully in the sulks. There is mystery in the
morning calms, mystery in a girl's melting mood, mystery in the
irresolution of a growing boy full of dreams. But behold! it is there, not
here. If you see it not, the fault is your own. It may be broad as day,
cut clean as with a knife, displayed at large before a brawling world too
busy lapping or grudging to heed it. The many shall pass it by as they run
huddling to the dark. Yet the few shall adore therein the excellency of
the mystery, even as the few (the very few) may discern in the flake of
wafer-bread the shining wholeness of the Divine Nature----"

"'The few remain, the many change and pass,'" I interpolated in a murmur.
But Perugino never heeded me. He went on.

"The Greek, young sir, took the fact and let it alone to breed. His act
lay in the taking and setting. Just so much import as it had borne it bore
still; just so much weight as separation from its fellows lent it was to
his credit who first cut it free. But nowadays glamour suits only with
serried muscles, frowns, and writhen lips; where darkness is we shudder,
saying, Behold a great mystery! Let a painter declare his incompetence to
utter, it shall be enough to assure you he has walked with God; for if he
stammers, look you, that testifies he is overwhelmed. Amen, I would
answer. Let his head swim and be welcome; but let him not set to painting
till he can stand straight again. For in one thing I am no Greek, in that
I cannot hold drunkenness divine." Here the good man stopped for want of
breath and I whipped in.

"Your great _Crucifixion_ in Santa Maria Maddalena," I began.

"Look you, sir," he took me up, "I know what you would be at. Take that
piece (which is of my very best) or another equally good, I mean the
_Charge to Peter_ in Pope Sixtus his new Chapel, and listen to me.
The first thing your painter must seek to do is to fill his wall. Let
there be no mistake about this. He is at first no prophet or man of God;
he is no juggler nor mountebank who shall be rewarded according to the
enormity of his grins; his calling, maybe, is humbler, for all he stands
for is to wash a wall so that no eye be set smarting because of it. Now
that seems a very simple matter; it is just as simple as the eye itself--
so you may judge the validity of the arguments against me, that a
wholesome green or goodly red wash would suffice. It would suffice
indifferent well for a kennel of dogs. But mark this. Although your
painter may drop hints for the soul, let him not strain above his pitch
lest he crack his larynx. To his colour he may add form in the flat; but
he cannot escape the flat, however he may wriggle, any more than the
sculptor can escape the round, scrape he never so wisely. Buonarroti will
scrape and shift; the Fleming has scraped and shifted all his days to as
little purpose. His seed-pearls invite your touch. Touch them, my friend,
you will smear your fingers. _Ne sutor ultra crepidam._ Leave
miracles, O painter, to the Saint, and stick to your brush-work. Colour
and form in the flat; there is his armour to win the citadel of a man's
soul."

"They call you mawkish," I dared to say.

"I am in good company," said the little man with much pomposity.

"You say boldly, then, if I catch the chain of your argument"--thus I
pursued him--"that you present (as by some formula which you have
elaborated) the facts of religion in colour and design? For I suppose you
will allow that your Art is concerned at least as much with religion as
with the washing of walls?"

"Religion! Religion!" cried he. "What are you at? Concerned with religion!
Man alive, it is concerned with itself; it _is_ religion. I see you
are very far indeed from the truth, and as you have spoken of my
_Crucifixion_ in Florence, now you shall suffer me to speak of it. I
testify what I know, not that which I have not seen. And as mine eyes have
never filled with blood from Golgotha, so I do not conjure with tools I
have not learned to handle. But I will tell you what I have seen. The
Mass: whereof my piece is, as it were, the transfiguration or a parable.
For it grew out of a Mass I once heard, stately-ordered, solemnly and
punctiliously served in a great church. Mayhap, I dreamed of it; we shall
not quarrel over terms. It was a strange Mass, shorn of much ornament and
circumstance; I thought, as I knelt and wondered: Here are no
lamentations, no bruised breasts, no outpoured hearts, nor souls on
flames. The day for tears is past, the fires are red, not flaming; this is
a day for steadfast regard, for service, patience, and good hope; this is
a day for Art to chant what the soul hath endured. For Art is a fruit sown
in action and watered to utterance by tears. Two priests only, clothed in
fine linen, served the Mass: ornaments of candles, incense, prostration,
genuflection, there were none. Yet, step by step, and with every step
pondered reverently ere another was laid to Its fellow's foundation; with
full knowledge of the end ere yet was the beginning accomplished; In every
gesture, every pause, intonation, invocation, stave of song, phrase of
prayer; by painful degrees wrought in the soul's sweat and tears,
unadorned, cold as fine stone, yet glittering none the less like fair
marble set in the sun--was that solemn Mass sung through in the bare
Church to the glory of God and His angels, who must ever rejoice in a work
done so that the master-mind is straining and on watch over heart and
voice. And I said, Calvary is done and the woe of it turned to triumph.
Love is the fulfilling of the Law. Henceforth, for me Law shall be the
fulfilment of my Love.

"Therefore I paint no terrors of death, no flesh torn by iron, no passion
of an anguish greater than we can ever conceive, no bittersweet ecstasy of
Self abandoned or Love inflaming; but instead, serenity, a morning sky, a
meek victim, Love fulfilling Law. Shorn of accidents, for the essence is
enough; not passionate, for that were as gross an affront in face of such
awful death as to be trivial. Nothing too much; Law fulfilling Love;
reasonable service.

"And because we are of the earth earthy, and because what I work you must
behold with bodily eyes, I limn you angels and gods in your own image; not
of greater stature nor of more excellent beauty than many among you; not
of finer essence, maybe, than yourselves. But as the priests about that
naked altar, so stand they, that the love which transfigures them be
absorbed in the fulfilling of law; and the law they exquisitely follow be
at once the pattern and glass of their love."

Master Peter drained a beaker of his Orvieto. I admired; for indeed the
little man spoke well.

"Now the Lord be good to you, Master Peter," I said; "men do you a great
wrong. For there are some who aver that you doubt."

"Who does not doubt?" replied my host. "We doubt whenever we cannot see."

"I believe you are right," said I. "Your great Saint is, after all, your
great Seer. For you, then, to question the soul's immortality is but to
admit that you do not yet see your own life to come."

"Leave it so," said Perugino. "Let us talk reasonably."

"Did all men love the law as you do," I resumed after a painful pause--for
I felt the force of the Master's rebuke to my impertinence (and could hope
others will feel it also)--"did all love the law as you do, the world
would be a cooler place and passion at a discount. But I cannot conceive
Art without passion."

"Nor I," said the painter, "and for the excellent reason that there is no
such thing. But remember this: passion is like the Alpheus. Hedge it about
with dams, you drive it deeper. Out of sight is not out of being. And the
issue must needs be the fairer."

"Happy the passion," I said, "which hath an issue. There is passion of the
vexed sort, where the tears are frozen to ice as they start. Of the
tortured thus, remember--

"Lo pianto stesso li planger non lascia,
E il duol, che trova in su gli occhi rintoppo,
Si volve in entro a far crescer l' ambascia."

"You know our Dante?" said Master Peter blandly (though I swear he knew
what I was at). "There may be such people; doubtless there are such
people. For me, I find a perpetual outlet in my art." I could not
forbear----

"Master Peter, Master Peter," I cried out, "how can I believe you when I
know that your Madonna's eyes are brimming; when I know why she turns them
to a misty heaven or an earth seen blotted by reason of tears? Do these
tears ever fall, Master Peter? or who freezes them as they start?"

For I wondered where his patient Imola found her outlet, and whether young
Simone has shown her a way. Master Peter drummed on the table and nursed
one fat leg.

Before I took leave of the urbane little painter, in fact while I stood in
the act of handshaking, I saw her white face at an upper window, looming
behind rigid bars. On a sudden impulse I concluded my farewells rapidly
and made to go. Vannucci turned back into the house and closed the door;
but I stayed in the cortile pretending a trouble with my spurs. Sure
enough, in a short time I heard a light footfall. Imola stood beside me.

"Wish me a safe journey," I said smiling, "and no more bare-headed
cavaliers on the road." Her lips hardly moved, so still her voice was.
"Was he bare-headed?" she asked, as if in awe.

"Love-locks floating free," I answered her gaily enough. "Shall I thank
him for his courtesies to you, Madonna, if we meet?"

"You will not meet: he is gone to Spello," she began, and then stopped,
blushing painfully.

"But I may stay in Spello this night and could seek him out."

She was mistress of her lips, and could now look steadily at me. "I wish
him very well," said Imola.

VI

THE SOUL OF A FACT

In the days when it was verging on a question whether a man could be at
the same time a good Christian and an artist, the chosen subjects of
painting were significant of the approaching crisis--those glaring moral
contrasts in history which, for want of a happier term, we call dramatic.
Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn
her more intimate manifestations to await likelier times, is a question it
were long to answer. The subjects, at any rate, were such as the Greeks,
with their surer instincts and saving grace of sanity in matters of this
kind, either forbore to meddle with or treated as decoratively as they
treated acanthus-wreaths. Today we call them "effective" subjects; we find
they produce shocks and tremors; we think it braces us to shudder, and we
think that Art is a kind of emotional pill; we measure it quantitatively,
and say that we "know what we like." And doubtless there is something
piquant in the quivering produced, for example, by the sight of white
innocence fluttering helpless in a grey shadow of lust. So long as the
Bible remained a god that piquancy was found in a _Massacre of the
Innocents_; in our own time we find it in a _Faust and Gretchen_,
in the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal Academy. It was a like appreciation
of the certain effect of vivid contrasts as powerful didactic agents
(coupled with, or drowning, a something purer and more devout) which had
inspired those most beautiful and distinctive of all the symbols of
Catholicism, the _Adoration of the Kings_, the Christ-child cycle,
and which raised the Holy Child and Maid-Mother to their place above the
mystic tapers and the Cross. Naturally the Old Testament, that garner of
grim tales, proved a rich mine: _David and Golias, Susanna and the
Elders_, the _Sacrifice of Isaac, Jethro's daughter_. But the
story of Judith did not come to be painted in Tuscan sanctuaries until
Donatello of Florence had first cast her in bronze at the prayer of Cosimo
_pater patria_. Her entry was dramatic enough at least: Dame Fortune
may well have sniggered as she spun round the city on her ball. Cosimo the
patriot and his splendid grandson were no sooner dead and their brood sent
flying, than Donatello's _Judith_ was set up in the Piazza as a fit
emblem of rescue from tyranny, with the vigorous motto, to make assurance
double, "EXEMPLVM SALVTIS PVBLICAE CIVES POSVERE." Savonarola, who knew his
Bible, saw here a keener application of Judith's pious sin. A few years
later that same _Judith_ saw him burn. Thus, as an incarnate
cynicism, she will pass; as a work of art she is admittedly one of her
great creator's failures. Her neighbour _Perseus_ of the Loggia makes
this only too plain! For Cellini has seized the right moment in a deed of
horror, and Donatello, with all his downrightness and grip of the fact,
has hit upon the wrong. It is fatal to freeze a moment of time into an
eternity of waiting. His _Judith_ will never strike: her arm is
palsied where it swings. The Damoclean sword is a fine incident for
poetry; but Holofernes was no Damocles, and, if he had been, it were
intolerable to cast his experience in bronze. Donatello has essayed that
thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a moment instead of denote a
permanent attribute. Art is adjectival, is it not, O Donatello? Her
business is to qualify facts, to say what things are, not to state them,
to affirm that they are. A sculptured _Judith_ was done not long
afterwards, carved, as we shall see, with a burin on a plate; and the man
who so carved her was a painter.

Meantime, _pari passu_, almost, a painter who was a poet was trying
his hand; a man who knew his Bible and his mythology and was equally at
home with either. Perhaps it is not extravagant to say that you cannot be
an artist unless you are at home with mythology, unless mythology is the
swiftest and most direct expression of your being, so that you can be
measured by it as a man is known by his books, or a woman by her clothes,
her way of bowing, her amusements, or her charities. For mythopoeia is
just this, the incarnating the spirit of natural fact; and the generic
name of that power is Art. A kind of creation, a clothing of essence in
matter, an hypostatising (if you will have it) of an object of intuition
within the folds of an object of sense. Lessing did not dig so deep as his
Greek Voltaire (whose "dazzling antithesis," after all, touches the root
of the matter) for he did not see that rhythmic extension in time or
space, as the case may be, with all that that implies--colour, value,
proportion, all the convincing incidents of form--is simply the mode of
all arts, the thing with which Art's substance must be interpenetrated,
until the two form a whole, lovely, golden, irresistible, and inevitable
as Nature's pieces are. This substance, I have said, is the spirit of
natural fact. And so mythology is Art at its simplest and barest (where
the bodily medium is neither word, nor texture of stone, nor dye), the
parent art from which all the others were, so to speak, begotten by man's
need. Thus much of explanation, I am sorry to say, is necessary, before we
turn to our mytho-poet of Florence, to see what he made out of the story
of Judith.

First of all, though, what has the story of Judith to do with mythology?
It is a legend, one of the finest of Semitic legends; and between legend
and myth there is as great a gulf as between Jew and Greek. I believe
there are no myths proper to Israel--I do not see how such magnificent
egoists could contract to the necessary state of awe--and I do not know
that there are any legends proper to Greece which are divorced from real
myths. For where a myth is the incarnation of the spirit of natural fact,
a legend is the embellishment of an historical event: a very different
thing. A natural fact is permanent and elemental, an historical event is
transient and superficial. Take one instance out of a score. The rainbow
links heaven and earth. Iris then, to the myth-making Greek, was Jove's
messenger, intermediary between God and Man. That is to incarnate a
constant, natural fact. Plato afterwards, making her daughter of Thaumas,
incarnated a fact, psychological, but none the less constant, none the
less natural. But to say, as the legend-loving Jew said, that Noah floated
his ark over a drowning world and secured for his posterity a standing
covenant with God, Who then and once for all set His bow in the heavens;
that is to indicate, somewhere, in the dim backward and abysm of time, an
historical event. The rainbow is suffered as the skirt of the robe of
Noah, who was an ancestor of Israel. So the Judith poem may be a decorated
event, or it may be the barest history in a splendid epical setting: the
point to remember is that it cannot be, as legend, a subject for creative
art. The artist, in the language of Neo-Platonism, is a demiurge; he only
of men can convert dead things into life. And now we will go into the
Uffizi.

Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of
amaze most people have who look for the first time at Botticelli's
_Judith_ tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, her
steadfast maid dogging with intent patient eyes every step she takes. You
say it is flippant, affected, pedantic. For answer, I refer you to the
sage himself, who, from his point of view--that painting may fairly deal
with a chapter of history--is perfectly right. The prevailing strain of
the story is the strength of weakness--_ex dulci fortitude_, to
invert the old enigma. "O God, O my God, hear me also, a widow. Break down
their stateliness by the hand of a woman!" It is the refrain that runs
through the whole history of Israel, that reasonable complacency of a
little people in their God-fraught destiny. And, withal, a streak of
savage spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to
death. There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too. So "she smote twice
upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him, and
tumbled his body down from the bed." Ho! what a fate for the emissary of
the Great King. Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox, "The Lord hath
smitten him by the hand of a woman!" That is it: the amazing, thrilling
antithesis insisted on over and over again by the old Hebrew bard. "Her
sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind prisoner, and the
fauchion passed through his neck." That is the _leit-motif_: Sandro
the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it, to the no small comfort of
Mr. Ruskin and his men. Giuditta, dainty, blue-eyed, a girl still and
three years a widow, flits homeward through a spring landscape of grey and
green and the smile of a milky sky, being herself the dominant of the
chord, with her bough of slipt olive and her jagged scimitar, with her
pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed, and her yellow curls floating
over her shoulders. On her slim feet are the sandals that ravished his
eyes; all her maiden bravery is dancing and fluttering like harebells in
the wind. Behind her plods the slave-girl folded in an orange scarf,
bearing that shapeless, nameless burden of hers, the head of the grim Lord
Holofernes. Oh, for that, it is the legend itself! For look at the girl's
eyes. What does their dreamy solemnity mean if not, "the Lord hath smitten
him by the hand of a woman"? One other delicate bit of symbolising he has
allowed himself, which I may not omit. You are to see by whom this deed
was done: by a woman who has unsexed herself. Judith is absorbed in her
awful service; her robe trails on the ground and clings about her knees;
she is unconscious of the hindrance. The gates of Bethulia are in sight,
the Chaldean horsemen are abroad, but she has no anxiety to escape. She is
swift because her life just now courses swiftly; but there is no haste.
The maid, you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, and steps
out the more lustily for it.

So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr. Ruskin, reader of
pictures. What says Botticelli the painter? Had he no instincts to tell
him that his art could have little to say to a legend? Or that a legend
might be the subject of an epic (here, indeed, was an epic ready made),
might, under conditions, be the subject of a drama; but could not, under
any conditions, be alone the subject of a picture? I don't for a moment
suggest that he had, or that any artist ever goes to work in this double-
entry, methodical way; but are we entitled to say that he was not
influenced by his predilections, his determinations as a draughtsman, when
he squared himself to illustrate the Bible? We say that the subject of a
picture is the spirit of natural fact. If Botticelli was a painter,
_that_ is what he must have looked for, and must have found, in every
picture he painted. Where, then, was he to get his natural facts in the
story of Judith? What is, in that story, the natural, essential (as
opposed to the historical, fleeting) fact? It is murder. Judith's deed was
what the old Scots law incisively calls _slauchter_. It may be
glossed over as assassination or even execution--in fact, in Florence,
where Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so called:
it remains, however, just murder. Botticelli, not shirking the position at
all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or essence
swiftness and stealth. Chaucer, let us note, had been of the same mind:

"The smyler with the kayf under his cloke,"

and so on, in lines not to be matched for hasty and dreadful suggestion.
Swiftness and stealth, the ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab,
are the standing elements of murder: pare off all the rest, you come down
to that. Your staring looks, your blood, your "chirking," are accidentals.
They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), but the horror of
sudden death is above them: a man may strangle with his thoughts cleaner
than with his pair of hands. And as "matter" is but the stuff wherewith
Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, when we flout or
mangle it, so it is against the high dignity of Art to insist upon the
carrion she must use. She will press, here the terror, there the radiance,
of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it in her face, to add
mentally the poor stage properties we have grown to trust. No blood, if
you please. Therefore, in Botticelli's _Judith_, nothing but the
essentials are insisted on; the rest we instantly imagine, but it is not
there to be sensed. The panel is in a tremor. So swift and secret is
Judith, so furtive the maid, we need no hurrying horsemen to remind us of
her oath,--"Hear me, and I will do a thing which shall go throughout all
generations to the children of our nation." Sudden death is in the air;
nature has been outraged. But there is no drop of blood--the thin scarlet
line along the sword-edge is a symbol if you will--the pale head in the
cloth is a mere "thing": yet we all know what has been done. Mr. Ruskin is
wrong to dwell here upon the heroism of the heroine, the beneficence of
the crime, the exhilaration of the patriot; he is traducing the painter by
so praising the poet All those things may be there; and why should they
not? But it is a pity to insist upon them until you have no space for the
pictorial something which is there too, and makes the picture.

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