THE CRITIC AND HIS MATERIAL

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not?  What does it matter?  That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the greater art.  Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of?  The painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure ‘set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,’ I murmur to myself, ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her: and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.’  And I say to my friend, ‘The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire’; and he answers me, ‘Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary.’

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-player’s music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves.  Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that ‘all the thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias?’  He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious colour-harmonies of blue and green.  And it is for this very reason that the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.  It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation.  It does not confine itself—let us at least suppose so for the moment—to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.  And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it.  Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.—The Critic as Artist.

DANTE THE LIVING GUIDE

There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who have discovered her secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are going to be.  We can choose our day and select our hour.  We can say to ourselves, ‘To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through the valley of the shadow of death,’ and lo! the dawn finds us in the obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side.  We pass through the gate of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the horror of another world.  The hypocrites go by, with their painted faces and their cowls of gilded lead.  Out of the ceaseless winds that drive them, the carnal look at us, and we watch the heretic rending his flesh, and the glutton lashed by the rain.  We break the withered branches from the tree in the grove of the Harpies, and each dull-hued poisonous twig bleeds with red blood before us, and cries aloud with bitter cries.  Out of a horn of fire Odysseus speaks to us, and when from his sepulchre of flame the great Ghibelline rises, the pride that triumphs over the torture of that bed becomes ours for a moment.  Through the dim purple air fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin, and in the pit of loathsome disease, dropsy-stricken and swollen of body into the semblance of a monstrous lute, lies Adamo di Brescia, the coiner of false coin.  He bids us listen to his misery; we stop, and with dry and gaping lips he tells us how he dreams day and night of the brooks of clear water that in cool dewy channels gush down the green Casentine hills.  Sinon, the false Greek of Troy, mocks at him.  He smites him in the face, and they wrangle.  We are fascinated by their shame, and loiter, till Virgil chides us and leads us away to that city turreted by giants where great Nimrod blows his horn.  Terrible things are in store for us, and we go to meet them in Dante’s raiment and with Dante’s heart.  We traverse the marshes of the Styx, and Argenti swims to the boat through the slimy waves.  He calls to us, and we reject him.  When we hear the voice of his agony we are glad, and Virgil praises us for the bitterness of our scorn.  We tread upon the cold crystal of Cocytus, in which traitors stick like straws in glass.  Our foot strikes against the head of Bocca.  He will not tell us his name, and we tear the hair in handfuls from the screaming skull.  Alberigo prays us to break the ice upon his face that he may weep a little.  We pledge our word to him, and when he has uttered his dolorous tale we deny the word that we have spoken, and pass from him; such cruelty being courtesy indeed, for who more base than he who has mercy for the condemned of God?  In the jaws of Lucifer we see the man who sold Christ, and in the jaws of Lucifer the men who slew Cæsar.  We tremble, and come forth to re-behold the stars.—The Critic as Artist.