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" There is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any creature, but It is capable of a unity of some kind with other creatures ; and in that unity is its perfection and theirs, and a pleasure also for the beholding of all other creatures that can behold."— Rdskim. WILLIAMSON & CO 1886. ''"'"hundrT"'"/ *^.'*'' '' ^""^'"^"^ "' Canada, nunared i»nd aUrh*,,^!^ \.. . „ __ ' Agiiculture. Ae,louItur». ^ "• ""««»»». in Hi= office ol the MtoLter „t PREFACE. My sole apology for launching this little craft on the sea of authorship " A promised prize to hope," is my love for the English language. Again in the words of Byron : " Would I were worthier " to accomplish the task I have set myself. Luckily, my part in the construction of the little vessel is but a sec- ondary one, and if I succeed in presenting some few score of what I consider to be masterpieces of their respective types before the English reader, without detracting from their beauties by my own suggestions or criticisms, I shall be satisfied. Especially would I enlist the sympathy of the Teacher in the subject of my text. He is the true high-priest of language, officiating at many an altar to many a neo- phyte, whose plastic mind and nascent tastes have not only to be regulated, but verily formed at the prompting of the minister. The glorious heritage of letters with all its wealth of grandeur, of strength, of beauty, and of music is for him who has the right of entry ; who holds in faith the talis- man of sympathy ; in love the key of desire. That talis- IV PREFACE. man may be transmitted by the earnest soul, himkS^lf be- liever, seeker, finder, to scores of humbler worshippers. That key may be turned by the resolute hand of the keeper for hundreds of waverers now groping at the gates, yet making plaintive moan for the inner light. This heritage has been too long neglected, too long un- known —suppressed by the autocratic fiat of the usurper, and the inflexible dogma of fashion. To the many, its palaced apartments are never opened, its consoled profiles are unfamiliar, its pictured glories are but misty daubs, its musical accords are unheard or unheeded. How long shall this be so ? Till the iron bars of ed- ucational prejudice are lowered for ever. Till we are taught to believe that erudition consists not solely in the knowledge of antiquities. Till we forget to despise the flowers growing at our very feet, while seeking alone the exotics of other lands. Till we forego the exclusive consideration of dimensions, abstractions, and computa- tions, to come back to the voices of earth and home ; to sit once more as at the feet of a mother; to drink in anew, but purified, refined, etherialized,' the language lessons of nature, which prompted the first utterance, which will syllable the last farewell, which, perchance will go out with our better selves into the temporal dark and the eternal light ! The Mother Tongue ! — What name should be dearer to the student ? What worthier his desire and his choice ? The twin sister of art, the imperishable and the true. Dear name, inseparable from that little land " bound in Mritb the triumphant sea ! " PREFACE. V Be its success what it may, to all lovers of art and lit- erature, I dedicate my first bom, this child of my heart. May it find some few sponsors to say a kind word for it at the baptismal font. Be its faults what they may, and I fear they are many, it is at least the child of affection, the legitimate offspring of love and faith— love for the dear, dead names that adorn its pages ; faith in the mis- sion of the glorious language they have immortalised — stamped with their own undying fame. As I commenced my preface with a metaphor borrowed from the sea, let me conclude with another, that though " I have ventured Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, in a sea of glory," * it may not prove to be altogether " far beyond my depth." A. H. MORRISON. Brantford, January 18th, 1886. CONTENTS. •-«-• . PAOB Introductory 9 Architecture in Language 15 Sculpture in Language 68 Painting in Language 137 Music in Language 216 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. INTEODUCTORY. " What in me is dark Illuinine: what is low, raise and support." Milton. Language may be described as verbal architecture. Words are ideas crystallised ; they are verbal bricks with which we plan our phrases, build our sentences and round our periods ; here, soaring in lofty rhyme or stately prose towards the acme of classic diction, there, planting but a stone, low lying, as humble tribute to the memory of a beloved thought. But language is not only verbal archi- tecture, it is verbal sculpture, often embodying in a few well-chosen and graphic words, the corporeal or mental characteristics of an individual, as truly as does the marble bust or statue convey to the human eye the line- aments and form of the being symbolised. Yet again, language is verbal painting, containing within its mani- fold vocabulary all the appliances of the artist to represent form and texture, light and shade, colour and atmosphere, every sentence penned or uttered being a mental picture, more or less artistic, impressed on the fair page of the in- 10 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. telligence. Lastly, language is verbal music, appealing by sound to that sense of the beautiful which is innate in overy human nature, without which this world would be an aching void and life a barren waste. If I am right in my deductions, I deem my metaphor a not inappropriate one. If language is in very deed, as I see no reason to doubt, architecture, sculpture, painting and music of a certain sort ; then is our national tongue a veritable art gallery, an art gallery of speech, in which are perpetuated and catalogued the loftiest conceptions of the aesthetic in- tellect and the constructive genius. In art all terms are convertible ; for architecture has been described as "frozen music," and it is not the first time one may have heard of " the shadow of a sound." We build our cathedrals and our epic verse. We carve our monu- ments and our biographies. We paint our landscapes and our narratives. We sing our anthems and our lyrics. There is no greater truth, than that within the limits of a few written or printed paragraphs, we may exhibit con- structions typical of all art, and as suggestive of the objects typified, as ever have been the creations of the sculptor's chisel or the artist's brush. And of necessity it must be so ; for eye and ear and voice are closely related; each is in telephonic communication with the intelligence. The effects of each are in a sense convertible. The eye can lend to the ear its cunning in a modified form. The ear repays the debt by rendering mentally visual what was before unseen. The eye inspires the voice,which re- acts upon the ear. The mind is in all cases the centre INTRODUCTORY. 11 ur monu- acted upon, and the result is the same, though arrived at by slightly different methods. The tirst man became an artist directly his eyes opened to the new-bom light ; for on his retina were traced in glowing procession the radiant forms of earth and sea and sky by that arch-artist, the perceptive intelligence. He became likewise a musician, though unconsciously ; for once again that perceptive in- telligence caught the rhythmic babble of the brook, the soft sigh of the wind, the twitter of the bird, and, possibly, the muffled refrain of the distant sea,through the intuitive aid of that arch-musician, the ear. He became a sculptor ; for mentally he outlined as they really were, the objects which surrounded him, trees, flowers, animals, himself. He became an architect, though still unconsciously, when his mind leaving, as it were, his body far behind, leaving it, yet attached to it, scaled the ramparts of nature and climbed the serried heights, which towered ridge on ridge, and peak on peak towards the clouds. Surely upon be- holding and appreciating all this novelty and all this beauty and all this grandeur, his lips must have opened spontaneously, to prefer, in a cry of astonishment and joy, the first orison to heaven. That cry was the vocal em- bodiment of all he had seen and heard and felt : 'twas the " frozen music " of the German poet, the foundation stone of the art gallery of speech. In a state of being as complex as our own, there must of necessity be great diversity of taste. Quot homines tot sententice is an aphorism as old as the hills, and this question of art, and what constitutes true art, must ever 12 THE AKT GALLERY OF ENGLISH. be matter for debate, of like and dislike, if you will. As for myself I can see beauty in all phsuses of nature and their representations, in a weed covered cabin as well as in the Parthenon, in a simple outline sketch as well as in an elaborate oil or water colour painting. The furrowed cheek of age bears not infrequently for me a bloom richer than the tints of youth. The rugged alliterative metre of the old Viking brings me messages quite as persuasive as the mellow lispings of more modern schools. The sombre pine bears a livery as grateful to my sense of sight as the gorgeous scarlet of the frost-kissed maple, and spite of Ruskin's " great, ugly, black rain-cloud," that lam-cloud is not ugly for me at all, it is, like its brighter hued brethren, fraught witli promise and blessing, a part of nature and her great dower to man. I am cosmopolitan in my tastes and I love all that is beautiful, and much that in the eyes of my fellows is not beautiful, for I argue thus, that in contrast consists beauty. The soul reared in the purple and fine linen of a conventional system, which fashion maintains is the only true one, has scarcely been reared at all. It is an alien page, washed in with the neutral tints of another's mixing. To appreciate nature, we must see her in all her moods, under all her skies, surrounded by all her children. To appreciate art, we must study all styles, be in sympathy with all honest effort and see and think for ourselves. Not only must we occasionally abjure the fine raiment of conventionalism, we must positively clothe ourselves in the rags of the in- digent. Not only must we temporarily renounce palm INTRODUCTORY. 13 groves and sun-kissed waters, we must traverse Sahara's arid waste. Not only must we forsake the rose-flushed snows of Alpine heio;hts, we must dwell in the blackness of the gorge which slumbers at the glacier's foot. My imiiiovtal soul, if it have a spark of the divine tire, will instinctively fan itself into the tiame of a divine appreci- ation, unaided by whim and untutored by caprice. Do not my senses speak to me of the sensible world around ni<^, and speak truly ? Do not those same senses respond as truly, when appealed to by the true imitations of the natural world, be the message delivered in architecture, in sculpture, in picture, in music, or in the literal embodiment of all, speech ? Most assuredly they do. If they fail faithfully to record inwardly the impressions they have received from without, then am I blind ; colour blind and form blind and sense blind. Then are we all by analog}- in a manner blind, and if the blind lead the blind shall not they both fall into the ditch ? Truly it is amusing to contrast the opinions of individuals on any given question in art or literature — amusing and at the same time, instructive. Here is one who deifies Turner, making him all but divine. By and by comes another, who with critical air and knowing shrug will " damn with faint praise" the misty glories of Ruskin's hero — Which is in the right ? I myself confess to an honest liking for the rugged diction, the splintered periods, the thunder ruffled clauses of tempestuous Carlyle, but by me stands one, who snarls, "Regarded as English, however, his style is simply an 'a "to execrable monjirel, althouirh it IS 14 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. marvellously wide iriouthed, blatant and ferocious, as mongi-els not unfrequently are. If our writers were to practise for a generation or two the scribbling of ever accretive pan-polyglot devouring Carlylese, Addison would be obsolete, Macau lay's works would be an unknown tongue, Shakspeare and our present version of the Bible would be unintelligible. The man who hybridizes it thus owes our literature an apology." Which is in the right ? Here is a very reputable building, erected in a very rep- utable city, somewhere in a very reputable republic, and. hither comes — led surely by an unkind angel — a very reputable English litterateur. He straightway condemns this building as unsightly and inartistic. With what re- sult? A dozen captious critics rear their muzzles to the moonlight of their inspiration and bay down a very chorus of dissonant anathemas upon that reputable Englishman's devoted head. W^hich is in the right ? Here is a vignette of Pope: " Those miserable mountebanks of the day, the poets, disgrace themselves and deny God in running down Pope, the most faultless of poets." Compare it with this : " His wit is as thick as Tewkesbury mustard." Which is in the right ? — So I might go on, ad infinitum. Yet what does it all prove ? That no man is a universal hero and that no work is a universal standard. We must see, each with his own eyes, and judge w^ith his own feelings, and if favourites get praise from some, they must expect abuse from others. Depend upon it, the better we are abused the better shall our work become, always provided that the workman be worthy of his hire. ARCHITECTUBE IN LANGUAGE. I. Architecture in Language. All are architects of fate, Working in these walls of time ; Some with massive deeds and great, Some with ornaments of rhyme. TiONO FELLOW. We build our sentences as does the arcliitect his chefs- d'ceuvre. Stone on stone the fabric rises. Word on word the sentence expands, till each is complete, the ex- pression of a thought — one embodied in stones, the other in words; one appealing to the perceptive faculties objectively, the other appealing to the same faculties subjectively; yet, both in a sense fulfilling the same mission, therefore, in the same sense, convertible. When the objective structure is complete, be it church, or mansion, or humble tenement, we may enter corporeally, to worship, to admire, or to rest. Similarly, when the subjective structure is complete, be it devotional, or classic, or simple, we may enter mentally, to worship, to admire, or to rest. In one we find bodily shelter, with a sense of mental^ or perhaps sensual gratifi- cation ; in the other we find mental accommodation, with a sense of bodily sympathy ; for mind and body have ever reflex actions and so far as we know are analogous and inseparable. Given a couplet, a stanza, a [)aragraph, or a succession of couplets, stanzas or paragraphs — What shall these be- come ? Why that depends upon one's genius, one's taste, 16 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. .. one's idiosyncrasies of artistic temperament. To A the message may be but a couplet, a stanza, a paragraph or a succession of either ; but to B it is a palace, a temple, a cathedral, or perchance a bridge of many arches, spanning the stream of thought and connecting the shores of time and finite sensibilities with the everlasting fields of eternal bloom and perfected mental fruition. It is to him then, according to humour, a couplet or a cupola, a paragraph or a pagoda, a succession of rhythmic lines, limited, not with- out beauty, yet breathing the music of earthly voices, or a succession of rhythmic fancies, " frozen music," limitless, reflecting the melodies of the winged choirs of paradise. It is anything he likes for the time being ; that is to say, if it be true art. He can find in it something besides it- self. It has a dual, a wraith, a ghost of itself, a shadow looking back at itself in quivering but not unsympathetic outlines from the crystalline depths of the psychical pro- found. It is but a step from the real to the ideal, from the objective to the subjective, from nature to irt, and vice versa. Look out upon the plain, there under the dawning light, dew-dimmed, stand the monoliths — under the dawning light of a new-born day, under the dawning light of a new- born civilization. They stand like sentinels, grim,scarred, ever alert, by ones and twos and threes, and if by chance, one has fallen, overtaken by the yearning desire for rest and slumber, its fellows watch over it, like Titans guard- ing the body of a fallen comrade. This is Stonehenge. These are the monoliths, mementos of the dead centuries. ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 17 The bleaching moss speaks more eloquently than the historic date or the half-obliterated epitaph, and circles their furrowed brows, so long bared to the storm and tlie drift, with hoary honour, scant relics clinging to the bald head of age. Twenty hundred years of sun and snow since they were young ; since first they stood ranged in all their savage and gloomy majesty on the Amesbury wold ; since first they stretched their barren arms to the pitiless void, whose minions have never yet ceased to scourge their fissured sides or trace thereon with mocking fingers the epitaphsj of dissolution. What do they there, so solitary, vast, weird, and apparently objectless and pro- fitless ? The centuries echo back no answer to the oft re- peated question ; the dumb stones tell no tale ; the plumed grasses nod in the yellow sunshine, the lichens redden and moulder in the autumnal blast, yet hold the secret ; history cannot solve the riddle ; only tradition and legend have their home here, and they make vague answer to the antiquary's quest. An air of glamour is over the spot, heavy with the mists of eld. Through it we see faint forms, and ever shifting phantasmagoria, of Celtic chief and Druid priest, of painted figure and flowing robe. Spirits we feel assured are not far ofi", as we peer between the sun- less chinks, or catch the subdued moonlight reflected from the furrows, or hear the sad wind wail the requiem of the long forgotten dead. Yet what boots it to know the pur- pose of this mighty place of altars — Is it a place of altars or a barbarian's caprice ? the relics are here. Are they not enough ? Perchance, were the secret known, half the 18 THE ART GALLERY OF ENOLISH. charm of the monolithic wilderness would be fled — thus is it ever — " Ignorance is the mother of admiration." When all the arts of the oracle are laid bare, what rever- ence remains for the priest ? It is enough for me, who am not an expert at the art of answering such conundrums, to. stand beneath the open sky of the fair young spring, -to feel the beatings of its lusty pinions, to catch the fra- grance of its balmy breath : to stand, I sa}', in open-eyed, child-like wonder, and gaze and muse and gaze again, till the present merges into the past, till the centuries glide from beneath my feet, and the long ago, as I like to imagine it, shines out at me from the midst of those weather-worn stones, crowning their heads like aureoles of mellow flame, and weaving for me a romance, that may not be authentic history, 'tis true, but which is history enough for me, who would not have my dream dispelled, nor wake to find the glory that halos the charmed spot, but a common place ignis fatuis after all, a very will-o'- the wisp of a diseased imagination playing above the grave of the possible. It is enough for me to know that I am standing spell-bound before the cradle of architect- ural art, as it was first manifested in our own loved land. Yes ! These unhewn pillars, though they support no dome but the arching roof of space, are veritable records of early Celtic monumental skill. How came they here in all their rugged massiveness ? What force lifted them endwise to greet the stars ? Where were they quarried ? By what means conveyed hither ? Again, I say, there is no answer. They are here, here to see, and touch and ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 19 dream over, and this is sufficient answer for me. Instinct- ively, my thoughts, spirit-led, glide from the monoliths before me, these silent attestations to a nascent architect- ural want in primitive man's nature, to language. I find myself surveying mentally the range of written literature, and asking myself, where is the written equivalent for all this majesty — for all this native grandeur of reality ? I know it exists. I feel assured it has been written. Iso- lated thought, strung like giant beads on the thread of narration — bathed in the light of the long ago — sighed over by ghost-ridden winds — weird, rugged, solitary, cloud-tormented idealism. I seek for it and ere long I find it — Is not this the word-building, the stonehenge of the pen ? — What form rises in the roar of clouds ? Whose dark ghost gleams on the red streams of tempests ? His voice rolls on the thunder. 'Tis Orla, the brown chief of Oith- ona. He was unmatched in war. Peace to thy soul, Orla ! Thy fame will not perish. Nor thine, Calmar ! Lovely wast thou, son of blue-eyed Mora ; but not harm- less was thy sword. It hangs in thy cave. The ghosts of Lochlin shriek around its steel. Hear thy praise, Calmar ! It dwells in the voice of the mighty. Thy name shakes in the echoes of Morven. Then raise thy fair locks, son of Mora. Spread them on the arch of the rainbow, and smile through the tears of the storm." Is not each of these rugged periods, isolated, weather- stained, tempest- torn, a verbal monolith ? Does not the moss of archaism choke up the broken clauses and hide r ?mm SO THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. their fissurcH 'neath its rugged fringe ? Is not the whole passage haunted with ghcjst gleam and ghost-shriek, the roar of tempest and the roll of thunder ? Does it not speak with the tongue of eld ? Is it not heavy with the air of romance ? Yes, all this, and more. It is to me a veritable reproduction in words of the stony monuments of Salisbury plain. Some minds I am well assured, love to dwell in the past, to drink their inspirations at the fount of the long- ago, and revel amidst the archives of antiquity. To such intellects,which must be preeminently retrospective, much of the present seems a dreary waste of practicality, a desert-like expanse swept by the dry winds of inanition, whose very air is impregnated with the dusty spores of the epidemic called ennui. Of such a type was the mind of Scott, and perhaps in a lesser degree that of Oarlyle — more mediaeval than modern. What a Gothic cathedral is to a nineteenth century warehouse, such is this medi- aeval cast of mind to the modern, plodding, matter-of-fact type of humanity. How can we account for such an an- omaly in nature — a creature of to-day animated by an archaic soul ? If effects be traceable, either directly oi- indirectly to causes, there must surely be some reason for the phenomenon. Is it because, though chivalry is dead and we have become in very deed a nation of shopkeepers, that some spark of the old knightly vitality is still latent somewhere in our money-grubbing, red-tape-tied natures ? Or is it because the voice of a free-born instinct still calls to her children, beckoning them away from the marts and iil ARCHITECTUHK IN LANGUAGE. 21 quays of commerce, back to the greenwood alleys and rugged fastnesses of yore ? Whatever the reason may be, the fact is beyond dispute that men love the past, and although the good old times are not, perhaps, just what they are represented to be by some of their more pronoun- ced admirers and advocates, there still lingers a golden radiance emanating from the dead centuries, beneath whose glamour we love to dwell, and whose Aurora-like beams are not unfrequently shot athwart the monotony of many an otherwise prosaic and neutral-tinted life, ren- dering to it all the light and colour it is capable of receiv- ing. Gothic is a fine word. There is a world of rugged beauty in it, just as there is a world of rugged beauty in the style of architecture known by that name, as there is a world of rugged beauty in a paragraph by Carlyle, spite of the sweeping strictures of Professor Ross. His clauses are built as were the buttrcvssed walls, before the superficiality of a later age and the vulgar tastes of trade corporations wrested the art from the hands of the architect, and let it to the contractor, the mason, and the plumber ; before the rugged pomp of the dim aisles and pointed archways, gave way to the finical touch of the decorator, and the mere- tricious intricacies of the draughtsman. Who has not stood at some time of his life in the "dim, religious light " of such an ideal edifice, looking up to the roof, lost in the half-gloom of distance, with faint outlines just shadowed forth by the arches, and all beyond vague, weird and awe-inspiring, as though curtained by the 8S THE ART OALLEKY OF ENGLISH. mighty wings of angels brooding over tlie .spot, when seen in a dream ? The vast columns grouped, as by the hand of Genii ; walls massy, rough-hewn, and sombre ; windows scarce letting in, yet not altogether excluding the light of day; just a faint streak of blended colour from the stained glass falling across the pavement at our feet, elotpient of warmth where all is cold, as is the soul-light from the eye momentarily shed across the pale face of in- tellect. All understood, yet half-expressed ; all seen, though indistinct in shadow ; the meaning clear, but the embodiments of the sense disjointed, uneven, antique, awe-provoking ! This is the embodiment of a type of art in stone. Has it too its epitome in words ? With- out doubt it has for those who choose to read : — " Sovereigns die, and sovereignties ; how all dies, and is for a time only — is a * time phantasm, yet reckons itself real !' The Merovingian kings, slowly wending in their bullock-carts through the streets of Paris, with their long hair flowing, have all wended slowly on — into etern- ity. Charlemagne sleeps at Salzburg, with truncheon grounded, only fable expecting that he will awaken. Charles, the Hammer, Pepin, Bow-legged, where now is their eye of menace ; their voice of command ? RoUo and his shaggy Northmen cover not the Seine with ships, but have sailed off" on a longer voyage." Is not this Gothic enough ? Then take this : " See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man ! On his plank, swinging over the abyss'of that stone ditch, plank resting on parapet, balanced by weight of patriots, he hovers ARCHITECTURE IN LANOUAGE. 28 perilous — such a dove towards such an ark ! Deftly, thou shifty usher; one man already fell, and lies smashed, far down there, against the masonry ! Usher Maillard falls not. Deftly, unerring, he walks, with outspread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through his port-hole ; the shifty usher snatches it and returns. Terms of surrender, par- don, immunity to all ! Are they accepted ? . ' Foi tVofficieripTi the word of an otHcer) answers half-pay Hulin, or half-pay Elie — for men do not agree on it — ' They are !' Sinks the drawbridge, Usher Maillard bolt- ing it when down ; rushes in the living deluge ; the Bas- tille is fallen ! Victoire ! La Bastille est 'prise!' Read on from this and you shall find further examples of what I would teach. Read through the chapter " Not a Revolt," then tell me if there is not masonry in speech ! All this to me is Gothic, early Gothic in its rugged majesty ; so strong, yet so simple ; so eloquent, yet so devoid of finish. The brief, terse clauses, tier on tier, not rounded ; but abrupt, pointed, sharp-outlined against the shadows, seem to rear themselves from the gloom of a remote past and lose themselves in the gloom of a remote futurity : well-expressed and sure; yet something left to the imagina- tion ; and through all, as through stained glass, the many- coloured light of genius playing over the rough stones. And with this Gothic art, this architectural regularity, yet ruggedness of structure, this repetition of similar phases of expressed thought, whether in stone, or clause, or word, are linked in inseparable communion the Bible and the altar; the church and the Book 24 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. !] . What was the Gothic edifice but the repetition of certain simple elements, combining to form a congruous whole. The pointed arch was the predominant feature ever re- peated ; yet this repetition was never wearisome. It was the key note to the pile. So with the Biblical phrase. What might be deemed commonplace, even monotonous, in lighter literature is here only emphatically grand : " While the earth remaineth seed time and harvest and cold and heat and summer and winter and day and night shall not cease." Or again : " For I am persuaded that neither death, tior life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nx)r any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God." This is the acme of architectural skill — word building extraordinary — consolidated walls of verbal expression loop-holed with the mono-syllables of faith. Turn to Egypt, where the sleepy Nile at flood time frets among the Papyrus fringes, and the ripples make soft murmur to the crisping sedges ; where the great water- lilies lift silvery chalices to the sunlight, and the low wind as it sighs along the shallows, kisses the white blossoms ere bearing away fragrant favour from their rifled bosoms. Yet 'tis not for rippling water, nor perfumed blossom, nor Bedouin breeze that we would seek this far-off clime. Hard by the banks of the historic stream stand the monu- ments of a by-gone race. There they stand ; one, two, ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 25 three, seventy in number, of all 8izes and ages, scattered, weather-stained, with an air half -repellent, half -defiant. Sphinx-like they propound their mighty riddle to the modem centuries, and who, in very truth, shall answer it ? There comes no (Edipus to rend the secret from the Mockers of the Ages. Guessers there are in plenty, fan- tastic faith and blear-eyed superstition wink and nod in the twilight of their own egotism and self-conceit, over a fancied solution ; but who shall say that the riddle is read, that the hag of doubt has been hurled to destruc- tion down the steep of time ? Set on their solid bases, they tower up to the clear sky, sunlit ; to the clear sky, moonlit and star-spangled. What mighty changes in the constellations have they not witnessed ! To what revo- lutions in the spheres have they not set their silent seal ! With feet firm set, feet bathed eternally in the shifting waves of the desert sea, swept eternally by the dishevel- led tresses of the torrid breeze, they stand, the sentinels of antiquity, guarding the resting places of kings. How came those huge blocks there ? What force uplifted them from the breast of earth midv/ay to the clouds ? Through all this time, through all this change, the desert blast frets them not ; monarchies fall, they heed them not ; nations pass away, they make no sign ; civilizations are born and perish ; creeds rise and wane ; philosophies bud, bloom, and decay ; but these are immutable. What is eternal of man's handiwork, of architectural perfection of skill is surely here. They are the symbolism of finite strength, the climax of finite will. Yes, the climax ! — stone B 26 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. on stone — step on step — tier on tier — ever lessening in vol- ume, yet ever increasing in grandeur, as they taper to the stars. Yet after all, the volume, the clay, the rock is the least part of them. This but fills the eye. The mere pyramid as pyramid is of the earth, earthy, and, if the sight go no farther, all that is left after scanning their giant flanks is the thought, that thousands have toiled on those flinty slopes and steps, and like the coral insects have perished at their toil, making no moan, and leaving no place incapable of being filled b}'^ future generations of toilers, who in their turn shall toil and likewise perish. But beyond the work, the bare accomplishment, is the sen- timent welling ever outward, and increasing till all space is permeated with the refrain, that, so far as this world is concerned, as the monarch is now, so is the labourer. Each sleeps alike in the forgotten dust. The completed work is mausoleum alike for king and captive. Is this all then of life and life's teaching ? What boots it whether the living clay be king's or captive's for the few short years ? When all is over who will care to distinguish their barren dust ? Is there nought further to learn ? Must all end with the mummy, the monument, and the epitaph ? Not so, we like to think, though life's record be indeed written among the shifting sands, the immortal energies dwell evermore beyond the futility of sepulchres, and the inanity of in- scriptions ; the panegyric of the satrap and the oblivion of the serf. Thus as the thought swells ever upward and onward before these architectural embodiments of the ambition of kings and the labour of slaves, these climaxes ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAOE. 27 in brick and stone, leading from the desert's drift, to the * blue-ceiled vault of heaven, so is the climax in words like- wise fraught with sentiment, which deepens and expands as it progresses ; here sentence is piled on sentence and thought on thought, each loftier than the preceding, each permeated with a subtler logic or a more divine inspir- ation, until the pyramidal whole is clinched by the last towering clause which links the message with the light. These pyramidal climaxes of earth are not so very far separated from the pyramidal climaxes of prose and verse. Each so grand, so progressive, so eloquent, yet itself so voiceless. An echo, this latent in words, that in stones. Each the shrine of an earthly monarch, though in differ- ent spheres. Each the reflected desire of a soul's ambi- tion to perish nevermore. Can Shakespeare ask a worth- ier immortality than this : — " The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palacen, The Holemu temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve ; And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind." or this:- " I conjure you, by that which you profess (Howe'er you come to know it), answer me : Though you untie the winds and let them fight Against the churches ; though the yeasty waves Confound and swallow navigation up ; Though bladed com be lodg'd, and trees blown down ; Though castles topple on their warders' heads ; Though palaces and pyramids do slope ~ Their heads to their foundations ; though the treasure Of nature's germins tumble all together, Even till destruction sicken, answer me To what laak you." I 28 THE ART GATXERY OF ENGLISH. What more touching tribute can there be to the im- mortal memory of " Manfred," than his own pityful ap- peal to the shade of the dead Astarte ? " Speak to me ! For I have call'd on thee in the still night, Startled the slumbering birds from the hush'd boughs. And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name, Which answer'd me — many things answer'd me— Spirits and men — but thou wert silent all. Yet speak to me ! I have outwatch'd the stars. And gazed o'er heaven in vain in search of thee. Speak to me ! I have wandered o'er the earth And never found thy likeness -Speak to me ! Look on the fiends around — They feel for me : I fear them not, and feel for thee alone — Speak to me ! though it be in wrath ;— but say — I reck not what — but let me hear thee once — This once — once more ! " Can the great pile of Cheops speak more eloquently than this ? Had the master builder of old Egypt greater magic in his touch ? What though the one be stone builder and the other word builder. Their enduring monuments alike shall stand — shall stand and point in glorious cli- max ever upward toward the stars. With what consummate art does Bacon build ! In that wonderful essay " Of Studies," the clauses are so artistically balanced and grouped that they seem to lie literally in strata. Verbal stories or flats so to speak, one over the other, ore thought leading to the next, one sentiment capping another, till the pinnacle is at- tained. Yet the construction is not of the pyramid or climaxing type. The structure is level, in flats, . ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 29 whose basements are equal areas. The effect is little heightened by gradation; but rather established by logical sequence and regularity of diction, by reduplica- tion of expressive means, though the thoughts are ever new. It is not a pyramid, it is rather a pagoda of many stories, each resembling its fellows in archtectural outline and symmetry of parts, yet each distinct ; each irradiated with its own light when the casements lie open to the rays of fancy ; each chequered with its own shadow where the subtler logic of the argument excludes the moment- ary play of the sunbeam. With what skill, too, are the Latin quotations introduced towards the close of the es- say, being in very deed, clamps of foreign workmanship, rivetting the upper clauses of the fabric to the pediments below, not obtrusive or grandiloquent or priggish, but ex- hibiting ornament as well as strength, suggesting finish as well as stability. " Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them and wise men use them. * " Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. iH « « » # # " Reading maketh a full man ; conference a ready man ; and writing an exact man ; and, therefore if a man write little, he had need have a great memory ; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit ; and if he read lit- tle, he need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise ; poets, witty ; the 30 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. mathematics, subtle ; natural philosophy, deep ; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend; * Aheunt atudia in mores! " But the master builder of the Eastern type is De Quincey, as illustrated in certain passages of his " Con- fessions of an English Opium-Eater." He gives us mina- rets and pinnacles, as well as domes and cupolas, in his tei"se, clean cut contractions and iterations. He piles thought on thought, not in flats, nor yet altogether in climax, though climax plays its part, too ; but in glittering and au iacious phrases, which rear their slender shafts up to the very clouds, and look down, star-crowned, from their giddy heights, upon the impassive sphinx, the loathsome crocodile, the oozy mud of the Nile. He builds, too, from the summit downwards in the passage I shall quote. Scorning the usual methods, and setting at defi- ance the laws of gravitation, his foundations are in the clouds, and he descends by flights of fancies ever broad- ening to the base, which spreads outwards into the mists of uncounted centuries, and buries itself fathoms deep in the slime and reeds of a forgotten past. All the incon- gruities of the eastern pile, too, are here ; its splendour and its filth ; its sublimity when far seen, its attenuations when close viewed ; its sacred animals and grinning idols ; its courts spangled with tesselated glories and approaches besmirched with the offal of the bazaars ; its atmosphere above, pure and fragrant with the breath of eastern forests, or brilliant with the flash of bird and insect ; its environ- ments below, rank weeds, mud and slime, reeking with ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 31 the odours of all unutterablo and loathsome airs. All this is suggested, if not directly expressed to the senses of him who has wandered in Eastern lands ; suggested by the magic art of the word buildei', which, spanning the gulfs of time and space with inimitable skill, lifts the ima- gination into an infinity of being almost too vast for finite intellect to grasp. " Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlight, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appear- ances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assem- bled them together in China or Industan from kindred feelings. I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagoias ; and was fixed for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms ; T was the idol ; I was the priest ; I was worshipped ; I was sacrificed ; I fled from the wrath of Brama through all the forests of Asia ; Vishnu hated me ; Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly up- on Isis and Osiris ; I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers, at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by croco- diles ; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud." I suppose individual taste is the arbiter of style ; that is to say, outside of individual taste there is no style. 32 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. ■! nor can there be any. No absolute style can exist by its own inherent right. We cannot speak of an immutable style as we can of an absolute and immutable truth. Truth forms the man, but man forms the style, and as few men see with the same eyes, there can be no rigid stand- ard for a universal perfection of expressed thought. What Professor Ross dubs " execrable mongrel," I deem very fine writing indeed. My architectural embodiments of verbal expression are to me very real, but to another they may seem to be absolute nonsense, plus apud nos vera ratio valeat, quam vulgi opinio. Yet because I pre- fer my own judgment, because I live in a world of my own, I do not wish to scout or ignore general prejudice. I would rather invite it to see with my eyes ; for long gazing sometimes leads to far seeing. It is said marks- men improve their sight, by concentrating all their powers of vision on a small spot which is gradually removed far- ther and farther, as the visual organs become strength- ened by the practice. So with literary appreciation. It is a progressive faculty, ever becoming sharper by use. What is taste after all but the faculty of appreciating certain phases of nature or art with more or less keen discernment and relish ; while opinion is but the expres- sion of that taste, which is more or less acceptable to the individual, according to the degree in which it assimilates with the preconceived, albeit unexpressed, notions of that individual. I suppose there is nothing in nature that is not beautiful in a sense,and in a sense interchangeable. But all eyes cannot see the beauty, or rather cannot view it ARCHTTECTUBE IN LANGUAGB. 33 through lenses adjusted to the same focus. Neither can all intellects appreciate the eternal fitness for conversion and transmutation that exists in the world of visible and invisible entities, of nature and of art. To one man, specially constituted, Westminster Abbey is an abbey, a venerable structure of wood and stone, and nothing more. It is a very good place in which to pray, and possibly in which to be buried, if good luck or personal merit and the nation so decree it. To the same man a passage in Mil- ton is a series of pentameters in very heroic blank verse. It is a verbal expression of lofty thought admirably ren- dered, and nothing more. He would deem it absurd to kneel before such a shrine to oflfer up a prayer, still more absurd to consider it a mausoleum or even a monument. But as for myself, I can enter the one as I do the other. I can wander, spirit led, through the echoing aisles of either. I can stand beneath the lofty arches, search the labyrin- thine cloisters, walk up the fretted aisles, ponder in the shadows and feel glad in the sunshine of one or the other. I can prefer my humble tribute of adoration at the altars of either, and to me the stanza is as grand a tomb as is the one which enshrines the dust of patriots and kings, of philosophers and bards. For why ? The fleshly hand that penned the immortal lines is ever present in the ac- complished material work, and that work is in very deed both mausoleum and monument. Yet the mere words, like the stones of the builder, tell me only that the design- er once lived and may be dead, but the spirit which ani- mates fane or verse, and which appeals in a reflex sense rp* Eg i g.: .' S IJ^J gJiat!iiJIJ S HiiaMiJ!HEB^^ 34 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. to my own spirit, proclaims the genius of the respective framers immortal — immortal and building for ever and ever. The abbey to me is but a fossilized poem echoing with seraphic strains of most exquisite music. The poem is to me but a verbal abbey reared and embellished with all of human skill and all of human sentiment, and like- wise echoing with strains of exquisite music, but of a dif- ferent type. And so with other thoughts verbally ex- pressed. They are words it is true ; but not mere "words, words, words," they are bricks f o the builder, or pigments for the painter, or blocks for the sculptor, of themselves formless, but by their just use and arrangement more than bricks, or pigments, or blocks ; they are, as I like to imagine, according to their fitness and associations, cathedrals and pictures and statues. Ay, more ; they are blossoms and fragrancies and harmonies and everlast- ing sermons, preached by the divinities of earth and air and sea to congregationsof immortal worshippers, that have their being in my own immortal instincts. How much of beauty, of ugliness, of happiness, of misery in this world belongs to a vivid imagination or a good digestive apparatus, how much to reality or an ill- conditioned liver ? How much of the beauty of litera- ture dwells in one's self, and how much in one's author ? I am led to propound these questions because I have been adv'.sed over and over again by competent author- ities, that certain passages in which I take great delight are by no means to be considered first rate style, and again, I am assured by the same authorities, that cer- ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 35 tain other passages which I cannot at all tolerate, are entitled to rank high among the chefa-dceuvre of the national literature. I have been laughed at, quizzed, wondered at, and pooh-poohed fnostmercilessly for dilating up3n the perfect expressions in some — to me — beautiful paragraph, stanza, or line ; foi Hnding in very deed, those blossoms, fragrances and harmonies, before alluded to; and sneered at for daring to suggest that even English has beauties comparable to the highest flights in classical poetry, and the grandest triumphs in mathematical de- duction. Well, quot homines tot sententioe. If my critics deem me an enthusiast, I, too, am entitled to my opinion, but in deference to the claims of friendship, and the ameni ties of social life, I shall keep it to myself, and go on find- ing my parallels, and expatiating thereon. As a specimen of purity of style in verbal architecture, where the sentiment is built in clauses rather than other- wise expressed, and built, moreover, without a flaw. I cannot instance a better paradigm than Milton's magnifi- cent apostrophe or invocation to light in " Paradise Lost." I say purity here advisedly, for there seems to me to be a crystal clearness about- the arrangement and ring of the words, as though they were constructed of material through which the light can, indeed, find its way, to per- meate with a translucent sense, like a crystal held up to the sun, the resplendent conceit. How doubly singular this effect, and how heightened in significance when we consider that the designer was himself blind ; that the beautiful day had forever set for him, and that he erected mssa 3G THE ART GALLKRY OF ENGLISH. in " ever-during dark " that temple to light, which will last as long as the sun illumines the page on which its own immortal eulogy is stamped. But here is the pas- sage, worthy of careful analysis, and a just estimate as to whether the material most resembles porcelain or crystal, and to what is due the secret of the resplendent effect : "Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven, first-born, Or of the Eternal co-eternal beam, May I exi)res8 thee unblamed ? since God is light. And never but in unapproachi^d light Dwelt from eternity ; dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate. Or hear'st thou rather, pure ethereal Htream, Whose fountain who shall tell? Before the sun. Before the heavens thou wert ; and at the voice Of God, as with a mantle, did'st invest The rising world of waters, dark and deej>, Won from the void and formless infinite." Here is another transparency, but this time it is a palace, and of ice, by Cow per : "Silently as a dream the fabric rose ; No sound of hammer or of saw was there ; Ice upon ice, the well adjusted parts Were soon conjoined ; nor other cement asked Than water interfused to make them one. Lamps gracefully dispersed, and of all hues. Illumined every side ; a watery light Gleamed through the transparency, that seemed Another moon new-risen, or meteor fallen From heaven to earth, of lambent flame serene, So stood the brittle prodigy ; though smooth And slipiwry the materials, yet frost-bound Firm as a rock. Nor wanted aught within, That royal residence might well befit, For grandeur or for use. ' Long wavy wreaths Of flowers that feared no enemy but warmth. Blushed in the panels. Mirror needed none t < ARCHITErTURE IN LANOUAOE. 117 Where all was vitreoiin ; but in order due Convivial table and (M)tninodiou8 neat (What Heemed at least commodious Heat) were there ; Sofa, and coucli and hit^h-built throne august, The same lubricity was found in all, And all was moist to the warm touch ; a scene Of evanescent glory, once a stream, And soon to slide into a stream again.'* Observe, there is little colour in these lines, on the other hand, its absence is well marked. Form, too, is well depicted, and light, the light which filters through the ice block, colourless in itself, but contracting a cold, blueish tint, from the very compactness and depth of the material. Blank verse is of all mediums, perhaps, the best for word building. The smooth iambic pentameter unhampered by the trickeries of rhyme, lends itself readily to the produc- tion of stately effects, and to symmetrical magnificence of construction. The octo-syllabic iambic verse of which we find so much in the romantic school of English poetry is better adapted to the painter's art. Here the colourist can revel in the hues of nature, while the short, rhyming, ryth- mical flow of the verse is admirably suited to convey to the mind's eye the numberless variations, yet ever recur- ring similarities, in landscape, costume etc., as regards form, tinting, and effects of verbal chiaro-oscuro. How skilfully Scott manages this measure, and, in a different sense, Byron. Their methods constitute true painting in speech. Long words are sometimes imperatively necessary to produce the best effects, either used singly or in pairs, or in long-drawn succession, and here again, the penta- meter line has an advantage over a shorter measure. 38 TFIE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. There is more room in which to exercise one's vocabulary. Polys3'llables judiciously used lend dignity to construc- tion. They s-^rve likewise to elevate the mental concep- tions; wide-winged they mount to heaven, or stretch from the centres of desert- wastes to " The nmltitudini^uB sea incarnadine." Short words are more suggestive of colour, that is of the commonest colour, and being short they can be mass- ed readily, monc^syllable on monosyllable, and trope on trope, till the page becomes a very transformation scene, according to the humour of the artist ; leafy coverts rust- ling in the breezes ; or tossed branches, bare and wintry, wailing to bleak and leaden clouds; or blue skies flecked with vapour fleeces ; or blossom-masses tinted with rain- bow hues, red, blue and white, stamng green meads or fringing pellucid waters, where the bronze and gold of insect life, and the silver flash of fish-scale and reflected sun-light are only different phases of the same illimitable power of colour-expression. But the pentameter is better suited for colder themes. If the rhyming tetrameter be colour and life-sense, then the decasyllabic of blank verse is Parian marble or Scottish granite, or may be, cedar of Lebanon. The vistas are colonnades ; Doric pillars or giant trunks. The climaxes; domes, gables, friezes, many-fashioned summits, stretching out to the horizon in straight lines, geometrical and correct, with occasional grand sweeps and slightly sinuous undula- tions, or piercing up to the heavens to tower above ordinary constructions, as the obelisk, erect, looks down ARCHITECTURE IN I.ANGUAQi:. 39 on the prostrate column at its feet. Not that the heroic measure is, or need be, always confined to the expres- sion of these sentiments, but, for such expression it is best suited. Its general effect on my mind, when I re- call the measure is right lined, lofty, pure, simple not sensuous, crystalline, or pearly, or cool gray — classic, loom- ing out of the semi-mists of antiquity and archaism, yet capable of reflecting all glorious tintings of the modern sunlight — not florid or gaudy, but flushed and stained rather than flaunting or highly -coloured, — breathing sug- gestion rather than proclaiming display — not the warm damask tones of the Orient queen with its heart's flame re- flected from its tell-tale face, bnt the faint hues of our own blush rose when the jewels of morning are yet glistening on its cheek. So have I seen the sunlight fade away from Himalayan snows, sweeping up till the last flush faded into the death hue on the brows of virgin heights. I have styled rhyme a trickery, not that I mean any- thing disparaging by the use of that somewhat invidious trisyllable. All that I intend to convey is that this jingle of rhyme is a modern innovation. The earliest verse had no such assonance of sound, it had not even alliteration, simply regulated accent and well adjusted pause — nothing more. Yet rhyme has its uses, but its principal office liesi in the domain of music. I doubt if it adds materially to form or colour-sense, even when in conjunction with the grand pentameter of Childe Harold or the polished decasyllabics of the Essay on Man. Rapid successions of similar sounds may give the eflect of motion, they can PIT 40 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. ;i .. never impart the sense of dignity or repose. Blank verse for the snow-capped heights of Himalayan solitudes ; but rhyme for the cataracts which dash and splash and rumble and tumble down their rugged sides. If, however, rhyme adds nothing to the dignity and grandeur of com- position, I do not say that it at all times detracts therefrom. The Spenserian cenotaphs of Adonais and the Coliseums and Venetian piles of Childe Harold are worthy compeers of " Temples of Light " and " Palaces of Ice." All I maintain is, that rhyme is not absolutely necessary to perfect poetic expression; that poetic expression of a certain type is, indeed, sometimes better without it. What infinite variety there is in nature, and of course, as nature's copyist, in art. The resources of either are boundless. Mutation is the law of natural being. It is questionable whether there has been an exact duplicate of anything since first the fiat of creative might went forth. It is this infinite variety which makes existence endur- able. Fancy a world in which there was no change. An eternal summer or winter ; eternal bloom or barrenness ; eternal beauty or ugliness ; eternal rejoicing or sorrowing ; every leaf the counterpart of another ; every smile the reflection of a type ; every tear the exact imitation of a model ; no diversity of style, no difference of opinion, no gradations of culture, no social distinctions, no divergen- cies of creed ; all infidels or all fanatics, all aristocrats or all sanS'Culottes, all Bacons or all punchinellos, all Tories or all Whigs, all sticklers for the ghosts of Herbert Spencer, or all apostles of the humanity of Frederick ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 41 Harrison. Liberty in fetters would moan in anguish over ca Sahara-like waste of inanity, — eternal simper or unceas- ing sigh ; or passions rampant would feed, ghoul -like, for ever upon eternal self-conflictions and moral suicides, as exemplified in ourselves and our fellows. We should de- vour each other, and like the Kilkenny cats, nought but tales of horror would be left to fill the void of insentient space, with the echoes of ineffable anguish and affright. Therefore it is that my notion of a possible heaven is a very different one from the monstrous conceptions formu- lated by the leaders of the early church. Their hell I can conceive, unabashed effrontery of stupendous mendacity as it was ; for monotony of being, whether in so-called realms of bliss or pain is hell ; that is to say to the best as the best are now constituted, the worst, the blacklegs of humanity and scum of the saloons, might find it endurable to be permitted to loaf through an eternity of the once orthodox Elysium. And I fail to see, accepting as a truth that the intellect is immortal, how the intellectual part of man's nature can be at once transformed by such a very simple and prosaic, and withal, fquiescent means of regeneration, as death, into a self-existont psychical entity in another sphere, altogether different to its former self as habited in the flesh. No, in change is bliss. This is the law of labour, that work brings change, and in change is progression and content. ^ Eternal procesa moving on, From state to state the spirit walks ; And these are but the shattered stalks, Or ruined chrysalis of one. C 42 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. An eternal circle of eternal choristers, white winged and radiant, harping their eternal symphonies on eternal harps, whether of gold or gun-metal, round an eternal throne of an eternal divinity, seems to me to be an eter- nal parody on the eternal fitness of the economy of man's better nature, and the supreme wisdom of the Formative Power. 'Tis a vision begotten of convent seclusion and cloistered idleness. 'Tis the link of an ignorant and soli- tary fatuity, uniting the voluptuous dream of Olympian bliss or che oi^gies of a Scandinavian Valhalla to the dawning light of a new Reformation, which has rendered possible and probable the inborn right of an immortal spirit to labour and progress even in the realms beyond the grave. Give me labor or give me nothing, — for idleness means nothing. If after lite's fitful fever we indeed sleep well, if the rest be dreamless and the spirit give no sign, then shall we know nothing, feel nothing, learn nothing, do nothing, which means dreamless rest. But, if one force survive to add its quota to the great industries of the universe, whether manual or mental, we in very deed live, and living, I hope and trust we shall be able to recognize our work, and give account of it to the eternal progression of the cycles, which, though concentric, like the ripples on the clear surface of water, spread ever out- ward and onward from the point where self-conscience first struck the great ocean of infinite being. Variety then is the soul of art. Art itself, even when perfect, is but a body of clay. Like the artist, it needs vivifying with an individual spirit. It must tell its ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 43 own tale, and stand or fall on its own merits, not on another's. Hence the different types of art. The world has never been contented with one pattern, however ex- cellent. Every age is marked by its own progressive or retrogi'essive spirit. And thus it must ever be. There is no cessation, for cessation means stagnation ; and stag- nation, first putrescence and then annihilation. A marble palace is of itself a very beautiful object to look upon, but who could live for ever in Venice without sometimes longing for Alpine heights and the peasant's chalet ? Who would care to perambulate for ever the corridors and halls of the art museum, and not sigh sometimes for a glimpse at the originals depicted ? Who could long gaze upon abeauti- ful miniature of the beloved, without longing to clasp in all the throbbing, passionate exultation of possession the fair prototype to his breast ? So with art in diction, — the architecture of the pen. Its great recommendation is its diversity. Excellence is, as I have already suggested, relative. To one a certain type may be altogether excel- lent, to another, expressionless, to a third, repulsive ; but if it suit me not, there is another to turn to. Rest assured, the rejected of one or of many shall yet find wooers, and, if at all worthy, lovers. Recollect, I speak of art. There is that, of course, to be met with at all times which is not art, but it will of itself sink and be forgotten. To live at all, a commonplace thought must be attired in raiment more excellent than that which clothes the com- monplace crowd, or a grotesque or unlovely phraseology must enshrine a thought, which proclaims itself fit to 44 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. (I M I'i MH survive, irrespective of the broadcloth or the fustian of the vocabulary. I fancy Macaulay will descend the stream of time more by virtue of the brilliant point lace of his narrative, than by inherent truth or reliability of sentiment or statement. The name of Carlyle, spite of his "jarring tattoos upon German kettledrums," which is, I suppose, equivalent to my fustian — will live when that of many a detractor has been forever buried beneath the drift of an illimitable oblivion — and why ? His thoughts are worthy, and, because worthy, immortal, though, giant- like, their limbs are thrust too far through the arms and legs of their often ill-fitting garments. They have out- grown the meagre and threadbare resources of the verbal wardrobe. Their muscular hero-worship and their double- jointed cynicism set the wristbands and trowser straps of a conventional diction at defiance. But this is digres- sion, our business is with the architect, not the tailor ; though we have heard of one of the last named fraternity building a pair of pantaloons. And, using the word in its widest sense, I presume the artist — or professor, which is it ? — of the goose and shears has as good a right to the term as I have when speaking of the construction of language. Such is life. Yet does it not prove the theory of convertibility ? The coat may build the reputation of a man after the man has built the coat, that reputation being direct or by proxy ; direct so far as the author of the coat is concerned, who merits our approval as a master-builder ; by proxy, so far as the wearer is con- cerned, who is not seldom proclaimed a gentleman on the jsjbrength of his tailor's — unpaid — bill 1 ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 45 To verbal architecture let us return. In order to illus- trate still further the variety in art and its methods, I shall leave pyramids, pagodas and ice palaces for the nonce, and quote Byron's magnificent stanza on the Pan- theon, found in the fourth canto of Childe Harold. "Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime- Shrine of all saiats and temple of all gods From Jove to Jesus— spared and blest by time ; Looking tranquility, while falls or nods Arch, empire, each thing round thee, and man plods His way through thorns to ashes — glorious dome ! Shalt thou not last ?— Time's scythe and tyrant's rods Shiver upon thee— sanctuary and home Of art and piety— Pantheon !— pride of Rome I Let us subject this stanza as an antiquary might the Pantheon itself, to close critical analysis, in order to see what it really is, or what it most resembles. It is a classic temple of purest marble. I know of no substance which the measured rhythmic phraseology of the clauses so for- cibly presents to my mind, as that loveliest of all materials so dear to the classic heart. Built with consummate skill and showing traces of inimitable art and grace ; reared on five verbal pillars, dissyllabic and Doric. " Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime." the fabric rises in all its simple majesty and perfection of symmetry, by evenly balanced clauses, to the fifth line, where it swells, again contracting in the concluding verses, till in the last we find the key stone " Pantheon " inserted midway be- tween two final phrases forming the interjectional climax 46 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. i or gable of the whole. I never read the stanza but I see the edifice — not the edifice, indeed, they call the Pantheon, which, I am given to understand, is dome-shaped ; but an edifice I have constructed mentally, that is inseparable from this discription. It is eminently classic, simple, pure, tranquil ; a sanctuary indeed, standing upon those five massive pillars, Doric, I imagine, for they rise without base clear from the ground, and terminate as abruptly, without volute or acanthus leaf to distract the eye, or mar the severely simple outline ; over them the entabla- ture lying along the summits in level lines, jointed yet rhythmic, culminating in the last grand hexameter which proclaims the completion of the perfect whole. This is the perfection of word -building ; thoughts reared on verbal pillars and enshrined in verbal blocks, rough-hewn from the quarry of speech, as eloquent of the type of a particular order as the most finished picture, and breathing a sentiment as pure as might have emanated from the sanctuary itself. Byron abounds with such examples. He is a prince among builders. Hear him describe a ruin : A ruin— yet what ruin ! — from its mass Walls— palaces- half cities —have been reared. Is not this dilapidation embodied in words ? Broken, disjointed, fragmentary; phrases for sentences; semi- ejaculations falling from one another — as stone from stone, moss-grown and weather-cleft, seeks the plain — while over all — Fall the stars' faint rays On the arena void— seats crushed— walls bow'd — And galleries, where my steps seem strangely loud. ARCHITECTUKE IN LANGUAGE. 47 Again, I call this word building rather than word painting; for form or position in space seems to me to be the embodied idea, and there is a total absence, or almost total absence of colour and atmosphere. In fact, it is partly this non-chromatic sense which suggests the builder rather than the painter, this sense, and the sometimes stately, sometimes broken succession of the clauses, lead- ing up by flights, as it were, to the culminating point, or, insinuating by elliptical or ejaculatory processes the idea of the dismantled edifice tottering to its fall. In all this there is profound art, whether it be taken as instinctive or premeditative ; that is, whether the words and clauses, flowed intuitively and spontaneously by a sort of inspira- tion from mind to pen, or whether they were studiously and laboriously thought out, and so piled on one another as the result of careful analytic foresight and subtle logic of execution. As a specimen of what I should call the alternative style of building, in which the clauses, well-proportioned and rythmic, balance one other and suggest choice or al- ternation, take this from Gibbon's " School of Athens" : — " When the liberty of public debate was suppressed, the orator, in the humble profession of an advocate, might plead the cause of innocence and justice ; he might abuse his talents in the more profitable trade of panegyric ; and the same precepts continued to dictate the fanciful declamations of the sophist, and the chaster bean- ies of historical composition. The systems which profess- ed to unfold the nature of God, of man, and of the uni- •^^rmm^nmm^m 48 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. ■ \ 1: verse, entertained the curiosity of the philosophic student ; and, according to the temper of his mind, he might doubt with the Sceptics, or decide with the Stoics, sublimely speculate with Plato, or severely argue with Aristotle." This, too, is a colourless type of verbal architecture — ^yet not biographical, which is sculptured, neither is music the prominent idea, though the clauses read very smoothly. It is simple yet eloquent ; not burdened with ornament, yet sufficiently relieved ; less imposing and massive, per- haps, than Byron's Pantheon, yet pure and elevated, and in its way as suggestive of the classic and the Greek. In direct contradistinction to the colourless type of word- building, which forcibly reminds one of the neutral-tinted or mono-chromatic structures so dear to the eye of lovers of repose and architectural simplicity of purpose, is that style known as ornate, and, to a still greater degree, the florid. By ornate, I mean decorated, beautiful, splendidly adorned. By florid, I have in my mind that style of Gothic architecture which in England succeeded the dec- orated style. It too was decorated, but stilted ; rose laden, yet thorn tormented. It has been described as stiff and rectilinear, the lines vertical, the mouldings thin ard hard, the ornaments cumbrous ; " rich and gorgeous, rather than elegant, graceful and comfortable." Perhaps, I should rather denominate it Elizabethan ; showy, possibly brilliant, but only so for efiect : the hues of apparent health mantling on the cheek ; but beneath — the grinning skull. As an example of the first order, the ornate, I shall instance Swinburne. Speaking of the ARCHITECTURE IN LANQUAGB. 40 structure of Shakespeare's chronicle histories, King John and Henry VIII, he says : — " Scene is laid upon scene, and event succeeds event, as stone might be laid on stone, and story might succeed story in a building reared by mere might of human handi- work : not as in a city whose temples or walls had risen of themselves to the lyric breath and stroke of a greater than Amphion,moulded out of music by no rule or line of mortal measure, with no sound of axe or anvil, but only of smitten strings, built by harp, and not by hand." Again, commenting on the masterly manner in which King John is made to suggest the death of Arthur, while contrasting Shakespeare's method with Marlowe's, our critic says : "The elder master (Marlowe) might, indeed, have written the magnificent speech, which ushers in with gradual rhetoric, and splendid reticence, the black sugges- tion of a deed without a name, — his hand might have woven with no less imperial skill the elaborate raiment of words and images which wraps up in fold upon fold, as with swaddliijg bands of purple and gold embroidery, the shapeless and miscreated birth of a murderous purpose that labours into light, even while it loathes the light and itself; but only Shakespeare could give us the first sample of that more secret and terrible knowledge, which reveals itself in the brief, heavy whispers that seal the commission and sign the warrant of the king." These examples, you will observe, are true instances of word-building ; for, though they contain colour and form 60 THEJART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. their .subjects are not such as may be depicted on canvas, neither could they be modelled or carved, nor do they belong altogether to the realm of music, as it is more the cunning of the structure than the music of the sound which commands admiration. True, the rhy'" ^ is per- fect, but it is subservient to a purpose. It . a mere accompaniment attending the evolution and growth of a plot, built of thoughts, framed in contrasted clauses, born of ambitious desire, and culminating in murderous ex- pression. As a specimen of what I denominate the florid type of verbal architecture, overstrained eflect, " rich and gorge- ous," rather than true, appealing to the head rather than to the heart, and somewhat cumbrous and top-heavy, I shall quote from Sheridan's speech agai^ * Warren Hastings : — "O, Faith! 0, Justice! I conjure you by your sacred names to depart for a moment from this place, though it be your peculiar residence ; nor hear your names profaned by such a sacrilegious combination, as that which I am now compelled to repeat ! — where all the fair forms of nature and art, truth and peace, policy and honour, shrunk back aghast from the deleterious shade ! where all exis- tences, nefarious and vile, had sway ! — where, amidst the black agents on one side, and Middleton with Impey on the other, the toughest head, the most unfeeling heart ! the great figure of the piece, characteristic in his place, stood aloof and independent from the puny profligacy in his train! — but far from idle and inactive, turning a ARCHITECTURE IN LANGITAGB* 61 malignant eye on all niiHchief that awaited him ! — the multiplied apparatus of temporising expedients, and intim- idating instruments ! now cringing on his prey, and fawning on his vengeance! — now quickening the limping pace of craft, and forcing every stand that retiring nature can make in the heart ! violating the attachments and the decorums of life ! sacrificing every emotion of tender- ness and honour! flagitiously levelling all the distinctions of national characteristics ! with a long catalogue of crimes and aggravations, beyond the reach of thought, for human malignity to perpetrate, or human vengeance to punish !" This may be very fine writing, but I do not like it. It may be built according to the purest models of English prose, but I fail to appreciate it. It may be truth, but it has a hollow ring. The dashes may represent the vertical lines of a peculiar & vie, and certainly the spaces are filled in with cumbrous 01 - ament enough, parturient montea, nascitur ridiculus mus. It forcibly reminds one of a monument, erected nominally to the memory of one of those much abused and persecuted little rodents immor- talised in the Latin maxim, but really perpetuating for all time the bombastic self-esteem, impudent assumption, and aggressive rhodomontade of a man thoroughly ignor- ant of the nature of the duty he had undertaken to per- form, viz., to convict of petty larceny the ridiculus mua aforementioned. Not that Warren Hastings at all resembles the huge and voracious quadruped which is proverbially supposed to carry terror to the hearts of the IT i i: 52 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. fair sex ; but the presumable offence for which he was arraigned, very much resembled it, in its normal dimen- sions. From the ilorid to the simple style, seems a natural enough transition. When one's eyt,,. have been half- blinded by the glare of colour and intricacy of form, or one's ears stultified by the banging of big drums and blare of trumpets, it is a relief to step into the cottage porch, or throw one's self at full length beneath the green twilight of the rustic arbor ; where the fragrance of the honeysuckle mingles with the perfume of the rose ; where nothing more dissonant, or suggestive of outside disturb- ance appeals to the ear than the drowsy hum of insect life, or the rhythmic babbling of the wayside rill. From Sheridan to Wordsworth is such a transition ; yet not at- tained by a mere step or succession of steps, 'tis a Curtius- like leap from meretricious, if resplendent heights, into the eternal peace and simplicity of another sphere. Con- trast Sheridan's gilded and gargoyled " Impeachment " with Wordsworth's *' Fountain," and tell me which is the more beautiful work of art : — " My eyes are dim with childish tearf*, My heart is idly stirred, For the same sound is in my ears. Which in those days I heard. Thus fares it still in our decay ; And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away, Than what it leaves behiad.'' Nothing could be simpler than the construction of these lines. The words are commonplace. The tenement i^^ ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 58 indeed an humble one. There is no pretence of imagery. Yet it is full of the loftiest art, the art which has copied nature so faithfully, that it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends. It is full, too, of a subtle melody, the murmur of the waters outside the porch, which, entered, leads straight to the builder's heart ; the heart that is enshrined within his own creation, for life, for death, for time, for eternity, nor needs it loftier mau- soleum or more enduring epitaph. Doubtless it is as sudden and great a transition from the simple yet peacelal porch of the cottage, with its trailing vines and fragrant blossoms, to the dim and drear precincts of the prison, as it is from the icily splendid tropes of Sheridan to the simple lay of Wordsworth. But in contrast sometimes centres interest. Beside the sunlight ever lurks the shadow. One half the globe must of necessity mate with night while the other half woos the day. Pleasure has repletion and life has death. Talking of prisons the question naturally suggests itself, should a prison be beautiful ? Or, should it be considered from a mere utility standpoint ? It seems like mockery to incar- cerate a fellow-being in marble halls ; to chain him to a fluted column with Corinthian capital ; to surround his thorny path of enforced woe with the acanthus leaves and blossoms of art ; or to compel him to drag out the " length- ening chain " of perpetual labour and coercion within sight of rose gardens. Would a criminal under the gibbet be " soothed and sustained," I wonder, by the knowledge that his noose was a silken one, or that the beams of the 54 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. I dcead instrument of death were carved from cedar ? Hardly, I suspect. Though some aesthetic criminals, — I presume they are jesthetic from their very insouciance- choose a dainty Tnenu for their final breakfast, and make their exit from the terrestrial platform with a rose in their button -hole, and the last fragrant whiff from a Havannah, yet haloing their lips. I admire such insouciance, simply, I suppose, because were I in a like pre- dicament I should behave quite differently. My exit, I fear, would be a most unbecoming one to record in the annals of heroism. But this is a good sign. Perhaps I shall never have to undergo the ordeal. Providence, they say, tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. Should, though, the prison-structure be beautiful? Emphatically, No ! 'Tis but adding another lash to the cat, another pang to incarceration. Simplicity, humanity, and Christian feeling, even for the felon — Yes ! But beauty — No ! To the slave nothing is beautiful. To the free, all things are a revelation of delight. A prison, to my mind, should be built in accordance with it's office, massive, unpretentious, low-lying, long-lined — an elegy in stone — the blank verse of architecture — the embodiment of Dante's vision ; — '* Through me you pass into the city of woe : Through me you pass into eternal pain : Tiirough me among the people lost for aye. Justice, the f yunder of my fabric moved : To rear me was the task of power divine, Supremest wisdom, and primeval love, Before me things create were none, save things Eternal, and eternal I endure, All hope abandon ye who enter here.' " ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 55 " Here sigba with lamentationR and loud moans, Resounded through the air, pierc'd by no star. That e'en I wept at entering. Various tongues, Horrible languages, outcries of woe. Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse. With hands together smote that swell'd the sounds, Made up a tumult, that for ever whirls Round through that air with solid darkness stained. Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies." Yes, this is a prison, built with words and strengthened with pitiless, iron-bound periods. I do not say that a prison should be dedicated to eternal pain, or that its courts should be made to echo with lamentations and loud moans, by harsher treatment than is necessary. All I maintain is, that a certain amount of pain and anguisli and woe is inseparable from the prison walls ; that such has ever been my notion of an earthly prison, and that notion is reflected in Dante's lines. Perhaps, it may not be a quite true reflection. I have heard that some prison- ers laugh and sing and are merry — are presumably happy and contented with their lot. So much the better for them. I mean to say that I cannot imagine such a state of affairs. To me a prison is a tomb. I want it built like a tomb, in fancy at least. Were I deprived of liberty even for a time, I [should be very, very miserable. If condemned to perpetual imprisonment I should wish for death. It is sometimes, indeed often, difficult to tell where the architecture of composition ends, and where its painting, or sculpture, or music begins. In our decisions, I suppose, we must be led by our tastes, and our tastes w 56 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. ! ;l I must be administered to by our appreciative abilities, our enthusiasm and our love. In some magnificent stanzas and passages, we meet with a blending of all styles, or of three or two. The architectural type will beget a sense of colour and atmosphere, we know not how, intuitively, as the gray of dawn flushes unconsciously -dnto the rose light of the early day ; or it will be so rigid and well-de- fined, and withal so characteristic of individual life or traits of personal entity, that it may become statuesque ; or oTi the other hand, the music of the rhythm may be so grand and imposing, or so soft and insinuating, that the stateliness of the structure is partly forgotten in the magic of the sound. We must, in such cases, be led by the domi- nant instinct of the moment, the intuitive appeal of natural tastes, to art. Yet, in the majority of cases, I deem the lines along which we have to travel, are well defined, and the tabulation into groups not difficult to accom- plish. As an illustration of embodied thought, partly archi- tectural, partly picturesque, and withal throbbing with the organ tones of a grand rhythm, I shall next instance that most magnificent stanza on Venice, which opens the fourth canto of Childe Harold : — ! " I stood in "Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs ; A palace and a prison on each hand ; 1 saw from out the wave her structures rise As from the stroke of an enchanter's wand ; A thousand years their cloudy wings expand Around me, and a dying Glory smiles, O'er the far times when many a subject land Looked to the winged Lion's marb* 3 piles, Wher« Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred iflles." ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 67 Notice well the mental effects produced as the theme develops. The first lines, balanced and rhythmical, sug- gest the art of the builder alone. Gradually the outline merges into colour, blending with atmospheric effect, " A thousand years their cloudy wings expand a dying glory smiles. What a word is Glory ! A concentrated millenium of voices shouting hosannas to high heaven ! While the lengthened cadence of the last alliterative hexameter anthems the triumph of the whole and ushers out the thronging ideas in a grand burst of stately harmony. Thronging ideas ! Ay, do they not come by companies, by troops, by battalions, by armies, by populations, by myriads, jostling the centuries, and crushing back the flight of years through the misty portals of time, back, to the very gates of a never ageing yesterday ! I know not whether I am singular in my views ; but the sound of *' Venice " has for me a nameless charm — upon the bare mention of the word, crowds of thoughts, like flocks of freed birds, burst from the dissyllable and wing their flight back, back, back, through the past years to the sea- girt home which gave them birth, there to flutter and hover and circle for evermore on tireless wings. Such is the magic of a word ! Such is the treasure locked in a few terse clauses ! Apply the key, and who can keep back the golden tide ? Past ages unfold themselves Shades of the mighty dead file in long procession from their graves, diademed with the lustre of great deeds and draped in the fadeless glory of an illustrious renown. A D 58 THE LRT GALLEKY OF ENGLISH. ! m\> 111 I i word ! and empires spiing again from the dust beneath which they have long lain mouldering. Once more does the busy mart resound with the hum of traffic. The ora- tor's voice is heard from the rostrum, while the plaudits of assembled multitudes shake the welkin anew. The clash of struggling armies and battling navies ; the pieans of the victors and the groans of the vanquished ; the song of youth ; the sigh of age ; the soft whisper of love ; the muttered malediction of hate ; the ecstatic utterance of devotion ; the organ's swell and the chime of bells, all combine in one grand symphony of sound and hurtle over us through the hush of dead centuries, striking the inner ear with a matchless volume of sound, while we listen to the music and realize the refrain and are lost in the speculative mazes of the past. Without doubt, such a word is "Venice." " What memories of old to that region belong." Venice the superb. The fairy city of the sea, The bride of the Adriatic, whose blue waves once kissed the snowy feet of the Mother of Republics, ere her marble basements were moss-grown, and the winged Lion looked down upon the triumph of her foes. Can there by any possibility be a more beautiful word ? It is marble. It is music. It is a palace. It is a thunder burst of harmony. It is at once an anthem and an elegy. It is the epitome of regal splendour. Alas ! that it should have become the home of indigence and want. The sere- nade of the cavalier has given way to the plaint of the ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 59 mendicant ; her palaces are crumbling ; her monuments decaying ; her highways forsaken. " And silent rows the songless go-idolier." But through all she is beautiful and mighty still. She reigns in memory the peerless Queen of the hundred isles, whose puissant nod once commanded the homage of nations. " A palace and a prison on each hand." A palace ! — From which the Doge, attended by the Venetian ^lite, and surrounded by all the pomp and cir- cumstance of more than kingly dignity, proceeded an- nually on Ascension Day to fling from the prow of his barge of state, the golden-decked Bucentaur, into the crystal tide, that ring which was the token of betrothal ; nay more, the pledge, that he, the representative of the republic had wedded the waves, which brought as mar- riage portion treasure from every clime to the very threshold of her imperial bridegroom's heritage ! A prison! — With whose drear and dreaded precincts are ever associated the memories of the Council of ten, the mysterious and terrible Council of three, the dagger, the poisoned flower, the deadly cup, the dark waters of the canal, the horrors of the dungeon ! A palace ! — Word suggestive of light and life. Of long lines of gondolas gliding up the grand canal. Of stately rows of palaces. Of marble shafts shooting up from crystalline depths. Of vast flights of steps kissed by the tremulous lips of glancing waters. — Blue waves ever 60 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. laughing below. Blue skies ever smiling above. Stealthy motion of floating vehicle, weird-like and yet graceful. Flash of waving banner iridescent with gorgeous tintings. Mellowing daylight. Ceaseless hum of converse. Mid- night and carnival. — And then the change. — The city illuminated from flood to attic, pours forth a blaze of splendour. Thousands of gondolas hung with painted lanterns flit hither and thither beneath the soft southern sky. — Myriad reflections in limpid waters. Subdued lustre of marble halls. Sparkle of lamp-lit waves. Rhythmic wash of ripples. Soft note of guitar. Low serenade of lover. Music everywhere. Laughter everywhere. Ca- rousal everywhere, till dawn flushing rosy in the east warns the revellers to their luxuriant couches to dream, perchance, of brighter, merrier carnivals to come. A prison ! Gloom of night — night unlit by the lamp of the gondola, uncheered by the voice of revel. The gray mists steal over the shadowy lagoons, fit companions for the " cloudy wings " of ghostly years that have glided for- ever into the eternity of the past. Around, like spectral Colossi, rise the marble structures lapped by the flood which now stretches beneath us cold and death like— an objective epitaph of the glories that have faded and the souls that have fled. We stand and muse in the mel- ancholy gloom of the lowering night. The present has merged into the past. " We become a part of what hath been, And grow unto the spot, all-seeing, but unseen." 'Tis the bridge of Sighs. Look, the victim ! A Patri- 1 ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 61 cian ! One of the noblest in Venice ! Out of the hall by a secret door into the covered way. Down the compart- ment reserved for the doomed. Out of the palace into the prison, to the dungeon and the death. Or worse, perchance, in some noisome cell below the lapping of the waters, alone with his bruised body and crushed heart, friendless, naked, cold, despairing, he is left to brood over his great agony, to tear himself in the frenzy of his de- .spair, or to die like a dog, without a dog's privilege of crawling into the sunlight to take a last glance at his kennel and his kind. Awake !— Let her citizens be thankful that their dungeons no longer echo the lamen- tations of the condemned, that Denunzie segrete has been wiped forever from the walls of the fair city of the sea. "After life's fitful fever," the puppets of humanity who have played their little parts on the world's stage, " sleep well," each in his narrow bed. How mournful is the thought that this is all for the labour of years. That the guerdon of the toiler, hoary with the snows of many win- ters, furrowed with the wrinkles of many sorrows, is but the same as that of the new-born babe, which blossoms into earth, and so fades with the morning dew into the mists of the future and the unknown. Mystery of mys- teries ! Who shall read the riddle ? It is hopeless. The mocking sphinxes of repeating centuries propound their ceaseless riddle, but guard the secret well, and the womb of Time yields not up her second CEdipus to hush the curious babble of the questioners, to quench the burning desire of the generations, the "Dwellers on the Threshold." 62 THE ABT QALLERT OF ENGLISH. 1; Born to-day in tears, while all around, perchance, make holiday — to-morrow comes, and nips the blossom, and we leave the shedding of tears to others, while we sleep our eternal sleep. All our beautiful work in the beautiful world ended — forever — and exiled, we go out, poor, naked, shivering wretches, scourged from the altars of our faith and the havens of our love, into the cold void of oblivion to — What ? A hope or annihilation ? Oh ! that the inevitable may bring greater consolation than a thought like this. Oh ! that something may be left beyond the river other than the bleak shadow cast by the sepulchre and the tomb. " Placed on this isthmus of a middle state A being darkly wise and rudely great." How can we help these gruesome shadows falling some- times athwart our lives ? How can we help giving way sometimes to despondency, when no voice comes from the gloaming to cheer us on our way ? How mourn- ful are the vistas of the Past, forsaken by the beautiful spirits that peopled their teeming ways ! How void as yet are the courts of the Future, catching but faint echo of advancing footsteps, which shall anon fill the silence, and then, in turn, fade into utter silence again. To-day we build a cradle and sing a crooning lay of life and love. To-morrow we dig a grave and moan a plaint of death and grief. Rosy palms to-day are outstretched in the dawning to the sunlight of being, while the air is full of the young mother's melodies and prayers. To-morrow the cold brow ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 68 of dissolution rests on its lonely pillow, and the Ijust sounds are the sobs of the heart-broken and the falling clods on the coffin lid. Yet is there strange fascination in the presence of death. The features so set and still ; the lines smoothed ; years wiped from the brow, and only a gentle smile left, like dumb response to the caress of the death-angel. There is such unutterable peace imprinted on the clay, that surely, I have thought, the disembodied spirit, wherever it may bo, must in a measure be partaker of the surcease of life's sorrow. I have seen such perfect content dimpling on the cheek of a dead child, that I have almost looked for the angel fingers that were smoothing away the traces of mortality ; that I have almost listened for the fluttering of the angel pinions that shadowed the face of the holy dead. We erect our tombstones and write our epitaphs and scatter our flowei-s and shed many tears, and soitow, perchance, many days, till the sun shines again, till Time — the beautiBerof the dead, Adorner of the ruin, comforter, And only healer when the heart hath bled. bids US rise from our ashes, and renounce our sackcloth and go forth once more into the haunts of the children of men. But ever and anon we return to the graves. I think when we have once laid a loved one beneath the quiet mould we love the graves. We in some sort antici- pate the time when we too shall sleep there and be at rest. Above all we love what is mournful and elegiac in all noble composition in which is the echo of sadness, the 64 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. refiain of mortality. We seek instinctively those tombs, not built of marble or granite, but constructed of words ; verbal catafalques, enshrining a threnody sacred to the memory of the illustrious, the noble, the brave, the good, yet still to earth, the lost. There are two such word mausoleums in our language that are unsurpassed for mournful beauty and solemn magnificence of diction. The muffled clauses in either throb virith more than mortal sympathy. They pass, " like a glorious roll of drums " through the vaults of the intellect, and the vaults echo and re-echo the refrain. They sound like the tramp of many feet, and the subdued murmur of many voices in the shadowy procession of a waking dream. They tower up like monumental indexes from earth to heaven, filling all of time and all of space, leaving no room for the finite and the mean, and bearing aloft the memorial hatchments of two glorious hosts — one sleeping in illustrious West- minster, the other in the gloomy Tower ; — One — the matchless requiem of all of admitted honour and all of accredited renown ; the other, the mournful tribute to the Nemesis of despotism and the tyranny of fate. The clauses of the first, though sad, at least haloed, like martyr's heads, with the light of a chastened sorrow ; the periods or the latter, like fiery crosses, quenched " .nd tears. " Upon my going into the church uteii ed lyself with the digging of a grave ; and saw in ev y shovel-full of it that was thrown up, the fragment of a bone or skull intermixed with a kind of fresh mouldering earth that ARCHITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 65 some time or other had a place in the composition of a liuman body. Upon this, I began to consider with myself, what innumerable multitudes of people lay confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral ; how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass ; how beauty, strength, and youth, with old age, weakness, and deformity, lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of matter." "When I look upon the tombs of the great,every emotion of envy dies in mc ; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate desire goes out ; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a tombstone, my heart melts with compassion ; when I see the tomb of the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those whom we must quickly follow; whenlsee kings lying by those who deposed them, when I consider rival wits placed side by side, or the holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sor- row and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind ; when I read the several dates of the tombs, of some that died yesterday, and some six hundred years ago, I consider that great day when we shall all of us be contemporaries, and make our appearance together." This is Addison's Westminster, and is at once a tribute and a hope ; in it there is at least something of consola- 66 THE AKT GALLERY OF ENGLISH. 1 >'?i !|IHil^ tion; but in the one to follow, none. It is Macaulay's memorial wail to Monmouth and his kindred dust in the Tower. " Thither have been carried, through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts. Thither was borne, before the window where Jane Gray was praying, the mangled corpse of Guilford Dudley. Edward Seymour Duke of Somerset and Protector of the Realm, reposes there by the brother whom he murdered. There has mouldered away the headless trunk of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Cardinal of Saint Vitalis, a man worthy to have lived in a better age, and to have died in a better cause. There are laid John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, Lord High Admiral, and Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, Lord High Treasurer. There, too, is another Essex, on whom nature and fortune had lavished all their bounties in vain, and whom valour, grace, genius, royal favour, popular applause, conducted to an early and ignominious doom. Not far off sleep two chiefs of the great house of Howard, Thomas, fourth Duke of Norfolk, and Philip, eleventh Earl of Arundel. Here and there among the thick graves of unquiet and aspiring statesmen, lie more delicate sufferers ; Margaret of Salisbury, the last of the pro'id name of Plantagenet ; and those two fair queens who perished by the jealous rage of Henry. Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth mingled." ARCITECTURE IN LANGUAGE. 67 I have now done with this special phase of my sub- ject, the architecture of thought. Not that I have by any means exhausted it, it is limitless, its possibilities can cease only with the death of language. But I have said enough to illustrate my meaning. Perhaps had I searched through the archives of all past literature I might have found other examples, worthy types of many different styles, for, as I have already said, the vocation of litera- ture is two-fold, and a poem or a paragraph is not merely the written or spoken embodiment of a sentiment, it is far more — ^the ocean as it rolls in from the ever pregnant horizon to fling itself on the repellent beach, is more than so much salt water and foam ; the beach is more than so much brackish shale, dank sea-weed, and broken shell. Each bears a message from another realm, a message from eternity to time, to be read, to be pondered, to be cherished. So with everything in nature and in art. If the... are sermons in stones, there are also stones in sermons — Ah, me ! How weighty some of them are — with which to build our mansions to the skies. If the ocean to this one is a poem, cannot he also construe the music of a poem into the veritable murmur of the sea-green waves, the lisp of ripple and the roar of billow ? He can convert all things by imagination into all other things. ■' The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." There is no length nor breadth nor height nor depth that] it cannot cioss or scale or fathom ; no music that it i I) 68 THE ART GALLERY OP ENGLISH. cannot hear ; and this is one of the pledges of eternity that it can make existence and labour and enjoyment possible even when all is changed. When the pedestal of earth has been knocked away from beneath these feet of clay, the intelligence, unincumbered and undismayed, can still poise itself, self-supported over the eternal gulf, still manifest itself by internal workings and promptings and aspirations, by external effort and effect, as a unit of deathless nature, which from its very essence is indestruct- ible, though not inconvertible ; everlastingly mutable, yet still eternal and still in some sort the same. II. SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. " Sculptors of life are we as we stand, With our souls uncarved before us." - Bishop Doan. I have said that language is not only verbal architec- ture, it is verbal sculpture. As some thoughts are built into verbal expression, so are others carved or moulded into descriptions of personality and character, or into biographies of style. I should term most biographical description, whether of the individual or the style,carving, rather than building or painting, for herein we deal with the human entity in the flesh, or if not in the flesh, at least in the spirit. That is, we consider traits, tempera- ments, eccentricities, affinities, aversions, purely subjective SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 69 notions, which in some shape give their own form to the flesh. Thus is it ever ; the figure in a sense, reflects the idiosyncrasies of the individual, the features are illumin- ated by the rays of the inner light, whether for good or Ijad, for high emprise or mean desire. We know a fox when we see him, be he quadruped or biped ; be he pre- ceding or following the hounds. A mountebank in morals or intellect cannot conceal his tell-tale grin, any more than can poor Jacko hide his capacious smile from the summit of the hurdy-gurdy, where, spite of durance vile, he has to obey the promptings of nature, by displaying his polished grinders to the juvenile sansculottes, for whose delectation he gibbers and performs his grotesque antics. IIow strange is it, by the by, this reflection of beast in man ! A strong proof to me of the credibility of evolution. Whatever is noble, and useful, and faithful and intelligent in the brute we find reflected in man, but reflected in such a manner that we cannot dis-associate the notion of the attribute from that of the brute. They are correlative and inseparable. In the crowd that comes and goes, that frets and seethes, in the mart, the mansion, and the thor- oughfare, we meet a man who has the noble look of the horse, the regal aspect of the lion, the wistful, yet open- eyed, frank benevolence of the Newfoundland, the patient, down-in-the-mouth dogged ness and forbearance of poor neutral-tinted Neddy, the longr-eared. Similarly, what is ignoble and useless, faithless and soulless is represented, only too faithfully, in the same marts and the same thor- oughfares, by the same reciprocal action or interchange of 70 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. lineament. We see the human jackal sneaking round his prey, the human hyaena feeding, ghoul-like, upon graves yet wet with the tears of the widow and the orphan, the human vulture picking the bones that jackal and hyaena have left. We have the human owl blinking from the plat- form and the rostrum. We have the human mice obtuse enough to be fascinated by the glare from those sightless orbs, transported by the insensate hootings from those capacious maws, and worse, we find them suffering them- selves to be hoodwinked, befooled, and ultimately devoured by the same blind cannibals of reason and devoureu of votes. If evolution be true, and I see no good reason to doubt it ; for what after all is the progress of nature and human- ity but evolution, and it matters little to me whether my great, great, great grandfather was an honest, whole- natured gorilla from South Africa, living peaceably with his mate in a baobab tree, or a " human " ruffian hanged for riot, outrage, and wife-murder in a pot house, ever so many years ago, so long as Lam not a gorilla and can keep clear of the gibbet. — If evolution, I say, be true, then this is the secret of the affinities I have just noticed ; and, further, if the fittest survive, which I again see no reason to doubt, this fact is at once a plea for the aristocracy of race, of intellect, o^ honor, in whatever guise f onnd, and ^ death-blow to the theories of Nihilism, Communism and socialistic creeds generally. Race will tell. Race must tell. Shatter the Roman^senate today, we shall have the feudal baron to-morrow; expel the baron and we give ere- SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 71 dentials to the pontiff; put down the pontiff and we usher in the prince; dethrone the prince and we crown the millionaire. King Mob cannot rule and shall not rule ; this is the fiat which has been written in revolutions and signed in blood, the testimony of the best. It is the im- mutable law of a Divine Nature, which ever springs, Phoenix-like from its own ashes. We cannot conceive of God but as regal, a throned king without a peer. Poor, persecuted, despised, insulted, crucified, rejected, as was the Christ-man, we cannot rank him with the sans culottes. If man is better than the ape, correspondingly, we require the highest class of man to be better than the lowest class, and this condition is the sequence of a very natural pride felt in certain well-defined superiorities of being and culture. Too much familiarity breeds con- tempt. The gentleman who consorts with the black-leg very soon, and almost invariably, becomes contaminated ; the black-leg seldom gains a point by his intimacy with the swell. We cannot touch pitch without being defiled. Nor is there mistaking superiority. As the progressive entity is sculptured by self or progenitors, that impress is left and bequeathed, nor can it be destroyed except after many generations of abuse and renunciation. A pick- pocket cannot at once be made to look like a lord- chancellor, neither can the long-descended heir to a throne be mistaken by the human-nature reader for a hoodlum of the slums. And this in spite of socialistic and subversive philosophy, philanthrophy, sociology, and psychology, to boot. What besotted egotists men are ! 72 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. What fallacious reasoners ! What rabid adherents to a sect, a notion, or a cult ! They tell you, with grave faces and the dogmatic air and tone of experts, that such and such an animal is worth three times, ten times, fifty times as much as such and such another animal, because it is better bred. They assure you that blood will tell, and that the high-bred pacer must beat the lowly nag ; that South Down mutton is infinitely preferable to the poor flesh of neglected stock. They prate of their breedings in and breedings out, and their pedigrees and their dams and their sires. They point with pride to a certain long-bodied, small-headed, greyhound-ribbed steed, and whisper with bated breath the modest sum at which it is appraised — Ten thousand guineas ! — while another far more pretentious and serviceable looking beast is knocked down to the first bidder at a hundred pounds — but all the difference is blood, you know ! Yes, blood is every- thing in nature until you come to man. Then suddenly " the crimson tide " finds itself, for some unaccountable reason, at a discount. The mere mention of blue blood or high-breeding in a man is enough to make one's Demo- cratic hair stand up in outraged dignity, like quills upon the fretful porcupine. A well-bred Berkshire hog, wal- lowing in his native filth, we can stand, in fact he is a rather savoury animal ; but a well-bred man — O'lt upon him ! He is too much for our sensitive noses. He smells of Mayfair. He is an aristocrat, an exquisite, he boasts of blue^blood, of long lineage. He is a fop, a numskull and an exclusive. " Who ever heard of a man's blue blood SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 78 attaining to anything like honour or success ? Can it win races, jump hurdles, weigh 3,000 lbs., or fetch 10,000 guineas ? Out upon it I say. What is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander. The better bred the beast, the better the beast. The better bred the man, the less we expect from him. Yet is this true ? Because some are unworthy and have stumbled along the slippery high- ways of rank and fortune, does the mire of contagion cling to all ? Does no blue blood moisten the arid sands of Egypt, or stain the barbs of Zulu spears ? Is the voice of the well-born never heard in the hour of peril animat- ing the soul of the serried ranks before the thronging foe ? Have no names from the hated class floated down the stream of time as patterns of chivalry, of honour, and of trust ? Does the historic page bristle with no high-bom titles of merit or well-won patronymics of renown ? Is all the aristocracy corrupt, degenerate, effete, and all the democracy pure, unselfish, patriotic ? Have the lower classes no failures to record ? No disappointments to register ? No shortcomings to compound ? What mockers of ourselves we are ! What harlequins of chance ! What ridiculous clowns of necessity ! What " irredeemable flunkies ! " Who would ourselves bid at the polls of nature, had we the chance, for the birthright of a silver spoon ; and could we, indeed, but be born again, would choose the very conservatism we denounce as our cradle, and mumble ourselves to sleep upon the bosoms of the wet-nurses of lineage and fortune ! Let us be true to truth, and own to the inevitable in- E 74 THE ART OALLERT OF ENGLISH. stincts that animate all true natures. Of what avail is it to carve our laborious initials in the adamant of life, if it be not to place our own self -glorified mementos a niche higher in the temple of fame. Should it be, indeed, the highest ambition of the Socialist to pull down all loftiness from its well-earned seat of vantage, and leave to posterity no pinnacle higher than a Nihilist's aim, a heritage of mediocrity only one degree above the level of the gutter ? A thousand times. No ! Rather than bemoan fate and decry those better, or higher, or wiser, or wealthier than ourselves, let us, too, face the fire. Let us, too, mount the " imminent deadly breach," and plant the standard of our faith in all that is lofty, and all that is worth emu- lating upon the repellent ramparts of adverse circum- stances — then, too, shall we be heroes, and our moan shall cease when we stand with our peers in the front ranks of the best. And that the best is the best I have no hesi- tation in proclaiming, let revolution and mutation say what it may. *' This is true liberty, when free bom men. Having to advise the public, may speak free ; Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise ; Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace. What can be juster in a state like this ?" In a sense all men are sculptors, predestined to carve out their fortunes in life, the only diflerence being that son^e, through a lucky chance, find life a softer material to deal with than do others not possessing like advantages. These first have merely to mould their futures in a plastic clay, with little labour ; while others, by dint of an en- SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 75 during courage or a lofty genius must hew them out of the solid rock of opposition, with much expense of vitality and feeling. But the result is about the same in either case. With the one class the ambition is to keep and perpetuate what they have obtained, perchance, through alien or hereditary influence. With the other to obtain, so that they may be enabled to keep and perpetuate. And notice how this metaphor of sculpture may be amplified. While some lives are so gi'and and complete that they seem to be carved, ''in the round," and stand out in all the majesty and beauty of an exact nature, the very counterparts of the models which must of necessity be the true man or the true woman, others are but bas-reliefs, high or low. Some nearer perfection, some with lesser merit, and therefore little above the plain, while the vast majority scarcely ever reach the level, they are intaglios, sunk beneath the surface and out of sight. Their aspira- tions or their opportunities have not served to raise them ; perhaps, their inherent weaknesses have sufficed merely to lower them still farther beneath the plain of a possible mediocrity. Is this the fault of the individual or the inevitable ? Who shall say ? Who can picture a world where all is "in the round," and nothing in intaglio? Who can express such a phase of absolute equality in terms of finite thought ? No ! No ! While there may be many a Phidias and Praxitiles, many an Angelo and Flaxman, there must of necessity be lesser lights — for without comparison the greater lights could never be recognized. " To those who understand God there is no i 76 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. God," for familiarity breeds contempt. If all had genius, or place, or gratified desire, earth would be no place for men. It would be at best a barren waste of ennui defaced by the folded hands of inanition, and somnolent with the yawns of a race of stultified and ambitionless automata. But if life be good at all, degree and condition of life is likewise good. It is good for " the best," who must look down to elevate. It is good for " the worst," who must look up to be elevated. This is good- work, that is, God- work. An eternal interchange. By this the lofty are taught humility. By this the lowly are taught a proper pride. How then shall we say, level all distinctions? For then, what work would there be to accomplish, what end to attain, what to teach and what to learn ? All would be swallowed up in an infinite vacuity. Progres- sion would cease and utter stagnation would be the lot of being. It would be the death knell of human possibil- ities, and of necessity, so far as humanity is concerned, the grave of the absolute possible itself. I am led to give expression to these thoughts, because in contemplating the unhewn block, no matter how rough the surface or how shapeless the mass, in fancy, I can always outline some beauteous creation lurking within, which it needs but the active, the aggressive genius of man to evolve from its stubborn womb. And so with words. Given one hundred words, the question with me is not so much, what are they ? as, what shall they be- come ? Thrown out in a promiscuous heap, like dice from a box, they are nothing. But gathered and moulded by SCULPTURE IN LANQUAGB. 77 the cunning craftsman, they may become " a thing of beauty " for evermore, an idea graved and embodied for all time in the adamant of the national speech. Given seventy-seven words with which to fashion into being a deathless conception, the image, let us say, of the dread Arch-tiend himself, the progenitor of all hell's offspring and earth's woe. Seventy-seven words, some of them duplicates, possibly triplicates, wherewith to stamp on a nation's memory forever, the melancholy figure of the yet half-glorified Arch-Nihilist of the ultra-mundane spheres. Who shall do it ? Who can, with such abbreviated material, give birth to such a tremendous work of art, worthy to be placed on the pedestal of immortal fame ? — Listen : — " Their dread commander ; he, above the rest In shape and gesture proudly eminent, Stood like a tower ; his form had not yet lost All her original brightness ; nor appear'd Less than archangel ruined, and the excess Of glory obscured ; as when the sun, new risen, Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his beams ; or from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change. Perplexes Monarchs." Is not this the perfection of art ? Perfection, indeed ! For although the arch-traitor has been discovered, defeated and condemned, does he not yet enlist our sympathies, even our admiration ? Who can withold a natural pity at the bare suggestion of this mighty wreck, standing yet aloft in the dignity of unconquered pride, though begirt 78 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. by the pains of hell,draped in the remnants of his departed glory, haloed by the last beams of his fortunes that have forever set. I say this is word carving extraordinary, or if it please you better, word moulding, for whenever I read or hear these wonderful lines, the attendant hosts, that I know are present, angel forms " Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa," fade into the far distance; the flames recede,beaten back as by a powerful air, the whirlwind of that arch-fiend's per- sonality ; the gloom descends, and settles, and gathers, concentres and takes shape, till from it is evolved one form, in which all else is swallowed ; he, " the dread Com- mander — " alone ; undismayed, though beaten ; un- conquered, though despairing — standing out in incompar- able majesty ; the livid twilight, " pale and dreadful," of the infernal abyss, growing darker at his frown — An arch-angelic Ajax in animated bronze, defying the light- nings of high heaven. This is a single figure, the embodiment of the super- natural. The sculptor is Milton. The passage may be taken as a type of what can be done in this department by a true artist with a limited number of words. Of course the question is open to discussion. Is it justifiable to call this Puritanical conception of the " Arch-Fiend " word sculpture ? Why call it word sculpture rather than word painting ? Because it relates to the individual and it is more than a portrait. A portrait, even full length, is at best, flat, and requires a sympathetic background to SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 79 heighten the effect as a whole. It suggests rather than truly reproduces, in short the essential element of natural form is wanting, just the very element given here in all its perfection. The figure stands out in startling distinct- ness from a background where all has become vague and subservient to the main idea. From the supernatural we descend, or, rather in this special case, ascend to terra fli'ma, to the level of the natural, to the depiction of man, singly or in the group. Here I mean actual man, the man who has lived and walked with his fellows, has perhaps paid the debt of nature and has mouldered into the dust from which he sprang ; the man of history, of biography, or of our own social circle. The creature of fiction and romance, the mythical hero of the novel or the melo-drama has his own sphere, to which I shall return anon. In the first place, how shall we arrive at a definite conception of the indi- vidual, the actual historical man ? We have not seen him. Years have passed away since death arrested his labours, since the grave swallowed up his visible form. There is no earthly trace left of the being once radiant with the hues and hopes of youth and health. We have seen no sculptured bust of the one we know, and, perhaps, love and reverence ; perhaps, pity and despise. No portrait gallery to which we have access shadows forth the linea- ments of the original. Whence, then, comes our love and reverence, our pity and loathing ? How do we know the hero we worship in our hearts, or enshrine in our intel- ligencies — for there may be love without admiration and 80 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. admiration without love — ? How do we recognize the tyrant we dread, the libertine we contemn, the pretender we deride ? Because the word-sculptor has been spon- sor. He has moulded in our hearts the cherished forms of our literary loves ; he has graved upon our brains the never-to-be-forgotten lines of our literary heroes and our literary aversions. More than this. Each worshipper, eacli student is himself a sculptor, and has embodied a conception, a thought, — which is unuttered language — of the divinity he V7orships, of the mediocrity he toler- ates, of the subterfuge he rejects. It may not be a true facial or figural conception. But what of that ? I wor- ship not the man, but the intellect. To me it mattsrs little if " The Thunderer " have a Roman nose or a pug, — ** Boz " may weigh two hundred -weight, or be a mere a ttenuation, " spindling into longitude immense." I have carved my conception of the real hero, that is, the im- mortal part of him, and I know it to be true. What do I want more ? Sufficient for Pope to v rite, " Natun , and Nature's laws, lay hid in night God said, Let Newton he, and all was light." and though I had never known Newton, or seen bust or porii'aiture, or read a line of uis " Principia," his image is now none the less a reality. He is the incarnation of light, the sculptured divJrity of philosophical law, stand- ing on the pedestal of rll time, with earnest eyes ever peering into the immensit}'^ of space, gauging the possi- bilities of the future, and lover-like, vrooing the secrets from the stars. SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 81 Who was Mrs. Corbet ? I know not. A prosaic name enough. It calls up no memories, pleasant or otherwise ; it reflects no sunlight ; it casts no shadow on the dial-plate of my being. I have no conception of what the woman was like, physically. For thai I care nought. Worse still, I have no mental image of her. Yet I know she was distingushed, or worthy, or notorious, else would her name have perished and been forgotten. But in the absence of personal acquaintanceship, or bust, or statue> or portrait, again I turn to Pope, for I find that he has embodied, has graven the true woman, the mental person- ality, in an epitaph of ten lines, which I read, and now I think I am intimately acquainted with Mrs. Corbet. I honour her. Ay, as though I had fraternized with her for years. I know her, and reverence her, and here is the secret of my knowledge and my esteem : " Here reats a woman, good without pretence, Blest with plain reason, and with sober sense ; No conquest she, but o'er herself desir'd ; No arts essay'd, but not to be admir'd. Passion and pride were to her soul unknown, Convinc'd that Virtue only is our own. So unaffected, so compos'd a tnind. So firm, yet soft ; so strong, yet so refin'd, Heaven, as its purest gold, by tortures try'd, The saint sustain'd them, but the woman died." Johnson calls this the most valuable of Pope's epitaphs, which means, I presume, that it is true. In his own words, " Who can forbear tc lament that this amiable woman has no name in the verses ?" As architecture may be made to embody many tastes, 82 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. ! i I and as paintin|^ may be made to represent many phases of natural being, so sculpture may be made to shadow forth in bronze, or stone, or marble, many sentiments in the personality of the individual. Thus, if I determine to erect a statue to my friend, I may seize upon any per- sonal or mental idiosyncrasy, which happens to be upper- most in my mind at the moment, and render that idea permanent, through the medium of the cast or the chisel. Was he sternly just ? Then can I invest him with the toga of Brutus, and he shall stand on his pedestal the im- personation of an impartial justice. Was he bold ? Then shall the soldier's meed be his, to wield from his lofty height the sword or the battle axe, as the apotheosis of the warrior. Was he a student ? Then cap and gown shall be his, habited in stone-gray academicals, he shall look down upon the learners of to-day. Was he unforunate and weary? Then shall the muse of melancholy best befit his monumental case, with broken lyre and abstracted air he shall sorrow forever in the midst of a sorrowing, breathing humanity. I can erect my effigy, a demi-god, above earth's minions on the summit of the loftiest column in Trafalgar Square, or, I can lay it in all humility, with meek hands clasped upon its pulseless bosom, prone upon some broken tomb in the dim-religicus aisles of Westminster Abbey. So with the sculpture of the pen. The hero or heroine we cherish may bear any general allegorical synibolisation we choose, as long as the linea- ments are preserved. He may be defiant Ajax, howlin;?, invectives at the lightnings of Jove — She may be a heart- "^ ! SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 83 broken Niobe weeping in stony woe over the unburied bodies of her murdered offspring. Some lives seem steeped in the bitter dregs " of a green and yellov;" melancholy," a perpetual pining from the cradle to the grave. Poor afflicted souls ! How j)itiful is their little tale of three- score pages ! How fraught with retrospective yearning the finis at the end ! Such a life was Cowper's, and no more pathetic monument has ever been left to an unhappy memory than that of the gifted bi. afflicted bard carved out in a few, brief clauses by Collier. " More than fifty years after the day on which a sad little face, looking from the nursery window, had seen a dark hearse moving slowly from the door, an old man, smitten with incurable madness, but then enjoying a brief lucid interval, bent over a picture, and saw the never-forgotten image of that kindest earthly friend from whom he had so long been severed, but whom he was so soon to join in the sorrowless land." What a world of pathos is here ! We live in a moment the silent agony of half-a-century, for out of the touching word-tribute looks the poor, pale face, with its wistful, wondering eyes, " Like patience on a monument smiling at grief ;" longing for the release which a Christian faith forbids to compass. Or the same type, the elegiac or melancholy, is that wonderful word sculpture dedicated to the poet Keats by his friend Shelley, of all characteristic and descriptive 84 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. carving the most touchingly beautiful. Like the classic statues of old, it is coloured, or rather tinged with the suggestion of colour; but not aggressive colour, " faded violets, white, pied and blue," all cold tints, or where relie-^ed, relieved by shadow only, " the last cloud of an expiring storm," " thunder," " pansies over-blown" " dark ivy tresses." It puts one in mind of a marble Faun, in strong alto-relievo, standing out from a twilight back- ground of all funereal and melancholy accompaniments — a statued threnody — a petrified grief transmuted into words, with something of the original wail yet lingering in the air, and linking together the sobbing clauses. " Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, A phantom among men, companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm. Whose thunder is its knell ; he, as I guess, Had gazed on nature's naked loveliness, Act£eon-like, and now he fled, astray. With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey. A pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift — A love in desolation masked — a Power Girt round with weakness — i\, can scarct^ uplift The weight of the superincumbent hoar ; It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, A breaking billow ;— even whilst we speak Is it not broken ? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly ; on a cheek The life can burn in blood, everk while the heart may break. His head was bound with pansies overblown. And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue ; And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew, Yet dripping with the foreat's noon-day dew, SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 85 "Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart Shook the weak hand that grasped it ; of that crew He came the last, neglected and apart ; A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart. All stood aloof, and at his partial moan Smiled through their tears ; well knew that gentle hand, Who in another's fate now wept his own ; As in the accents of an unknown land He sang new sorrow ; sad Urania scanned The stranger's mien, and murmured : * Who art thou ? He answered not, but with a sudden hand Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, "Which was like Cain's or Christ's. Oh I that it should be so." No man is a hero to his own valet, but as some one very fitly remarks, that may be, because the valet is a valet and not because the hero is not a hero. A statue may sometimes be a burlesque upon the individual, perhaps in- tentionally to point a moral; or from lack of ability in the artist ; or from prejudice which aims to direct the finger of scorn at a defunct aversion. Iti any case, the original whose effigy is so pilloried, can hardly be deemed a hero by the grinning valets of society, no matter whether these strut in the silken hose of the "Upper Ten," or shuffle and skulk in all the unkempt exuberance of patchwork and tatters peculiar to the " Great Unwashed." If any one man, who might have been a hero, had he so chosen, has been lampooned more than another, buffeted with words of scorn, beaten with many verbal stripes, metaphorically spat upon, and crowned with the thorny jibes of a never- ceasing laughter, that man is surely " His most high and mighty Majesty" Charles IL, "Our mutton-eating king" of the witty Rochester. " The Old Goat " of the courtiers. If 86 THE AKT GALLERY OF ENGLISH. His verbal statue, too, has been erected, in matchless prose by Taine, but what a soiry hero looks down from the height ! What a burlesque of a monarch to wield the sceptre over a powerful realm ! " Charles and his brother, in their state dress, would set off running as in a carnival. On the day when the Dutch fleet burned the English ships in the Thames, the king supped with the Duchess of Monmouth, and amused himself by chasing a moth. In council, while business was being transacted, he would be playing with his dog. Rochester and Buckingham insulted him by insolent repar- tees or dissolute epigrams ; he would fly into a passion and suffer them to go on. He quarrelled with his mis- tress in public ; she called him an idiot, and he called her a jade. He would leave her in the morning, " so that the very sentries speak of it." He suffered her to play him false before the eyes of all ; at one time she received a couple of actors, one of whom was a mountebank." We naturally ask ourselves, is this conception which gibbers upon the grinning crowd more like a Frenchified Pantaloon than a starred and gartered monarch, a true one, or is it exaggerated from any of the causes already mentioned ; intentionally, through lack of appreciative ability, or through prejudice ? Alas ! If history, which in this case at least, means a remarkable consensus of reputable opinion, be reliable, our " hero " is nought but a crowned " idiot," forever posing as a royal charlatan "in a corner," and " kissing by the half hour together to the observation of all the world," his latest infatuation in hoop SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 87 and patches. But notice the exquisite carving. What- ever the demerits of the sculptured, we cannot withhold the meed of praise from the sculptor. A monarch ! What monarch ? Chasing a moth, with the enemy at his gates. A statesman ! What stato^man ? Coquetting with his dog during the emergencies of business. A hero ! What hero ? Insulted by the courtiers he had benefited. A man ! A model of a man ! What man ? What model ? An idiot. Dubbed witless by a strumpet, whose treasury was the same " high and mighty " Prince, but whose para- mour was a " mountebank," pampered and gorged, we presume, by means of the very funds extorted from that same royal treasury. Yet one more contribution from the Stuart Gallery, by an artist no less distinguished than Dryden himself, ere we leave the embodiment of the real for that of the ideal. This time Buckingham poses as the model. Poses, I say, but that word is quite inadequate to convey my meaning. Buckingham, a Proteus among courtiers, who was everything and nothing by turns, at once a despot and a slave ; patriot and profligate ; duellist and inn- keeper ; cabalist and dupe ; ambassador and exile ; chan- cellor and renegade ; comedian and traitor ; satirist and soldier ; citizen and fool. A very Proteus, I repeat. A lion ; for he devoured the fair. Fire ; for he scorched his friends. A torrent ; for his passions were irresistible. A whirlwind ; for he swept his opposers away. A gossa- mer; for temptation swept himself away. Surely no single character of his time so truly resembled the sea- 88 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. god of old, to astound merely by his marvellous changes, yet to succumb miserably if arrested by the illicit witch- ery of a wanton's smile. Difficult as the task may ap- pear, at least one inspired pen impaled this many-hued Will o* the wisp of fashion, this variegated Jack o* Lan- tern of the stews. Impaled him, and with inimitable cun- ning drew him in splendid bas-relief across the frieze of a matchless satire in extended procession — of himself in all his moods. There the impressions remain for ever fixed, tinctured with the prismatic hues of their unique original. " In the first rank of these did Zimri stand, A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome : Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong. Was everything by starts and nothing long ; But in the courso of one revolving moon Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon ; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking ; Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. Blest madman, who could every hour employ With something new to wish or to enjoy ! Railing and praising were his usual themes ; And both, to show his judgment in extremes ; So over- violent, or over-civil, That every man to him was God or devil. In squandering wealth was his peculiar art ; Nothing went unrewarded but desert. Beggared by fools whom still he found too late, He had his jest, and they had his estate. He laughed himself from Court ; then sought relief By forming parties, but could ne'er be chief ; For spite of him the weight of business fell On Absalom and wise Achitophel ; Thus wicked but in will, of means bereft, .He left not faction, but of that was left." SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 89 Now for the third type of our word carving, "the ideal," which oftentimes, however, so closely resembles " the real," as scarcely to be distinguished from it. This type is, of course, to be found in its greatest perfection in the lighter literature of our language, for it belongs, par excellence, to the realm of the dramatist, the romancer and the poet ; in short, the inventor of being. 'Tis true there may have been an original in the mind of the artist, a mental shadowing of an actual form. Yet the creation is none the less ideal ; for in the first place it is not a direct copy, and, secondly, it is often purposely disguised, as regards some of the minor details, in order to avoid the odium of extreme personality, or to outwit legal process. The broad type is of necessity subdivided into many minor classifications, as all phases of human being are represented ; all grades of intellect, of sentiment, or of humour, impressed into the service of the designer. We have the lofty and the humble, the grave and the gay, the dignitary and the waif, the intellectual and the simple. As wide as is the compass of human possibilities, so wide is the plastic capability of expression, by means of which are moulded the verbal statuettes of ideality. Moreover the masters of the art are many. The page of literature bristles with names which add lustre to the aurora of literary renown in this department. They span the " dome " of all time ; some shooting up to the zenith in arrowy shafts of resplendent light; others merely flickering along the horizon in rippling possibilities or potentialities, so to speak; but each adding iis quota to the F I I) 90 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. sum of the magnificent whole, whose iridescent arch throws down through all the centuries its quenchless lustre, haloing the graves of the immortal dead and illumining the pathway of the future for other aspirants yet unborn. I shall call these next few illustrations which I have culled from the wealth of the National Art Gallery of speech, word-statuettes ; because I can think of no happier name to give them. They so forcibly remind one of thos3 beautiful little images, seen in museums and art collections, modelled in some sort of plastic material, red clay, or wax, or plaster of Paris, and labelled with names familiar to all who take a delight in visiting such repositories of the beautiful and the chaste : " Rip Van Winkle on the Mountain," « The Wounded Scout," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," " One More Shot," &;c., &c. Some of these statuettes are little gems so far as design and execution are concerned. Poems in clay. As are their kinsmen the poems and descriptive paragraphs them- selves statuettes in words. Here is a single figure from Goldsmith familiar to every school going youth and maiden, yet how touching and how grand. Perhaps all the more touching because we like to believe the reality not only possible; but that the poetic ideal, with slight alterations, might indeed stand for many an original, who, having done his life-work, has passed quietly and unosten- tatiously away, leaving the world better for his presence. " A man be was to all the oountry dear, And passing rich with forty pounds a year ; Remote from towns, he ran his godly race, Nor e'er had chaug'd, nor wish'd to change his place ; SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 91 ' Unpractis'd he to fawn, or seek for power, By doctrines faahion'd to the varying hour ; Far other aims his heart had leam'd to prize, More skill'd to raise the wretched than to rise. His house was known to all the vagrant train, He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain. Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride. And e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side; But in his duty prompt at every call, He watoh'd and wept, he pray'd and felt for all, And, as a bird each fond endearment tries To tempt its new fledg'd offspring to the skies, •' He tried each art, reprov'd each dull delay, Allur'd to brighter worlds, and led the way. At church, with meek and unaffected grace, His looks adorn'd the venerable place ; Truth from his lips prevail'd with double sway. And fools, who came to scoff, remain'd to pray. The service past, around the pious man, With ready zeal each honest rustic ran ; E'en children follow' d with endearing wile. And pluck'd his gown, to share the good man's smile." Second only to this pen anaglyph of the village preacher is that of the village schoolmaster, by the same author. It is scarcely less beautiful and quite as true. Yet no less ideal than true. For these impersonations stand for types, not individuals. We recognize them, but rather with the eye of instinct than that of direct vision. We may have dreamt of such characterisations, or even created them, and feel assured that they exist, though we have never met them in real life. They are copies of the indi- vidual, plus every possibility for good in the type, model- led to illustrate abstract excellence, viz.; virtue and rustic 'iu IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) t ^ :/. <° ^x ^ f/; ^- 1.0 I.I 1.25 IIM IIM IM 2.0 1.8 1.4 IIIIII.6 m % \ o^ #> X V 23 WEST MAIN STREET WEBSTER, NY. 14580 (716) 872-4503 ^ 1 92 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. learning. They are not mere hard reproductions to be adversely criticised by the stickler for cast-iron rule and slavish imitation, if a wrinkle is wanting or a hair be out of place : " A raan severe he was, and stem to view, I knew him well, and every truant knew ; Well had the boding tremblers leam'd to trace The day's disasters in his morning face ; Full well they laugh'd with counterfeited glee At all his jokes, for many a joke had he ; Full well the busy whisper circling round, Convey'd the dismal tidings when he frown'd ; Yet he was kind, or if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault ; The village all declar'd how much he knew, 'Twas certain he could write, and cipher, too j Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage. And e'en the story ran — that he could gauge ; In arguing too, the parson own'd his skill. For e'en though vanquish'd, he could argue still ; While words of learned length and thundering sound, Amaz'd the gazing rustics rang'd around. And still they gaz'd, and still the wonder grew, That one small head could carry all he knew." The schoolmaster has ever been a favourite topic with the dealer in words. Not seldom, has he, poor fellow, received hard treatment at the hands of that worthy; sometimes — in which case, though, he is not " poor fellow" — it must be admitted deservedly, for instance there is Squeers: at others, it has been rather his misfortune than his fault that he has cut such a sorry figure on the author's pedestal. He has been considered a legitimate butt for the gamins of Scribbler's Alley to deride ; for the parvenu of Grub Street to point the finger at ; for the penny-a-liner of the Slums to be-spatter with word- SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 93 garbage. He has been the hete-noire of embryo humanity, and the evil-to-be-endured of adults. He hfls been the slave of querulous infants, and the dupe oi nv^y rdly trustees. He has been the Punch and Judy of the exami- nation halls, and the Diogenes of the social circle. He has been slighted as a hybrid, and sneered at as neither " fish, flesh, nor good red-herring." He has been a man among boys, but a boy among men, without a voice in the councils, a status in the commonwealth, or a balance at the bank. In fact he has been a tutorial Vox et prce- terea nihil, his only inheritance a ferule, and his sole, in- alienable right a seat, not in the hereditary house, but in a waxed chair, possibly supplemented by the aberrant horrors of a fretful pin. Poor fellow ! His has been a hard lot. Nature has not been kind to him, neither has for- tune. Nor, sad to say, has fame itself. Goldsmith's tri- bute is, however, a fair immortalisation of many a peda- gogic rose that has been fated to " blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air." It is eminently British, and eminently rustic. And, withal, the concep- tion is a taking one. It deserves to live, and will do so. Of quite a different type, the very antipodes of our village " Syntax " is, however, Washington Irving's conception of the same worthy. It, too, is marvellously good and as true to New England character as Goldsmith's is to British, and as deserving of immortality. It is the old Teutonic dominie masquerading a.s a Pilg/im Father of the third or fourth generation. It is the village square- toes elongated into an academical Yankee Doodle. IV II I' I, \ i 94 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. The educational bogie of conventional custom transmuted into the nascent scare-crow of republican latitude. It is our rustic and substantial Duns Scotius, whittled into the attenuated skeleton of a prospective Daniel Webster run to seed. It is a type of humanity such as the United States alone can produce. It is a type of the schoolmas- ter such as only the United States could maintain with- out scaring the genius of learning into fits, and the whole of her progeny into premature graves. The figure of Ichabod Crane, the instructor of the juvenile tatterdema- lions of Sleepy Hollow, is a masterpiece in its v/ay, and here is a copy : " The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame i^iost loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon its spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes baggy, and flutterinor about him, one mi^ht have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scare-crow eloped from a corn-field." I have here a fragment by Elia, a torso, plus head and arms. A disfigured remnant that might have been dug out from the ruins of an antique temple. Like the cen- taur of old, a human head and body, but mounted now on SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 95 wheels, instead of the curvetting limbs, that erst bore the man-monster onward to do battle with the Lapithae. The original of this fragment was a cripple who had lost his lower limbs, and was, therefore, compelled to move from place to place by means of a machine on wheels, constructed for the purpose. More than once have I seen such a figure gliding over the pavement between Hyde Park corner and Kensington, and I can vouch for the truth of the copy ; but, whenever I read it, so subtle is the method of presentation, that I lose sight of the man himself, that is, the Real. My mind goes back to other scenes, to other ages, and I recognize nought but the Ideal — a metope of a Doric frieze fallen from the Parthe- non, habited not in flesh and blood, but chiseled from the puro face of the marble by a sculptor of old. Here is the fragment : " He seemed earth-born, an Antaeus, and to suck in fresh vigour from the soil which he neighboured. He was a grand fragment; as good as an Elgin marble. The nature, which should have recruited his reft legs and thighs, was not lost, but only retired into his upper parts, and he was half a Hercules. 1 heard a tremendous voice thundering and growling, as before an earthquake, and casting down my eyes, it was this mandrake reviling a steed that had started at his portentous appearance. He seemed to want but his just stature to have rent the of- fending quadruped in shivers. He was as the man-part of a centaur, from which the horse-half had been cloven in some dire Lapithan controversy. He moved on as if 4 96 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. he could have made shift with yet half of the body-por- tion which was left him." I have hitherto given no example of the delineation of the " female form divine." We have examined the man supernatural, in Milton's Satan ; man, the real, of the bio- grapher and the elegiast ; man, the ideal, of the poet and the essayist; but, as yet, for man has been found no help meet for him. It is time then to touch upon this branch of the subject. The subject of woman is one well fitted to employ the sculptor's chisel and the poet's pen. As there is nothing so beautiful in animated nature as a lovely woman, so there is nothing so typical of purity and grace as a lovely disposition enshrined in a woman. She is to the true man the embodiment of all virtue and all love. Indeed she is the sole guarantee that virtue exists, and that other than mere family affection is possible. She is at once the hostage and the victor of love. Her form partakes of her spiritual nature, all her lines are soft and flowing, that is, from a perfect physical standpoint. All her idiosyncrasies of temperament are cast in the same mould as her physical attributes, that is, from a perfect psychological standpoint. We need not stay to note the exceptions. She is the representative of the statuesque in art. Her pose is naturally graceful ; her curves undulating ; her outlines, soft and rounded ; her lineaments, pure. Colour, though frequently present, is unnecessary for the portrayal of the type. It adds little to the inherent perfection of that type, be it physical or mental. A fair woman, like a marble statue, may derive SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 97 the major part of her fascinating grace from the very ab- sence of colour, and the consequent heightening of the effect of purity ; for colour, though it may add to vol- uptuousness, always detracts from the idea of abstract purity. It renders beauty carnal, rather than etherial. That is why snow is symbolical of innocence, and red is the colour of war. A crimson lip is a beautiful feature ; but its first tacit vocation is to provoke the kiss of pas- sion : " He pressed the blossom of his lips to mine." A pale cheek on the other hand subdues the merely ani- mal, and at once calls up the intellectual and the contin- ent. In the description of women then, we have to take into account the method of treatment pursued by the author. If his portrayal be warm, ])assionate, charged with colour, voluptuously sensual, and full of life and action, such description accords rather with the painter's instinct than the sculptor's. It is a picture, not a carving. Of course there may be colour present, but it must not be in excess, for directly characteristics of outline and purity are made subservient to tintings, then marble fades from the mind, and canvas and the palette are suggested. Some pens are so incisive, that they perforce make their creations stand out from the page. Here outline, shape, position, figure, is truly represented, that is statu- ary. Others again are suggestive, they merely shadow forth their conceptions, they show them as through a gauze veil,half displaying, half concealing the charms they describe. This type occupies a middle position and must m V h V, '■ ' 98 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. be classed according to modifying circumstances. Yet others limn their divinities in all the colours of the rain- bow. The cheek flushes with health, the lips, like over- ripe cherries, are ever ready to bur«*t open and show the milk-white seeds within. The flesh tints are pronounced, the garments many-hued. Jewels flash everywhere. The dispositions are in accordance with the physical belong- ings and surroundings. They are Eastern houris, human pomegranate blossoms, languid with the dews and odours of Eastern climes — the very antipodes of the first class, who are high bred Teutonic maidens ; blanche-roses, with white skins and fair tresses. Notice, too, the difference of psychical characteristics. The pomegranate blossom will sway to the torrid breeze, and languidly yet volup- tuously meet its wanton caress. The blanche-rose, on the other hand, will draw her pale skirts closer to her shrinking form, till the hot breath of the f roward zephyr has passed by. The following very fine delineation of female form from Edwin Arnold's " Light of Asia," will illustrate the idea of the statuesque in diction. It is an exquisite group of sleeping maidens from the pleasure- house of Prince Sidd^rtha, and forcibly calls to mind a somewhat similar work of pen-art in Don Juan. Similar, with a difference, for Arnold's description has purer tints than that of Byron. Notice that form is the element depicted, form with very little colour, till we come to the concluding lines, when the tints become warmer, and the two principles blend : |) I SCULPTURE W LANGUAGE. 99 " Here one lay full length, Her vina by her cheek, and in its strings The little fingers still all interlaced As when the last notes of her light song played Those radiant eyes to sleep and sealed her own. Another slumbered, folding in her arms A desert antelope, its slender head Buried with back-sloped horns between her breasts Soft nestling ; it was eating— when both drowsed — lied roses, and her loosening hand still held A rose half -raumbled, while a rose-leaf curled Between the deer's lips. Here two friends had dozed Together, weaving mAgra-buds, which bound Their sister sweetness in a starry chain, Linking them limb to limb and heart to heart, One i Allowed on the blossoms, one on her- Another, ere she slept was stringing stones To make a necklet —agate, onyx, sard. Coral and moonstone— 'round her wrist it gleamed, A coil of splendid colour, while she held, Unthreaded yet, the bead to close it up. Green turkis, carved with golden gods and scripts. Lulled by the cadence of the garden stream. Thus lay they on the clustered carpets, each A girlish rose with shut leaves, waiting dawn To open and make daylight beautiful." Now compare this with the same idea as elaborated by our other word-artist Byron : " Many and beautiful lay those around. Like flowers of different hue, and clime, and root, In some exotic garden sometimes found, With cost, and care, and warmth induced to shoot, One with her auburn tresses lightly bound, And fair brows gently drooping as the fruit Nftds from the tree, was slumbering with soft breath, And lips apart, which show'd the pearls beneath. One with her flush'd cheek laid on her white arm, And raven ringlets gather'd in dark crowd Above her brow, lay dreaming soft and warm ; And smiling through her dream, as through a cloud i ' 100 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. The moon breakn, half-unveil'd each further charm, Ah, elif^htly stirrinf,' in her snowy shroud. Her beauties seized the unconscious hour of night All bashfully to struggle into light. « « • » # « A fourth, as marble, statue-like and still, Lay in a breathless, hush'd and stony sleep ; White, cold, and pure, as looks a frozen rill, Or the snow minaret on an Alpine steep. Or Lot's wife done in salt — or what you will." » « # • « • The careful reader will note that this latter extract, beautiful as the first, and descripti'^'^e of the same phase of Eastern life, is, however, its very converse, as regards method of treatment, for whereas the first commences and continues with outline and towards the end becomes tinged with colour ; the second opens and continues with slight colour and terminates in a few matchless verses of pure outline. Those form a veritable figure carved in word-marble. We almost see the literal embodiment of the vision, the peculiar lustre of the freshly cut marble, the crystalline sparkle of the salt. 'Tis a dream from the age of Praxitiles transmuted into rhyme. To pass now from groups to double or single figures, we need not leave the author last quoted. Take stanza CXGIV of the second canto of Don Juan. We have the image of a pair of lovers that might well be taken to represent a terrestrial Cupid and Psyche, or Venus and Adonis : " They look upon each other and their eyes Gleam in the moonlight ; and her white arm clasps Bouud Juan's head, and his around hers lies Half buried in the tresses which it grasps ; SCULPTURE IN LANGUAQE. 101 She aitH upon his knee and drinka hu Hij^ha, He herH, until they end in broken gaapa ; And thua they form a ^roup tlmt'rt ([uite antique, Half-naked, loving, natural and Ureok." In stanza XLIII, canto 6, is a fine example of that suggestive style I have already mentioned as being shadowed forth ; looming, as it were, through a medium which conceals nothing but the sharp outline and prom- inent feature. *' She was not violently lively, but Stole on your spirit like a May-day breaking ; Her eyea wens not too sparkling, yet, half-shut, They put beholders in a tender taking : She looked (this aimile'a quite new) just cut From marble, like a Pygmalion's atatue waking, The mortal and the marble still at strife, And timidly expanding into life." Yet once more let me take an illustration in prose of a single figure — a goddess, from Nathaniel Parker Willis, perhaps as fine as anything of the sort in the language. A combination of outline and shadow ; of incision and suggestiveness. It is the statue of Albina McLush. " She sat usually upon a fauteuil, with her large, full arm embedded in a cushion, sometimes for hours without stirring. I have seen the wind lift the masses of dark hair from her shoulders, when it seemed like the coming to life of a marble Hebe — she had been motionless so long. She was a model for a goddess of sleep ; as she sat with her eyes half closed, lifting up their superb lids as you spoke to her and dropping them again with the de- liberate motion of a cloud, when she had murmured out 102 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. her Hyllablo of assent. Her figure, in a sitting posture, presented a gentle declivity from the curve of her neck to the instep of the small round foot lying on its side uj)on the ottoman." This is fine work. Words have never been put to bet- ter use. These latter figures seem to evolve out of a background of bare possibility; and gradually to take shape till they stand out in full relief — or full relief par- tially hidden by a veil you have seen carved over them, the product not of the neutral background, but of the artist's ingenuity. I have spoken of figures carved out of word-marble ; these seem to have been moulded out of word-mist. There is such a thing as generalizing in sculpture — the embodying of a class in the individual. For instance ; in a statue to Liberty, we typify every f jeeraan who has strug- gled in the cause of emancipation : — in one to Victory ; every hero who has fought and bled in the annals of con- quest. When we carve a bas-relief to Ceres and sur- round her with the wheat sheaves and cornucopise of plenty we signify the reign of prosperity ; so we repre- sent strength by a Hercules ; justice by a blinded figure with sword and scales ; time by the figure of an old man with hour-glass and scythe ; death by a skeleton, etc. In literature we repeatedly find the same generalization, now in poetry, now in prose. Humanity and the attri- butes of humanity are of course favourite topics, and not infrequently in a few lines glowing with warmth, or sparkling with humour, or magnificent with rhetoric are SCULPTURE IN LANQUAQE. 103 hit off with inimitable skill and grace the virtues, the follies, and the vices of mortals. This species of charac- terization belongs properly to the sculpture of literature. It is better done in stone than in colours ; for the concep- tion is general rather than particular, abstract, yet that can take a concrete form, and is therefore better moulded by the intellect than coloured by the passions or the fancy. We require a rigidly pure type of truth which is better colourless. Whenever colour enters there is more piay for the fancy, and consequently, exaggeration. Man corporeal as applied to the typical has always been a favourite topic with man. Atlas supporting the world on his brawny shoulders is typical — of labour and strength and with the Japanese, 1 believe, of punishment. Adam is typical — of the potentiality of human possibilities for greatness as well as for frailty and sin. Jove hurling his thunderbolts at theGigantes is typical — of superhuman strength and vengeance and the inevitable law of retri- bution. Prometheus chained to Caucasus, is typical — the vulture of remorse represented as ever preying upon the vitals of a fallen and earth-bound humanity. Buddha is typical — of the great heartedness which after all beats beneath the bosom of degenerate man. So is Christ typi- cal. So is the Wandering Jew. So is Prince Arthur. So is Nebuchadnezzar. So is Moses. So is Noah. So is Tubal Cain. The Deity itself is typical — of man ; for in the image of God created he hin« ; and man, reacting, is like wise typical of the Godhead, for the human figure has been worshipped by all nations in all ages, whether 99 104 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. carved, grim and misshapen from the solid rock ; moulded or fashioned in clay, bone, met'xl, ivory, or other material ; or suspended from the crucifix in all the symbolised agony of the death throe. Man metaphysical as applied to the tjrpical has like- wise always been a favourite topic with man, especially with the dramatist,the novelist, and the poet. . Indeed in these modem days, more perhaps, than in any other age, there is danger, that while treating him from this purely metaphysical standpoint, we forget that he is possessed of a corporeal entity, and so depict him as a mere abstrac- tion or sentimental pivot, round which to revolve fine drawn theories of the potentialities of psychology, the sublimities of aesthetics and the utter insignificance and inutility of doctrines that deal with anything really hu- man or capable of a common sense and therefore common place existence. Take up a novel, the product of this modern analytic school of fiction, and we shall find that instead of having to dealjwith narration, where personalities are prominent, and from which personalities we are led to infer the characteristics of the individual, the method is reversed; that we are fed upon abstractions and theories, mere metaphysical speculations round which we have our- selves to construct the flesh and blood of humanity as best we may. But as for narrative, there is none. There is no sight or scent or sound of nature in all the plati- tude of dreary pages. It is an eternal drawing room, furnished with the upholstery of the stance, and occupied SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 105 by highly rectified spirits, who converse as no ordinary spirits encased in normal" integuments, were ever yet heard to converse; or perhaps, a chemist's laboratory, where creeds and cults and philosophies take the place of the elements in the crucible; where much of the me- tallic is brass, and much of the gaseous, — pure wind. The conceptions are clever, but strained, and not altogether comprehensible, far preferable to my taste is a good ghost story; therein, at least, I am deceived with my eyes open. It does one good after perusing half-a-dozen lucubrations of this type to get back to Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday, for these, at least, are indigenous to earth ; to revel among wild Indians and Hottentots ; to take a hand in a murder or so, half-a-dozen burglaries, and a brace of Gretna Green marriages ; to inhale the intoxicating spirit of a real old-fashioned highway robbery, supplemented by the return of the ladies' jewels, the elaborate apology of the Gentleman of the Road, and his final acceptance by the heroine of the piece. All this helps to counteract the bilious tendencies of the stance. A thorough course of Scott orDickens is, moreover,a capital tonic for the mental system prostrated by long exposure to the analytic and philosophic epidemic alluded to, while Harrison Ainsworth and Wilkie Collins are certain cures. Well, chacun a son goM. I like the analytic in its place. But to my taste the romance is the proper field for everyday personages, no matter how improbable their adventures and hair-breadth their escapes. The more improbable and hair-breadth the better. I read a novel 106 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. rather for amusement than instruction. The philosophies belong of right to the schools ; and they are my labours, not my recreations. A drama where the actors are skele- tons and their dialogues scientific treatises may be all very well for a literary gathering of aesthetes, but is hardly fit for the play houses of ordinary humanity. But as I have said, the study of man, whether man physical or man metaphysical, possesses a rare charm for a certain order of intellect. The man physical, under every possible condition of being, even to the absolutely repel- lent, has exhausted the skill of the sculptor. We have biographies in stone, histories in bas-relief, and the pedi- grees of nations in marble. Man metaphysical, too, has been symbolised under every conceivable form. His virtues have been extolled as archangels, and epitomised as mural tablets. His aggressiveness has been allegorised as the figure of Siva, and his vices deified as the abomina- tion of Moloch. So in literature we find his record on every page. Now the individual, in biography ; now the type, in drama, criticism, or poetry. Here, for instance, is his life chiselled in speech by Shakspeare. It is a modern frieze, if you will, on which are carved in seven verbal metopes the biography of man from the cradle to the grave : " All the world's a stage, And all the meu and women merely players ; They have their exits and their entrances ; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms ; And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel, SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 107 lies urs, :ele- ; all it is man for a 3very repel- have pedi- o, has . His omised BTorised omina- ord on LOW the istance, It is a a seven radle to And shining morning face, creeping like a snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover ; Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier ; Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking tin bubble reputation Even in the cannon's mouth : And then the justice ; In fair round belly, with good capon lined. With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws and modern instances, And so he plays his part ; The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon ! With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side ; His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide For his shrunk shank : and his big manly voice, Turning again towards childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound ; Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness, and mere oblivion ; Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." This is an amplification, a procession as it were, like those on the Doric temples of old ; but here is a mural tablet on the same topic set in the wall of literary narra- tion, and by the same hand : " Is man no more than this ? Consider him well : Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume ! Ha ! here's three of us are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself : unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. — Off, off, you lendings." Of a somewhat different order, but still inimitable in its way, and true to the life, is man's full length, metaphy- sical statue by Pope : " Kiiow then thyself, presume not God to acan, The proper study of mankind i« man. 108 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. Placed on thia isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great ; With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, He hangs between ; in doubt to act, or rest ; In doubt to deem himself -a God or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer ; Bom but to die, and reas'ning but to err ; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, - Whether he thinks too Uttle or too much ; Chaos of thought and passion, all confused ; Still by himself abused or disabused ; Created half to rise, and ha^f to fall ; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all ; Sole judge of truth in endless error hurled, The glory, jest, and riddle of the world." This is human nature epitomised in poetry, if you like. Has Phydias given us anything more splendid ? Has Flaxman bequeathed us anything more true ? These are, of course, ambitious works of art, embracing in one magnificent series or group every conceivable type of man, past, present, and — so far as we are able to judge — to come. But if so disposed, we can particularize. We have statuettes as well as monuments. Here is the statuette of a man by Shakspeare. " What a piece of work is man ! How noble in reason ! he w infinite in faculties ! in form, and moving, how express and admirable ! in action, how like an angel ! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world ! the paragon of animals ! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust ? " If we so choose, we can form a Shakspearian gallery of these statuettes, there is material enough, and of excellent SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 109 quality. What will you have ? The effigy of a lover ? Here it is : "A lean cheek, which you have not ; a blue eye, and sunken ; which j-^ou have not : an unquestionable spirit ; which you have not : a beard neglected ; which you have not : — but I pardon you for that ; for, simply, your having no beard is a younger brother's revenue : — Then your hose should be ungartered, your bonnet unhanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desola- tion." Here is a fortune-teller, a capital figure. Notice the attenuation of the outline, you can count his ribs : " A hungry, lean-faced villain, A mere anatomy, a mountebank, A thread-bare juggler, and a fortune-teller ; A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch, A living dead man ; this pernicious slave. Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer ; And, gazing in my eyes, feeling my pulse. And with no face, as 'twere outfacing me. Cries out, I was possess'd." Now we come to a merry man. Look at the twinkle in hi. eye. It is catching, mirth-[»rovoking, the personi- fication of jollity : " A merrier man. Within the limits of becoming mirth, I never spent an hour's talk withal; His eye begets occasion for his wit ; For every object that the one doth catch. The other turns to a mirth-moving jest ; Which' his fair tongue (conceit's expositor) Delivers in such apt and gracious words, 110 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. That aged ears play truant at his tales, And younger hearings are quite ravished ; So sweet and voluble is his discourse." But see ! here is a cupid, a gem, unique of its kind, copied from the life : ■ "The boy, Than whom no mortal so magnificent ! This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy ; This senior- junior, giant-dwarf, ])an Cupid ; Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms. The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, Liege of all loiterers and malcontents, Dread prince of plackets, king of cod-pieces. Sole imperator, and gn'eat general Of trotting paritors, — 0, my little heart !— " Next to the Cupid stands a villain. Mark the scowl upon his brow — a thorough-bred ruffian, I warrant you : " Hadst not thou been by A fellow by the hand of nature mark'd. Quoted, and signed, to do a deed of shame. This murder had not come into my mind, Hadst thou but shook thy head, or made a pause, When I spake darkly what I purposed ; Or turned an eye of doubt upon my face. And bid me tell my tale in express words ; Deep shame had struck me dumb, made me break off, And those thy fears might have wrought fears in me." A Brawler should be a suitable companion to the Villain, and here he is, with a sneer upon his lip, and a menace in his eye. *' Thou ! why thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more, or a hair less, in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. Thou hast quar- relled with a man for coughing on the street, because he SCULPT0RE IN LANGUAGE. Ill hath awakened thy dog that hath lain asleep in the sun. Didst thou not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter ? With another for tying his new shoes with old ribbon ? And yet thou wilt tutor me from quarrelling ! " Look at the cheeks of this next figure, a Trumpeter. One can almost hear the blast of his instrument : "Now crack thy lungs and split thy brazen pipe ; Blow, villain, till thy sphered bias cheek Out-swell the colic of puff'd Aquilon , Come, stretch thy chest, and let thy eyes spout blood, Thou blow'st for Hector." Here is an exquisite little figure of a beauty : " Oh she doth teach the torches to bum bright ! Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear ; Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear ! So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows, As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows." Now we come to a group, splendidly cut, true to the life, that will stand for the whole class of Braggarts ; " Hold you content : What man ! I know them, yea. And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple ; Scambling, out-facing, fashion-monging boys. That lie, and cog and flout, deprave and slander,, Go anticly, and show outward hideousness ; And speak off half-a-dozen dangerous words. How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst, And this is all." Yet one more ere we leave our Shakspearian Gallery. We began with the statuette of a Man, let us end our list with the effigy of a Fool. What more fitting ? For though 112 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. I 1 many a man may be Life's knave, every man must be- come at last perforce Death's fool, and grin for ever in mockery of life from out the charnel house of corruption. Ha ! ha ! what a joke on life is the skull ! Though'some- tiraes to be sure Dame Nature is too shrewd for the grave and robs the joker of his teeth, whereat artifice and the dentist, true to instinct, step in, to remedy the defect, and so perpetuate the irony of Fate and the " Motley " of the tomb. Well, here is our Fool : " A fool, a f«ol !— I met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool ;— a miserable world ! — As I do live by food, I met a fool ; Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, And railed on Lady Fortune in good terms. In good set terms, — and yet a motley fool. Good morrow, fool, quoth I : No, Sir, quoth he. Call me not fool, till heaven hath sent me fortune : And then he drew a dial from his poke ; And looking on it with lack-lustre eye. Says very wisely, It in ten o'clock : Thus may we see, quoth he, how the world imgs ; *Tis but an hour ago since it icas nine ; And after an hour more, 'twill be eleven ; And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe. And then from hour to hour we rot and rot, And thereby hangs a tale. When I did hear The motley fool thus moral on the time. My lungs began to crow like chanticleer. That fools should be so deep contemplative ; And I did laugh, sans intermission, An hour by his dial. — O noble fool ! A worthy fool ! motley's the only wear." All these figurettes of humanity are inimitable after their kind. Again, I say, I know not how the average mind receives these messages, for myself, they are insepa- SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 113 rable from objective forms, and herein lies the beauty of a literary masterpiece, it is not merely so much descrip- tion or analysis, it is sugi^estive. It is a link joining the subjective and the ideal to the tangible and the real. These vignettes of poesy are veritable graven images as well as letter-press ; — now in a [museum, now in an art studio, now on the head of a peripatetic Italian, cry- ing his snowy wares before the area railings, according to the humour of the moment. Much of course must depend upon individual imagination and individual taste, likes or dislikes. I have heard of a young lady who fainted at the odour of a rose. T have known men blind to colours. Others who hated music. Some who de- spised pictures. One, at least, who has denounced the female form as the ugliest created thing so far as out- line goes. Que voulez-vous. This is part of the wisdom of nature's plan. In diversity is the only possible pana- cea for ennui. But for those who can see with the eyes of tr.ansmutation, this faculty is, indeed, the philo- sopher's stone. It transmutes all to gold. It hears an elegy in the insect's hum. Erects a stanza into a cathe- dral. A line of Ruskin becomes a veritable picture. A quotation from Shakspeare, a statue. A clod of earth is transformed into a garden of Eden. This is life ; this is enjoyment. There is nothing else worth living for. It is the only present heaven. Fancies like these, are the sun, moon, and stars of existence. Quench them, and the im- penetrable darkness of the night of despair enfolds all in its bat-like wings. Vampire-like, it sucks the life-blood 114 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. from the heart of a slumbering humanity. Therefore it is that imagination is good, and romance is good ; for with- out imagination creeds would perish, and without ro- mance, honour would decay, nay life itself would become a Sahara of reality too torrid to support its own outgrowth. It would produce but to destroy. A fairy tale is the most beautiful idyl to the child-mind, as love is the most beau- tiful idyl to the youth, as honour is to the mature, as rest is to the aged. Yes, the grave itself is a romance, and a beautiful one withal ; a chrysalis-sheath, an earth-shell, crowned with flowers, watered with tears, and watched over by gentle hearts, from which the spirit, butterfly- winged has broken forth, to sip the dews of heaven. What matter if it be a figment ! We believe it none the less. If it make us happy while we live, — well. Will the insentient dead mourn the fiction if the earth-dream never be realized. No, it is the living that are haunted by fears and vague unrest and unsatisfied longings. The dead sleep well, and their last peaceful smile is the token of their satisfaction, that they have indeed entered into their rest. From Shakspeare I shall again quote, for he is the Phidias of the pen ; yet not merely the true copyist of nature, or the matchless idealist, but something of the sensualist as well. He is both Phidias and Praxitiles. He can mould a hero or a history. He can carve a nude and voluptuously languishing conceit or a Bacchanalian revel. As the purely abstract is, how- ever, to be our present theme in connection with verbal SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 115 sculpture, he is for the nonce rather Phidias than Praxi- tiles. We have the purely abstract embodied, as I have before remarked, in various ways ; for instance, Justice, a figure blindfold, with sword and scales ; War, a figure with drawn sword ; Peace, a female with a child in her arms ; Plenty, the cornucopia ; Music, the lyre ; Poetry, Callio[)e, &c., &c. In Shakspeare we find a gallery of such conceits carved with inimitable skill, each perfect of its kind. Some posing in utter nudity of abandonment, others clad in the flowing robes of a chaste and becoming seemliness. Here the bold, unabashed effrontery of passionate desire flashing from the verse ; there, the modest, down-cast mien of the novice, shyly shadowed forth in words. One altogether good and lovely, as we • know intutively, from its aspect ; the second comely to the eye, but with a nameless something in the air which proclaims a heart at variance with the fascinating exterior ; a third, undisguised, standing forth in all its undraped ugliness of deformity and nakedness of sin. As Life is the first desideratum to the individual, let us commence our second gallery — of the abstract — with the symbolization of Life. Here is the fac-simile, a word- group in which the same idea is typified by diverse objects, 3^et each pointing the same moral : " To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last eyllable of recorded time ; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle ! Life's but a walking shadow ; a poor player, I Hi I 116 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. That Rtnita and frets his hour upon the stage. And then is heard no more ; it in a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. -" What is of the next importance in the category of the abstract ? Love, perhaps. Here it is in the guise of a female : " She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek ; she pined in thought ; And, with a green and yellow i.ielancholy. She sat like patience on a monument, Smiling at grief." Or here it is as a boy : " Things baHe and vile, holding no quantity. Love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind ; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind ; Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste ; Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste ; And therefore is love said to be a child. Because in choice he is so oft beguiled. As waggish boys in game themselves forswear. So the boy Love is perjured everywhere. — " Yet again we have it as a flower : ' ' The imperial vot'ress passed on In maiden-meditation, fancy-free, Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell ; It fell upon a little western flower, Before milk-white ; now purple with love's wound, And maidens call it love-in-idleness." So on ad infinitum. — As a sequel to love, marriage, I opine, deserves a prominent place on our consoles, and shall have it : SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 117 " Marriage in a matter of mons worth Than to be dealt in by attorneyship. • • # • « « For what is wedlock forced, but a holl, An age of discord and continual strife ? Whereas the contrary briugeth forth bliss, And is a pattern of celestial peace." With love and marriage are surely connected such conceptions as chastity, reputation, cheerfulness. Here are their word-types moulded in finest phrase. Chastity. A maiden's figure : " Mine honour's such a ring ; My chastity's the jewel of our house, Bequeathed down from many ancestors ; Which were the greatest obliquy i' the world In me to lose." Reputation shall be represented by two superb figures, than which nothing can be finer. First : " The purest treasure mortal times afford. Is — spotless reputation ; that away, Men are but gilded loam, or painted clay." Second: " Good name, in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls ; Who steals my purse, steals trash ; 'tis something, nothing ; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands ; But he, that filches from me my good name, Kobs me of that which not enriches him. And makes me poor indeed." Last of this group, Cheerfulness, a humorous con ception : " Let me play the fool ; With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come ; ■■Hi 118 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. And let my liver rather heat with wine, Than my heart cool with mortifying groana. Why should a man, whoae blood is warm within, Sit like his grandsire, cut in alabaster ? Sleep when he wakes ? and creep into the jaundice By being peevish ? " The Virtues and the Vices have ever been favourite subjects with the sculptor and the modeller. The gener- alization of the former has been well symbolized in the three graces : Faith, Hope and Charity, a beautiful conceit, more than once exquisitely rendered. As for the embodiment of incarnate vice, the original is so hydra- headed that it would be really hard to find an adequate universal type. The fittest museum for the apotheosis of the order, however, would not unlikely be the " Chamber of Horrors " at Madame Tussaud's." We have such a chamber in Shakspeare and shall come to it presently ; but in the meanwhile let us consider a few casts of a dif- ferent description. Here are Virtue and Vice contrasted, two pieces of two figures each, lilliputian groups so far as brevity is concerned, but pregnant with epigrammatic genius : ♦ "Noble madam, Men's evil manners live in brass ; their virtues We write in water." " The evil that men do lives after them ; The good is oft interred vidth their bones." Next in order come the Virtues, singly, each excellently modelled. — First a statuette co Honour; " What is it that you would impart to me ? If it be aught toward the general good, Set honour in one eye, and death i' the other, SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 119 And I will look on both indifferently ; For, let the gods so speed me, as I love The name of hom)ur more than I fear death." Then we have a husband's love tipified : " You are my true and honourable wife, As dear to me as are the ruddy drops That visit my sad heart." The next is a more ambitious work, " a terminal " set up to invoke the deity of Friendship, while itself embody- ing the idea : " I am no orator, as Brutus is ; But, as you know me all, a plain, blunt man. That love my friend ; and that they know full well, That gave me public leave to speak of him. For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth. Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, To stir men's blood ; I only speak right ou ; I tell you that which you yourselves do know ; Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths. And bid them speak for me ; but were I Brutus, And 'Brutus Antony, there were an Antony Would ruffle up your spirits, and put a tongue In every wound of Caesar, that should move The stones of Home to rise and mutiny." Eloquenfce is represented as a female, persuasive by reason of both beauty and loyic : 'Mn her youth There is a prone and speechless dialect, Such as moves men ; beside, she hath prosperous art When she will play with reason and discourse, And well she can persuade." One of the chefa-d'cauvres of word-sculpture, is our next figure, that to Mercy : The quality of mercy is not strain'd ; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, I ! I' mi I 120 ' THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. Upon the place beneath ; it is twice bless'd ; It blesdeth him that gives, and him that takes ; 'Tis mightiest in the mightiest ; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown ; His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings ; But mercy is above the scepter'd sway, It is enthroned in the hearts of kings ; It is an attribute to God himself ; And earthly power doth then show likest God's, When mercy seasons justice." Content is symbolised by a beautiful fragment — would there were more of it : "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue, Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess." Lowly content is thus epitomised : " 'Tis better to be lowly bom. And range with humble livers in content, Than to be perk'd up in a glistening grief, And wear a golden sorrow." And now for the Chamber of Horrors. Shakspeare is a master at portraying vice in all its naked hideousness. He never hesitates at a strong word and his trenchant graver pares away every atom of mere sentiment, that might otherwise interfere with a just rendition. He leaves nothing to the imagination, all is expi-essed, seen, and recoiled from. What a memorial is this to Hypocrisy : " Mark you this, Basaanio The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 121 An evil soul, produciDg holy witness, Is like a villain with a smiling cheek ; A goodly apple rotten at the heart ; Oh, what a goodly outside falsehood hath !*' And this to jealousy — It is a verbal statuette of Othello. Is there anything more pathetic in language. Words have exhausted themselves in this eflfort. Every line is a suspicion, a plaint, a heart sob, a Niobe of woe, weeping for the slaughtered offspring of her love: " Look, where he comes ! Not poppy, not mandragora. Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou ow'dst yesterday." 0th. " Ha ! Ha ! false to me ? To me? I had been happy, if the general camp. Pioneers and all had tasted her sweet body. So I had nothing known. Oh, now, for ever, Farewell the tranquil mind ! farewell content ! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars. That make ambition virtue ! Oh, farewell ! Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife. The royal banner ; and all quality. Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war. And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats The immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit, Farewell ! Othello's occupation's gone !" Here is the same figure in a slightly different guise, posing as wounded pride : ** Had it pleas'd Heaven To try me with affliction ; had he rain'd All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head ; Steep'd me in poverty to the very lips ; Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes ; ir 122 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. I should have found in some part of my soul A drop of patience ; but (alas !) to make me A fixed figure, for the hand of scorn To point hia alow unmoviug finger at,— Oh! Oh! Yet could I bear that too ; well, very well ; But there, where I have garner'd up my heart ; Where either I must live, or bear no life ; The fountain from the which my current runs, Or elae dries up ; to be discarded thence ! Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads To knot and gender in ! — Turn thy complexion there ! Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubim ; Ay, there look grim as hell !" Here he is again as the type of unreasonable and jealous accusation : Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, Made to write whore upon ? What committed ! Committed ! — O thou public commoner ! I should make very forges of my cheeks. That would to cinders bum up modesty. Did I but speak thy deeds. — What committed ! Heaven stops the nose at it, and the moon winks ; The bawdy wind that kisses all it meets, Is hush'd within the hollow mine of earth, And will not hear it. What committed ! — Impudent strumpet !" Yet again — the same gloomy form, now muffled in the cloak of a dread irresolution : "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul, Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars! It is the cause, — Yet I'll not shed her blood, Xor Bcar that whiter skin of hers than snow. And smooth as monumental alabaster, Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men. Put out the light, and then put out the light ; If I quench thee tbou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore, SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 123 in the Should I repent me ;— But once put out thine, Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd thy rose, I cannot give it vital g^'owth again, It needs must wither : — I'll smell it on the tree. — O balmy breath, that doth almost persuade Justice to break her sword ! —one more, one more, — Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee. And love thee after.— One more, and this the last ; So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep, But they are cruel tears ; this sorrow's heavenly ; It strikes where it doth love." For the last time this unhappy model proclaims itself as the personification of Remorse : " Now, how dost thou look now? O ill-starr'd wench ! Pale as thy smock ! when we shall meet at compt. This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl ? Even like thy chastity.- - O cursed, cursed slave ! — Whip me, ye devils, From the possession of this heavenly sight ! Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur ! Wash me in steep-down gulfs'of liiiuid fire ! — O Desdemona ! Desdemona ! dead ? Dead ? Oh ! Oh ! Oh !" Language can go no further. All this is the acme of pathos, of anguish, and of sin. It is more startling than the grim form of Robespierre in his bath, with the cruel blade in his side ; more repellent than the caged criminal, rat-haunted and torn, behind the iron meshes of his prison bars ; more pathetic than the unuttered monody of the axe and the gibbet, that makes that dismal chamber in Baker Street reek with an atmosphere of woe, and chases the novice, terror-striken, from its unhallowed threshold. mmm 124 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. !f ' But one more figure in this catalogue of frailties, and that but one line, ere we close the list of the personified abstract. It is the effigy of Calumny." " Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny." We have yet to consider another phase of this branch of the subject, which may with propriety be denominated verbal sculpture. Indeed, I do not see how it is to be otherwise classified. It is so utterly and undisguisedly subjective, that it would be almost impossible in sculpture itself to give the idea a tangible form, unless, indeed, we may call a shadow tangible, and were to represent it as the shadow cast by the statue on the floor or wall of the gallery. I allude to the Biography of Style, or perhaps I should term it Criticism of Style, by which in a few happy words are hit oft' the leading excellencies, defects and mannerisms of the authors considered, with here and there interposed a personal trait or habit, to render more life-like the portraiture. Well, the metaphor of the shadow may not be such a bad (one after all, for what is one's style but the reflection of the soul, or the temperament cast outwards by the light of the inner reason, or taste, or humour. The matter is the true sub- stance, the fashion in which it is presented, whether heavy or light, enduring or evanescent, repellent or fasci- nating, must in a large measure depend upon the hulk of the question or matter discussed, and the strength of the light brought to bear upon it. Nor yet is the metaphor exhausted, for,as sometimes the shadow remains for a space, SCULPTURE IN LANQUAQE. 125 after the legitimate source has passed out of sight, so will a happily conceived paragraph, or stanza, or line, linger in one's memory, haunting it, as it were, long after the mere matter-of-fact thought, which gave rise to the felicitous shade, has released its hold on the perceptive faculties. Who does not know Carlyle, with his rugged diction hanging, so to speak, in tatters round the sturdy limbs of his giant thoughts — patchwork of dissertation rent by his own portentous growlings ? It is philosophy done up in faggots; hero worship, bristling with fretful quills ; and family-glorification and personal abuse, posing as verbal scare-crows to intimidate the diarists of the future. I love Carlyle. He is one of my heroes. T admire him and his Teutonic voice, shouting, and roaring, and raving, and rumbling in the Valhalla of Nineteenth Century Literature ; but I can see his faults. The style is like the man, no humbug about either ; yet both occasionally howling under the intermittent spasms of dyspeptic colic. What could be happier than this little effigy of semi-humorous and not altogether untruthful satire by Professor Ross : " His Sartor Resartus is a colossal half-German jumble of rugged common sense, sporadically uncommon nonsense, close epigram and wayward irrelevancy, and an oscilla- tion between old gaberlunzie rags and the transcendent- alism of Fichte." Ross is not altogether fair in his treatment of Carlyle ; but the above extract merits consideration, if only out of respect for the " gaberlunzie rags," whatever they may be. na 126 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. The humorous and the sardonic suit well this style of word-sculpture. Epigram, satire, down-right abuse, if hearty and conscientious, lends interest to the modelling. What can be more exquisite to the man with a sense of humour, than the following "casts" of the poet Churchill's style by Hogarth, Johnson and Murphy respectively : " Wilke's toad-echo." " He (Johnson) talked very contemptuously of Churchil I's poetry, observing, " That it had a temporary currency, only from its audacity of abuse, and being filled with living names, and that it would sink into oblivion. * * * * * * To be sure he is a tree that cannot pro- duce good fruit ; he only bears crabs. But, sir, a tree that produces a great many crabs is better than a tree which produces only a few." " No more he'll sit in foremost row before the astonished pit ; in brawn Old Mixon's rival as in wit ; and grin dis- like, and kiss the spike ; and giggle and wriggle ; and fiddle and diddle ; and fiddle-faddle, and diddle-daddle." Surely Punchinello himself must have posed as the model of the above works of art. Sometimes we call the simious order of animated nature to aid in the personification of style, as instance Hervey's conception of Lyly's Euphues : "Nash the Ape of Greene, Greene the Ape of Euphues, Euphues the Ape of Ennui e." Sometimes the idea to be conveyed may be transmitted through a double medium : man and beast. Here are Spencer and Greene on Shakspeare : SCULPTURE IN LANGUAGE. 127 " The man whom nature self hacl niade To mock herself and Truth to imitate." " An upstart crow beautified with our feathers." Here is the estimate of Shakspearian genius embodied in prose and verse by ^^ rious hands, by Gray : "To him the mighty mother did imveil Her awful face." by Dryden : " But Shakspeare's magic could not copy'd be, Within that circle none durst walk but he." and by Coleridge : " In Shakspeare one sentence begets the next naturally ; the meaning is all inwoven. He goes on kindling like a meteor through the dark atmosphere ; yet when the crea- tion in its outline is once perfect, then he seems to rest from his labour and smile upon his work and tell himself that it is very good. You see many scenes and parts of scenes which are simply Shakspeare's disporting himself in joyous triumph and vigorous fun after a great achieve- ment of his highest genius." Milton's style is admirably epitomised in a few terse words by Johnson ; where his Paradise Lost and Sonnets are contrasted : " Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a Colos- sus from a rock, but could not carve lieads upon cherry- stones." The madame addressed being Hannah More. Not infrequently is the adventurer impressed into the service to stand as sponsor for an objectionable style : as when Byron says of Leigh Hunt : 128 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. " lie is an honest charlatan who has persuaded himself into a belief of his own impostures and talks Punch in pure simplicity of heart He is a good man and a good father A great coxcomb and a very vulgar person in everything about him." But others hold different sentiments, going to botany and the hedges for their inspirations, as does A. Smith when writing on the same subject : " Hunt, whose every sentence is flavoured with the hawthorn and the primrose." Sometim<^s a statue itself is made the lay figure : as in the following magnificent analysis of her sister Emily's " Wuthering Heights," by no less an artist than the illus- trious author of Jane Eyre : " ' Wuthering Heights ' was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor ; gazing thereon he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister ; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur, power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his medita- tions. With time and labour the crag took human shape ; and there it stands, colossal, dark, and frowning, half- statue, half-rock ; in the former sense terrible and goblin- like — in the latter almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow gray, and moorland moss clothes it ; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faith- fully close to the giant's foot." An old classic that has long mouldered in his grave SCULI»TITRK IN LANGUAOR. 129 and modern science, two most unlikely co-workers, may be engaged to personate tlio author's fancy in the art studio of speech — nay, one may even imperceptibly glide into the other, a sort of literary metempsychosis of deline- ation, long drawn, beginning with feet of classic clay and ending in atmospheric scintillations of polar light. Such is Wainright's memorial to Thomas Hood : " Young in years, not in power. Our new Ovid ! — only more imaginative ! — painter to the visible eye — and the inward ; commixture of what the superficial deem in- congruous elements, instructive living proof how close lie the founts of laughter and tears ! Thou fermenting brain, oppressed as yet by its own riches ! Though melancholy would seem to have touched thy heart with her painful salutary hand, yet is thy fancy mercurial, undepressed, and sparkles and crackles more from the contact — as the northern lights when they near the frozen pole." Sometimes the " study " is commenced in the studio or the library and ends in a bath-tub, or the model, first seated in an easy chair armed with " gray goose quill," and MS. is finally relegated to the exterior of a hair- dresser's, where he is expected to shoulder the barber's pole, and exhibit himself in his shirt. In such fashion has Sydney Smith conceived his conceit of Bentham : " Mr. Bentham is long ; Mr. Bentham is occasionally involved and obscure ; Mr. Bentham invents new and alarming expressions ; Mr. Bentham loves division and subdivision — and he loves method itself more than its consequences. Those only, therefore, who know his 130 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. originality, hia knowledge, his vigour, his boldness, will recur to the work themselves. The great mass of readers will not purchase improvement at so dear a rate, but will choose rather to become ac(juainted with Mr. Bentham through the medium of reviews — after that eminent phi- losopher has been washed, trimmed, shaved,and forced into clean linen." Compare this next fragment on the same worthy by Hazlitt with the general tone and " gaberlunzie rags " of Ross' critique on Carlyle : " His (Bentham's) works have been translated into French — they ought to be translated into English He was a kin also sport mong far as ferent fected ent or d the or and lalities Itured nonize lection g, ^19 sober sually ellow. in a le sex, lovely an of sation always titude coming and artistic, never vulgar or ostentatious — seems to be inclining to sombre unobtrusive shades in habit, leaving the brighter tints to nature and her denizens. Still tlie colour sense is developed in civilized man, and only with a highly developed colour sense is possible the artist, that is, the artist on canvas, and the artist in poetry and prose of a certain type. Architecture and heroic verse would be possible without colour. Statuary and critical analysis of character and style are sometimes better without colour. But an autumn day, an idyl, or a romance could hardly exist as such without the attribute of colour. Without the glory of the setting sun, the autumn day would fade into the ashy twilight of a monochrome. Without the purple and yellow efflorescence of the mea- dows, the hawthorn and dog-rose of the hedges, the clustered glories of trellis and porch, the idyl would be but a pale-winged moth, fluttering ghost-like in the dusk over the white blossoms of fancy. Without plumes and crowns and shimmering steel, and gay dresses, and bright land- scapes, the romance would subside into an elegy, its death-knell would be rung in the sad neutral tint of its own narration. Yet does the painter require other aids than colour to the full development of his purpose. In common with the architect and the sculptor he desires form to lend reality to his depictions. For the same purpose he requires texture. This latter adjunct is, of course, an insepar- able concomitant of his fellow-craftsmen's art, with this difference, however; that whereas the architect 144 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. and the sculptor deal with the material itself, and elaborate from it, their conceptions, both the brush- artist and the word-artist have to imitate the material which they imdertake to represent; that is to say, their creations must not onlv be formed of a certain material, but the material it or rather its appearance, has to be called into being by the same hand — this is what I mean by texture. A church on canvas has not merely to be constructed aright, with all its lines sym- metrical, dimensions proportioned, and colour natural, let us say stone-gray, it must be made to look like stone, to have that appearance of stability, solidness, texture, inseparable from erections of the kind. A velvet dress must not only be coloured purple, or claret, or crimson, the pile upon its surface mr^t be raised by the cunning hand, so that it may not b( ^taken for a meaner fabric. But above all, and here the mtist — be it with brush or pen — stands alone; does he require light, shade, and atmo- sphere to imitate exactly the phases of nature in all her moods, and render palpable to the eye of the intelli- gence by reproduction and imitation what has already been conveyed to the senses at first hand, through the appeal of nature herself. Form and texture, light and shade, colour and atmos- phere, are, then, some of the desiderata of the word artist ; that is, the one who paints rath^. u.ian builds, or carves, or simply sings in language. Of course, the more subtly are these elements blended in the pictures, the more artistic will be the effect, the more enjoyable the work to PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 145 the connoisseur. Now to one, now to another, must be given the greater prominence ; or, if the work be of a certain order, each must contribute its quota to tlie general etft'ct. In a higlily finished, sunny landscape, for instance, colour and atmosphere are the predominant elements. In a bieaking storm, light and shade. In architectural designs, form and colour. In describing the bloom on a peach, or the dress of a female, colour and texture. In certain tyj>es of genre painting, an adroit admixture of all is indispensable to true artistic effect. Of course, it is in "association that much of the charm of word-painting centres, and the keener the i)erception, and the more highly cultivated the taste, the greater tlie ap[)reciation. A child looking at a picture is pleased, simply because he recognises by a sort of intuition certain objective repro- ductions, with the originals of which he is already acquainted. This is association of ideas. For the same -eason Le is entertained by the recital of an adventure or the relation'of an incident ; for narrative at once conjures up a mental picture of the situation, which will be expressed in terms of his experience of life, supplemented by fancy where experience fails. I doubt very much if the child, in either case, can analyse the source of his pleasure, or state in logical sequence, the causes which give rise to his emotions. But the trained and accom- plished artist sees farther than the child, and therefore enjoys more thoroughly the perfection of the art. He will see beauties that entirely escape the child's gaze. He will detect delicacies of tint and differences of out- ■■■■ 146 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. line, the consideration of which constitute distinct en- joyment in themselves. In short, his associations will be multiplied, will be abstract as well as concrete. They will be the child's raised to the 100th power. The objective tending m subjective, the subjective to trans- cendental, the transcendental to emotions and prompt- ings and longings which defy analysis and lead to a maze-land of conjecture and myth. So is it ever in literature and art. The untrained mind may be pleased with a work as a whole without exactly knowing why. It is your true artist alone, who goes into ecstacies 'over the landscapes of Ruskin and Turner, while able to give a reason for the faith that is in him. How many indi- viduals among the everyday crowd know why nature is so beautiful ? How many of the so-called " educated classes " can give definite reasons for preferring t.he old masters to the new, the classic school to the modern ? How many can explain the secret of the beauty contained in these exquisite lines : " The slender acacia would not shake One long milk-bloom on the tree?" How many see more than ordinary beauty in the lines ? So on ad infinitum. It is all very well to talk of beauty, but what is beauty ? I seriously doubt if there be any outside of the individual. The world is full of colour, you say. True ! but of what avail is it to the blind ? The woods resound with music. Do the deaf hear it ? The world, we say, exists. Does it, — to me, if I be dead or had never lived ? The first principle of being is in self, PAINTINQ IN lANGUAG^. 147 personal sensation ; the highest in personal effort. The first principle of beauty is in personal perception ; the highest in personal culture. I go so far as t-o say that with even sensation and perception there can be no beauty of a certain type without culture ; for instance, literary beauty of the highest order. The grandest effort in poetry may fall on deaf ears, simplv because the eai*s have not been attuned to the music. There may be exceptions, certainly ; but the exceptions prove the rule. What must be the inevitable conclusion arrived at from a knowledge of these facts ? That there may be, nay, are, many to whom the terms form and texture, light and shade, colour and atmosphere as applied to literature are meaningless words — and why ? Not because these elements are not abun- dant in literary composition, but because the faculties have not been trained to receive or recognize the impres- sions. To such a one ■» "A primrose by the river's brink A yellow primrose is to him, And it is nothing more." No, nor so much, for a literary primrose would not even be yellow. Habit is second nature ; therefore, if we learn the habit of seeing the beauties of nature in prose and poetry, we shall double nature, and thereby double the pleasures of life, for appreciation constitutes pleasure. Without ap- preciation life must be pain or a blank. The cottager sitting at his door in the summer evening, placidly smok- ing his pipe and watching the blue wreaths curl lound Wr sasa I ! 148 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. his head ere vanishing into the upper air, doubtless derives a sense of pleasure from the prospect before and around him, especially if it be an agreeable one. There is a sense of mellowness in the atmosphere at once seductive and comforting ; a softgreen exuberance of leaf and meadow which is soothing to the eye ; a pleasant sound, not dis- tinct, but suggestive in the air ; a quiet langour over everything that is felt and appreciated by the child of nature himself. In time he wearies. The fire dies out in the bowl. The last cloud is puffed from between his lips. Drowsiness approaches. The mingled sounds of the ebbing day grow fainter, till finally, the rustic, weary too with his twelve hours labour, retires to take his needed rest. The man of letters likewise enjoys the evening spell of leaf and sound and langour, and, let us not be hard upon him if he, too, finds a temjjorary pleasure in offering up burnt sacrifice to the deities of peace and reflection. But after the gloaming falls and the shadows have swallowed up the light, when he also retires to his sanctum ; the study, or the library, he is in possession of a talisman the clown knows nothing of. From his well furnished shelves he can take town a second summer, or if it please him, spring, or autumn, or winter, and wander once more among fields of fragrant clover, or stand by lisping brooks, 'or gather wealth of bloom, or skim over Siberian snows till midnight, or till his drooping eyelids shut out the second light of day and warn to slumber and to dreams. The fountains and the violets and the fragrance and the music go out at 9 o'clock", or earlier, with the wearied PAINTING IN LANOITAGE. 149 hind ; but to tlie student they remain in glov/ing words till all glowing hours, as his eyes, unwearied, peruse idyls like this : " O mother Ida. many fuuntain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die, For BOW the noon-day quiet holds the hill ; The grasshopper is silent in the grass : The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, and the cicala sleeps ; The p'lrjle flowers droop : the golden bee Is lily-cradled : I alone awake. My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love, My heart is breaking and my eyes are dim, And I am all aweary of my life. Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die. It was the deep midnoon ; one silvery oloud Had lost his way between the piny sides Of this long glen. Then to the bower they came, Naked they came to that smooth-swarded bower, And at their feet the crocus brake like fire, Violet, amaracus, and asphodel, Lotus and lilies : and a >\ind arose. And overhead the wandering ivy and vine. This way and that, in many a wild festoon Ran riot, garlanding the gnarled boughs With bunch and berry and flower thro' and thro'. " O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida, Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die. Idalian Aphrodite beautiful, Fresh as the foam, new-bathed in Faphian wells. With rosy slender fingers backward drew From her warm brows and bosom her deep hair Ambrosial, golden round her lucid throat And shoulder ; from the violets her light foot Shone rosy white, and o'er her rounded form Between the shadows of the vine bunches Floated the glowing sunlights, as she moved. ■nn mimm im ' 1 1 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. ' * O mother, hear me yet before I die. They came, they cut away my tallest pines, My tall, dark pines, that plumed the craggy ledge High over the blue gorge, and all between The snowy peak and snow-white cataract Foster'd the callow eaglet — from beneath Whose thick mysterious brows in the dark mom The panther's roar came muffled, while I sat Low in the valley. Never, never more Shall lone ^none see the morning mist Sweep thro' them ; n^ver see them overlaid With narrow moon-lit slips of silver cloud, Between the loud stream and the trembling stars." Are not these exquisite substitutes for scenes that have but just waned with the daylight ? Can any read these appreciatively and misunderstand what fragrance and colour and light and music in literature mean ? Is it not a second life, the privilege to peruse, to 'Jinderstand and to love another world like this — another world with - out its sin, whose pleasures are unalloyed, and whose only grave is the dreamland of slumber from which in ere seems an eternal waking ? Now that the thought strikes me, I would ask, what joy has even the mathematician equivalent to this ? His second life, if he have a second life, is a sphere within a sphere. Either he pursues through trackless space the evanescent shadow of a constantly retreating formula, or pent within a poly- gon, his existence is a perpetual see-saw upon right lines, or a game at hide and seek in angles. Can he see the emerald of the meadow hi. x-\-y, or hear the murmur of the "multitudinous sea incarnadine" in the cosine of an angle ?" Can he pluck violets in a parallelogram, or blow the dew-drops from the thistle -spine, in the intricacies of PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 151 an equation ? What can he see outside of his four walls — for space to him must be walls ; walls and a dome, papered and ceiled with a sphere-dotted firmament, and lit by the globular chandeliers of two unapproachable lights ? It is grand, it is noble, it is intellectual if you like, but there trills not the voice of the bird in the mes- sage, there blooms not the flower in the garden of the mind. The ruby, the azure, the perfume and the cloud- land are shut out by l)onndaries, and the only refrain is the reiterated thunder of an eternal No, making answer to the plaintive query, Have I solved the solvable ! Have I attained the finis of the quest ? Therefore would I teach the little child, the love of all that is beautiful in nature and all that is beautiful in the reflection of nature, first, in the pages of this fair earth, and next in the pages of our fair language and literature, so that indeed his life may be dual in its best sense. That when the light of each successive day is quenched, he may see with other eyes, beyond the evening bars, into the azure-land of another morrow, cloud-flecked yet sunlit, and decked with all the beautiful things that make life itself beautiful, and an earthly paradise possible. I suppose all close students of literature, that is, they who read for reading's sake, have favourite passages which serve to illustrate some peculiar turn or bent of mind. For myself, as I confess to a strong love of nature, I may say, that next to nature, I admire a good description of the natural, either with pencil or pen. Those pictures or picture-passages which best typify the natural ; that is, 152 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. li I I li- which are replete with form, colour, harmonie.s, contrasts of light and shade, etc., possess a rare fascination for me. Among literary excerpts typical of this reproduction process, I have one which I consider a master piece of diction, as it embodies in itself all the desiderata of the word-artist lately enumerated. I allude to that magnifi- cent stanza in the first canto of the Lady of the Lake, which describes sunset in the Trosachs. The analytical reader will notice the fine contrasts of light and shade therein depicted. How the opening lines, which are full of light, colour, and atmosphere, the accompaniments of the peaks and upper air, are succeeded by verses replete with the gloom of the valleys and the darkness of the glens ; while out of the darkness into the light are reared the fantastic forms of the mountain masses, whose texture is so effectively rendered, that they seem to be literally written in granite. I have italicised those words and lines especially suggestive of form and texture, as there is a natural affinity between these elements, and they have already been mentioned in conjunction : " The western waves of ebbing day Foiled o'er the glen their level way ; Each purple peak each flinty spire. Was bathed in floods of living fire. But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravines below. Where twined the path in shadoio hid, Round many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly frova the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle ; Bound many an insulated mast The native bulwarks of the pass Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piUd on Shinar's plain. PAINTING IN LANOUAQB. 153 brasts )r me. iction ece of )f the ignifi- Lake, lytical shade re full ents of replete of the ; reared texture iterally |vds and ,s there id they The rocky summitt, split and rent. Formed turret, dome, or battlement, Or seemed fantastically set With cupola or minaret. Wild crests aapayod ever decked. Or mosque of Eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair ; For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o'er the unfathomable glade, All twinkling with the dew drop's sheen, The brier-rose fell in streamers green, And creeping shrubs, of thousand dyes, Waved in the west wind's summer sighs." This is as fine a piece of word-painting, with one ex- ception — which we shall come to by-and-bye — as is to be found in Scott, and well merits careful perusal and close analytic study. Scott is a master of colour, but he is a master of much besides, not the least is his power to capti- vate the eye while holding the ear. As a fine instance of form, form with a suggestion of texture, which also presents contrast of light and shade, the following from E. A. Poe's " Descent into the Mael- strom " deserves a place in our gallery. I think the dark swirl of the dreadful gulf and its funnel shape are admir- ably portrayed : " Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration with which I gazed about me. The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down upon the interior surface of a funnel, vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewil- dering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the J 154 THE ART GALLERY OP ENGLISH. gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss." Coleridge, too, has given us a fine idea of form in his " Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni." Here again I italicise the lines or words which convey the notion. The last figure, " the billows stiffen," is very grand, and suggestive of a world of form-thought : " And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely clad ! Who call'd you forth from night and utter death, . From dark and icy caverns call'd you forth, Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks. For ever shatter'd, and the same for ever ? Who gave you your invulnerable life, Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy, Unceasing tbimder and eternal foam ? And who commanded— and the silence came, Here let the billows stiffen, and have rest ? Mountains and delineations of mountain scenery are, of course, inseparable from the idea of form; that is elevated, lofty, majestic form. A level landscape, or a reach of sea, or a description of either tends to produce a flat, monotonous effect, though pleasing in other lines. With the mountain is connected nobility of being, of thought, of artistic expression; and, moreover, diversity of colour, and exquisite contrast of light and shade. I have two pictures in my mind's eye of mountain scenery, which I shall never forget, so deeply are they impressed on the retina of memory, Either might have furnished data for PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 155 a poet's masterpiece. One is of the Western Ghauts, the mountain chain lying between Bombay and the great inner plateau of Hindostan; the other, that vast range of upland giants skirting the table-land of Thibet, the Hima- layas, which stretch for hundreds of miles along the north-eastern frontiers of the peninsula. Never shall I forget one memorable journey over the Ghauts, made in the spring of 1871. How stupendous the heights seemed after being accustomed to the monotonous plain of ocean ! How luxurious the vegetation after being deprived so long of the sight of green leaf and herbage ! We started early one dewy morning by train from the foot of the monster rampart, and commenced the assent, winding up serpent-like in successive replications through a wilderness of tropical verdure and bloom. Up we went, ever up; here startling troops of screaming parrots from their perches on the jungle- skirts, there scaring the jackal from his lair. Up, up, up — the giddy heights towered above us, while below, ever so far, it seemed miles; from the carriage- windows we could just discern another train, tiny, attenu- ate, indistinct, like a string of ants, commencing the same laborious ascent. Up, up, up — backward and forward, round and round, through all that spring morning, we crawled, two massive engines labouring in front, I know not how many break vans in rear. The dew-drops shrank awav from the herbage. The red sun mounted to his mid-day throne. The wild panorama yet lay around in majesty of confusion, an amphitheatre of rock, and leaf, and bloom, precipitous height and far-stretching vale, p 151} THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. mountain peak, and the interminable jungle, below us, around us, above ua, here mingling with the sky, there vanishing into unfathomable depth. Up, up, up — the hawk circled and screamed overhead, a stone detached by the passing wheel near some overhanging brink, plunged down, it seemed forever, into a ravine too measurelessly profound to be plumbed. Fancy followed that never-resting stone for ages, for aeons, for eterni- ties; a pebbly Ixion, falling evermore through torrid space. Still up, up, up, till at length a platform reached, we halted, and here I alighted to stretch my legs and get my first outside glimpse of mountain-jungle sce- nery. I faced the sea, from which a faint air seemed blowing, bringing with it suggestions of home and loved ones, now far away. Behind and yet above still rose the broad mountain barrier. How strange, thought I, as I stood on that little space midway to the clouds, yesterday this was the haunt of the wild beast and the forest bird, to-day, man with indomitable will, scorning the blazing, torrid sun, the fastness and the terror, hews his way to the forbidding summit, and so to the rich plains beyond, even now, as I look down into the depths we have left, man's pigmy train is crawling up the face of the pre- cipitous cliff. What will to-morrow bring forth ? The shrill whistle of the locomotive breaks my reverie. One wistful good-bye look, out over the peak and the plain, the jungle and the ravine, that I might never cross again in the direction of the old home, and then once more the crowded car, the braced heart, the moun- PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 157 tain cliff, with our backs towards home and our faces to the east, once more up, up, up, and so to the promised land beyond. But with the Himalayas is associated more than form: — magnificence of height, immensity of extent, solidity of compactness, blackness of darkness, eternity of snow, sunlight and moonlight and starlight, depth of depth and height of height, threaded with torrent and skirted with verdure, blazing under day's noontide glory, or sleeping under the soft mellow noon of night, dew-gemmed and star-spangled. I recall my bungalow at the edge of a small artificial plateau that has been carved from the hill top, 0,000 feet above the sea level. Before me, across miles of valley which descends hundreds of feet, a rug- ged mountain ridge, beyond, another valley, said to be forty miles across, and then, shooting up 25,000 feet into the cold air of twilight, snow-crowned and cloud-mantled Jawahir, the Jewel. The eye, unimpeded, ranges up and down on snow-capped heights, for hundreds of miles without a break. What forms are there, and hues ? I watch the settinor sun Hush the white snows and kindle O them into flame as the blush deepens on the cheek of a beantiful maiden. Deeper and deeper, and higher and higher, and then fainter and fainter, till the rosy hues die away like the tints on the dolphin's back, and only ashen- gray is left. Cold, sombre, melancholy as the sun goes out, darker and darker grow the shadows, creeping up where the flush has been, like waves of dissolution mantling on the brow of the dying, all below in the i i>!! 158 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. darkest, deepest shadow. One by one, the lights j^leain out on the hill-side, looking like fire-tlies in the gloom. Blacker grow the shadows, still grayer the snows, till a silver edge lights up the loftiest peak. One by one the stars peep out, and then the great face of the full moon peers curiously over the ridge ere she climbs to her place in the zenith. Star by star she mounts, up by the jewelled rungs of her empyrean ladder. The snows throw off their livery of gray and shine like molten silver. A flood of soft radiance creeps down the hill -side lower and lower. But — so far and no farther, — for below the pine belt even that light cannot penetrate. There the darkness becomes by contrast yet blacker and more profound, till at mid- niglit the transformation scene is complete ; black depth of unfathomable darkness, intermediate twilight of moun- tain gloom, sheen of silver snows, and above, the dome of illimitable azure, flecked with light clouds and spangled with galaxy of stars, paying mute homage to the Queen of night. Yes, the lowlands are for the toiler and the craftsman ; but the highlands are for the artist and the poet. At the mountain foot may slumber the bondman and the despot; but the snow-crowned peak is face to face with heaven, the heritage of the free. On the mountain, too, can be studied in all its perfec- tion, that great and. inrJ w ,>ensable aid to artistic expression, " tex - " ^o > easy to outline an ob- ject, say a youii girl's jad aud neck, to apply the appropriate colours of ^ londe or brunette, and so to im- part a semblance of the real, but who, af^'^r all, can equal PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 159 )ei'fec- artistic an ob- iy the to im- equal the reality ? Who can copy the exquisite graining of the delicate cheek, the soft mottlings of youth and health, the exquisite blending of the rose and snow ? Who can pencil the soft hairs just shadowing the white neck, from whose faint suggestiveness of wealth, the auburn masses spring in their full perfection of sun-glinted exuberance ? The master of texture, alone, can approach the reality. The crude amateur can never deceive even the eye of inexperience. So with the mountain side and mountain crest. There is more than gloom in the shadow, there is more than light upon the summit. The effect is com- paratively easy to produce, but behind the effect lies the cause. The fringed web ol the leafage or the stain of the lichen, the flaked crispness of the snow or the sunlit atoms of the vapour, clustering like nebulae of sky-bloom against the tender background of suffused azure, here rising in cirrus-phalanx to the topmost height, there transmuted by the touch of the fairy beam into a many-hued iris, translucent-winged, playing at hide and seek with the spi'ay. And as on canvas, so in literature ; all must be, if not represented, at least suggested in such a manner, that the mind, the coadjutor of the eye, may not be de- ceived when perusing the lines of nature, may see be- hind the lines and conjure up tor the time being nature herself in all her beautiful perfection, with the shadows folded on her bosom and the sunlight playing in her eyes. See how Ruskin paints the pine groves, the rocks and the mosses. The pine grove with him is something more than a mere mass of shade. The moss is more than the 160 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. harbinger of decay mantling on the stone. They are real, substantial textures. We wander fancy-led through his dim forest aisles. We rest ourselves fancy -seated on his rugged stones, and fancy-visioned we see the velvet " mercies " veiling as with a dream-mantle the naked sadness of the ruin and the rift. Here is his picture of a pine grove : " For along all its ridges stand the dark masses of in- numerable pines, taking no part in its gladness, asserting themselves forever as fixed shadows, not to be pierced or banished even in the intensest "^unlight : fallen flakes and fragments of the night, stayed in their solemn square3 in the midst of all the rosy bendings of the orchard boughs and yellow effulgence of the harvest, and tracing them- selves in black net-work and motionless fringes against the blanched blue of the horizon in its saintly clearness." Consider this study of a rock by the same hand : " When a rock of any kind has lain for some time ex- posed to the weather, nature finishes it in her own wa^ . First she takes wonderful pains about its forms, sculp- turing it into exquisite variety of dent and dimple, and rounding or hollowing it into contours, which for fineness no human hand can follow ; then she colours it ; and every one of her touches of colour, instead of being a powder mixed with oil, is a minute forest of living trees glorious in strength and beauty, and concealing wonders of structure." Yet again, a study of mosses, than which nothing in the English language is more suggestive of cause behind eflfect, that is, texture : -^ PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 161 " Meek creatures ! the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its dintless rocks ; creatures full of pity, covering with strange and tender honour the scar- red disgrace of ruin, laying quiet finger on the trembling stones to teach them rest. No words that I know of will say what these mosses are. None are delicate enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green, the starred divisions of rubied bloom, finc-tilmed, as if the rock spirit could spin porphyry as we do glass — the traceries of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace ? They will not be gathered like the flowers, for chaplet, or love-token ; but of these the wild bird will make its nest, and the wearied child his pil- low." Let us turn to the " Eve of St. Agnes," by Keats, that most exquisite creation of a too exquisitely sensitive mind, and ascertain what it can teach of texture in words. Take this : or this : or this " Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees. " Soon, trembling in her 9oft and chilly nest. In sort of wakeful swoon, perple^'d she lay, Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppress'd Her soothed limbs. ' ' " Over the hush'd carpet, silent, stept." 162 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. or any of these following, noticing the effects of the italics : " Thus whispering, his warm, unnerved arm Sn.nk in her pillow.' " Broad golden fringe upon the carpet lies." " Meantime the frost- wind blows Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet Against the window-panes." The arras, rich with horsemen, hawk, and hound. Flutter d in the besieging wind's uproar ; And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor." ".The chains lie silent on the foot-ioorn stones ; The key turns, aud the door upon its hinges groans." There is material as well as description in these itali- cised words. We see and feel the objects as well as hear the sounds that convey the meaning ; but the following stanza is a master piece : " And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, In blanched linen, smooth and lavender d While he from forth the closet brought a heap Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd. With jellies soother than the creamy curd, And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon, Manna aud dates, in argosy transferr'd From Fez, aud spiced dainties, every one, From silken Samarcand to cedar' di Lebanon." Then again there is Pope's description of the Sylj^hs in " the Rape of ihe Lock." What can be finer than the delineation of texture therein given : " The lucid squadrons round the sails repair ; Soft o'er the shrouds aerial whispers breathe, That seemed but Zephyrs to the train beneath. Some to the sun their insect wings unfold. Waft on th« breeze, or sink in clouds of gold ; PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 163 Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight, Their fluid bodies half dissolv'd in lif^ht, Loose to the wind their airy garments flew, Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew, Dipt in the richest tincture of the skies, Where light ''.isports in ever-mingling dyes. While every beam new transient colours flings, Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings. Amid the circle on the gilded mast, Superior by the head, was Ariel plac'd ; His purple pinions opening to the sun, He raised his azure wand, and thus begun :" All this is texture apart from the human form. Now let us consider humanity itself. The glory of a portrait is its textual perfection. Without that it loses its roundness, its softness, its proper play of shadow and light. It becomes hard, bare, smooth-mown and inex- pressive like the circumference of a billiard ball, or the shaven crown of a Buddhist priest. Here is a girl- group from the Light of Asia, painted, observe,'not carved. Brilliant with Eastern colour and radiant with Eastern light, while the prominence given to both outline and texture forms one of its chief beauties : " With careless grace they lay, their soft brown limbs Part hidden, part revealed ; their glossy hair Bound back with gold or flowers, or flowing loose In black waves down the shapely nape and neck. Lulled into pleasant dreams by happy toils, They slept, no wearier than jewelled birds. Which sing and love all day, then under wing Fold head till morn bids sing and love again. Lamps of chased silver swinging from the roof In silver chains, and fed with perfumed oils. Made with the moonbeams tender li^^hts and shades, Whereby were seen the perfect lines of grace, The bosom's placid heave, the soft stained palms 1()4 THE AKT GALLERY OF ENGLISH. Drooping or clasp'd, the faces fair and dark, The great arch'd brows, the parted lips, the teeth Like pearls a merchant picks to make a string. The satin-lidded eyes, with lashes dropped Sweeping the delicate cheeks, the rounded wrists, The smooth small feet with bells and bangles deck'd, Tinkling low music where some sleeper moved, Breaking her smiling dream of some new dance Praised by the prince, some magic ring to find Some fairy love-gift." Nathaniel Parker Willis has given us two lovely pen portraits that would be hard to better for perfection of textual suggestiveness. Both are portraits of the same divinity, Albina McLush. Here they are : " Miss McLush was tall, and her shape, of its kind, was perfect. It was not a fleshy one exactly, but she was large and full. Her skin was clear, fine-grained, and transparent ; her temples and forehead perfectl}'' rounded and polished, and her lips and chin swelling into a ripe and tempting pout, like the cleft of a burst apricot. And then her eyes — large, languid and sleepy — they languished beneath their long, black fringes as if they had no busi- ness with daylight — like two magnificent dreams, sur- prised in their jet embryos by some bird-nesting cherub. Oh ! it was lovely to look into them ! " " I found her one morning sipping her cofiee at twelve, with her eyes wide open — she was just from the bath, and her complexion had a soft dewy transparency, like the cheek of Venus rising from the sea. It was the hour, Lurly had told me, when she would be at thp trou- ble of thinking. She put away with her dimpled fore- finger, as I entered, a cluster of rich curls that had fallen PAINTING IN LANG yj AGE. 165 over hvF face, and nodded to me like a water-lily swaying to the wind when its cup is full of rain." Enough, I deem, has now been said to illustrate what I mean by form and texture in verbal painting, and we pass to the next phase of the subject, light and shade, contrasted or alone. I believe many people hate, or at least dislike, shadow or gloom, whether in nature or pic- tures — so Ruskin speaks of "a great, ugly, black rain- cloud," and I have heard artist friends say that they infinitely preferred blue skies to stormy ones. Well, I have a passion for a storm. I think a tempest-curtained sky, stooping over a wilderness of heather and tarn, dis- tant-mountained, veiled in gloom, with just a rift in the canopy, a loop to let filter through one arrowy ray of light upon the sullen waters of the pool below, if well rendered, one of the most fascinating sights on canvas. I love mist and rain and wind and ocean spray driven before the gale, ships rocked by storm, billows crested with foam, and grim and fissured rocks beating back the temerity of the boisterous main, while echoing in harsh thunder, " Hitherto shalt thou come but no farther and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." I have a sailor's instincts, and one of the grandest and most awful memory- pictures of the past is of such a scene. A. scene I might never have lived to reproduce but for a freak of nature herself. We had been sailing through fairy-land, the islands of the Eastern Archipelago, and were well-nigh surfeited with beauty. It seemed a perpetual pic-nic. Never had fairy tale mirrored aught so lovely to my young iniagi- 166 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. WW nation as the sights we saw. Island after island, clothed to the water's edge with verdure. Ocean gems. Eme- ralds set in turquoise or rubies in amethyst. Now of un- mixed green, now dappled with crimson stains, skirted with snow of bloom, fringed with yellow radiance of old- gold, or threaded with traceries of violet and azure. Here we caught glimpses of cool thickt :s, draped in shadow ; there could be seen low coasts, fringed with the drooping plumesof the cocoa- palm. The seas were clear as crystal, and down in their depths might be dimly traced strange forms of fish and weed, tangled masses of sea-verdure, threaded with silver, or starred with coral, or laced with sinuous bands that seemed shot with the iridescent lus- tre of mother-of-pearl. In the morning the land-breeze would come off to us heavy with the fragrance of the dew-damp mould and the lusty tropic woods ; in the even- ing the great moon would peer down through the shrouds and make objects as visible as by day. B' t one after- noon, just as we had made open water, the scene changed. We were lounging on deck under the awning, enjoying what breeze there was to temper the ardent rays of the sun, when the clouds began to gather and assume an ominous appearance. Indications of an approaching storm became so manifest, that orders were issued to shorten sail, and make all things snug for squally weather. Blacker and blacker grew the sky, whiter and whiter gleamed the foam which crested the ridges of the broken waste of waters. The wind from faint moanings changed to shrill pipings, and anon to hoarse, thundering challenges, Happing the PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 167 sails wildly against the spars as the vessel was brought too near the wind, or tugging angrily at the leach lineo as though determined to rend the bellying canvas from the sheets. It was a magnificent sight. The waves were not running very high. The surface of the sea presented a broken rather than a mountainous appearance, of a gray- green colour, with long seams of snowy white where the crests had been churned by the wind. Ever and anon great ropes of spray were lifted from the ridges, and flung to the air, to be scattered back in showers of glittering drops. The ship almost on her beam ends, under short- ened sail, cleft her way at the rate of ten or eleven knots through, rather than over, the wave-ridges. The sullen clouds overhead stooped as though to meet the deep be- low, while all was so dim towards the horizon, that the eye could scarce distiuguish where sea ended and sky be- gan. Every now and then a great rushing rain-drift would swoop down upon us, deluge our decks, and then career madly away to leeward, to Ve rucceeded ere long by another, and another and yet auo ^rer. All this while the clouds to windward were getting blacker and blacker, and the circle of vision more limited. Suddenly a cry from one of the crew, " waterspouts," drew every eye to the spot indicated by the look-out ; there, sure enough, towering up towards the heavens, rose one of those mighty columns, which seemed to be careering in mad haste right down upon our track. A few rapid orders were issued by the officer of the watch, but the man at the wheel, either misapprehending his instructions, or 168 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. m ' i rendered nervous at sight of the dreaded visitor, by his clumsy manipulation of the wheel, rendered the ship un- manageable, or technically speaking, got her in irons. Down swept the monster, a tower of liquid death, right down upon our beam. Every man stood as though rooted to the deck. Every eye, as though fascinated, followed the course of the spout. Not a human voice broke the warring of the elements, the swirl of the lashed waters, the wail of the wind, and by-and-bye the awful svAsh — sh of the approaching stranger. Nearer and nearer it came, its head wrapped in awful obscurity, the clouds bending to kiss its lowering brow. Its body a mass of whirling water, revolving in ceaseless gyrations. Its base a huge circle of yeasty foam, out of which the tortured spray, spurned by the whirling giant, spun like flakes of liquid flame ; and now above all rose the ominous hiss of the seething waters which skirted its unquiet base. Still as death every man stood watching, watching and waiting — for death. It would be useless to attempt an analysis of my own feelings. I do not know whether I had any to analyse, I felt no fear, only a sort of vague surprise and curiosity. I began to wonder, I recollect, where the spout would first strike us, whether we should sink at once or be torn into ten thousand fragments ; what my sensations would be at the moment of impact, and then — a blank supervened, I suppose, for the next thing I remember was seeing the huge mass of revolving water hurrying away to leeward and hearing a cheery voice, " square away the main yard, bear a hand, my hearties." All I then realized PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 1G9 was that the messenger of death had passed us. All I afterwards learned, that almost at the moment of striking, a sudden flaw of wind had diverted the spout from its course and carried it past our bowsprit. It was a narrow escape, though ; the ship's cutwater had been caught in the eddy which formed that terrific whirling base, while the column itself had missed the jib-boom by a few feet only. I have a faint remembrance of hearing a sound like a protracted sigh, as the crew, released from their spell sprang to stations. Such pale faces, such thankful yet scared expressions it has seldom been my lot to witness. I only know my own heart was deeply thankful and for a time I walked and felt as one in a maze. The yards were trimmed, the squall outridden, and in a few days we were safely anchored in Manilla Bay. But though I thus love the dark and tempestuous, and at times the weird and the awful, yet I like light, too, and above all, I delight in contrast — Dora's pictures with the gloom of infernal chasms, and the lone figure of the melancholy bard, with his sad, saturnine features lit up by the only ray permitted to fall across the scene. Our literature is full of such contrasts, full, too, of separate light and shade effects. I deem one of the grandest figures of contrasted light and shadow to be found in English verse, is contained in Coleridge's master-piece, " The Ancient Mariner." Two stanzas, one reflecting the pale azure of the sun-lit sea, suffused with light and glory ; the other, done in Prussian blue or indigo, with sugges- IVO THE ART GALLEllY OF ENGLISH. tions of old-gold, and veins shot with the dull red of metallic fire : " Beyond the shadow of the ship, I watched the water-jnakes ; They moved in tracks of shining white, And when they reared, the elfish light Fell ofi in hoary Aakes/ ' Within the Hhadow of the ship I watched their rich attire ; Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam ; and every track Was a flash of golden fire." I can quote another fine instance of contrast trom the same author's " Chamouni." Much of the charm centring in the adroit juxtaposition of contrasting elements : dark- ness and stars, night and dawn, sunless pillars and rosy star, etc., etc.: " Thou first and chief, sole sovran of the vale ! Oh, struggling with the darkness all the night, And visited all night by troops of stars. Or when they climb the sky, or when they sink I Companion of the morning star at dawn, Thyself earth's rosy star, and of the dawn Co-herald : wake, oh wake, and utter praise ! W^ho sank thy sunless pillars deep in earth? Who fili'd thy countenance with rosy light ? Who made thee parent of perpetual streams?" As far as shadow itself is concerned, we have whole poems by our first word-artists dedicated to the subject, instance : " The Raven," that weird, ghost-haunted mys- tery, with its music and its wail, " In Memoriam," which sounds like a sobbing voice-shadow, haunting the graves of possibility and promise, " Lycidas," and *' Adonais." PAINTING IN LANQUAOE. 171 ed of •om the sentring : dark- ind rosy The openin<^ verses of " L'Allegro " afford a striking example of the type : "Hence, luatheil Melancholy, Of CerberuH and blackest niicluight boin In Stygian cares forlorn 'MongHt horrid HlmpeH and Hlineks, and sights niiholy ; Find out Honi« uncouth cell, Where brooding I)arkiie«H 8)>riiadH his jealous wings, Aiul the ni^dit-raven sings ; There, under ebon shades and low-brow'd locks, As ragged as thy locks, In dark (Hniinerian desert ever dwell.' In Longfellow's " Birds of Passage " the idea of shadow is tinely suggested : "Black shadows fall From the lindens tall. That lift aloft their massive wall Against the southern sky ; And from the realms Of the shadowy elms A tide-like darkness overwhelms The fields that round us lie," and again in the "Fire of Driftwood:" " We sat and talked until the night. Descending, filled the little room ; Our faces faded from the sight. Our voices only broke the gloom." * * * **■}»• The very lines in which we spake Had something strange, I could but mark ; The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark." The following very beautiful lines, too, from Hales "Suggestions on the teaching of English," embody the same fancy, the funereal and gloomy : I 172 THE ART GALLERY OF ENGLISH. " The dinmal yew and cypresH tall Weij,'h o'er the church yard lone, Where regt our friendn and fatherH all Beneath the funeral Htone. In holy ground our kindred Hleep ; O early lost, o'er thee No sorrowing friend shall ever weep, No stranger bend the knee. Mocherna lorn am I ! Hoarse daHhing rolls the salt sea wave Over our perish'd darling's grave." But the climax of inspiration from the shadow-spirit, I think, is to be found in the concluding refrain of the last sad stanza of " The Raven " : ** And the Raven, never flitting, Still is sitting, snll in sitting. On the pallid bust of Pallas Just above my chamber door ; And his eyes have all the seeming Of a demon's that is dreaming. And the lamplight o er him streaming Throws his shadow on the floor ; And my soul from out that shadow, That is floating on the floor Shall be lifted— Nevermore ! " From the shadow we turn again to the light. As with the one, so with the other. Whole poems have been devoted to its realization, are, in fact, pictures upon which the light of many coloured imagery filters, as from prisms, and is dispersed everywhere, searching all the nooks and crannies, leaving no spot unillumined by its radiant presence. Shelly 's " Cloud, "and " Skylark," are good specimens of the type, from the former of which I (juote : PAINTING IN LANGUAGE. 173 " The Banguine sunrise, with his meteor eyes, And his biirnin^^ plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my Hailiii},' rack, When the morning; star shines dead ; As on the ja;,' of a mountain cra^f, AVluch an earth