JUVENILIA
Juvenilia : being a Second Series of Essays on sundry ^Esthetical Questions, .
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LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN.
JUVENILIA
BEING A SECOND SERIES OF
ESSAYS ON
SUNDRY ^ESTHETICAL
QUESTIONS
VE1(NON LEE
VOL. I.
JLonDon
T FISHER UNWIN
26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE
MDCCCLXXXVII
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Introduction : Juvenilia i
The Lake of Charlemagne . . -23
Botticelli at the Villa Lemmi . . 77
Rococo . . . . . . . 131
Prosaic Music and Poetic Music . . 149
Apollo the Fiddler ..... 165
JUVENILIA:
TO MY FRIEND CARLO PLACCI.
VOL. I.
JUVENILIA:
TO MY FRIEND CARLO PLACCI.
TN calling this volume "Juvenilia," I do not
* intend to suggest that I consider myself
as already and utterly in the sere and yellow;
although I may have occasionally put great
store upon the abyss of years separating
twenty-five from thirty, in order to obtain
from you, my dear Carlo, more patience
for my theories and sermonings.
My meaning is not that. Do you re-
member, among the allegories on the floor of
Siena Cathedral, the little fifteenth-century
figures representing the various ages of
man ? Among them is Youth : a boy
holding a hawk, Now there is no reason
4 JUVENILIA.
why a hawk should not be held equally by
a man of mature age ; and the good people
of the Renaissance, who saw their great
captains and orators and merchants and
reverend signiors of various descriptions
ride out a-hawking many times and oft,
were certainly aware of this. But whereas
to the mature man hawking is but a mere
holiday pastime; to the youth it and all
similar sports are the most serious matters
in the world ; indeed, the only matter for
which a serious creature can be expected to
exist. Hence the hawk is on the wrist,
not of the mature man, but of the boy;
though the one may bring back whole bags
of partridges, and the latter but a solitary
brace of sparrows.
Similarly in the case of these essays. I
do not imagine that assthetical questions
are fit only for immature young people-
forgive what seems a personal reflexion-
nearer twenty than thirty. I mean that, in
many cases, in my own case certainly, and
JUVENILIA. 5
in yours I suspect, they are, up to a certain
age, the only, or very nearly the only,
questions which seem thoroughly engross-
ing. Later we care for them still, and
perhaps fully as much; but we care for
other questions also. It is the case of the
boy with the hawk; and for this reason I
class such matters as "Juvenilia." And,
therefore, my dear Carlo, I dedicate this
little volume to you, not because I conceive
you to be still in the phase when only things
of this sort seem important; but because,
on the contrary, you appear to be emerging
from that intellectual boyhood ; and I would
therefore fain talk with you, now that the
serious interests of the soul are beginning
to push aside its mere pleasant pastimes, of
the relative values of these things, and of
what is due to each.
You will think me, perhaps, unjust, to
my own past, and to what is still your
present. The Beautiful, you will say, the
Beautiful thus contemptuously classified
6 JUVENILIA.
under the head of " Juvenilia," is the beau-
tiful not merely of material objects, but of
the soul. We, who are young and none
the worse for our youth (you continue, and
I agree with you) are not mere fiddle-
faddle dilettanti, adorers of roulades and
Japanese lacquer and " Odes Funambu-
lesques." We are serious; and seriously
seeking for the beautiful, and for what is
the same as the beautiful, the good.
I know it. In those earliest years of
spiritual existence, we are far removed from
every baseness. The danger of baseness,
indeed, comes later, with the consciousness
of imperfection and conflict, with the
necessity of making a choice. Taken in
themselves, those early days of thought
and feeling are exquisitely calm and pure ;
we require their memory later, as a refuge
from present reality. The only pity is that
this comparative Elysium was never a reality,
but only a phantom place of our own
fantastic building.
JUVENILIA. 7
It came home to me very keenly, like
the taste or the scent of some fruit or
flower not seen for years, the peculiar
flavour, I would call it, of those aesthetic,
classic, Goethian days, while reading Pater's
" Marius the Epicurean." The book is to
my mind the most charming, and in a way,
consolatory, of any latterly written, precisely
because it takes one back to those first
years when the good and the beautiful
seemed as the concave and the convex .of all
things. I read it in the earliest days of
our Florentine spring. The banks were
full of fennel tufts, of sage, marigolds, and
all manner of herbs that leave an aromatic,
spring-like scent upon one's hands ; between
the leafless vines the paths were powdered
with daisies ; on the hillsides the peach and
almond blossoms made a pinkish, whitish
mist upon the silvery olives, the coppery
sere oaks ; and everywhere in the sprouting
bright green wheat, flamed the scarlet and
purple anemones, the light playing with
8 JUVENILIA.
them as with gems. The pale blue sky
was washed by recent showers ; the air of
delicate cold crispness. With these im-
pressions from without mingled the impres-
sions of the book : sunny, serene, bracing,
like those first spring days, with its back-
ground of the Latin country life of Virgil
andTibullus; its principal figure, harmonious
and strong and chaste like the statue of
some high-born boy priest ; its story of the
search after Beauty and Good, the Lehrjahre
of an antique Wilhelm Meister; but a
Wilhelm Meister simpler, purer, more
dignified than the hero of Goethe. The
book brought back to me, more vividly
than the sunshine and daisies and scent of
crushed herbs, the sense of a moral and
intellectual spring; the poignant remem-
brance of long ago, when at eighteen or
nineteen I too had read those descriptions
of rustic life and rites, austere and serene,
in Virgil and Tibullus; when I too had
looked upon the world as a tract of spring-
JUVENILIA. 9
tide country, through which one might
wander, calm and wise, like an antique
statue, in search of the great dualism : the
Good and the Beautiful. The Good ? One
feels, at that age, that one has got it; for
v/ho can connect anything save good with
beautiful form, when it is temperate, har-
monious, perfect; with sensations and
emotions and thoughts so utterly simple,
single-hearted, and detached from all things
practical ? The world is beautiful, or we see
only its beauty ; we feel, therefore, happy ;
and in feeling happy (being consciously
harmless), we feel also good. It is the
morality of all antique art and philosophy,
of the teachings of Goethe and of Plato,
of every blossoming fruit tree and sprouting
blade of grass ; and it is the morality of
the youth of such of us as are best.
Unfortunately, it is delusive, and when
we come to read <f Marius " a second time
we feel a certain sadness, of which this book
is the seemingly serene result.
2*
IO JUVENILIA.
Little by little we begin to perceive that
there are ugly things in the world : apathy,
selfishness, vice, want, and a terrible wicked
logic that binds them together in thousands
of vicious meshes. And perceiving the
ugly things in the world, we perceive for
the first time, perhaps, the ugly things
within ourselves : for of each there is
somewhat in each of us. Then comes the
moment of choice : we have learned, or
guessed, that in continuing to live only
for and with the beautiful serenities of art,
we are passively abetting, leaving urifought,
untouched, the dreadful, messy, irritating,
loathsomenesses of life ; and, on the con-
trary, in trying to tackle even the smallest
of these manifold evils, we are bringing into
our existence ugliness and unrest. Gradu-
ally, in short, we discover that to be good
means, unluckily, to deal with evil ; to
be, I will not say beautiful, but clean and
moderately healthy, spiritually, means to
see much that is ugly and foul. Of course
JUVENILIA. II
we may still go and live with the daisies
and the statues, seeing only them with the
eyes of body and soul ; unfortunately to
live with the daisies and statues means no
longer to be like unto them, but like rather
to the dust-heap and the scarecrow, not
much more beautiful in soul, certainly.
We were happier first. Decidedly ;
that is what I have been insisting all
along. But while we were happy other
folk were wretched ; and this convenient
division of property and class cannot be
kept up for good. I know not whether
the old saints were judicious in stripping
off their good clothes, amply sufficient for
themselves, that beggars might have them,
each rather less than he needed; nor whether
the Socialists of to-day would be wise in
dealing similarly with their own (or other
folks') worldly possessions. But this seems
certain : in order that the great mass of
mankind, which has neither peace nor
dignity, nor beauty of life, should obtain
12 JUVENILIA.
a small allowance of any such qualities, it
becomes necessary that we, who happen to
possess thereof, should deprive ourselves of
a portion for their benefit.
Hence there comes a time, to such of
us as shall not remain eternally children,
when, by the side of all questions artistic,
there must arise other questions, less
pleasant to contemplate, and less easy,
alas, to solve, nay, seemingly, almost in-
soluble. And together with this there
comes also the knowledge that such things
as have hitherto absorbed our attention
are "Juvenilia." How such questions
arise ? In a hundred ways ; and less per-
haps from our additional experience of the
world than from a greater maturity within
ourselves ; for external matters would not
affect us were it not for a certain change
in us. Mere visible objects become some-
thing more than mere visible objects ; and
individual cases begin to pain us with the
force of great class evils.
JUVENILIA. 13
This, my dear Carlo, you are beginning
to feel, and more so, I think, quite of late.
You have just been in England, and Eng-
land shows its evils grimly, as much as Italy,
unconsciously, thanks to climate, beauty,
and a certain dignified stagnation, hides
them. Moreover, while Italy makes one
think of the past ; England, inevitably, leads
one to speculate upon the future : each
country is a key to what is not yet, or no
longer, mere present. Among the various
sights, I don't know whether you saw, along
with theatres and slums, and political meet-
ings, and aesthetic houses, what to me must
always seem one of the most impressive of
all spectacles, short of hell the Tyne at
Newcastle, Impressive spiritually as well as
physically. A vast mass of leaden water,
polluted with every foulness, flowing heavily,
or scarce seeming to flow at all, between
lines of docks and factories, their innumer-
able masts and innumerable chimneys faint
upon the thick brown sky, faintly reddened
14 JUVENILIA.
with an invisible sun, and streaked in vari-
ous intensities of brown and grey and black,
with ever rising curls of smoke. This
river flows, most often as deep as in a gorge,
between banks of blackish cinders, of white
poisonous chemical refuse, or worst of all, of
what was once pure live soil, now stained and
deadened into something unnatural, whereon
the very weeds refuse to grow. Down
these banks trickle, from black blast fur-
naces, and rotting greenish docks, and white
leprous chemical works, crumbling with
caries, foul little streams, vague nameless
oozes, choking with their blackness, staining
with their deadly purple and copper- colour
and green and white ; while the air is thick
with the smoke as of brickkilns, with the
hospital whiffs of chlorine. And against
this sky rise the masts and riggings, and
funnels and chimneys and cranes, the long
line of crumbling reddish roofs and black
sheds, to where the great river, thickening
and thickening in the greyness, a great river
JUVENILIA. 15
of hell, winding in huge folds, spreads itself
out at Jarrow into a grey and sullen lagoon,
marked with serpentine posts, and ribbed
with rafts, a Stygian lake, among the dim
lines of chimneys and rigging. But sadder
even where, up at Newcastle, things seem
less bad : sadder where there rises sheer
from the water a mound of vivid green
crowned by a black church, greenness of an
abandoned churchyard ; making the grey of
the water, the blackness of the houses and
soil but the greyer and blacker, the violation
of all natural things more keenly felt, with
the suggestion, that but a few miles off are
the brownish moors and pale green fells.
And in this spot also, as if to remind us that,
as there are still in the world green places,
so there is also in the world's history a
period when other things were held more
important than the plating of ironclads, the
ribs of ships, coal, coke, and magnesia,
there rises above the polluted river, into
the smoke suffused with sun redness, the
I 6 JUVENILIA.
delicate outline of a mediaeval church
tower.
There are men who live among all this
by the thousand, and they are far from
being the worst off in the world ; men like
those who crowded the Tyne steamer re-
turning home after their day's work ; black,
red-faced, and blistered, or with flesh in
pale creases under the grime, their clothes
engrained with dirt, shiny with grease,
often tattered, the filthy wisp of comforter
round their necks ; men who sat silent and
morose, scarcely exchanging a word, and
who are yet human beings, intelligent and
sensitive, who get treatises on political
economy from the free library, in order to
see why things should be so very queer and
uncomfortable down here. There are other
men also, not living on the Tyne, and
women also, clean, well-dressed, apprecia-
tive of art and music and literature, with
whom we can sympathize vastly about
Wagner, and Swinburne, and Whistler,
JUVENILIA. 17
and Venetian sunsets ; for whom, in short,
we write our books, sing our songs, or
paint our pictures, as the case may be; men
and women, of whose souls we occasionally
get a glimpse, a glimpse that shows that
polluted as are the waters of the Tyne, and
black as are its smoke-clouds, and noisome
and sterilizing its fumes and trickles of refuse,
there are things more polluted and blacker
still, and more noisome and sterilizing.
These things are beginning to strike
you ; and, therefore, you complain, you no
longer feel quite so happy as formerly ; no
longer so certain what to think and to
care for. Therefore you, also, are beginning
to have a class of interests which might be
called " Juvenilia."
"Juvenilia!" Well, why not? And
why not be contented with them ? Have
we a recipe to cure all evils ? Can we
clean out the Tyne, or clean our neigh-
bours' souls ? And if not, why talk or
think about either ; when there arc things
iS JUVENILIA.
which are clean, pleasant, and which require
only that we should enjoy them : art,
music, poetry, beautiful nature, delightful
people? If such things are "Juvenilia,"
were it not better to cast in our lot with
them, and say boldly, I choose to remain
young ?
Not so. For do what we will, devote our-
selves exclusively to the pleasant and certain
things of this life, shut our eyes and ears
resolutely to the unpleasant and uncertain ;
we shall be made, none the less, to take part
in the movement that alters the world. Help
it to alter we must, in so far as each of us
represents a class, a nationality, a tendency,
nay, as each of us eats a certain amount of
food and occupies a certain amount of
standing-room. For the whole of all things
is ever moving, changing plan and form ; and
we, its infinitesimal atoms, are determining
its movements. The question therefore is,
in which direction shall our grain of dust's
weight be thrown ?
JUVENILIA. Ip
This is what we require to know. Do
not let us swell with self-importance. It is
not a question of our leading any one you
or I, or Tom, Dick, or Harry. The
number of the world's leaders is small,
and perhaps the world's leaders are neces-
sarily irresponsible, biassed, blind, mere
forces. It is a question of being led ; and
in v/hich direction ; of being led towards
good or towards evil, in darkness or in
light ; for follow, in one way or another,
with some result, of more or less comfort or
misery to some one, we needs all must.
Therefore, it behoves us to know what
the world is ; what we ourselves are ; above
all, what we think, and why we think it.
And therefore also, my dear Carlo, we
must look at many things that are not
beautiful ; we must bring home to our
feelings many things that are not good ;
we must think out many matters that are
bitter and uncertain ; we must recognize
that we are no longer children, and that
2O JUVENILIA.
we have other interests besides those which
I have called " Juvenilia."
The feeling comes home to one often
and oftener ; and in less and less expected
ways. It saddens, in a certain sense, and
makes the world less pleasant, and one's
companionships less satisfactory. But, on
the other hand, it gives to the world a
meaning which it never had before, this
seeing it no longer as a mere storehouse
of beautiful inanimate things, but as a
great living mass, ti availing and suf-
fering in its onward path ; and it makes
one feel less isolated, in a way, to recog-
nize all round, among creatures of different
habits and views from one's own, and
profoundly unconscious of one's existence,
the companionship of the desire for good.
Last autumn, just before that glimpse of
the Tyne, I was wandering about with
some friends about the foot of Cross Fell,
when we came, in a tiny hamlet, upon a
company of Methodist preachers. The
JUVENILIA. 21
cluster of black cottages, with the brownish
green slopes, scarcely purpled with heather,
stretching away, roll after roll, without a
tree or a bush for landmark, gave me
a sense of remoteness greater than anything
I have ever felt before ; the very roads
seemed to lead nowhere, and the paths
to wind on, from hill-top to hill-top, with
always the same clouds to face them and
nothing else. In the middle of the village
green, that is, of the bit of grass round
the pump, with the big brownish moor-
land, ribbed with black walls, rising behind,
a dozen people, the total of the inhabi-
tants, were gathered round a youngish man,
in a long black coat, with a wide white
face, who was bellowing out the necessity
of following the call of God, of coming
to the light. I fear the poor man would
not have thought me a very satisfactory
listener ; and I certainly should not have
considered his views decisive as to the
nature of God and of God's light. But
22 JUVENILIA.
I felt that, in a certain way, we sym-
pathized, he and I ; and that there was
a closer link between us, without two ideas
or tasks in common, than between myself
and so many of my friends, whose pictures
I look at, whose songs I listen to, and who
are so polite as to read and praise my
books.
Yes, certainly ; for I could have told
that Methodist preacher, and he would
have understood me, though he had never
perhaps seen an antique, nor heard an
opera, nor read a novel, what I have
wished to explain to you, my dear Carlo,
that there are in life "Juvenilia," but there
are other things also.
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE.
AN APOLOGY OF ASSOCIATION.
AN APOLOGY OF ASSOCIATION,
A SENSE of indecision and self-contradic-
** tion has been worrying me of late. A
suspicion has come to me, in moments of
weariness and depression (as such suspicions
always do come), that I might be getting
entangled in exaggerated, unjust notions ;
that I might, so to speak, be selling my
soul to the most cunning of all fiends, the
Demon of Theory. This demon is much
more subtle and dangerous than those of
his brethren who, once upon a time,
haggled souls out of unlucky alchemists
and architects in exchange for books of
spells and plans of cathedrals. He does
not frighten you with his horns and fumes
3
26 JUVENILIA.
of brimstone, nor make you think twice
by exacting signatures with your own
blood, and similar alarming legal proceed-
ings. He merely leaves carelessly about
the object of your desire, the explanation
which will spare you all further fatigue
and labour, which will save you from the
torment of self-doubt, from the humilia-
tion of self-contradiction' as rapidly as will
a banker's letter and a cheque book save
the penniless wretch from the torment and
humiliation of bankruptcy. He himself, I
mean this demon, keeps studiously out of
the way. You find the unexpected thing
which solves all your difficulties, puts an
end to all your worries; and in all prob-
ability you hasten to pick it up, thanking
your good fortune, and wondering at your
stupidity in not having noticed before this
invaluable piece of property. The demon,
who sees all that is going on, laughs in his
sleeve. The mouse has walked into the
trap. For, strange as it may appear, from
TFIE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 2J
the moment of your pocketing that ex-
planation thus cunningly thrown in your
way, you are, to an ever-increasing extent,
and for a daily-increasing number of years,
the property of that Theory Demon ; his
serf, whom he can drive to the right or the
left, whom he can pinch and prick and pull
about to his heart's content ; whom he can
order either to rob, or murder, or stand
indecorously head on the ground, heels in
the air; upon whose back he can ride (as
other demons ride on witches) to the very
Brocken orgy of insanity and falsehood.
Mind, I am speaking but too seriously.
Let once our vanity or laziness tempt us
into neglecting the doubts, the suspicious
little facts, which would require a careful
and cruel revision of our ideas, which
might entail the labour of seeking some
new explanation for a thing already ex-
plained, the humiliation of an admission
that all had been a mistake; let us but
give way to this temptation, and we shall
28 JUVENILIA.
find ourselves, little by little, surrounded by
new doubts which must again be quashed ;
by new facts which must again be set
aside; by new injustices which we must
commit; by new lies which we must
tell, unless we wish the whole edifice
of our ideas to crash publicly to the
ground ; in order to be consistent we shall
have become habitual liars ; in order not
to appear liars, we shall soon appear, what
we shall be, fools. Oh, not to slip into
the bondage of the Theory Demon, to
remain free, and able to be, at least as
often as our wits will permit, the scatterer
of mere truth, not the kneader up together
of a little sense in a great deal of rubbish !
The fear of possession by the fiend has
always been a disagreeable matter. The
poor monks, we know, saw fiends in every-
thing, and scarcely durst blow their nose
or wash their hands lest Beelzebub or
Mephistopheles might lurk in the hand-
kerchief or in the soap and water. And
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 2p
similarly with the Demon Theory. If
once you have reason to suspect that he
is laying traps for you, you are for ever
beset by doubts and discouragements.
You scarcely venture to handle an idea ;
you tremble at every liking or disliking,
lest it be a prejudice, that demon's in-
vention ; and ever and anon you awake
with a start of terror, and catching up
the explanation of things at which you
have been working for months, you rudely
pull it to pieces, till no shape is left, and
only a heap of disorderly facts remains.
Such is your condition if once the sus-
picion enters your mind that there is
danger from the Theory Demon ; and
such, to some extent, has been my state
of mind ever since it occurred to me that
the Theory Demon was going to snare
me with the subject of association, if,
indeed, he had not trapped me already ;
at which thought my mind shakes and
jerks to rid itself of possible meshes.
JO JUVENIUA.
The matter of Association is simply as
follows. I have always felt and expressed
that in all our relations with art, associa-
tion that is to say, the faculty by which
the real presence of one object evokes the
imaginary presence of other objects is
a most dangerous and pestilent faculty,
leading to insincerity, injustice, and stupid
wastefulness, by making us think of things
suggested by a work of art instead of
attending to the work of art itself. This
I have thought and said, and indeed, at
the moment of stating my position once
more, it seems to me that I was perfectly
right. But now comes the mischief.
Little by little, watching my own thoughts,
my own living, moving, yet unstated
thoughts, it appears to me that this very
faculty of association is being highly
honoured in my mind ; that, in a sort of
quiet, half-perceptible way, those thoughts
of mine are attributing a great deal of
good to it; indeed, are making for it
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 3!
quite a fine position. The question is,
Which is the snare laid for me by the
Theory Demon the opinion that associa-
tion is a pestilent thing, or the opinion
that it is excellent, useful, and most
honourable ? Is the Theory Demon
cozening me, or trying to make justice
appear to lie in relentless severity towards
association, or perhaps more subtly by
causing my very fear of injustice to be-
tray me into unwarranted recantation ?
This is what has been worrying me for
a long while, until a circumstance, which
has only just taken place, and which brings
home to me the wonderful power of this
faculty of association (legitimate or ille-
gitimate) in our aesthetic life, has de-
termined me to settle the question by a
sort of Oriental or Mediaeval proceeding ;
which is, after having spoken ill of as-
sociation, and while not really rescinding
one word that I said, to write an apology
containing all the good things about asso-
32 JUVENILIA.
elation of which I can possibly think.
In this way, whichever side justice lies,
I shall be safe not to miss it.
A week or so ago I was going up the
Rhine from Coblentz to Bingen, sitting,
not at all enraptured, on the steamboat. I
was neither surprised nor vexed at expe-
riencing none of the delight which our
fathers and mothers experienced on their
first sight of Rhineland ; I was not dis-
appointed, because I was perfectly prepared
for disappointment. I had clearly realized
beforehand how completely the Rhine, with
respect to its emotional and imaginative
power, is a thing of the past. The imagi-
native and emotional, the aesthetic habits
and wants of people have undergone a
great change since the days when the
Rhineland was the holy land of romanti-
cism. The mass of mankind scarcely knows
what will or what will not give it aesthetic
pleasure ; it requires specially endowed men,
painters and poets, to select and copy bits
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. JJ
of reality ; so that having seen and been
made to appreciate the picture, it may
recognize, appreciate, and, if possible, ex-
tend its knowledge of the original. Now
the Rhine, harsh as it sounds, is not the
sort of thing singled out and copied by the
artists of to-day, painters or poets. Our
painters do not care for the ostentatious,
self-conscious picturesqueness of rocks and
river and ruins ; they are seeking for the
beauty, the wonder of commonplace scenes,
they are striving after the tints, the sheen-
nay, the very darkness with which nature
enrobes most regally the veriest plebeian
of a landscape. The poets, on the other
hand (or perhaps I should have said the
poet Browning, the great showman-in-chief
of our imaginative puppet-show), the poets
no longer care for ready-made and ex-
tremely made-up heroism and romance ;
for knightly perfection draped in ana-
chronism, and satanic grandeur draped in
mystery. What interests them (and I am
3*
34 JUVENILIA.
speaking not of those who merely paint
exquisite unreal decorations of antique or
mediaeval fashion, but of those who can
really react on our lives and tastes) is reality,
of past or present ; historical knowledge has
made them hungry of the realities of former
days, of the every-day life of beauty and
sordidness, of the rotten heroism and fiend-
ishness and water. In all modern art, the
effects which shall move and delight us,
the beautiful and the pathetic, are being
sought every day more and more by
realistic means ; and I, for my part, feel
that herein our artistic feeling has got on
to a far worthier road than in the days
of romantic poetry and painting. But, be
this as it may, one point is certain, which
is that the Rhineland has been gradually
pushed out of our own aesthetic and
emotional life, and been quietly put by
in the lumber - room of superannuated
romanticism. These points, explaining why
the Rhine should give me but little plea-
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 35
sure, I kept revolving in my mind ; and,
as I sat on the steamer between Coblentz
and Bingen, involuntarily conjuring up
other scenes, other rocks, rivers, and old
towns, comparing, deciding, and seeking to
understand my own decisions, the sense
became stronger and stronger in my mind,
as the water foamed round the paddles and
fell in ridges behind the ploughing keel,
and the awning flapped in the draught,
that for my own part I would willingly
give all this romantic Rhineland, rocks,
castles, nixes, robber knights, and all, for
a reach, pale under the pale blue sky,
of poplared and shingled Tuscan river,
for a sluggish bend of English stream,
flowing you scarce can tell which way,
under the willows, beneath the sedge
and meadow-sweet, through the low-lying
pastures.
But while such were my reasoned ideas,
I gradually became aware of the presence
within me of something different, diffusing
36 JUVENILIA.
itself, and permeating my consciousness.
Not exactly an idea, nor yet a set of im-
pressions, something impossible to define,
because definition is not made for vagueness;
first within myself, warming me like a cor-
dial into vague pleasure, then afterwards
surrounding me from outside, an alUencom-
passing medium in which the soul floated
with languid enjoyment pleasurableness
slowly produced (as heat is slowly given
out by a few embers when we blow upon
them) by the sense that this was the Rhine-
land. The Rhineland, but not the Rhine-
land as a concrete reality, a sum total of
present and actually perceived and analyzed
impressions and ideas ; not the Rhineland
which was now before me, which I was now
criticizing, of which at this selfsame mo-
ment I was still duly reiterating to myself
that it was a thing of former days, no
longer in harmony with the imaginative re-
quirements, etc., etc., and the various other
subtle remarks which you have read above.
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. $J
Not this Rhineland ; quite another. A
Rhineland of the past, but which neither I
nor any other mortal had ever seen ; one
which used only to exist in my childish
fancy, and which, wholly different from the
reality, was gradually brought back to my
memory by names which I had for years
forgotten. A Fata Morgana Rhineland,
which years and years ago I had constructed
or rather, which had constructed itself
for me from the random allusions, the
incoherent descriptions of a servant-maid we
had had while living in the neighbourhood
of Frankfurt. 1 must have been a small
creature of five or six ; she was a buxom
thing of eighteen or nineteen, romantic,
poetic, and of decayed gentility, as nurse-
maids in Germany frequently are, or were ;
a native of the Rhineland, Rheingau as she
called it, meaning thereby merely that
classic portion between Bingen and Cob-
lentz ; all the rest of the river's course,
before and after, being apparently non-
^ JUVENILIA.
existent for her, as it certainly was for me.
Of this Rhineland of hers she was per-
petually telling, and to me she could never
tell enough. She was not from the river
bank itself, but from Inland, some small
place whose name has completely gone out
of my memory ; there her father was school-
master, her grandfather had been parson ;
it was the most marvellous region in the
whole world ; it never appeared to me as
having anything in common with the rest
of the earth. Everything was wonderful.
Fruit trees, the like of which did not exist,
covered it with miraculous blossom. Now
fruit blossom, the transparent, easily shed
pure white of the cherry ; the solid creami-
ness, crowned with tiny pale green leaves, of
thepear ; the pink-tipped,woolly, unwillingly
opening buds of the apple, the various
foam-like flowering of all the various kinds
of plums, fruit blossom of all kinds always
had, I know not whether from the difficulty
of obtaining it, its association with sweet taste,
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 39
or with the excitement and surprise of spring,
or merely from its own peculiar beauty,
quite a particular fascination for my child-
hood. Embosomed in all this were all the
other marvels of the girl's birthplace. The
father, a schoolmaster such as there never
was elsewhere ; the parsonage, a parsonage
such as there could not be more than one in
the world ; the parson himself, the grand-
father, a grandfather as other folks never
possessed one ; who had been alive during
the French Revolution (the French Revolu-
tion had a marvellous power over my
imagination), who had seen, spoken to,
flouted, repelled (who knows ?) Napoleon
when he came into Rhineland ; an old
gentleman whose wonderful wisdom was
deeply impressed on my mind, one of his
dicta c 'The hair of the head, the orna-
ment of mankind, let it hang, let it hang "
(" Die Haare des Hauptes, die Zierde der
Menschen, lass hangen, lass hangen") re-
maining in my memory like an oracle,
4t> JUVENILIA.
Moreover, this Rhineland, this particular
Rhineland, was full of legends of nixens,
castles, treasures, nuns and knights, things
which all the world can (in all probability)
read in the sixpenny books sold at the
stations, but which appeared to me as
learned in some occult and direct manner
by my nurse, as the emanation of the
wonderful country. Of these legends there
was, moreover, a mysterious large volume,
of which (without ever having set eyes upon
it) I can see, brown binding, tapestry work
markers and all, at this very moment, so
often did I clamour for descriptions of it.
It was apparently unique, at least it never
seemed to occur to any one that a copy of
it might be procured ; vague hints were
thrown out that some day it should be
brought, I should see it and hear the stories
read out of it, but it never was brought ;
having something inscrutable and mirage-
like in its nature ; and it remained, and still
remains, a mysterious object in my imagi-
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 4!
nation, a wizard book, which, when opened,
lets out a cloud of diaphanous figures,
knights, water sprites, nuns, enchanted
princesses, even as other old books, when
clapped open, emit dust from out of their
pages. Round this existed the parsonage,
moved the father, the grandfather, uncles
and cousins, all unique people, in a kind of
sea of everlasting fruit blossom. Such was the
Rhineland as it existed for me : the land of
wonders and joys, too wonderful indeed for
approach ; the idea never as much as oc-
curring to me to wish, in my wildest wishes,
even to penetrate into it. Not a province,
not a substantial country, to which you
could get by two hours' railway travelling,
but a land east of the sun and west of the
moon inexplicable, unapproachable, a thing
to sit and wonder on.
All this, long, long, forgotten, gradually
returned to my memory with the name
(magic names, alas ! how long forgotten) of
Lorch, Kaub, Rhense, Bacherach, and other
42 JUVENILIA.
villages by the great stream ; and, while my
eyes were staring at the monotonous zigzag
of dwarfed vines and stone walls up and
down the hillsides, with the battered little
castle here and there ; at the white towns
with gabled houses and extinguisher steeples
spread out primly at the water's edge ; at
the little oasis of brilliant green grass, fruit
trees, hedges breaking the weariness of the
eternal vineyard ; at the solemn grey-green
water, on which the huge rafts went in and out
like floating spars ; as the logical certainty
of the insufficiency of all these sights and
associations for us familiar with Italy, ad-
mirers of Whistler and readers of "My Last
Duchess," came clearer and clearer before
what ought to be called, I suppose, the
more intelligent portion of my mind ; the
rest of my mind, nay, somehow my whole
nature, was invaded by the consciousness of
that imaginary Rhineland of my childhood.
I felt excited, pleased, scarce knowing at
what ; and whenever the boats came along-
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 43
side the steamer and the cry arose " Bop-
pard," or cc Kaub,'' or " Lorch," the effect
was as if I caught distant notes of some once
cherished tune, thrilling me faintly, but
surely.
Very pleasant, I grant it ; but, after all,
pleasant things are not necessarily good
or proper : to be excessively conceited is
pleasant; and pleasant also, doubtless, to
have an opium vision of bliss ; or to think
that a certain number of genuflexions, a
certain number of Latin rhymes will gain
us admittance to a paradise whose sky is
molten gold, and whose everyflower is a living
jewel ; but in all these cases the pleasantness
to the individual between whom and the
truth such figments interfere, does not
diminish by a tittle the moral and intel-
lectual degradation attendant on such hallu-
cinations ; and the visions conjured up by
our faculty of association are but another
form of such hallucinations, and have
their attendant degradation. Degradation,
44 JUVENILIA.
moral and intellectual, you will answer, in
moral and intellectual matters ; but, after
all, what great mischief has arisen if associ-
ation have its way in artistic matters ; if an
unreality of the fancy come between us and
what are, at best, but the unrealities of art ?
But I say that degradation it is. The king-
dom of beauty is, it is true, only the play-
ground of our lives ; but, even as children
may soil their frocks, or hurt their play-
mates, or tread down grass and flowers in the
course of their games ; so we also may not
only trample into unseemliness our aesthetic
playground and shatter our aesthetic toys,
but also, during our pastimes, become guilty
of injury to our neighbours' rights ; of
destruction of our moral garments ; of
various things which, when on returning
to our serious work and serious lessons, on
seeing our playthings in bits, our playmates
bruised and battered, our playground de-
vastated, and ourselves tattered and be-
smirched, may make us feel exceedingly
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 45
ashamed. Now, of all tricks which we
grown-up folk may play in our aesthetic
playground, there are few as mischievous
as that trick of association : none certainly
affording such opportunities for maltreat-
ment of others, vandalism, and wastefulness.
Let us look into the matter. Association
means the investing of one object, having
characteristics of its own, with the charac-
teristics of some other object : the pushing
aside, in short, of reality to make room for
the fictions of imagination or memory.
Now, in a work of art, or a thing of
nature which can afford artistic pleasure,
there is, as in man, woman, beast, plant, or
stone, nothing so important as its reality.
This reality, this sum total of all its
actually existing characteristics, means, in
the work of art, all the labour expended
upon producing it, all the good luck en-
joyed in finding it, all the pleasure that it
may give. In practical concerns, this is
recognized by every creature : we do our
46 JUVENILIA.
best to get at the reality of man, woman,
beast, or plant, knowing that on that reality
depends all it can do for us, or that we
must do for it. But in all assthetical matters
the case is different : We do not seek for
the reality of the work of art, do not ask
ourselves what it is. The reality of a work
of art is that by which we recognize and
remember, that of which we can make a
copy, the identical and individual, which to
all men similarly constituted must appear
the same : the form, this form, the visible
shape of picture or statue, the audible
shape of symphony or song ; what the artist
has conceived, has seen or heard in his
mind, which he has perfected in the mere
conception, and then laboured to transmit
outwardly to us by arranging the paint on
the canvas, the bosses in the marble, the
relations of the sounds of voice and in-
struments.
But little knowledge of music is required
to realize the work of composing a sym-
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 47
phony or a mass : inventing the themes,
dovetailing them into each other, distri-
buting them in little bits to the various
instruments or voices, and giving to the
other instruments and voices something
which shall enhance and not impoverish
the effect of those main parts. And when
the artist has all the science and taste and
experience required for all this, when he
can drive (without lurching) the frightful
twenty-in-hand of counterpoint and orches-
tration, he yet requires, for his work to be
good, a thing considerably rarer than rubies,
and, unfortunately, not obtainable for money
the trifle called genius. In the same way,
it is good to meditate upon the fact, casually
mentioned to me one day by a sculptor
friend that a statue intended to be placed,
not in a niche, but on a free-standing
pedestal, would afford, if every point giving
a new relation of points were represented,
from twenty to twenty-five possible and
different photographs. This simply means
48 JUVENILIA.
that the sculptor must make a statue which
shall present well in twenty or twenty-five
ways ; after which there remains the per-
fecting of all this in a minute detail. You
may sometimes go to the studio and see the
clay model finished, ready for casting ; re-
turn a week later, and you may, just as soon
as not, find the model still there, with per-
haps a whole leg and one half of the drapery
reduced to an unseemly lump of greenish
clay, which the artist is slowly working back
into shape, having suddenly grown discon-
tented with such and such a fold of drapery,
because, although admirable when looked
at in front, it made some trifling lump or
point which looked bad at the side. Such
is the reality of a good symphony or a
good statue ; and such is the labour which
even genius cannot dispense with in its
production. This is the reality, and this
is what association immediately proceeds
to mar.
The symphony is being performed ; and
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 49
as, bit by bit, is unfolded that complicated
pattern of sounds ; as passage follows pas-
sage, whose invention may have been a
flash of genius, whose arrangement an
agony of long unsuccessful effort, you (t
mean mankind in general, presumably in-
cluding myself) who are perhaps the mere
unproductive aesthete, sit blandly, a plea-
sant noise of music soothing or gently
stirring your nerves, letting your mind fill
(like a leaky boat) with vague thoughts
and emotions. The sough of wind among
pines, the smell of the forest ; the sheen
of the sunset on the sea; your dead or
distant friends ; the soul, its peregrinations
through infinity, love, and death (after Burne
Jones or Solomon) leading or snaring it,
on the way whither ? to the paradise of
Fra Angelico, the pink and blue Jerusalem,
shimmering among the gilded meadows,
or rather to the whirlpool of atoms, the
viewless seas and skies of Nirvana. Mean-
while things have been going by : happy
VOL. i. 4
50 JUVENILIA.
movements and combinations ; things gone
in a second, but, remembering which in
moments of dishearten ment, the poor com-
poser may have smiled, and the smile may
have meant : " There is genius in me after
all." These things have gone by : past
your mind, your pampered soul, noticed
about as much as the long cricket notes
through a summer evening's talk ; the
crackling of the fire during the composition
of your last poem a poem, I would wager,
upon the power of music.
Similarly with the statue, one glance, just
taking in the general aspect, perhaps another
to see how well the stone is cut ; and then
you contemplate the work with that vague
stare which sees nothing ; you think of the
hero's life, and of his mighty battle-shout,
of his tears over his fallen comrade. Of
the waves on the Trojan shore, the clear
night over the plain dotted with watch-
fires ; the youth of mankind Socrates,
Sappho, the brutal Roman praetors, and
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 51
a whole Panathenaic procession of imper-
tinent associations. Meanwhile the marble
stands before you, neither fighting, nor
shouting, nor weeping; with no waves or
watch-fires near him, and no consciousness
of the youth of mankind ; a mere comely,
naked body, with a wisp of drapery over
the arm, and no personality save in the
name graven on the pedestal, a name
snatched at on its first suggestion by the
friend whom the sculptor has asked, " Now,
what is this to be called? " Thus poor in
sentimental or psychological qualities, but
rich with a hundred beauties of line and
curve and boss ; of light expanded here,
and imprisoned and fretted there ; of chisel
grainings, delicate like sea sand ; of bold
point-strokes, vigorously marking off" bone
or sinew ; things, all these, which make up
the complete reality of the work ; things
over which the artist may have half broken
his heart; and with the vaguest general
impression of which you depart, persuaded
52 JUVENILIA.
that you alone have appreciated the statue,
and ready to write (as Winckelmann, who,
however, really saw the good points of a
statue, used to do) that this masterpiece is
altogether moulded out of the most subtle
abstract ideas, is, in short, the perfect em-
bodiment of the shapeless.
And this, all this has been the doing of
association ; a rare and beautiful thing has
been within our spiritual reach, and we have
not cared to stretch out to grasp it. The
genius and patience, the labour of months,
nay, rather of years, of all the previous years
of the artist and of those from whom he
learned, expended to give us an exquisite
and exotic pleasure ; all this has been
wasted, wasted as stupidly and ungratefully
as would be v/asted the precious fruit
brought with infinite care from other
climates, of which some captious child
might say, after a bite, " Thank you, I
prefer the unripe apples I can pick up in
the orchard."
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 53
What has become of my desire for jus-
tice, of my plans of dealing equitably
by saying all the good I could think of,
while thinking all the ill that could be
thought of this abominable faculty of as-
sociation ? I had determined to write an
apology, nay, a panegyric, and, instead, I
have written a diatribe ; the mere name of
association has made me acrimonious ; acri-
monious, but, you cannot deny it, just;
because this association really is ...
Well, yes ; that is just the tantalizing
thing about association : the more I examine
into its workings, the more malignant it
appears. And yet, when I am not trying
to reason it out, to do justice all round, a
great number of things do come into my
head illustrative of the beneficial effect ;
yes, indeed, the beneficial effect, I may
even (strange as it may sound) go to the
length of saying, the absolutely indis-
pensable character of this faculty of asso-
ciation in our aesthetic perceptions. You
54 JUVENILIA.
think this an absurdity ? You think
association can be but detrimental in our
relations to art ? Well (how idiotic one's
own arguments do sound when some one
else is using them against one, to be sure !)
I am of opinion that without association
there would be no relations to art ; nay, no
art at all. You smile? You say (what I
somehow said myself, and now I can't
make it square any longer) that as the
action of opposition is that of a wave, an
allusion of all manner of chaotic thoughts
and impressions washing over the definite
artistic forms which are settling in our
mind ; it is evident that the definite artistic
forms run the risk of being completely ob-
literated. That seems to you conclusive :
good ; that is the very reason why the
action of opposition is indispensable to the
appreciation, nay, to the creation of artistic
form. You have compared the action of
association to that of a wave carrying
innumerable heterogeneous odds and ends
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 55
of thought and impression. As such, in
my turn, I claim it as the action which
is for ever making the firm soil of our
mind ; by collecting round the microscopic
present all the floatsam of the past, the
action which is perpetually preventing the
sea of constantly undulating experiences,
atoms of sensation and reflection for ever
changing place like the drops in the ocean,
from reabsorbing everything which might
become a permanently existing idea, a
definite emotion, a solid form. The float-
sam, the bits of triturated imagery and
feeling (already soaked and battered into
something unlike their original nature) may
be brought in too great abundance ; and
the wave may carry too much of that
strange sea froth of sentiment, a thing
neither solid nor fluid, and which fast im-
prisons and dooms to never-ending float-
ing and tossing everything that it once
encloses; and thus a something, perhaps
rare and precious, may go for ever churned
$6 JUVENILIA.
about among the floatsam and the sea froth,
until, rotting, it become mere sea froth it-
self. The wave of association may deprive
us ever and anon of some addition to the
little islet of wisdom and beauty of our
lives; but had there not been that wave
tossing the past to the present, no solid
wisdom or beauty, nay, no individuality of
ourselves would have existed at all. This
is a metaphor ; you object, and there is no
nonsense so great as not to be made most
judicious by metaphorical presentation.
Then I will drop the metaphor, and speak
the dry language of fact (so often making
us lose those sudden revelations of analogy
which flash upon us in metaphor). With-
out association, I say, no art. In the first
instance, every modern psychologist who
has studied the origin of our aesthetic
faculties, will tell you that one half, and
that in far more complex, of the instinc-
tive preferences which are the rudiments
of all our aesthetic feelings, is referable,
tHE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 57
not like the simpler kind of such rudi-
mentary instincts of beauty, to the greater
physical comfort which the eye and ear
experiences in the perception of certain
relations of colour and sound ; but to the
habit, due to the experience of our remotest
half-human progenitors, of associating ma-
terial pleasure, safety, or usefulness with
certain aspects rather than with others.
Were we to seek the reasons why a strong
and healthy human body of our own race
gives us a general sense of beauty which
we should not receive from a deformed
negro, we should find that the single
elements of line, curve, and tint were
probably not, in the one case, more agree-
able to our nerves of sight than in the
other case ; we should probably discover
that the selfsame lines, curves, and tints
were contained in a great number of other
objects of which we should call some ugly
and others beautiful ; and that we must
consequently seek the explanation of the
4*
58 JUVENILIA.
sense of beauty connected with the one
figure, and of ugliness connected with the
other, in the practical generalization made
thousands of years ago, that a body formed in
one way was useful and agreeable, and formed
in another way useless and cumbersome;
in the contempt, moreover, and the sus-
picious loathing with which savages of a
slightly superior race would look upon
other savages of a slightly inferior race,
their slaves or enemies. The original
motive of preference has been obliter-
ated by centuries; just as for years we
may forget the original circumstance which
directed us to the occupation or friendship
which has been the all in all of our Jives ;
but the result of the act of association
which took place in ancestors living per-
haps before what we call Europe was
turned into ice fields ; the instinct of pre-
ference, the habit of pleasure, have become
part and parcel of our nature. Thus, you
see, there would never have been any
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 59
works of art or any people to appreciate
them; nay, there would not have been
such faculties as perceive and create the
beautiful, had it not been for this same
much abused faculty of association. Why
did our apelike progenitors enjoy the ap-
pearance of a green tree with white blos-
soms which did not bear eatable fruit,
because they remembered the greenness
of leaf and whiteness of blossom of a tree
which did bear eatable fruit? Why did
they not limit their likings to the real,
but go loving one thing for the sake of
another; the present for the sake of the
past ? They were sentimental and quite
deficient in intellectual discipline. But, alas !
had they been less maundering and more
logical we should have had no Raphael,
no Michael Angelo ; we should care to
see only the things we can eat. All that,
you answer, is perfectly true ; but that
happened a long time ago ; that associa-
tion was useful in our remotest ancestors
60 JUVENILIA.
is not a reason that it should be desirable
in us. After all, men and women, in early
times, lived in caves and on posts in lakes;
and had they refused to do so, the human
race would have come to an end, and we
should not be here to live in houses. But
is that a reason why we also should go and
live in caves or on posts in a lake ? Thus
you, chafing my spirit more and more by
repeating arguments which are my own,
and which I detest proportionately.
I continue.
But as there are cave and lake homes
which our ancestors did well to inhabit,
and there are also houses which it is
fit we should live in, so also are there
modes of association which were useful
in our ancestors ; and different, much
more modern modes of association which
it would be as fatal for us to regret,
as for us to be too grand to live under
roofs, and insist upon establishing our-
selves on floating cirrus clouds. I have
THE LAKE Ot CHARLEMAGNE. 6t
compared the action of association to that
of the wave which brings to the nucleus
of solid earth all the floating things which
can make soil. Now, do you know what
makes our mind, our experience, our
genius ?
Do you think that we perceive, much
less remember, the totally unknown ? Not
a bit of it ; we merely constantly recognize
the already familiar ; what we catch hold of
with our mind is not that which is new,
which belongs to to-day ; but that which is
old, and belongs to yesterday : the diffe-
rent, the new, we take in, tolerate, enjoy,
only later. We wander, as it were, through
a vast and populous city ; those that we
notice and speak to are our old acquaint-
ance ; but the old acquaintance introduce
new ones, whom we admit for their sake.
Nay, if we sometimes look twice upon the
face of a stranger, if we accost a man of
whom we have no knowledge, it is because
in the face, the gait, the manner of that
62 JUVENILIA.
stranger, we have recognized something of
the face, the gait, and the manner of some
one we have known before ; and if, later,
we come to love the new friend for qualities
in which he differs wholly from the old one,
we must not forget that we cared for him
at first merely for the things by which he
reminded us of that other.
Thus does association gather the past to
the present, assimilating for ever new im-
pressions to old ones. Within the mind of
all men for whom or through whom the
beautiful exists, there has thus come to exist
a perpetual coming and going, submerging
and rising to the surface of fragments of
thought, and feeling, and perception ; a
chaotic whirl of atoms, of broken-down
fragments of works of art, of shreds dyed
with some strange sky or wave tint of
nature, of mere imperfect silhouettes, and
of most heterogeneous dabs of colour ;
moreover, faces and voices of persons,
branches of trees, bars of melody, snatches
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. j
of verse, little shreds of mysterious and
momentary feelings, of love and hate and
hopefulness and sorrow : a perfect witches'
caldron full, and seething like a witch broth,
each atom seeking the atoms most akin to
itself, uniting with them, but usually to be
swept back again into the common whirl.
Every now and then a curious phenomenon
takes place. Whether from the accident of
a greater than usual homogeneousness in
these seething atoms, or from the accident
of some unusually great heat or pressure
exercised upon them, or from any other
similar cause that you can think of, there
arise in this chaos agglomerations which
are no longer chaotic ; there appear in this
constant change things which are stable,
mere bubbles at first, but gaining solidity
and definiteness every moment ; until at
length they can actually be removed out of
the heterogeneous and never-resting whirl,
and be known not merely by him in whose
brain they have arisen, but by others also.
64 JUVENILIA.
And these things, arisen out of the chaos
of elements brought together by association,
nay, separated from that seething mass, and
united with other separating fragments by
the power of that very association again,
these things are what we call forms : pictures,
symphonies, works of art. And there is
no stranger thought than that of the great
unused, disorderly mass of sights, sounds,
feelings, and thoughts, whose existence is
proved by the production of certain definite
works, and which every artist has carried
with him, unused, into his grave. Oh, for
a glimpse into that splendid and inestimable
chaos out of which have issued the works
of Shelley, of Mozart, of Raphael ; for a
glimpse into the crepuscular places where
thronged the dim shapes from among whom
Michael Angelo called forth his sullen
goddesses and prophets; into the unsub-
stantial, fluctuating crowd whence Shake-
speare evoked Miranda, and Portia, and
Romeo, and Lear ; or into those untrodden
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 65
and intangible woods and dells whence
Keats bade Endymion guide his chariot.
Empty and impossible desires ; yet not
so empty, not so cruelly impossible as the
desire, the longing of those in whose mind
things of beauty and dignity are for ever
turning, are for ever seeming to unite and
take shape, merely to fall asunder, and be
absorbed once more into chaos.
Thus much for the part played by asso-
ciation in the actual production of beautiful
things. Let us see now what is its share in
the enjoyment of them. How great this is
I realized, perhaps fully, only this summer ;
realized it not only by a mere rilling up of
an empty present by a rich past, as in the
case of the Rhineland experience which I
have told you of; but by suddenly feeling
the vivid present accompanied, like some
clear melody, by the fainter but fuller har-
monies of the past. I had just returned to
England, and was walking one morning
across one of our south country commons,
66 JUVENILIA.
all mottled yellowish with tender-sprouting
bracken, and rusty, inky green with gorse,
and all a-chirrup with young larks. It was
of all things the most opposed to the hills,
misty grey with olive, the fields all a yellow
shimmer of pale green vines and wheat, the
diaphanous tints, the sharp but unsubstan-
tial forms of Tuscany, whence I had just
come ; and it filled me with a sense like that
of breathing suddenly a wholly different air,
of moving in a different element, as those
must feel who rise in a balloon, or dive
down deep under water. Folds on folds
of green undulation, strips of grass and
common enclosed by round trees, and
tightened, shrunk by distance, till the
horizon is nothing but treetops upon tree-
tops, monotonous in line, for ever the same
shape, yet varied, painted by distance into
a whole scale of various greens, from the
brilliant pure green of the grass under foot,
through all manner of yellowish tints and
pale brown, of scarce mature or nipped
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 67
leaf, to the pure grey, nay, rather blue, of
the horizon. There is about that country
a great sense of dim and attractive distance,
not, as in other places, of beautiful delect-
able mountains which our fancy vainly
seeks to scale, but rather of a possibility,
nay, a necessity, of our imagination going
on for ever through that easily walked
sweetness. Yet, under the grey sky,
moister even in its little rifts of blue and
its white vapours, moistest, perhaps, in its
gleams of sun (which is colour, but not
light), which are yellow from the blackness
surrounding, this country is not without
a certain dreariness and austerity, in the
brown and rusty tones of the gorse, of the
thinned trees, the blighted hedges, and of
the seeded reed clumps ; most of all in the
damp chilliness of the air and sky. Walk-
ing across this common, I was struck by
something which reminded me of Brittany,
and immediately Brittany came before me
Brittany, with its resemblances and dif-
68 JUVENILIA.
ferences ; with those same folds of blue-
green treed horizon, those same patches
of sombre, tarnished rusty gorse. Again,
Brittany, with the yellow earth of its lanes,
the yellow stubble (the straw being cut at
only half length) under the apple trees of
its high-lying fields, with the long rows of
tall rustling poplars, nested with mistletoe,
along the roads, with the beautiful grey
fcatheriness of thatch of its farms and
gentilhommieres. Brittany thus came back,
seemed to exist side by side, as a kind of
bass to the melody of the really existing
present, filling up all gaps, strengthening
and softening, making complete the plea-
surableness of that English scene. Noticing
this, and thinking over it later, it came
home to me that in our perceptions of
nature and of art there usually exists a kind
of phantom of the past, omitting which,
we enjoy in a less poignant way (a sort of
thrumming accompaniment or set of chords)
the resemblances and diversities between
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 69
which and the present occasion a sort of
half-unconscious pleasure, nay, the past
may exist only in the condition of a har-
monic, a sound which we do not disentangle
at all in our impressions, but which still
forms part of them, marking, by a recog-
nition of some distant and past thing, the
qualities of the present. For the present
is in itself, however vivid, too transient and
thin ; like a single bright coat of colour, it
requires, in order to remain, a layer or two
of the past, unseen, perhaps, but which
gives it body, and tone, and stability. Nay,
but for this intervention of the past should
we perceive the beautiful things of the
present, its patterns of lines, and colours,
and sounds, in a way more satisfactory than
that in which we perceive a single note,
or the taste of a fruit, or the warmth of a
cloak ? There are persons, and many, who,
going through a picture gallery which is
new to them, or walking through a new
country, will frequently complain of a sort of
7O JUVENILIA,
painful sense that their minds cannot take
in new things sufficiently quickly. Now,
if you question such people, you will
almost invariably find that they have only
confused and very general impressions
about the galleries and countries which they
have previously visited. They compare
their brain to a thoroughly soaked sponge,
which can absorb no more water. But
their simile is false ; they suffer not because
there is too much past to admit the present,
but because they have not enough of that
many tinted though faded tapestry of the
past, into which to weave, to secure them,
the brilliant threads of the present.
These are the benefits which we obtain
in our aesthetic life from association ; nay,
this constant adding of old to new is our
esthetic life itself. Sometimes even one
might wish that this life were slower, that
impressions were fewer and further between;
that one might enjoy to the full the pleasure
of going over one's odd impressions, of
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. Jl
noting the ever-changing and fantastic effects
of this embroidery of new and old, of the
dimmed thread of years and years ago, shot
with the vivid purple or starlet of yester-
day. The fact is that our assthetic life is
too crowded or huddled ; we have too
many arts, too many schools of literature
of all times and nations, and we properly
enjoy (not even in the present impression,
and certainly not in the past) none of them.
We are like the inhabitants of certain re-
mote villages in the south of Italy, who,
until roads were made in the last century,
were unable to export their products and
unable also to consume them. We want
all our casks and barrels for the new wine,
the terrible new wine which seems to be
made, not once a year, but once a month,
nay, once a week ; and we have to empty
out into the gutters, like so much stale
water, the mellow, the delicate vintage of
previous years.
There now I see you laughing. Laugh-
72 JUVENILIA.
ing, I suppose, because after having found
it so very, very difficult to say one good
word for association, I have now made not
only an apology, but a panegyric, and that
the only drawback I can find is that we
cannot so fully enjoy all the benefits of this
pestilent faculty. Is that it ? Well, I
always told you that the very disagreeable-
ness of my position arose from the sense
that so much good as well as so much harm
could be said of association, and that I
wanted to state both. Besides, after all, is
it of association itself that I have spoken ill ;
or is it not rather of the stupid wastefulness
of those who indulge in it out of place ?
Association, I have said, makes art, makes
our capacity of enjoying it ; nay, makes our
minds. Now are we not balking the very
end and aim of association when, in order
to enjoy its action in ourselves, we neglect
its works ? Is it not, whenever we let our
thoughts wander in the presence of a picture
or during the hearing of a symphony, as if
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. jj
we were to refuse to let a poet read us his
verses because we found his conversation so
full .of poetic charm ? Yes, indeed, it is
not association which is pestilent ; it is our
own conceit, our own stupidity, our own
want of self-command.
Very self-contradictory. That is your
verdict upon me ; and it is useless, I sup-
pose, to answer, cf Where is the contradic-
tion in saying that fire under some circum-
stances keeps us alive, and under certain
others most effectually puts an end to us ? "
I have said too much harm to be permitted
to say much good ; that is always what this
just world will not tolerate. Well, then,
to be consistent, if possible, at least in the
beginning and in the end of my remarks,
I will mention a trick sometimes practised
by association, and from which you per-
chance may have suffered, even as did the
Emperor Charlemagne, whose melancholy
tale is told by Petrarch in his epistles and
elsewhere, but best of all by old Burton.
VOL. i. 5
74 JUVENILIA.
f< He foolishly doted," we read in the
second volume of the Cf Anatomy," " upon
a woman of mean favour and condition,
many years together ; wholly delighting in
her company, to the great grief and indig-
nation of his friends and followers. When
she was dead he did embrace her corpse as
Apollo did the bay tree for his Daphne,
and caused her coffin (richly embalmed
and decked with jewels) to be carried about
with him, over which he still lamented.
At last a venerable bishop that followed
his Court pray'd earnestly to God (com-
miserating his lord and master's case) to
know the true cause of this mad passion,
and whence it proceeded ; it was revealed
to him, in fine, that the cause of the em-
peror's mad love lay under the dead
woman's tongue. The bishop went hastily
to the carkas, and took a small ring thence;
upon the removal, the emperor abhorred
the corpse, and instead of it, fell furiously
in love with the bishop ; he would not
THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 75
suffer him to be out of his presence.
Which, when the bishop perceived, he
flung the ring into the midst of a great
lake, where the king then was. From
that hour the emperor, neglecting all his
other houses, built a fair house in the midst
of the marsh, to his infinite expense, and
a temple by it where after he was buried,
and in which city ail his prosperity ever
since used to be crowned." Thus the
legend of Aix la Chapelle ; and to Petrarch,
to Burton, to all our wonder-greedy fore-
fathers, the tale seemed marvellous and
eery. But, alas ! are we not most of us
in the same case as Burton's emperor ?
Have we not, many of us at least, some
strange lake, which to others is a mere fiat
swampy pond, into which the charmed ring
of association, taken from off some loved
thing, has been, we know not why, cast?
Even as the emperor did, so we also sit and
stare into the shallow grey waters ; and the
moving cloud reflections seem to gather
76 JUVENILIA.
into familiar shapes, and the reeds moaning
and creeking as they sway, and the languid,
sleepy water lapping dully as it eats into the
green, crumbling, spungy ground, have
accents which almost bring the tears into
our eyes ; and we look into the dim water
and strain to see the bottom : for in the
bottom of our marsh pond, cur dreary
pool, without trees, or bushy banks or
reflected hills, our shallow sheet of water
spilt on to the desolate plain, lies the charm,
the ring, the potent mysterious something
which we shall never see, but always long
for. And the fault here belongs to asso-
ciation. But I must end, for I wished to
conclude with a word more of the evil of
this faculty ; and unless I stop at once I
may catch myself (but too late) saying that
perhaps after all such a Charlemagne's lake
may be a blessing.
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA
LEMMI.
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA
LEMMI.
WOODEN frame thick overlaid with
paste of sulphur applied to the face
of the frescoes ; the bricks deftly cut into,
sawed, picked away from behind ; the
sulphur paste frame with adhering painted
plaster pulled away from the broken,
picked, jagged old wall ; a second frame-
work covered with wet gypsum applied to
the back of each thin sheet of frescoed
plaster; sulphur paste delicately peeled off
the painted surface of the plaster, the back
of which remains adhering to, encased in,
the gypsum ; that is the operation. A
new back has been substituted for the old
8O JUVENILIA.
wall; and the frescoes are intact, unspotted,
safe, framed, portable, ready for the wooden
cases of the packers, the seals of the officials,
the van of the railway, the criticism of the
experts, the gape of the public. Civiliza-
tion has driven before it even dead art,
even art faded to a ghost ; and the pictures
which some four hundred years ago Ales-
sandro Botticelli painted in one of the back
rooms of the little villa- farm outside
Florence, are now upon the wall of the
grand staircase of the Louvre.
This is what they have just done, and
this is what gives me annoyance. Now, I
sincerely think that I am quite without any
morbid aesthetic aversion against modern
times and modern arrangements: I often feel
how much nobler in many ways- of generous
thought and endeavour, which we sniff at
because it has become commonplace, is this
prosaic age of ours than many another with
which we associate ideas of romance ; I
sometimes even feel a doubt whether in
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 8 1
several branches of art itself, in its most
delicate branch of poetry, these modern
times have not given and are not giving
o o o
work more completely beautiful than the
work of times with more pretensions to
poetry and picturesqueness. I cannot
therefore suspect myself of morbid aversion
to modern things and actions. Yet this
particular modern action of removing the
frescoes from the Villa Lemmi leaves in me
a strong, though at first somewhat inarticu-
late, sense of dissatisfaction. It may be
right, this instinctive and vague feeling of
displeasure, or it may be wrong, but any
way there it is ; and my present object is
exactly to discover whether this is a selfish
and sentimental personal crotchet, or a
well-founded and honest conviction. This
is what I wish to do ; and in order to
do it, let me separate from one another
the various impressions of the past, the
various expectations of the future ; let me
place in some sort of intelligible order the
5*
82 JUVENILIA.
fragments of scarce conscious argument,
which taken together make up or produce
the vaguely painful sense that comes over
me every time I remember the removal
of those paintings from that place.
The first question which I hit upon in
this ransacking of my consciousness, is one
in which the explanation of the whole
matter may possibly lie. The question is
simply whether the removal of those paint-
ings from one locality to another deprives
me of a particular kind of pleasure, de-
pendent for me upon the presence of these
individual frescoes, in the same manner as
the departure of a friend to some other
country would deprive me of an analogous
kind of pleasure obtainable only from the
presence of an individual friend who has
gone away. This seems a likely enough
explanation, but I do not think it is in
any way the true one. There are, indeed,
there must be to every one, a certain
small number of works of art which
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 83
are very much what to each of us is a cer-
tain small, very small number of friends ;
certain books or passages in books, certain
pictures or statues, certain pieces of music,
never to be able to read which again, to see
again or hear once more, would be at the
moment of first knowing that these things
must be, a sharp pain, and with the passing
of time, a sort of vague and dull nostalgia,
coming ever and anon in moments of weak-
ness and depression, like the hopeless long-
ing for a face we can see only through a
shifting mist of years, for a voice whose
tone we can evoke for only one scarcely
perceptible instant. Such works of art
there must be for all to whom art is any-
thing, although there can be but few from
which we can thus be wholly and utterly
separated ; since a poem, a picture, a piece
of music, are things whose identity can be
almost indefinitely multiplied, not things,
like friends, which live but once and only
in one place. But among such things for
84 JUVENILIA.
me are not those frescoes, nay, not any
work of Botticelli. There are personal
sympathies in art as in all things, harmonies
more or less complete between certain
works and certain minds ; and Botticelli is
to me one of those incompleter harmonies.
Not but that I appreciate him : that I
could, I think, weigh his merits fairly
enough if fairness of judgment were the
question, and not personal sympathy. I
know him well, familiarly ; but he is as
one of those persons whom you are for ever
meeting without ever especially seeking,
familiar from sheer habit, perhaps justly
enough appreciated for what they are ; one
of those people who never give you the
satisfaction either of thoroughly liking or
thoroughly disliking them, and who at the
same time will not permit you to grow
indifferent : suddenly charming you, when
you are ill-disposed to them, with a look, a
turn of the head, an intonation of the voice,
and the next time as suddenly leaving you
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 85
dissatisfied, rubbing you the wrong way ;
till the perpetual alternation of liking and
not liking, of agreeable surprise and dis-
heartening disappointment grows mono-
tonous, is foreseen ; and yet even then the
satisfaction of utter indifference is still
maliciously withheld, for every now and
then there unexpectedly gleams out that
look, there vibrates that intonation which
charms you, which annoys you, which
drags you back again into the routine of
surprised pleasure, disappointment, mono-
tony, wearying, and yet too soon inter-
rupted to become indifferent, This is how
the matter stands between me and Botti-
celli ; he is more sympathetic and less
unsympathetic to me by far than certain of
his fellow- workers, but with them I know
exactly how much I shall like, how much I
shall dislike ; and with him, never. No,
not even in the same painting. I am
m^de capricious by his capriciousness; I am
never in tune, always too high or too low
86 JUVENILIA.
for him. I always catch myself thinking
of this, that, or the other of his works ;
nay, of the abstract entirety of them all,
differently from how I felt when last time
I actually was in their presence, from how
I shall feel when I actually am in their pre-
sence again. Oh the woebegone Madonnas,
lanky yet flaccid beneath their bunched-up
draperies, all tied in the wrong places, nay,
rather strangely ligatured with coloured
tapes into strange puffs and strange waists ;
Madonnas drooping like overblown lilies,
yet pinched like frostbitten rosebuds, crea-
tures neither old nor young, with hollow
cheeks and baby lips, not consumed by the
burning soul within like Perugino's hectic
saints, but sallow, languid, life-weary with
the fever which haunts the shallow lakes,
the pasture-tracts of Southern Tuscany ;
seated with faces dreary, wistful, peevish,
gentle, you know net which, before their
bushes of dark-red roses, surrounded by
their living hedges of seraph children, with
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 87
faces sweet yet cross like their own faces
too large, too small, which ? with massive
jaws of obstinacy and vague eyes of dreami-
ness. Madonnas who half drop their babes
in sudden sickening faintness, Christ children
too captious and peevish even to cry ; poor
puzzled, half-pained, half-ravished angels ;
draperies clinging and flying about in all
directions ; arms twining, fingers twitching
in inextricable knots ; world of dissatisfied
sentiment, of unpalatable sweetness, of
vacant suggestion, of uncomfortable grace-
fulness, of ill-tempered graciousness, world
of aborted beauty and aborted delightful-
ness, created, with infinite strain and dis-
couragement, by the Florentine silversmith
painter, hankering vainly after the perfect
elegance and graciousness, the diaphanous
sentiment of Umbria, and trying to turn
the stiff necks and bend the stolid heads of
the strong and ugly models of Filippino,
Verrocchio, and Ghirlandajo ; to twine and
knot the scarves and draperies on their
00 JUVENILIA.
thick-set bodies, to make solitary and con-
templative passion burn in their matter-of-
fact and humorous faces, as all such things
could be only in the delicate, exquisite,
morbid Umbrian boys and women of Peru-
gino. No, this world, thus wearisomely
elaborated by Sandro Botticelli, has no
attraction for me ; it is all bitter, insipid,
like certain herbs and the juice pressed out
of them ; I fail to see the charm, I recog-
nize the repulsion. And yet, even as I
write, there crowds into my mind a certain
swarm of angels, of eager, earnest, pale
young faces, with wavy hair streaked with
gold threads, and sweet lips, of which you
feel that through them pass clear and fresh
choristers' voices, voices which are so vocal,
so unlike pipe, or reed, or string, and yet
which have in their sweetness a something
of the bleating of young sheep, making
them but the sweeter ; there come before
me certain slim, erect, quaint, stag-like
figures, all draped in tissues embroidered
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 89
with roses, and corn, and gilly- flowers, and
others with delicate wreathed tresses droop-
ing on to delicate and infinitely crinkled, half
transparent white veils, and certain others
yet, with slim and delicate arms, curved-in
waists, and slender legs and feet, themselves
wreathed, entwined, swaying like some
twisted sprays of wind-flowers round some
tall and bending wind-shaken reed : 'with
the recollection of them comes a sense of
spring, of trees still yellow with first be-
ginnings of leaf, of meadows with the first
faint dyes of their later dark-yellow and
indigo patternings, of fields green with
corn, and grey with still dry branches, of
warm sun and cold air, and the sweet un-
ripeness of the early year ; and amidst all
this, emerging from this vague tangle of
impressions, a strange face, an erect long
neck, with strange straight joining eye-
brows, and thin curled lips, defiant, laugh-
ing, fascinating, capricious, capriciousness
concentrated, impersonate ; the capricious-
90 JUVENILIA.
ness of the art, of the man, of myself,
the capriciousness which will, if I leave
these phantoms and go once more to the
reality of Botticelli's works, make me meet
again only slim and flaccid Madonnas,
sickly, puling children, and angels all
peevishness and airs and graces.
Such are my individual feelings towards
Botticelli's art, and this incompleteness of
sympathy between the great Florentine who
tried to be an Umbrian and myself or, if
you prefer, my misappreciation of the
peculiar exquisiteness and fascination of his
v/ork must make it clear that my sense of
dissatisfaction at the removal of his two
frescoes from the Villa Lernmi cannot be
due to the fact that in losing them I am
being deprived of something analogous to
the power of seeing and talking with a very
dear friend. Moreover, this Florence in
which I live is full of Botticelli's works,
gocd and bad ; and among those remaining
are paintings of his superior to the frescoes
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 9!
of the Villa Lemmi, and more distinctly
attractive to me than they are. So that
there can be on my part no sense of depri-
vation connected with those two particular
frescoes. And furthermore, I must make
a confession which will help to clear away
any erroneous explanations which may still
be in the way of the correct one ; and that
confession is, that less than two months
hence I shall be in Paris, in the Louvre,
with every opportunity of seeing those two
Botticellis again ; and that together with
the knowledge of this I have the know-
ledge of the fact that being there, in Paris,
in the Louvre, I shall feel no particular
craving to look upon those two frescoes
once more. Nay, I even foresee a certain
avoidance of them ; a something more than
indifference to their being near at hand,
within sight ; an almost repugnance to see
them in their new place. So that I am
obliged to come round again, and seek my
explanation elsewhere. Looking again in
92 JUVENILIA.
my consciousness, the next thing I find is a
very strong impression of the time when I
saw those frescoes first, of the succeeding
visits to them, or rather a vivid group of
impressions which used to be connected in
my mind with the few words <{ the Botti-
cellis at the Villa Lemmi." And as but
very few people who lived in Florence or
came hither even knew of the existence of
these frescoes, discovered not ten years ago,
and still unnoticed by the guide - book
makers and you may happen not to be
among that small number and as, more-
over, it is now a matter of the past ; I
think I had better, in order to understand
myself and be understood, try and give
you an idea of the Villa Lemmi and the
going there.
You followed, for some twenty minutes,
the road towards Sesto Fiorentirio, the
castle of Petraia and the other places which
lie at the foot of the Monte Morello, whose
bleak flanks, shadowing the passing clouds,
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 93
are patterned grey on grey, like some huge
folds of greyish watered silk ; then you
turned off by another high road towards
the old Medicean villa of Careggi, where
Lorenzo died, whose castle-like machicola-
tions and overhanging roof are just visible
among the trees, while behind rise the little
slopes of the Terzolle valley, grey with
olive at the base, dark green and feathery
with pine woods at the top, and all dotted
with white farms and villas. Thus past
one or two villa gates, and then you left
the high road suddenly for a little rough
short cut, with white walls, rudely pat-
terned and overtopped by the whitish olive
branches, on either side ; in front rose,
against a screen of dark cypress plumes, a
little old white house, with heavily grated
windows and a belvedere tower, opened out
into a delicate pillared loggia, whence the
pigeons swooped in flocks into the adjacent
fields. That was Villa Lemmi. But you
passed the old doorway, surmounted by th
94 JUVENILIA.
stone escutcheon of Albizi or Tornabuoni, I
know not which, and knocked at a wooden
door, which being opened, a peasant woman
or a little bare-legged brat led you into a
kind of farmyard. Past the big mulberry-
tree just yellowing into leaf, and the rose
and currant bushes ; under the stable arch-
way, by the side of the dark cowshed,
whence came lowing sounds and scent of
hay and dairy ; through a yard where the
lemon- trees stood in big earthen jars, and
the linen hung over the grass on the drying
lines ; and thence into the cool, dark,
cloistered court of the villa a court whose
brick pavement was patterned with yellow
and greenish lichen, and in which one's
steps sounded drearily ; but where the farm
maid was drawing water out of the well in
the centre, and the farm children were
swinging on ropes from the pillars, making
the arches resound with laughter and
screams. On the first floor a narrow para-
peted balcony ran round one side of this
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 95
court, and along this you followed the
peasant woman clattering in her wooden
clogs, with two or three little brown boys
and girls, with broad little faces running
into a sudden point, and hair cropped or
tightly tied in a top-knot, like the children
who sing and play, kick their legs and en-
twine their arms in Luca della Robbia's
choir parapet high-reliefs. Then up a
sudden step, a narrow door unlocked, and
you entered a small, low room, the former
scullery of the villa, where, about ten years
ago, some kitchen-maid scraping at the wall
with her knife laid bare a sudden patch of
paint, a shot purple and red bit of drapery,
a gold-streaked lock of hair ; till, scraping
well and iil, they scraped into existence two
unguessed frescoes, and out of existence
perhaps two for ever lost ones. Of the
two frescoes, now in a very different place,
the one shows four young women, advan-
cing in hesitating and faltering procession,
long, slender, with doubled-girdled, puffing
96 JUVENILIA.
garments, green and mauve and white ; and
sweet, soft wistful young heads, vacil-
lating, pouting red lips, and vague, shy
grey eyes and loosened light hair, giving I
know not what, perhaps some effaced
flower, dropping it, with dainty, supple-
wristed hands, into a folded cloth held by
one dressed in the straight, stiff, fold less
russet skirt of a Florentine matron ; to the
back a half rubbed out portico, a many
jetted fountain ; and to the side a little
curly brown boy with iridescent wings
holding an obliterated escutcheon ; the
whole closed in by a group of pointed
pillarets half covered with plaster. The
second fresco represents a company of
damsels, in richly-hued antique garb, seated
in a circle in a laurel grove ; their garments
once delicately embroidered with threads of
gilding. One holds a globe ; another,
large featured like a statue and of bronzed
complexion, rests an architect's square upon
her shoulder ; below reclines another with a
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 97
hand organ and a tambourine ; on a raised
throne in the middle sits a half-veiled lady-
holding a bow. Towards her, into this
goodly company of sciences and arts, a
nymph, a muse, with loosened yellow hair
and wistful pointed face, is leading the
young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,
stately yet timid ; a noble and charming
figure in scholar's gown of blue and purple
shot silk, his fair long hair combed neatly
from under a scarlet cap ; a sweet and
thoughtful face, thin and pale, with high
arched nose and pale eyes, under much-
curved, fanciful brows ; a something be-
tween the scholar, the saint, and the page
in his demure boyish elegance ; a thing of
courts as well as of the study.
These were the frescoes. One looked
at them ; then, between thus doing, looked
also out of the little window, over the
shimmering olives, the bright green corn,
to where the pines and cypresses of the hill-
side detached their featheriness against the
VOL. i. 6
98 JUVENILIA.
sky, and the white houses and tower of
Fiesole, and its tiers and tiers of villas, rose
high in the distance. And then, when one
had given the last glance to the frescoes,
and the woman had locked the door behind,
one descended into the garden, or farmland ;
where, against the walls of the old villa,
under its bowed-out window gratings, were
spaliered any amount of the delicate May
roses, of intensest pink, and a scent which
made one think of the East, of the rose-
gardens of Pcestum, of the paladin Orlando
filling his helmet with crushed rose-leaves
lest he might hear and be seduced by the
song of the birds in the garden of the en-
chantress Falerina, where the Lamia wound
her green coils through the grass, under
the orchard trees, and the sirens sat and
wove garlands in the clear blue depths of
the lake.
Among the confused general impression
left by many a visit to the frescoes and the
garden, there remains distinct the remem-
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 99
brance of one particular late afternoon of
spring at the Villa Lemmi. Going away
from seeing the frescoes, we stepped on to
the rusty old twisted iron balcony, and
looked out on to the green country, drip-
ping and misty with the afternoon's rain.
A large cherry - tree, its white blossom
thinned by budding leaves, was immediately
below the balcony ; then an expanse of
fresh, bright green corn, bealen down by
the rain, broken by the pale, scarce bud-
ding mulberry-trees, and dotted with farms
and villas, undulating away upwards into
the olive and cypress covered hills of
Careggi ; away, paler bluish, greener, and
bounded like a lake by the blue slopes of
Signa, with here and there a screen of pop-
lars, an isolated black cypress, or a project-
ing square belfry, the sky and sunset
gleaming through its pillars. The sun was
setting ; emerging, round, immense, rayless,
golden, from beneath a bank of vapours,
which gradually rolled aside ; descending,
IOO JUVENILIA.
yellow among livid cloud and blue cold
sky, until it disappeared behind the grey
hills simulating a bank of clouds, or the
clouds piled up in semblance of a ridge of
hills, I know not which, down the Arno ;
leaving, as soon as it had disappeared, a
bright speck, a spark, a glowing ember, on
the top of the cloud hill, which grew and
sent forth red feathery vapours of flame,
turning the light grey cloud which hung
above it, clear on the pale blue sky, into
the flamelit cloud of smoke hanging over a
volcano ; filaments of red flame combed
like hair at the narrow base, solid masses of
turbid smoke - like vapour above. The
ember left by the sun glowed redder and
redder, sending, slowly and gradually, long
yellow rays across the western sky ; the
glow died gradually away ; the white mists
wrapped the foot of the Apennine ; the
volcano red departed slowly from the cloud
hills blue and cold ; only the lower edge of
a grey cloud, wet and distinct above the
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. IOI
high blue sky, still reddened and gilded by
the departed blaze. A great greyness and
dampness and stillness came over every-
thing at last, till the sky remained white
and livid, resting on shoals of heavy
vapours. Even thus, four hundred years
ago, Botticelli may also have watched the
sun set as he left his work in the little quiet
farm villa, before hurrying back to the city,
or sauntering across the fields to the castel-
lated Careggi yonder, where the Magnifi-
cent Lorenzo supped and discussed Plato
and improvised verses about falcon hunts,
comic paladins, or antique nymphs with
Pico and Pulci and Politian.
This sort of impression used to hang to
the words, " the Villa Lemmi Botticellis ; "
words which have now become meaningless,
a mere momentary label, no better than a
mere number, for the two frescoes just set
up in the Louvre. And it is, I think, this
change, this loss, which I vaguely resent
every time I think of the removal of the
IO2 JUVENILIA.
frescoes. Not merely for myself, since
after all I have enjoyed, possessed the past,
am by so much richer than my neighbours.
Not even merely for those who come too
late, to whom the Villa Lemmi will be
unknown and the frescoes no better than
any other paintings in the huge gallery ;
since for such persons will still remain other
places, if not as perfect as the Villa Lemmi,
yet akin to it : convents high among the
barren grey hills overlooking the Sienese
Maremma, where Signorelli and Sodoma
painted while the wind moaned, as it moans
now, through the thick cypresses and the
pines which fill the ravine below Monte
Oliveto ; quiet little scuole of Venice,
where you seek after the long row through
the tortuous canals, after the sad green and
grey and brown streakings of wall and
water, the purple robes and gold-woven
linen, the bronzed faces and auburn heads
of the altar-pieces of Carpaccio and Bellini ;
secluded corners of Norman and Breton
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. IO3
towns, where the cathedral stands, with
delicate thistles and dog-rose and hawthorn
carved in its crumbling grey stone, and
plants as delicate as they, stone pinks and
long-seeded grasses grow in the crannies of
its buttresses and belfry, round which circle
the rooks ; the cornfields and apple-orchards
as near by as the black carved and colon-
naded houses of the town : places where
art still keeps its old, familiar, original
framework of reality, of nature, of human
life. The dissatisfaction with which I am
filled is the dissatisfaction at no one par-
ticular loss, but at a whole tendency whose
result is loss, which consists in wantonly
ridding ourselves of our most precious
artistic possessions ; and of which this
episode of the removal of the Villa Lemmi
frescoes is but one instance among many.
I have said that this modern tendency de-
prives us of our most valuable artistic posses-
sions; and this will doubtless seem rather an
insane speech. For what is the aim of all
1O4 JUVENILIA.
modern efforts (however bungling, perhaps,
in single instances), if not to save from
destruction and to render accessible as
great as possible a proportion of the works
which former artistic times have bequeathed
to us ? Towards this purpose every
cultured nation spends much of its time
and money and brains ; galleries are being
built on all sides, statues are being dug for
wherever any are buried, pictures are being
bought up whenever there are any for sale ;
Vandalism in the shape of defacing restora-
tion or absolute destruction is being watched
for and pounced upon in every place where
it may be suspected ; the whole world is
busy in trying to save whatever artistic
things have been left us by more productive,
but also much more destructive times.
So much for the mere physical, economic,
practical side of the matter. But corre-
sponding with it is a quite extraordinary
intellectual side : an activity, unknown
before our days, in teaching people to
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 105
understand the spirit in which all these
different works of art have been produced,
the historical conditions by which they have
been affected, the whole genealogy and rules
of precedence of schools and artists : art
is not only physically, but intellectually
housed, it is as safe from the imbecile
misinterpretation of former times as it is
from the bullets of former generations of
soldiers, the stones of former generations
of street-boys, the smoke of long-snuffed-
out altar candles. All this is evident,
palpable, irrefutable, and all this means that
mankind is growing daily more anxious to
preserve its artistic properties. Evident,
palpable, irrefutable ; far be it from me to
attempt to disprove it. But there is an
artistic possession more valuable than any
picture, statue, cathedral, symphony, or
poem whatsoever - - indeed, the most
precious artistic property that we possess.
It is the power, the means, the facility, due
to the condition both of our minds and of
6*
]O6 JUVENILIA.
works of art, of assimilating art into life.
Such assimilation means not only the enjoy-
ment at the actual moment of seeing
picture or statue, of hearing poem or
symphony ; but also (what is of more
importance) the wealth of garnered-up
impression which remains to us when the
picture or statue has been long out of sight,
the words of the poem have long been
forgotten, the chords of the symphony have
for years ceased to vibrate. For in the life
of each of us there is, or might be, a sort
of unseen treasury of beautiful things ; we
have the power if we choose of carrying
with us many a precious immaterial thing,
many a tapestry wrought by ourselves out
of the threads, imperishably tinted, taken
from poem or picture, with which we may
deck ourselves when fate leads us into mere
whitewashed mental lodgings, or squalid
moral gaols ; many a beautiful nicknack
of thought or feeling, or fragmentary form,
which remain to us when we are beggared
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI.
of all else ; and again, many a thing which
will enhance the already excellent things,
which will be as unseen lutes or viols with
which to make music through the silent
spring evening meadows, the silent autumn
woods. A great stock of wealth, all con-
tained in a tiny, nay, invisible thing, much
more valuable than any purse of old
Fortunatus : a stock also, and mind this,
of real wealth, not of the mere delusions
with which in our weakness we try some-
times to sweeten our life, the dreams of
passion and worship, to enjoy which we
must waste our precious time in sleep,
merely to wake up poorer and sadder than
before. This we have, or might have ;
and to obtain it we require not merely to
enjoy art superficially, momentarily, but to
assimilate it into our nature, to make its
impressions our own. But this possibility
of assimilation of art into life cannot be
obtained by the mere wishing ; it depends
upon conditions which we can produce, and
IO8 JUVENILIA.
which we can also, and frequently do,
prevent. As recognition means previous
knowledge, so does assimilation mean a
certain homogeneousness between that which
absorbs and that which is absorbed ; and
this seems to be the case far more in
intellectual and moral matters than in mere
physical ones. Completely new impressions
are not perceived, since the very organs of
perception are formed by the repetition of
a but slightly varying act of perceiving ;
the harmonic combinations which seem
most obvious to our ears would probably
have left but a completely muddled impres-
sion on even the most musical of the men
of antiquity. Hence it is that if artistic
impressions are to be assimilated into our
life, there must already exist in our life a
habit of impression akin to those given
wholesale by art ; and also that there must
be in the manner in which artistic impres-
sions are presented to us something familiar,
something analogous to the manner in
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 109
which we obtain the ordinary inartistic
impressions of life. There must, for such
assimilations of art into life, be a rudiment
of art already in life, and a habit of life
still clinging to art.
The rudiment of art exists in our life
from the very nature and origin of art ;
since those instincts which make us appre-
ciate the complex things of art have origi-
nated and developed during our contact
with the things of reality ; we love, in
nature, those lines, colours, shapes, and so
forth, which art later combines for us on a
larger scale ; we love the elements of the
work before the work itself is dreamed of.
Thus the first condition for real artistic
assimilation is already partly fulfilled from
the very origin and history of our artistic
perceptions. And quite of late, in our
own country particularly, there has been a
half-instinctive, half-deliberate attempt at
supplying that much of the necessary
familiarity with beautiful form and colour
IIO JUVENILIA.
which is not provided by the hills and
clouds and trees all about us. For, as
during the best period of Antiquity and
the Middle Ages, with that flower of
theirs which we call the Renaissance, the
extraordinary activity of perception of
form and colour produced not merely the
imperishable works of independent and
useless art, but also a great amount of
beauty in all manner of humble, useful
things ; so, by a sort of reversing of
phenomena, the laboriously acquired ap-
preciation of the qualities of great works
of art has in our time produced among
a minority a greater irritability of artistic
perception, a dissatisfaction with ugliness
in common household properties, which
has made people seek to surround them-
selves no longer with the hideous furniture,
hangings, and utensils of twenty years ago,
but with copies of those of the days when
the sense of beauty which built cathedrals
and painted Sixtine frescoes had its way
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. Ill
also with the meanest chairs and tables
and pots and pans. There are, indeed,
some persons whom a smattering of
modern ideas concerning the spontaneity
of all things has made suspicious and
contemptuous of this sudden preoccupa-
tion about the shapes of chairs and tables,
and the colours of carpets and chintzes ;
and who, because this movement is the
result of deliberate study, and therefore
artificial, predict that it must for this
reason be sterile. But the processes to
which we owe so many now apparently
spontaneous things, transplantation, irri-
gation, cropping, grafting, are all of them
perfectly deliberate and artificial acts ; and
as in point of fact all progress has origi-
nated in a minority, and the sole condition
of its success is that the majority should
be prepared to accept it, I think that this
modern attempt at aesthetic improvement
will certainly result, if not in improving
our own art, at least in making us far
112 JUVENILIA.
more appreciative of the art of other
times. For just as it seems doubtful
whether a person who has always con-
templated with perfect satisfied familiarity
a sofa or wall-paper of hideous design and
abominable colour, will really enjoy in a
statue by Praxiteles or a picture by Titian
design or colour which is beautiful ; so
also is it probable that a person accus-
tomed from childhood to beautiful tones
and colour in the carpet and walls of his
room, will be far more likely to seek in
statue or picture not psychological pro-
blems, historic evidence, or romantic (and
usually utterly gratuitous) suggestion, but
the kind of beauty with which he is familiar
in homely things, and of which these great
works are merely the most splendid de-
velopment. With this desire to introduce
beauty into ordinary things is intimately
connected another tendency of our day, but
which has a moral as well as an artistic bearing
the noble tendency to make beauty acces-
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 113
sible and familiar to every educated person.
Art, when limited to such works as can be
bought only by the very rich, becomes
little better than the concomitant of French
cookery, dresses from Worth, and hideously
set diamonds : an object of ostentatious
luxury ; whereas if only a little of the
artistic power concentrated in such work
could be bestowed upon things of easy mul-
tiplication, small price, and ordinary use,
it would not only bring pleasure into many
lives in which pleasure is as scarce as
flowers in a close, smoky town, but also
train innumerable men and women into
an habitual perception of beauty, without
which they must wander through all the
galleries provided for them by the nation
with mere vacant, unfamiliar wonder, and
leave them as poor of durable artistic im-
pressions as they entered them. There
are, doubtless, many things for which the
writer must always envy the artist, greater
f.-eedorn and charm of impression, and
114 JUVENILIA.
the ineffably delightful sense that he is
reproducing and not merely reminding,
showing and not merely suggesting; yet
the writer has a more than compensating
satisfaction in the thought that if pleasure
he can give at all, he will give it to
thousands of distant, unknown, pleasure-
poor people ; and this sort of feeling can
nowadays, when little is to be done in the
way of public monuments, be got by the
artist only by condescending or in reality
rising to the level of such designing as can
either be largely diffused for household
properties or as can be indefinitely multi-
plied and put within reach of all, as in
illustrations, Christmas cards, toy-books,
and similar humble things. But of this, and
of the far more honourable position occupied
by men like Mr. Randolph Caldecott or Mr.
Walter Crane than by many a fastidious
genius who produces works worthy of Gior-
gione or of Velasquez, in order that they
may grace the smoking-room of an " h "-less
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. I 15
cotton spinner, or the staircase of a Jewish
broker, much more should be said than
I can say in this place.
I let myself be tempted into digression
upon a subject in which the moral dignity
of art, or rather of artists, seems to me
greatly concerned, just at the moment
when I had pointed out that of the two
conditions necessary for the assimilation
of artistic impressions into life, the one,
namely, that the rudimentary perceptions
of form and colour beauty should already
be familiar to us before we go to great art,
was not only partially provided by our
natural surroundings, but further and most
importantly facilitated by the recent move-
ment in favour of giving beauty of form
and colour to the necessaries which sur-
round our daily home life. But there
remains the other condition, whose fulfil-
ment seems to me almost as necessary for
the real absorption of art into life the
condition that there should be in our
Il6 JUVENILIA.
manner of receiving artistic impressions
something analogous to that absence of
strain, that familiarity with which we un-
consciously assimilate the other impressions
of our lives. Now, it so happens that the
tendency of our time is towards rendering
more and more difficult the fulfilment of
this second condition, and that this is due
to that self-same interest in art which has
been so beneficial in beautifying common
things ; by the same droll, but quite ac-
countable, self-contradiction which makes
enthusiasts for old architecture combine to
protect the horrid disfigurement of historic
buildings by the architects of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth century because they
are in terror of the possible disfigurement
thereof by the architects of our own day ;
the protection against modern Vandalism
being freely extended to the Vandal work
of the past. For this comparatively recent
preoccupation about art has, while tending
to surround ordinary men and women with
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. llj
beautiful furniture and accessories, at the
same time induced a perfect habit of re-
moving works of art from their natural
and often beautiful surroundings in order
to place them in a kind of artificial stony
Arabia of vacuity and ugliness. I should
call this the modern gallery-and-concert ten-
dency. We are so horribly afraid that a
picture should get damaged by the smoke
of the candles on the altar whence its
Madonna, seated on her carpeted throne
before the lemon spaliers, and its viol-and-
tute-playing angels rise almost fairy-like
from among the freshly-cut sweet peas and
roses, the scarlet pomegranate, and bright
pink oleander blossoms in the coarse jars
before it ; we are so horribly afraid that
smoke or sacristan (both freely taken into
account by the painter) should possibly
injure this picture, that we hasten to buy
it, new frame it, stick it up under the
glaring light of a gallery, among six dozen
other pictures which either kill or are
IlB JUVENILIA.
killed by it, with perhaps the additional
charm of a plate glass, which reflects the
outlines of the benches and chairs and the
beautiful faces of the gaping or loafing
visitors. And in our fervent appreciation
we thus make it infinitely more difficult
for the work of art to be appreciated.
No, not appreciated ; I have used the
wrong word. We do appreciate our works
of art ; we know all about the filiation of
the schools and the characteristics of the
epoch ; we know, every ignoramus of us,
that, after all, there are only three or four
Leonardos and two Giorgiones in the wide
world, that all the other exquisite things
are <c mere school-work, or by some imi-
tator of the seventeenth century." We
know that we must not let our feelings
cozen us with respect to antiques ; that,
after all, we have only five or six utterly
battered pieces of stone which can be un-
hesitatingly proved to be the statues men-
tioned by Pausanias, all the rest being the
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 119
less talked of the better. All this we
know, and the going to a gallery becomes
daily more like a solemn sitting in judg-
ment or listening to evidence ; we grow
every day more and more appreciative.
But do we enjoy more and more, or less
and less ? Enjoy freely and simply ; let
the impressions sink deiiciously into us ;
keep them clinging to us as the unfading
perfume of certain Eastern essences ? I
think, if we ask ourselves honestly, we
shall find that we do so daily less and less.
We shall find that even as some of our
moments of keenest musical pleasure have
been during the casual hearing, in a church
into which we have strayed, from a window
as we passed along the street, some familiar
melody sung certainly not by Madame
Patti, played certainly not by Joachim
or Rubinstein ; so also the impressions
of full artistic enjoyment are strongest, not
from mornings in the Elgin Room or the
Louvre, but from an hour or so of ram-
120 JUVENILIA.
bling through some old town like Verona,
or Padua, or Siena, where we have found
some picture by Girolamo dai Libri, or
Moroni, or Sodoma isolated over an altar,
in the place, among the cheap finery, the
tarnished finery, in the solitude and silence
for which it was painted by its artist.
But we are too persuaded of the aw-
ful value of art to leave it where it can
be quietly enjoyed ; instead of letting it
crumble into vague impressions which are
the rich and fruitful soil of our mind,
we like to embalm art, to mummify it
splendidly, to let it grow into a useless,
utterly inorganic, unassimilated piece of
grandeur. The fact is that instead of
considering a fine statue or picture or piece
of music as something very akin, in mode
of impressing us and value, to a fine group
of trees, or a fine sheet of water, or
a fine cluster of clouds, we have con-
tracted an almost unconscious but in-
tensely strong habit of considering such
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 121
things from an historical, scientific, state-
record point of view : as a papyrus of
Pharaoh or a prepared cobra in a glass
jar. Hence we have for our artistic heir-
looms scruples exactly like those we should
have about such scientific grimcracks. If
a papyrus is incomplete, we do not set
our learned men to patching it ; and if a
statue is hideously mutilated, we do not
let our artists restore it ; entirely over-
looking the fact that the only value of
the papyrus is in the authenticated facts
it hands down from antiquity, whereas the
only value of the statue is the beauty
which that unrepaired mutilation may easily
have marred. I am far from thinking
that the Renaissance was right in having
modern arms given to figures which had
quite balance and completeness enough
without such restorations ; I am thinking
at present of the question of noses and
their absence ; and I am well aware that
I shall be set down as an utter Vandal
VOL, i. 7
122 JUVENILIA.
for suggesting the mere question whether
the worst restoration is not a less barbarity
for us to inflict than the deliberate con-
demnation of some noble antique head to
continue for ever a partial eyesore ? Yet,
feeling myself already a Vandal, I am
hardened to the accusation, and I put
forward my suggestion, which is as fol-
lows : No modern nose could disfigure
or alter an antique head one-millionth part
as much as that hideous wound (as in our
lovely Demeter of the British Museum)
which not only alters the whole relations
of the features and distorts the most
beautiful face by its unseemly rough flat-
ness and its stump between eyes and
mouth, but gives a loathsome sense of
disease as completely distorting of the in-
tellectual aspect of an antique as the
physical mutilation is of its visual beauty.
Nor do I know whether a collection of
Phidian and Praxitelian gods and god-
desses, looking like so many maimed and
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 123
scrofulous creatures out of Orcagna's
Triumph of Death, would have pleased
a Greek ; nor whether in our prudery
about restoration we are not in reality
respecting less the genius of the great
masters who planned whole, entire, healthy
figures, than a ragamuffin's hand which
defaced their work. Be this as it may,
our modern fear of restoration greatly
increases, instead of diminishing, the
natural difficulty of assimilating impressions
of beauty. It is left to our minds to recon-
struct the mutilated statues ; and after the
greatest strain in this direction, we go away
with the impression not so much of sane,
living beauty, as of depressing, puzzling,
and often actually revolting imperfection.
Another form of this modern apprecia-
tion of art, which makes art more and
more difficult to assimilate into life, is the
indignation of many people at such hotch-
potch things as operas ; because in every
opera there is so much that is wholly
124 JUVENILIA.
unmusical, or of small musical value ;
because an opera is not the same serious
concern as an oratorio or a concert. It
is perfectly true, as for instance Mr.
Edmund Gurney has pointed out, that
there is no possibility of making an opera
into a well-blended mixture of several
arts. But just for that reason there is
in this incongruous hotch-potch a power
of bringing art into life much greater than
there is in oratorio or concert. The strain
of a concert, of the mere attention of the
ear for two hours, while the mind and
eye remain idle, is aesthetically wrong :
it taxes instead of refreshing the musical
sense ; it is good for people who want
to know what certain music is like, not
for people who want to enjoy it. In the
opera, on the contrary, the musical im-
pressions are separated into groups by
other sesthetical impressions or by im-
pressions of real life : the melodies may
be taken or left at will, a sine qua non
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 125
this of all assthetical enjoyment ; they
are not forced upon us whether
we be fit to enjoy them or not. An
opera is a sort of little epitome of life :
you move, look about, follow an action
with eyes and mind, look at faces, dresses,
and movements, take in words and sights ;
see and chat with your friends ; and if,
with all this, you listen to the music, it
is freely, as you would listen to the sound
of birds among the numerous impressions
of a walk in the country. It is quite
wonderful how a little cheap plot, a little
cheap scenery, dress and gesticulation, a
little cheap words, a little talk with a
neighbour or watching of unknown faces,
how all this trumpery refreshes, enables
one really to assimilate music. The
explanation is that in this case our life,
into which the music (if it is to be of
any use) is to be absorbed, is going on,
has all its powers of assimilation due to
easy and general excitement. In the case
126 JUVENILIA.
of a concert our minds are tied as with a
ligature : we may plunge our soul in music,
but our spiritual life-blood is stagnant, and
we are neither warmed nor refreshed. The
difference between an opera and a concert
is that between a town, with all its trivial
details and its statues and pictures here and
there, and an awful expanse of gallery.
Hence I have called this modern
tendency towards isolating art of life, the
gallery-and-concert tendency ; and it is
very principally as a signal example of
this gallery-and-concert tendency that
I resent the removal of the Botticellis
from the Villa Lemmi. The villa with
its frescoes was like some quiet evening
with open windows, when the music is
interrupted by conversation ; and when
the sough of the trees and the chirping
of the crickets outside, the noise of the
children on the stairs within, keeps up a
sense that besides art nature exists and
life goes on. Of course such matters are
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 117
often purely economical : a man cannot
be expected to forego many thousands
of francs for the sake of the superior
artistic pleasure of a very few strangers,
nor can a nation be expected to be so
civilized as to prefer possessing frescoes
among exquisite surroundings hundreds of
miles off, to possessing those same frescoes
among arid surroundings within a few
yards. No one can blame the owner of
Villa Lemmi for selling his frescoes, nor
the French Government for buying them.
But those should be blamed to whom the
kind of action typified by this Villa
Lemmi business is a matter of great pride
and self-congratulation, a sort of triumph
of civilization : the daily increasing class
of people who care for art, but who see
nevertheless in any statue or picture still
unmolested in its original church villa,
merely a sort of huge assthetic specimen,
which must be immediately uprooted or run
through with a pin, that it may as soon
128 JUVENILIA,
as possible enrich some artistic herbarium,
or collection of dead butterflies.
Meanwhile the little villa near Careggi
looks as if nothing more wonderful or
important than the reaping of the corn,
the bleaching of the wheat, the birth of
an additional calf or farmer's brat, had
taken place since this time last year. The
red cart is drawn up outside the old gate
with its stone escutcheon, while the vege-
tables from the garden or the barrels from
the vineyard on the hillside are being piled
into it ; and the row of bells on the
horse's brass-studded harness jingle as he
shakes his fly-worried head ; the cows are
still being milked in the dark stable by
the pale-green mulberry-tree ; the vines
still pruned on the spalier along the
blackened wall ; the roses still blow, and
shed their pink petals on the strawberry
beds all round the house ; the brass pitcher
still goes up and down on its wire through
the lichen-stained, cloistered court ; the
BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 129
peasant children still swing between the
columns ; the old villa, with its square
tower opened into a pillared loggia, looks
just the same among the green cornfields
and dark cypresses, against its background
of olive-grey hills. The same as it did
last year ; the same, most likely, as it did
four hundred years ago. It has lost its
frescoes ; but, for all the greatness of
Botticelli, it has lost less than have lost
those poor, hustled, jostled paintings,
expatriated, exiled on to that Louvre stair,
case. And, though it be quite forgotten
and neglected henceforward, the Villa
Lemmi has lost less than have we, good,
self-satisfied people, in losing the sense
that a painting is better in a farmhouse
where it can be enjoyed, than in the most
superb gallery where it will be over-
looked.
ROCOCO.
ROCOCO.
A POLITE editor has recently sent me,
in recognition of certain studies I once
made of Italian eighteenth-century things,
a copy of a fine new edition of the com-
plete fairy plays of Carlo Gozzi. I feel
flattered, and greatly obliged. But I feel
also within myself an odd, mixed feeling,
half pleasurable, half sad, as if an old play-
fellow had suddenly thought of presenting
me with some particular sweet or some
particular toy for which I may have had
a passion now long forgotten in my
childhood. Most children at least, I wish
to believe it are consumed by violent
passions less material than those which are
satisfied at the pastrycook's or the fruit-stall.
JUVENILIA.
Passions, strong, ideal, all-absorbing, such
as can exist, perhaps, only when our fancy
has not yet been messed and muddled away
over realities ; and is able to spread its
wings freely, unconscious of the frontier
of the possible and the impossible. At
that time of life we are probably already
in possession of whatever reasoning power
and passion we may ever possess ; what is
missing is merely experience. We are like
people born blind, and whom an operation
has suddenly given I cannot say restored
to sight : we see things and their quali-
ties, colours and shapes ; but we do not
perceive, we do not yet feel, the propor-
tions and the distances that exist between
them. The moon is up there in the
heavens : big, round, white, bright ; and
we put out our hand to snatch it. We see
things without the intellectual connection
furnished by experience ; but as we are
fully possessed of logic and imagination,
we weave round everything a mystic net-
ROCOCO. 135
work of unreal relations half understood,
mysterious, which has the strange sparkle
of those thinnest of all cobwebs, called, in
France, threads of the Virgin, that are
stretched, intangible, white, flaming with
dew diamonds, on every hedge in early
autumn. It is at this moment of our life
that we experience those imaginative pas-
sions, inexplicable, dumb, almost tragically
serious, for some historic personage, at
whose very name we redden or shed tears ;
for the people of the Middle Ages, as they
exist in the novels of Scott, of Ainsworth,
and G. P. R. James ; for the Indians of
Chateaubriand, of Fenimore Cooper, and
Aymard. Passions, all these, which we
conceal from all grown-up folk, because
we know they would make fun of them ;
and we feel that, in this case, making fun
would be something like sacrilege.
To me, who had remained, like the
Prince Parzival of Wolfram and of Wag-
Ij6, JUVENILIA.
ner, a child and an idiot long after the
legitimate period, there came, after the
usual passions for Joan of Arc and Marie
Antoinette, after the more fervid passion
for the Natchez, the Sioux, and especially
the inconvenient and entrancing Mohicans
a passion, be it said, which made me
walk along the beach looking pathetically
in the direction where America probably
lies or swims after all these childish pas-
sions, there came then to me an unaccount-
able passion for the people and things of
the eighteenth century, and more particu-
larly of the eighteenth century in Italy.
How it arose would be difficult to explain ;
perhaps mainly from the delight which I re-
ceived from the melodies of Mozart and
Gluck, picked out with three fingers on
the piano. I followed those sounds ; I
pursued them, and I found myself in the
midst of the Italian eighteenth century.
I found myself in the midst of the Italian
eighteenth century. I have selected that
form of words with the intention of your
taking it literally. I really did find my
way into that period, and really did live in
it ; for I began to see only the things be-
longing thereunto ; and I had little or
no connection with anything else. The
eighteenth century existed for me as a
reality, surrounded by faint and fluctuat-
ing shadows, which shadows were simply
the present. Things presented them-
selves to me only from their eighteenth-
century side, real or very often imag-
inary. I meditated over such houses as
had probably been built in the last cen-
tury ; or, if they were visibly older, I
directed my attention upon such portions
of their existence as lay in that time; I
didn't care a pin about the Renaissance,
or Antiquity, or the Middle Ages. In
Rome the scene of all this my particular
predilection was the little shell - shaped
square of Sant' Ignazio, where the semi-
138 JUVENILIA.
circle of houses, each with its plaster laurel-
branch and shell, its little balconies of
twisted iron, seems arranged as a back-
ground for a comedy by Goldoni.
Behind our house, under the wall of the
Pincian, there were still the ruins of the
old Aliberti Theatre ; and many are the
half-hours I spent leaning on the kitchen
balcony and dreaming of the songs of Per-
golisi and Paisiello which had once sounded
among the broken and burnt-out walls of
that famous theatre ; songs which I nearly
succeeded in hearing, accompanied by the
creaking of the bucket journeying along its
iron wire, the final plop when it dived into
the well, the screams of the children playing
in the garden, and the snatches of song of
the maids washing up the dishes.
And then in spring, wandering under the
huge ilexes, or on the anemone-starred grass
of the majestic Roman villas, I would think
of the rows of gilded coaches that used to
draw up before the little palace, of the
ROCOCO. 139
companies of ladies and cavaliers, in powder
and patches, who had once formed bright
spots of colour on the blackness of the
avenues. Or, if the something so supremely
spring-like, the something in those flowering
pastures beneath the pines and the bay-
trees that inevitably suggests Proserpine
and the valley of Enna, brought up to my
mind more pastoral images, the shepherds
and shepherdesses were always little figures
of Dresden china with embroidered waist-
coat and andrlenne.
I began to study that period to read
the books, even the newspapers, of the
last century, which seemed to me full of
actuality. The dingy bookstalls, the rows
of useless and dirty old books exhibited for
sale along the walls of palaces and churches,
had for me a magical attraction. I became,
I may boast, a remarkably well-educated
young person of the end of the eighteenth
century, perfectly up to all the last new
140 JUVENILIA.
things of that time, and able to cut a very
pretty figure, discussing encyclopedism, rival
composers and singers, nay, even personal
tittle-tattle, in the salon of some Arcadian
muse.
But I was not satisfied with reading. I
should have liked to see, to hear; if not
directly, at least through the mediumship
of some one who had seen and heard the
things of those days. There was in me
a vague hope of being able to come nearer
to that century, of finding, in some mystic
way and mystic place, a hidden corner
thereof. I was tremendously interested in
very old people, hoping that they might
bring me into contact with the days of their
childhood ; for I forgot all that immense
sea of nineteenth century in which their
few impressions of earlier times must have
got drowned, or at least discoloured ; and
many disappointments did not quell my
ardour in seeking out these precious half-
living relics of my beloved period. The
ROCOCO. 141
disappointments were numerous. But, on
the other hand, how delightful when this
or that old creature said, "When I was
a child they used still to act Metastasio's
plays ; " or, " My father used to talk of
the way Pacchierotti sang at Lucca in
1780"! What a moment that was when
my dear old singing master suddenly re-
membered that he had heard Cimarosa sing
some of his own comic songs !
My dreams of a sort of St. Brandan's
Isle, containing somewhat of the life of
my dear eighteenth century, were, I need
scarcely say, never realized. But every
now and then I came upon some little corner
whence that century seemed to have only
just departed, leaving in the atmosphere
a faint smell of musk and hair-powder.
Such a place was the little villa (I fancy
now turned into a cafd concert /), surrounded
by a pretty bit of garden which had once
been the Parrhasian Grove of the Roman
142 JUVENILIA.
Academy of Arcadian Shepherds. The
house was full of old portraits ; the ne-
glected garden was bright in May and
June with flowers sprung, so to speak,
from the bulbs and slips planted in former
days an elegy which you touched with
your hand and trod under foot.
Another such place was the former convent
of San Giacomo Maggiore at Bologna, con-
verted into a music school by the prefects
of Napoleon. How many happy hours
have I not spent in those halls, in those re-
fectories and cells, from whose walls looked
down a crowd of composers and singers
and noble amateurs in bobwigs or pigtails,
doing the dignified or the graceful, leaning
on their harpsichords, a music-roll in their
hands, smirking fatuously at the forgetful
world ! For me a visit to that place was
a visit of ceremony ; I invariably took a
fresh pair of gloves. You could not present
yourself badly got up before all those dis-
tinguished and delicately dressed people,
ROCOCO. 143
And, of course, in that crowd of poets
and composers, and singers and fine ladies,
there was always one particular person
whom I worshipped, growing perfectly
crimson with rage every time that he or
she was lightly spoken of in some old
memoir or letter. I knew them very well,
these delightful objects of my adoration,
but only from a distance, on account of
the excessive respect and admiration, which
made me as timid as a half-fledged boy
coming for the first time into a drawing-
room full of ladies.
The result of all this fantasticating, cf
this unconsciously acted romance, was
naturally enough a real and genuine ro-
mance, I mean a romance on paper. I
conceived a grand historico-musical novel,
on the model of Consuelo, but only far, far
more beautiful and interesting. There was
to be a little German Court of the early
144 JUVENILIA.
eighteenth century, a crazy Elector, a
philanthropic and despotic minister, a per-
fidious favourite dwarf, some delightful
ladies, and an Italian singer, the hero and
Deus ex machind of the whole : a perfect
eighteenth-century ideal of the Telemaque,
Sir Charles Grandison, and Re Pastore
sort. Round these persons moved a
crowd of politicians, of philosophers, of
poets, and of villains, all of whom dis-
cussed during chapters and chapters the
" Theory of Sensations " of Locke and
Helvetius, the musical reforms of Gluck,
the "Contrat Social " of Rousseau ; subjects
that in my eyes were palpitating with activity.
This novel was my companion during
several years my companion, be it under-
stood, only in my own head. I wrote
little of it, and with extreme slowness,
perpetually adding and altering. There
was no hurry. All my life was before
me wherein to write this masterpiece ; and
it would be a well-employed life. Why
ROCOCO. 145
begin at once ? Was there not plenty of
time ?
Thus I argued. But there was a possi-
bility which had not entered into my calcu-
lations. A horrible possibility ! to which
I can barely bring myself to allude ; a
possibility the thought of which would
have been a profanation. The possibility
that, as time went by, I might . . . No.
The thought never dawned in my mind.
I remained perfectly loyal. I continued to
believe most sincerely in my eighteenth-
century novel, and my duty of writing it.
But somehow, I cannot tell how, it so
happened that I began little by little to
take an interest also in things which had
no connection with the eighteenth century.
I persevered in my rococo studies, but to
them I gradually added others, studies, for
instance, of the art of Antiquity and the
Renaissance.
And gradually, insidiously, I became
VOL. i. 8
146 JUVENILIA.
absorbed in them. I went on thinking
about the eighteenth century, but no longer
in the same way. I determined to write a
book about it, but the book was no longer
that famous novel. It became necessary
to explain to the world that this despised
eighteenth century was most important in
the history of art ; that, in the domain of
music and the drama, it takes rank among
the great artistic periods of the world's
history, along with the times of Pericles
and of Leo X.
Pericles ; Leo X. ; history of art ; artistic
periods ! how little did I understand at that
moment the meaning of all this sudden
eruption of philosophical and historical
Hegelian verbiage ! I really imagined that
I loved the eighteenth century as much as
ever. Alas, all this phraseology of modern
criticism signified that my much - loved
century had ceased to be alive, that it had
become, in my eyes, a mere corpse, and
that I was preparing to dissect it ! It sig-
ROCOCO. 147
nified that I looked at it no longer from
within, but from without ; that in issuing
from the eighteenth century, I had emerged
also out of childhood ; that the days of
great imaginative passions, of Joan of Arc
and Marie Antoinette, of Sioux and Mohi-
cans, were gone by for ever.
PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC
MUSIC.
PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC
MUSIC.
HE blaring trumpets of the Prologue
in Heaven, the thundering hymns of
the Epilogue, were still shrilling and rumb-
ling in my ears, like the echoes of a distant
storm ; my fancy was crowded with all
that phantasmagoric jumble and jostle of
mediaeval and antique things, Faustus,
Helen, the devil, the witches, the sirens
and oreads, of Boito's Mefistofele ; when I
went to hear for the second time an opera
I am very fond of, the Matrimonio Segreto.
To hear within forty-eight hours an opera
by Boito and an opera of Cimarosa's, is an
aesthetic experience such as presents itself
152 JUVENILIA.
rarely. It means a meeting of incongruous
and hostile things, rather like that very
adventure of Dr. Faustus and Helen of
Troy, of whom we have been speaking.
'Tis a fantastic experience, this meeting
of the arch-modern with the old-fashioned,
of an art literally of the future, seeking for
new horizons and countries unexplored, and
an art which might be called of the more
than past fitting into some verbal conju-
gation which means " a thing that has been
and never will be again," unknown to our
miserable grammars. A fantastic experi-
ence in itself, and one which results rather
in disconnected bizarre impressions, than in
such critical theories as are manufactured
with ruler and compasses. You are there-
fore requested to expect in the following
remarks neither logical sequence nor
aesthetic principles. Should you persist in
so doing, you would be disappointed, like
those friends of Hoffman's crazy Kapell-
meister Kreisler, who, having dropped the
PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 1 53
snuffers into his piano and broken the
principal strings, had the happy thought
of describing in words the things he had
intended to suggest with his notes.
That blast of the seven trumpets, those
strange shivered chords, the earthquake
rumble of all that orchestra, and the an-
them which issues out of it all, strong and
placid like a rift of blue sky when the
clouds have been torn asunder after the
blackness of the storm ; this cosmic or
seraphic drama, fitter for Dante than for
Goethe, goes to my brain as goes only one
other thing a fragment of a psalm by
Benedetto Marcello, poet and composer,
imaginative and aristocratically eclectic artist,
artistic ancestor of Arrigo Boito.
Then there is that serenade, that invoca-
tion of the siren, which we must imagine
those two demi-goddesses singing, not as
on the stage (for the stage is the death of
8*
154 JUVENILIA.
all poetic conceptions), stupidly standing
before the footlights, but wandering with
interlaced hands through some island gar-
den, some orchard inundated by the moon,
and surrounded by the misty moonlit sea ;
the tremulousness of the moonlight, the
throb of the sea, the thrill of the hidden
insects, the alternate slumbering and
awakening of the wanderer's fancy, all
contained in that duet. But there is some-
thing more beautiful still and more fasci-
nating. I mean that duet in the prison be-
tween Faust and the poor crazy Margaret,
that tranquil wavelike swaying upon those
two or three notes, which widens like the
circles in the water, from one modulation
gently to the other, while the words de-
scribe, what the music seems to give, the
lapping of the tide on that shore untrodden
by all earthly cares.
Poetic music this, suggestive ; and which,
besides its own beauty, seems to give us
something more, and more exquisite than
PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 155
itself. No ; not more exquisite, but more
subtle and elusory.
The long and the short of the matter, in
all that confusion of the Matrinwnio Segrcto,
is simply thi's, that an old noodle, who is
also as deaf as a post, wants to marry his
daughter, already secretly married to the
shop-boy, to an English nobleman called
Milordo Robinson, an extraordinary grass-
hopper being with green coat-tails down to
his heels, and a starched necktie up to his
eyes ; while, on the other hand, the same
counter-jumping young hero is being made
red-hot love to by the sister of his em-
ployer, a toothless and sentimental Tabitha.
Hence endless mistakes and misunderstand-
ings, with consequent tremendous bickerings,
rages, blows, laughter, feminine shrillnesses
and masculine bellowings. As to the poetic
element, it enters into the business to much
the same extent as it would in reality that
is to say, not at all. And here I may
156 JUVENILIA.
parenthetically remark, that in the way of
poetic suggestiveness, except in so far as it
is distilled by our modern brains on con-
tact with the past, there is not much to
be squeezed out of the good folk of the
eighteenth century.
And yet ... while I watch these
domestic battles of a respectable shop-
keeper's household of the year 1792 : this
love-making of what looks like an abigail
in striped skirt and coloured apron, and a
footman in topboots and a pigtail ; all this
while I feel something moving about in my
fancy, which something or other is not
prose, is not caricature ; nay, which is,
putting it quite plainly, poetry. No ; I
was wrong. It is not poetry, it is music.
Counter -jumping Adonis of a Paolino,
hero of measuring staff and scissors ; Caro-
lina, vulgar little shopkeeper's daughter
some curious metamorphose seems to be
at work upon you. In that famous air,
cc Before Aurora appears in the heavens"
PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 157
(no more is said about Aurora, but instead,
a great deal about travelling carriages,
whips, postillions), and in that duet where,
with the tallow candle in one hand and the
shabby portmanteau in the other, the
young people prepare to slip out of the
paternal house ; in these, and in ever so
many melodies and fragments of melody,
there is something undefinable, something,
strange to say, which makes the same im-
pression as those phantasmagoric visions of
Mefistofele ; something that at bottom,
is of identical natural, something we call
music, and feel inclined to call poetry.
* ->:-. %-. * *
It really does seem at times as if there
existed between us and the men of the late
eighteenth century a perfect abyss ; one
wonders whether the series of human lives
has really been uninterrupted. This is
especially the case in all matters imagina-
tive ; for, as I have already remarked, those
amiable great-grandfathers and great-grand-
158 JUVENILIA.
mothers were possessed of little poetic
fancy, or if they had it, contrived to put it
successfully under a bushel. This reflec-
tion has arisen in my mind from a compari-
son between the subject of to-night's opera,
the Matrimonio Segreto, and the opera of
two days since, namely Mefistofele.
Yes, you will answer, but is not one of
these comic and the other serious ? Quite
true, but this makes no difference. A comic
piece can have as much poetry in it as a
serious one (all Shakespeare's comedies, and
Musset's, are there to prove it) ; and the
eighteenth century was equally flat and un-
imaginative in both styles. Nay, it is odd
that the most imaginative subject that ever
fell into the hands of an eighteenth century
composer, happened to be that of a comic
opera, Doit Giovanni, a tragi-comedy of
savage and fantastic Spanish comicality, re-
duced to utter prose first by Moliere, then
by Goldoni, and finally by Mozart's libretto
writer, D'Aponte.
PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 159
In short, I defy any one to show me an
opera libretto of the eighteenth century
which is imaginative in the same sense as
Mefistofele. Metastasio's opera librettos
have a poetic quality, dramatic interest,
pathos, even grandeur ; but they have
nothing imaginative, although he hunted for
subjects not merely in Plutarch and Hero-
dotus (whose names he always put at the
end of the Cf argument," learnedly contracted,
with those of Sanchoniathon, Berosus,
Ocellus Lucanus, like Dr. Primrose's
friend, lest any one should think he did not
work sufficiently hard for his salary of
Court Poet), not merely in Plutarch and
Herodotus, but also in Ariosto and Tasso.
On the other hand, Gluck and his librettist
Calsabigi, both of them furious reformers,
pre-Wagnerian Wagnerists, were never
struck with the idea, which every fifth-rate
composer would have to-day, of using up
in their opera the barbaric, fantastic, and
gruesomely imaginative element contained in
l6o JUVENILIA.
the massacre of Orpheus by the frantic
Maenads. Orpheus and Eurydice are sent
home quietly, at the end of the third act,
like a newly-married couple returning
from their honeymoon.
All those good composers of the eigh-
teenth century, from Carissimi, their pre-
cursor, to Rossini their latest representative,
manufactured their music as other men
manufacture soap or cloth (and much in
the same way, f may add, as were manu-
factured also the cathedrals of the Middle
Ages and the frescoes of the Renaissance),
at so much a day. Sometimes they put into
the business more conscience or more genius,
and sometimes less ; but they worked on,
all of them, in the same happy unconscious-
ness of any imaginative suggestiveness. And
when the public or the manager wished it,
these great masters of delicate melody, of
magisterial counterpoint (at least in their
sacred music), were quite pleased to set
afresh, once, twice, or even three times, the
PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. l6l
same libretto, the same words, as they were
quite willing (except for natural human
laziness) also to overhaul or exchange the
music written specially for some situation,
because it did not suit their singers to sinj
those particular pieces.
What an abyss between a man like Boito
and these musical bricklayers, tailors, cob-
blers of the last century ! Nevertheless,
we must believe Hegel, a sort of Council
of Trent in all aesthetic matters, and who
taught, what all professors of aesthetics
are bound to teach, namely, that music is
tJie romantic art above all others, that is to
say the art where the concern for the sub-
ject, for the poetical suggestion, for what
the Germans call lubalt, entirely lords it over
any concern for the mere form.
* * *
(( Canta Sirena Canta Sirena " this
tune of Mefistofele, knocking about in my
memory, suddenly comes in collision with
the theme of the second finale of the
l62 JUVENILIA.
Matriomonio Segreto. This is indeed poetic
and suggestive art, romantic art, this of
Boito's. After all, Hegel doubtless knew
what he was talking about. Poetic, ro-
mantic, suggestive But suggestive of what ?
Of the siren, to be sure, and the full moon.
But, after all, where is the siren ? where is
the full moon? In the words. As to the
music, it would be difficult to point out in
what particular arrangement of notes there
is any allusion to a siren or a full moon ; in-
deed it might be hard to convey either of
these two items to the mind of the audience,
if that audience happened not to understand
the words.
What is more is that I have a similar
difficulty in finding in the arrangement of
notes which constitutes the second finale of
the Matrimcnio Segreto any indication of the
marriage of a shop-boy and a shop-keeper's
daughter, and of their consequent flight
down the paternal stairs with a tallow candle
in one hand and a portmanteau in the other;
PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 1 63
still less any indication of the presence
of papa, snoring unsuspectingly in bed.
Nay, if some poet of my acquaintance
would only be so obliging as to fit a couple
of verses about sirens and full moons to the
tune of this duet, I really see no reason
why . . . No. The thought is odious.
No self-respecting creature could assert that
these notes, associated during ninety years
with the difficulties of a shop-boy and a
shop-keeper's daughter, with the tallow
candle, the portmanteau, and the snoring of
papa Geronimo, might, if only you clapped
on a few verses about the siren and the
full moon, serve equally in evoking the
vision of that June moonlight when Helen of
Troy and her women, moonbeams vaguely
humanized, wander about among the Cen-
taurs and Sphinxes, the Dryads and Nereids
of the classic Walpurgis night.
*****
In that case, wherein consists the poetry ?
Wherein lies that something ideal and super-
164 JUVENILIA.
natural which we feel in Boito's opera, if
that phantasmagoric vision of Heaven and
Hell, of Antiquity and the Middle Ages,
is not evoked by the music, but by the
words ? Wherein consists the poetry ?
The poetry of this opera, which treats of
necromancers and angels and sirens, lies
simply, to my mind, in the something
wherein lies also the poetry of that other
opera, dealing with deaf papas, flirtatious
old spinsters, shop-boys, and runaway mar-
riages : in a very prosaic circumstance the
fact that the music is beautiful.
After which very unpoetical and exces-
sively unphilosophical remark, I had better
banish from my mind the melodies both of
Boito and of Cimarosa, and take down
that volume of " Vorlesungen iiber die
.ZEsthetik," in which Hegel demonstrates in
the most satisfactory manner that music is
the art where concern for the form is most
completely subordinated to concern for the
subject.
APOLLO THE FIDDLER.
A
CHAPTER ON ARTISTIC ANACHRONISM
APOLLO THE FIDDLER.
A
CHAPTER ON ARTISTIC ANACHRONISM.
AISE up and hollow out your two
hands, so as to exclude from your
eyes all the vague, flickering shadows ;
so as to concentrate what little light you
can upon that luckless unlit fresco over
the prison cell window of the Signature
Room of the Vatican. At first we can see
scarcely anything except the spots of light
dancing before our eyes ; but gradually the
black wall seems to scoop itself out, to
deepen, till the mass of blurs take shape,
and becomes the ghost-haunted slopes of
Parnassus. Vaguely still, and for ever
sucked back into the darkness, flickers forth
168 JUVENILIA.
the company of poets : bearded, regal men,
with filleted, gem-like heads, and robed
youths with laurel wreaths in their long
hair ; and the Muses seated with lyre and
flute, in gowns of white and green and
tawny red ; and glimmering white in the
midst of all, on the summit of the hill,
beneath the straight-stemmed laurels, with
the streams bubbling and the flowers open-
ing between his naked feet, King Apollo,
seated with his bow in his hand and his
fiddle against his cheek. We look, and
laugh, and ask ourselves why in the world
Raphael should have chosen to paint Apollo
as a fiddler ? Why indeed ? Well, I have
a notion that I can explain to you why
Raphael painted Apollo as a fiddler, and I
will try and expound my idea ; but on one
condition, that afterwards, in return, we
shall do our best to explain why, Apollo
having been painted as a fiddler, that cir-
cumstance should have made you laugh.
Why Raphael painted Apollo playing,
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 169
not upon lyre or cithara, or any other
imaginable antique instrument, but upon a
fiddle upon, of all things, the most
modern, unantique of instruments, an
instrument born of the Middle Ages, and
raised to importance only in Raphael's own
time this is a question which has exercised
the ingenuity of a variety of ingenious
persons. Some have supposed that Raphael
wished to indicate that Apollo was not only
the god of poetry, but of music ; and that
he gave him, therefore, in contradistinction
to the lyres and citharas and psalteries,
instruments used solely to accompany lyrical
declamation and therefore symbolical of
poetry, handled by the Muses, the one
instrument which seemed most purely
musical, most disconnected with mere verse
recitation the violin. Others have ima-
gined that the fiddle was placed in the hands
of Apollo as a delicate or indelicate piece
of favour-currying with some musical
minion, some viol-playing page of Pope
VOL. i. 9
I7O JUVENILIA.
Leo X. ; perhaps even that same lad, with
dark wistful face, and long straight hair,
whose portrait Raphael painted, bow in
hand, dressed in green velvet and fur.
Others have put forward yet other explana-
tions, with which we need not be troubled.
Explanations of this sort people have felt
bound to make, because the most obvious
explanation of all the explanation of the
similar vagaries of Benozzo representing
Babylon with Strozzi palaces and Chinese
pagodas, of Pinturicchio painting Ulysses
returning in the dress of a Sienese man-at-
arms to a weaving Penelope apparelled like
the lady of any Petrucci, Tolomei, or Pic-
colomini of his day ; nay, of Uccello
painting a chameleon as a monster half
camel, half lion the simple explanation of
blissful ignorance, cannot go any length to
explain the fiddling Apollo of Raphael.
For Raphael was of all men the least
likely to be guilty of a sin of ignorance.
He was, above any artist of his time, of
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. Ijl
the literary, learned, or at least dilettante-
learned, temperament. In the vague
accounts we obtain of this rather pale-
coloured and faintly-drawn man of genius,
almost the sole strongly marked characteris-
tic is the noble-patron-of-learning sort of
interest, the refined, accomplished, scholarly-
gentleman delight in antiquities. It is true
that many other artists of the Renais-
sance had as great, if not greater, a passion
for antiques as Raphael, but none, it would
seem, from the same reasons. For them
the antique was a mere subject of study.
If Mantegna spent fortunes, and sold houses
and orchards, in order to buy mutilated
statues and battered bas-reliefs and half-
obliterated coins ; it was that to the intense,
fantastic master of Mantua these things
were as the ores and smelting-ovens of an
alchemist. It was that he sought, in the
broken, rust-stained marbles, what Leonardo
sought in fanciful geometrical problems,
and Michael Angelo in dead limbs and
172 JUVENILIA.
flayed bodies a sort of magic, omnipotent
spell, a sort of ineffable elixir of life the
secret of perfect proportion. But it was
not so with Raphael : a student of Tuscan
nudities, a dexterous imitator of Michael
Angelo, he was yet at bottom an Umbrian,
bred in the workshop, the manufactory of
disembodied yearning saints, of Perugino ;
and the antique, although he studied it as
he studied everything else, was never to
Raphael a supreme teacher or a final pro-
blem. His love for all things antique, his
constant alacrity to buy or have copied any
ancient marbles that came within reach, his
anxiety for the preservation of the ancient
buildings of Rome, all this was merely the
result of a sort of humanistic tendency, a
sort of intellectual busybodyness, seeking
for a vent in a man of far less literary
training than many of his contemporary
artists ; an interest, in short, academic and
archaeological, in antiquities for their own
sake, such as was shared by his nobler and
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 173
more learned friends, Bembo and Castig-
lione and Sadoleto and Fedra Inghirami,
and in less degree by all the poeticules and
prelatry of the court of Leo X. Raphael,
therefore, cannot be supposed to have been
ignorant of the antique instruments which
might be placed in the hands of Apollo ;
nor to have been ignorant (at least for any
length of time) of the fact that the fiddle
was not an antique instrument. He, who
certainly took a vast deal of scholarly
advice for his Vatican frescos, who must
have heard whole lectures on antique philo-
sophy and poetry before he was able to
compose The School of Athens and Mount
Parnassus, could not have put a fiddle into
the hands of Apollo from the mere stolid
ignorance, the happy-go-lucky indifference,
which made both Signorelli and an unknown
pupil of Squarcione coolly sketch, the one
an Apollo, the other an Orpheus, fiddling
away in the face of all archaeology.
If, therefore, an anachronism was com-
174 JUVENILIA.
mitted by Raphael, by the preeminently
archaeological painter, it was certainly not
without a motive. No, not exactly a
motive, for a motive is self-conscious, and
consciously restricted to one particular case.
Rather a habit, unconscious and general,
influencing in one case because it influenced
in all cases. Raphael gave a fiddle to
Apollo, not because the giving of the fiddle
had any particular meaning in his eyes, but
because the giving of the fiddle was conso-
nant with the manner of conceiving subjects
which Raphael shared with all the painters
of his day ; which the painters of his day
shared with all the men and women of the
Renaissance; and which the men and women
of the Renaissance shared with the men
and women of ancient Greece, of the
Middle Ages, of Elizabethan England, of
every country and every time which has
possessed a really great and vigorous art
sculpture, painting, poetry, or music : the
habit of conceiving of all subjects given to
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 175
the artist as the mere material or pretext
for a decoration, a show, a pageant ; a
pageant of sculptured or painted forms, of
grouped and linked sounds, of images and
emotions ; a pageant to pass before the
mind, ostensibly to tell some story or
honour some person, really merely to
delight, even as some great mystery play,
with its processions of richly apparelled and
grandly mounted soldiers, its cavalcades of
mummers and musicians, its companies of
singing choristers, its flower-wreathed poles
and painted banners and flaring torches, Its
wheeled stages hung with arras and cressets,
and peopled with strangely arrayed figures,
may have passed, to do honour to some
prince, or to enforce some religious lesson,
slowly through the streets of a mediaeval
city.
To us such a conception of artistic sub-
jects seems far-fetched, artificial, nay, almost
impossible ; yet it is in reality by far the
earlier, the more natural, the more really
176 JUVENILIA.
artistic. The desire for realizing an already
known event, for imitating an already
extant character, for placing before the
imagination a fac-simile of something ex-
isting outside it, or for showing to the
bodily eyes what was visible already to the
memory ; this desire for pitting together
the artificial and the natural is, in point of
fact, one of very late growth. It did not
exist as long as events and characters
seemed sufficiently interesting from their
more practical bearing ; as long as the past
was too active a factor in the present and
future to require any further reason for
remembrance. It could not exist as long
as artistic means were fully employed in
satisfying men's fancy or expressing men's
cravings ; it could not exist as long as the
artificial and the real were both sufficiently
important to dispense with the interest due
to comparison between them ; nay, such
comparison between the reality and the
artistic representation required a lazy and
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 177
objectless activity of the reason, which was
impossible in a time when the reason, over-
burdened with practical problems, had little
leisure for play, and when the artistic crav-
ings and activities were too rigorous to be
its passive playthings. Above all, the
purely intellectual reasoning enjoyment of
watching how far art will differ from nature
could not exist as long as the mechanical
powers, the powers of responding to the
artistic wants of mankind, were still grow-
ing in their constant efforts after the yet
unaccomplished.
There is in all the art of great periods
a sad absence of logic ; at least of the logic
which we expect. Mere chronicle and
mere portraiture put aside, the exposition
of an event or of a character is generally
embedded in a perfect arabesque of poetical
or pictorial digressions. In a play, which
is, after all, only the imitation of the man-
ner in which we suppose any given events
to have taken place, there is in Antiquity
9*
178 JUVENILIA.
a series of musical and lyrical interruptions,
a series of odes upon extremely indifferent
subjects sung at the most critical moments
by people who would either not be present,
or be thinking of anything rather than
choruses ; there is in the Elizabethan
period a constant arabesquing off into most
elaborate lyrical imagery, of digressing into
complete chapters of philosophy ; all things
which we disregard from a sort of inherited
familiarity with the style, but which would
astonish us greatly if we had never before
read anything like " Prometheus Bound "
or f c Macbeth " ; astonish and shock us as
much as some intelligent child or peasant
would be astonished and shocked by the
orchestral preludes, the roulades, the fugues
accompanying the conspiracies and murders
of our opera stage. Indeed, an opera,
with its symphonies, its airs, its quintets
and sextets, its choruses, its ballets, its
whole tissue of unrealities woven over a
few threads of realism, is perhaps the only
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 179
artistic form of our day in which we can
study the unrealistic, pageant-like art of
past times ; the only modern thing which
can make us realize, with its innumerable
incongruities and impossibilities, endured
for the sake of mere artistic pleasure, the
sort of serious masquerade, the solemn
mummery of the plastic and poetic art of
former days.
People did not ask for realization ; they
did not ask to be shown an artistic fac-
simile of a character or of an event. The
public which crowded Blackfriars or the
Globe Theatre did not ask for a realization
of a tyrant as Becky Sharp is the realization
of an adventuress ; they did not ask for a
realization of a tale of murder as any novel
of Emile Gaboriau is its realization : they
merely wished to be interested and de-
lighted ; and a certain proportion of rough
psychologic portraiture, a certain propor-
tion of loosely narrated story, a certain
amount of passionate expression, of philo-
l8O JUVENILIA.
sophic rhetoric, of poetic magnificence, of
trap-door and magic-lantern horror, did
succeed in interesting and delighting them :
and the whole strange compound of de-
veloped and half-developed elements was
called, as the case might be, Macbeth,
Hamlet, or the Duchess of Malfy. And
the same with painting. The most subtle
Florentine public did not ask for a reali-
zation of a Scripture story, or an episode
in history, as Alma Tadema's Cf Ave Caesar,"
or Morelli's "Raising of Jairus's Daughter,"
may be considered as realizations of events,
as representations of men and women, and
place and costume, and look and gesture
of the whole occurrence, in short, such as
it probably looked. They were satisfied,
the people of the Renaissance, with a figure
or two which they could recognize as St.
Peter, or St. Paul, or the Proconsul, or the
priest of Apollo, with the traditional
costume belonging to them, the general
expression of exhortation or prayer, or
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. l8l
command or terror, which might convey to
their mind some idea of their action ; and
then they were satisfied that Masaccio or
Filippino or Ghirlandaio should surround
the whole scene of altercation or of miracle
with a group of Greek soldiers, of mediaeval
men-at-arms, of robed scholars and magis-
trates, of ladies in brocaded stomachers, and
nymphs in antique draperies, of pretty
dandies in kilted tunics and striped hose,
of people with baskets, and dogs and horses
and musical instruments, all looking in no
particular direction, with plenty of vine
trellises, perspectived streets, peacocks, bas-
reliefs or imitation dolmens, with arches of
rock overgrown with trees and framing
views of towered towns in the distance.
Was it stupidity on the part of the men
for whom Shakespeare wrote, of the men
for whom Masaccio, or Botticelli, or Signo-
relli painted ? I should not care to tax
them with that ; or if it were, their stupi-
dity had better results than our wisdom.
1 82 JUVENILIA.
I do not think that they had all these things
done from mere ignorance or dulness. I
think they had merely a different system, a
different habit of viewing artistic matters.
They did not require that all the items of
play or picture should be portions of an
organic logical growth, that each part should
depend upon another, and the whole pro-
duce a single logical impression, any more
than, when you make a nosegay or garland,
you expect all the flowers and leaves to
be homogeneous : lilies do not grow on
melon plants, nor poppies on oak leaves ;
yet as a combination of form and colour,
as a decoration, a garland such as the Rob-
bias were wont to imitate in their altar-
pieces is certainly preferable to a garland
made all of one flower, or of one sort of
flower. I have said " as a decoration,"
and this brings me to the fact that the art
of all great periods is, in point of fact,
nothing but a decoration ; for just as men
made their dwellings delightful by stamping
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 183
leather with blue and gold patterns (which
are certainly not what leather naturally
presents) and hanging it on the walls ; by
weaving the dyed threads of wool and silk
into strange figures and devices ; by cutting
holes into wood and filling them up with
bits of ivory or mother-of-pearl ; by setting
together all manner of various marbles in
shapes such as no quarry could ever show ;
by carving in wood, and painting on plaster,
all sorts of shapes, just like enough to beasts
and flowers to show that there never was
beast or flower like them: as men united
together things and forms from all parts of
the world and all orders of creation, and
altered and assorted them to beautify their
houses ; so also men took elements of
thought and feeling and form, things which
delighted the eye, and things which appealed
to the fancy, and united them together
into quaint and gorgeous arabesques, with
which they patterned their lives. And if
we consider for a moment, and put aside
184 JUVENILIA.
all our own habits of considering art as a
semi-scientific product, we shall acknow-
ledge how much more natural and spon-
taneous is such arabesque of form and
fancy than our own modern attempt to
adorn, to decorate our Jives with the
museum cases, the rows of pricked and
pinned butterflies, and stuffed animals of
psychological analysis ; to stencil it over
with the tables of dates and geological
maps of logical realism ; whence it is that
our lives, for all the attempts we make to
adorn them, preserve to the last so dreary
a look of schoolrooms and laboratories.
Thus we must understand that in the art
of the past there is no more logical homo-
gencousness than in the arabesques of a
carved chest or a painted plate ; things are
juxtaposed and combined with reference
only to pleasantness of effect. Hence it
is that we constantly meet in the paintings
of the Renaissance, and even of the Middle
Ages, what appear to us contradictions in
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 185
the telling of a story, jumbles of time and
place, broken up or hopelessly muddled
allegory. But in reality only a fragment
of story was expected to be told, only a
small amount of unity of time and place
to be observed, only a scrap of allegory to
be carried through ; what seems to us the
contradiction, the jumble in story or alle-
gory, no longer belongs to the story or the
allegory ; is something else, possibly as
foreign to them as the miniature angels
along the gilded border, or the griffons
and satyrs upon the carved frame. These
things were not intended to logically
coalesce, they merely pictorially harmonized.
The gentlemen in furred robes and ladies
in high coifs, who knelt at the foot of the
cross, the pages holding the caparisoned
horses, and the half- naked St. Johns and
red-hatted St. Jeromes of Van Eyck's and
Memling's pictures were not supposed to
be really co-existing with the fainting
Virgin, the sobbing Magdalen, the bleeding
1 86 JUVENILIA.
Redeemer ; the cross was not really sup-
posed to be erected in front of a Dutch
castle farmhouse, with fowls cackling by its
barn door, palfreys crossing its drawbridges,
and ducks swimming in its moat. All this
was neither narrative, nor representation,
nor allegory, but a little of each and all,
combined into one beautiful-looking pic-
ture, into one confused, suggestive, moving,
delighting pageant of the imagination. For
the agony on the cross, the anguish of the
Virgin and her attendants, touched people's
hearts ; the knights and ladies and horses
impressed their imagination ; the barn-door,
the drawbridge, the ducks, the rabbits, the
twenty familiar irrelevant details, tickled
their fancy ; the singing angels sounded
delightful ; and the whole to us so incon-
gruous picture was enjoyed like some
great play, in which there is tragedy and
comedy, and pastoral and allegory, all
mixed together, and the whole effect of
which is delightful.
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 1 87
Such, therefore, was the spirit in which
even that strangely modern-minded, reason-
ing, psychological, archaeological Raphael
must have conceived his works. And in
this lies the explanation of that anomaly
of the fiddling Apollo. It is difficult to
indicate, with however much sense of their
unconsciousness and vagueness, the vague,
unconscious thoughts and feeling which
form the background of all conscious
artistic creations. As soon as ever we
speak of them they appear definite, con-
scious ; they are no longer the real thing.
We can therefore only vaguely suggest the
sort of confused conception which Raphael
may have had of his Parnassus. In the
first place, and of entirely overbalancing
importance, the sense of a great piece of
pictorial composition of perspective, draw-
ing, colour, and so forth ; then the sense of
an allegory of poetry, of personified ab-
stractions ; then, again, the sense of certain
individuals, of certain personalities these
150 JUVENILIA.
two purely intellectual conceptions very
much mixed up and entirely driven into the
shade, or, more properly speaking, absorbed
into the all-important pictorial conception.
Thus there would come to be a similar
confusion in the conception of the details
of the work. There would be an idea of
Apollo of an antique personality, an in-
dividual belonging to a definite period of
time; then an idea of poetry personified,
of poetry in general, modern as well as
ancient, not belonging at all to any par-
ticular epoch ; then again of music, and of
music in all probability as something
modern the music which Raphael had
heard, not the music which he had not
heard. A nebulous, eddying sort of jumble,
united, solidified, cast into definite shape
by the predominant thought of a young
man, a naked young man, a model yes,
seated thus, with his arm thus. The real
lad, peasant or colour-grinder, the real,
distinct form, fills the mind of Raphael ;
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 189
he takes a piece of paper and rapidly
scrawls a figure, the figure of the boy
whom he sees in his memory, whom he
sees perhaps as a present reality ; quick,
the outline of his swaying body, of his
firmly planted legs, of his upturned, side-
long face ; and then who shall tell how ?
from the subsidiary conceptions of the
work, from the intellectual notions of his
meaning, come his surroundings the
roughly sketched Muses, in antique
draperies, belonging to the idea of him as
Apollo, as the antique reality; the rapidly
indicated figures of the poets of Father
Allighieri and Messer Francesco Petrarca,
and perhaps even of Messer Piero Aretino
as part and parcel of the idea of poetry, of
poetry in general, old and new, embodied in
this youth ; and finally, as a recollection of
the something musical which enters into the
vague whole, there comes into Raphael's
head, and emerges from under his pencil,
with some recently heard tune starting
190 JUVENILIA.
suddenly into his memory, the final touch
the fiddle.
So the work is done : the anachronism
is committed ; yet without either uncon-
sciousness of its being an anachronism, or
consciousness of its being one ; without
either ignorance or absurdity. And when
the men of the Renaissance, the prelates
and courtiers, the humanists and antiquaries,
come and look upon the work, they do not
laugh, they do not ask the meaning, they
do not question about anything. For in
their minds exists the same decorative
arabesque as in that of Raphael. An an-
tique god, a personified art, a remembered
tune, a bit of narrative of how King
Apollo was wont to sit upon Parnassus ; a
bit of allegory of poets grouped according
to their styles and merits, in company with
the personified branches of the art ; a bit
of realism, a recollection of heard music,
a fiddle ideas running confusedly into each
other, pleasing, amusing, reminding; above
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 19!
all, a noble piece of work, a noble group,
grandly perspectived, nobly drawn, har-
moniously coloured.
But it is different with us ; with us who
understand so much about all the condi-
tions under which art was produced, and
who sympathize with them so little. We
come into that prison-like hall of the Sig-
nature, we blink and wink in the half-light,
we screen our eyes from the shadows, till
the frescoed Parnassus gradually emerges
from out of the dark wall. We look,
appreciate, admire, enjoy (or think we
enjoy), and then we laugh. At what ?
At Apollo, or at his fiddle ? Surely not
at Apollo. He is but a single figure, very
simple and simply worked, not elaborate
either in form or in expression, yet perhaps
conveying a greater impression of genius
than all the dozens of Madonnas, Perugine
and Florentine and Roman, than all the
great ceremonious allegories like the
" School of Athens " and the cf Dispute of
JUVENILIA.
the Sacrament," than all the Michelange-
Jesque nudities of the "Burning of the
Borgo," with that terrible perfection of
drawing and composition and expression,
that terrible balance of good qualities,
pictorial and psychological, which so often
makes Raphael less interesting than many a
one-sided, unintelligent little Lombard, or
Umbrian, or Venetian. He is but a sim-
ple, human-looking god, yet perhaps more
poetical, and poetically charming, with his
slightly raised young head, singing, quite
gently and sotto voce as yet, humming over
the song he has just composed and will
sing anon quite loud and joyous to the
Muses more poetically charming, perhaps,
this fiddling Apollo of Parnassus, than
almost any marble Apollo of antiquity;
than the little Lizard-hunter, a lithe and
supple young lizard himself, of Praxiteles ;
than the young Florentine Apollino, the
delicate poet-boy, with hair dressed by
some admiring Muse ; than the long-robed
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 193
laurel-crowned Musagetes of fluttering,
half-theatrical inspiration, the divinization
of the improwisatore, of the male or semi-
masculine Corinne ; than the sombre pro-
phetic Pythian (Cassandra's ill-omened
lover, certainly) leaning his half-draped
chest upon his cithara, wearily pillowing
his braided head upon his arm ; nay, even
than the wizard statue of the Belvedere,
which, for all our wiser judgment, for all our
archaeology and all our knowledge of Elgin
marbles, does still give us a little shock of
surprise, a little shudder of delight, every
time that we, the contemptuous moderns,
come face to face with him. No, certainly,
we cannot be laughing at Raphael's Apollo.
Is it then at the fiddle ? But why laugh at
the fiddle? There is nothing absurd in a
fiddle. If the good Saxon name shock
you, call it, if you will, poetically, viol ;
or musically, violin, tenor, alto according
to the pitch you judge it to have. To the
eye the instrument handled by Apollo,
VOL. r. 10
194 JUVENILIA.
though lacking the subtle curve, the sharp
scooped flank of the perfected riddle of
Amati, or Guarneri, or Stradivari, is even
in its pre-Cremonese ungainliness more
elegant in shape, and much more graceful
of manipulation, above all, infinitely finer
in tone than any lumbering antique stringed
thing. To the imagination, on the other
hand, it does not, or need not, present
any grotesque images. There is nothing
grotesque in the recollection of one of
Haydn's quartets or one of Tartini's
sonatas ; nothing undignified or unpoetical
surely in the thought that just such an
instrument as this once rested against the
moonlit armour, and whined beneath the
reddened fingers of Volker the Fiddleman,
as he sat with Hagen of Tronegg on the
bench outside Queen Chriemhilt's hall,
holding watch over the dreadful chamber
where Huns and Burgundians lay slaugh-
tered beneath the charred and fallen rafters ;
nothing unpoetic in the thought that just
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 195
such an instrument as this is played on the
carpeted steps of the Venetian altar-pieces
by the angels at the feet of the Virgin,
enthroned in solemn drapery of wine-lee
and clove crimson in her tapestried niche,
beneath the dangling silver lamps and the
garlands of melons and lilies and green
leaves slung in heavy festoons. You do
not laugh at the fiddle of Morone or
Bellini's angels ; you do not laugh at the
fiddle of the Niebelung knight; you do
not laugh at the fiddle for which Hadyn
or Mozart composed. Why then laugh
at this fiddling Apollo of Raphael's? In
reality we are laughing neither at Apollo
nor at the fiddle, but at the anachronism,
the anomaly of their being thus united
the antique god and the mediaeval play-
work. We are laughing at the mere name,
the droll meeting of incongruous words,
"Apollo the Fiddler." And as the name
sinks into our mind there crowds forward
a vague jumble of grotesque ideas of
Ip JUVENILIA.
Heinrich Heine's tales of exiled gods, of
Bacchus turned convent cellarer, and Jove
selling rabbit-skins on Heligoland, and
Mercury turned Dutch skipper, with pig-
tail instead of winged cap, and knobbed
cane instead of Caduceus. Apollo the
Fiddler ! and there emerges from out
of this confusion a vision of Apollo
wandering from fair to fair, and from
pothouse to pothouse, with his fiddle on
his back ; of Apollo screwing his pegs and
waxing his bow among the clatter of plates
and glasses, the cries of water-melon and
pumpkin-seed sellers, the gabble of pedlars
over their tapes and fans and mirrors, the
shuffle and scramble and hum and yell of
a village holiday; the vision of the god
seated calmly, with dangling legs, on the
side of some wooden stage, fiddling away
in concert with earthly pipers and drum-
mers until the curtain shall be drawn aside
from some mystery play of <c Joseph and
his Brethren," or cc The Three Kings from
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 197
the East ; " from some grand display of
giantesses, or painted negroes, or camels
bestridden by wrinkled, red-jerkined mon-
keys. Why should we be thus haunted by
grotesque images? why should we laugh
where the men of the Renaissance merely
enjoyed? Those humanists surely knew as
well as we do what were and were not
antique instruments ; those men for whom
the greatest art was produced surely knew
as well as we do what was artistically right
and what artistically wrong. Yet we laugh,
and they did not. For, as we have already
seen, those men did not let their knowledge
of how things are or have been in reality,
interfere with their enjoyment of how
things are represented in art ; they designed
ornaments where we only label specimens ;
they did not habitually and perpetually,
almost unconsciously and automatically,
judge of all things from a scientific point
of view.
From a scientific point of view ? This
Jpo JUVENILIA.
assertion takes you somewhat aback, does
it not, my friend ? You, at least, you
imagined, were safe from such an imputa-
tion. For you happen to be peculiarly
unscientific, particularly artistic. You are
(and not without a little pride thereat in
your heart of hearts) a person whose ar-
tistic and imaginative nature is for ever
being ruffled by the scientific spirit of the
age. You hate all explanation, analysis ;
you recoil, almost as from some gritty or
clammy contact, from the theories which
attempt to explain your likings and dis-
likings ; you are, even by your own con-
fession, just a trifle cowardly in the presence
of ideas and facts ; you wish merely to feel
and imagine, and to keep the luxurious
sense of mystery and wonder. You are
proudly conscious that your real home was
not modern London, but ancient Athens
or mediaeval Florence ; and being thus
cruelly exiled into a land of desolation, you
strive to build out of all manner of frag-
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 199
ments of beauty and fancy, and fashion, out
of all manner of broken-down, long-in-
herited sounds and sights and images, some
sort of retreat, half hermitage, half-pleasure
dome, where your soul can loll at its ease,
secluded, peaceful, high above the smoke
and smut and rattle of modern ideas. You
have, in short, a vague, uncomfortable,
instinctive aversion to science. And yet
you, even you, are in this case, and in a
thousand similar cases, judging and even
condemning art from the point of view
of science.
When we say science, we must define.
There is science of all kinds, and some
kinds have no possible chance of intruding
into the domain of art. And, strange to
say, these latter happen to be the very
sciences you dislike most : those physical
sciences, physiology, optics, acoustics, which
teach other folk (for you decline being
taught) why certain linear forms by re-
quiring a painful adjustment of the visual
2OO JUVENILIA.
muscles, and certain colour combinations
by causing an excess of stimulus to the
retinal nerves, and certain sequences and
meetings of sounds by disintegrating with
opposed movements the delicate mechanism
of hearing, give us, each in its way, an
impression called ugliness ; while certain
other combinations of lines, of colours, and
of sounds, induce the pleasurable sense of
beauty: these natural sciences, which thus
impertinently and coarsely explain the
causes of artistic likings, do not attempt
to influence those likings and dislikings
themselves. For art deals only with the
very surface of Nature ; with that which
she reveals to the naked eye and the un-
aided ear, with the combinations which
require for their perception neither scalpel
nor alembic nor logical mechanism of ana-
lysis. Our artistic sense of right and
wrong is safely based in the structure of
our organism, which science may explain,
but which science cannot replace. It is
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 2OI
from no knowledge of cell or tissue, of
bone or muscle, of anything inside the
human body, that we know when that
body is comely and when it is uncouth.
Our perception of line and colour, perhaps
a collateral sense of weight and resistance,
perhaps even a long engrained, long un-
analytic, long instinctive, nay, automatic
sense of fitness for the purposes of life
all these various senses, combined into
what we call artistic perception, taught the
Greek sculptors where to seek models for
Aphrodite or Apollo long before the first
profane knife had ever pried into the mys-
teries hidden beneath the mere grand curves,
the supple broken lines, the beautiful sur-
face of the human body. Knowledge of
beauty, knowledge of the fair shapes and
tints of man, and beasts, and plants, and
rocks, and skies ; knowledge of the sweet
harmonies or melodies to be got out of
pipe, or string, or throat knowledge of
beauty, though knowledge, most indis-
10*
2O2 JUVENILIA.
putably, is no more scientific knowledge
than is the knowledge of virtue or vice.
Science, with its analysis, can teach us what
hidden reasons of physical benefit or injury,
of social progress or degradation, have
made us such as to prefer beauty to
ugliness, good to evil ; but science was
not born when our remotest ancestors
already preferred beauty to ugliness, good
to evil, and thought that the preference,
the knowledge, was the pressure of some
guiding angel's hand, the mysterious voice
of some unseen divinity. This sort of
science, therefore, physical and physico-
mental, which explains the functions by
the structure and the structure by the
function of things, has therefore no power
of meddling with art ; for the sculptor
knows before the anatomist when a limb
is misshapen ; and the musician has per-
ceived that a chord is insupportable long
before the physicist can begin analyzing his
air waves.
APOLLO THE FIDDLER.
No ; it is not those coarse matter-of-fact
physical sciences which can and do imper-
tinently interfere with art. It is those far
vaguer, less scientific sciences, historical
and geographical, which with their charm
of colour and incident, their stimulus to
fancy and emotion, have become one of the
luxuries of your life, making you forget
almost that they are sciences at all ; as in
some picturesque museum, where furniture
and plate are grouped into habitable rooms,
and armour and musical instruments look
as if only now thrown aside ; or in some
great greenhouse, where spreading palms
and huge ferns hide the glass and ironwork,
and flowering parasites half impede the
way, you may forget that all these things
are so many scientific spoils, so many speci-
mens collected and arranged by historian
or geographer.
These geographic and historic sciences,
which you look upon as if they were scarcely
sciences at all, have in reality no connection
2O4 JUVENILIA.
whatever with our perceptions of beauty
and ugliness ; their range of explanation
does not contain any of the phenomena
of artistic preference. As the physical
sciences explain the structural reasons of our
pleasure or displeasure at certain artistic
forms, so the geographico-historical sciences
explain why given countries and ages have
produced one kind of artistic form rather
than another. The one set of sciences ex-
plains the impression being received by the
spectator ; the other set of sciences explains
that impression being conveyed by the artist.
But the geographico - historical sciences,
which teach us that the Greeks modelled
beautiful naked figures because they greatly
practised athletic exercises ; and that the
Venetians were excellent colourists because
they lived in sea-marsh land and traded
with the East ; these geographico-historic
sciences approach less near to the real artistic
problems of right and wrong than do those
physical sciences that teach us, that owing to
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 05
the configuration of our eye, the bosses of
Greek sculpture and the tints of Venetian
draperies are specially agreeable to us. Yet,
while physiology, optics, acoustics, never
venture upon interfering in our artistic
judgments ; the geographico - historical
sciences, which cannot even explain the
physical basis of our artistic impressions,
are for ever stepping in and telling us that
in a picture, a statue, or an opera, this, that,
or the other is right or wrong. Nay, it is
they, these irrelevant sciences of date and
place, which, while our artistic preceptions
are perfectly delighted, will cry out that we
ought to condemn some anachronism ; it
is they which, in the midst of our admira-
tion for Raphael's Parnassus, evoke that
whole procession of ludicrous images, and
burst out laughing at the Fiddling Apollo.
Yes ; and they have made us laugh at
many other things. At Mozart and Ros-
sini's Romans and Assyrians singing rou-
lades and declaiming accompanied by or-
JUVENILIA.
chestral flourishes, like so many Corydons
and Chloes, in the Forurn or at Nineveh ;
they will make us laugh at half the paint-
ings of the Renaissance ; they may make
us laugh some day at Shakespeare's jumble
of Athenian dukes and London tradesmen
and fairy-land fairies. The laughing is,
however, the least harm they have done ;
for, after all, when we have laughed at
Raphael or Mozart or Shakespeare, we are
still obliged to enjoy and to admire. We are
not smitten blind or deaf for our sacrilege ;
and the great artists are avenged by our
ignominiously returning to the very things
we scorned. But our scientific habits, our
habits of always knowing how and when
and where everything happened, have made
us believe that it is a special mission of
modern art to make up for the anachron-
isms and anomalies of former days by be-
coming in a way the illustrator, with colours,
sounds, and words, of the reality of things
as we now suppose it to have been. His-
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 2C>7
torical painting, which in former days had
nothing whatever to do with history, and
calmly presented us with Romans and
Egyptians and Hebrews in slashed jerkins
and pointed shoes, has in our time become
historical in all good sooth ; poetry, which
used to put into the hearts and mouths of
men and women of distant countries and
bygone ages the passions and words of the
poet and his own contemporaries, now ela-
borates and studies and imitates sentiments
which we fortunately can no longer even
conceive, words of which the real sense has
happily grown obsolete to us. Nay, music,
which would seem the most ungeographic
and unhistorical of all arts, has succeeded, as
critics tell us, in giving us " historic opera ; "
and even, as an enthusiastic Frenchman de-
clared about the " Aida " of Verdi, in de-
lighting us no longer with mere empty
melodies and harmonies, but with the vision
of ancient Egypt, with its pyramids and
mummies, its priests and its warriors, its
2O8 JUVENILIA.
desert sand and Nile mud, and all the mys-
teries of its mixed mysterious races. All
this may seem exaggeration, and indeed,
when such aims and pretensions are dis-
tinctly formulated, there are few of us in
whom they will not occasion a smile. Yet
in point of fact we are constantly acting and
judging according to these ideas ; painters
turn their studios into perfect museums, and
wander all over Syria and Egypt before
attempting some subject which to Michael
Angelo or Leonardo would have presented
nothing beyond a problem of anatomy
or of light and shade. Musicians collect
and print huge volumes of the rude chants
of distant peoples and times, in order that
composers, when on the point of writing
an opera, may know exactly where to look
for the proper local colour. And as to
poets have they not turned of late into
perfect rhymed Michelets and Froudes,
requiring for their proper criticism no longer
literary critics, but keepers of State Records?
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 209
What harm is there in all this ? you may
ask. Granting its uselessness, is it not a
mere amusing mania ? Not so ; and for
several reasons. First, because art must
suffer in its essentials as soon as it is made
subservient to some extra-artistic interest ;
because all this elaborate doing of things
scientific prevents the simple doing of things
artistic. For when a painter, well versed
in Oriental realities, has made of what some
ignoramus of Florence or Venice or Ant-
werp would have made into a grand display
of beautiful figures, faces, and draperies, a
something closely resembling, in its rows of
flopping, veil-muffled, and shawl-huddled
Egyptians or Syrians, a number of clothes
bags in process of being emptied, the art
of painting and the aesthetical cravings of
mankind are not very much the gainers
thereby. When a musician introduces into
an opera elaborate imitations of the music
of centuries and peoples who had no real
music at all, his work is not much improved
2IO JUVENILIA.
thereby. Worst of all, when a poet has
reproduced effects, modes of thought and
feeling, he has not only given us things
with which neither he nor his reader can
sympathise, but he has at the same time
cheated us of the expression of his own and
our real emotions, which, in their quivering
reality, can force the sympathy even of men
to whom these emotions may have grown
obsolete and strange. But this is not all :
in thus attempting to make art the mere
illustrator of science, we shall in the first
place violate the inherent organic conditions
of art ; and then, as sole reward, give it,
in exchange for the stability and imperish-
ableness of artistic form, the fluctuating,
changing impersonality of scientific fact.
For, with regard to the nature of art itself,
we must remember, or understand, what
daily observation ought long since to have
impressed upon us, that there is as com-
plete an organic necessity in the sequence
of style upon style and form upon form as
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. Ill
there is in the sequence of the seasons of
the year and their respective products, or
in the growth of the child into the youth
and the youth into the man ; and that thus
all spontaneous, really vital and valuable
art must always present a certain homogen-
eousness of form and character, a certain
limitation in its capacities, which prevents
the adoption of the forms and characters
of another time or another place : for art,
to be good, or rather when art is good
that is to say, when art is vital men can
imagine, write, paint, only the things which
they see and feel, men can work only in the
style which belongs to their race and to
their generation : to ask, therefore, for a
correct expression or imitation of feelings,
fancies, or forms of other races and other
generations, is simply to demand what no
art in its vital condition, in its condition of
really valuable function, can by any pos-
sibility give. And could living art thus
become the scientific reproducer of efforts,
212 JUVENILIA.
feelings, and forms, could any art worthy
of the name exchange its own powers of
satisfying our aesthetic wants, for the power
of bringing home to us some scientific fact,
some conception of distant or long-ended
things ; could it do this, what would be its
reward ? We have spoken of the stability
and imperishableness of artistic form as
contrasted with the fluctuating, changing
impersonality of scientific fact : this phrase
may have seemed to some an impertinence,
to others an absurdity. Yet if we look
into matters, we shall have to confess the
truth (a bitter truth to the mere critic) that
no purely scientific works can ever live,
that no purely scientific book can ever con-
tinue to be read, that only artistic excellence
endures.
For the man of science, be he naturalist
or ethnologist or metaphysician, gives only
a certain number of new facts, or a certain
magnitude of new system ; his successor in-
herits those facts and that system increases
APOLLO THE FIDDLER.
the one, enlarges the other ; so that the
second comer is always the richer and more
valuable than the first, and the third than
the second. The most valuable scientific
book is necessarily the most recent, because
it contains all the truth contained in its pre-
decessors, and more, and also less error. The
books of the very greatest scientific minds
of the past are now read only by specialists
studying the development of some particu-
lar science or idea. Harvey discovered the
circulation of the blood, Newton gravita-
tion, Smith the relations between price and
supply and demand. Nothing can diminish
their glory for having discovered those facts,
but those facts no longer belong exclusively
to them : they have been developed, cor-
rected by others, and can be found elsewhere
than in their books, and found more com-
plete than in them. We venerate these men,
but we do not read their books. If we want
to know about gravitation, or about supply
and demand, we turn, not to the "Prin-
214 JUVENILIA.
cipia " or to the ff Wealth of Nations," but
to the most recent text-book of physics or
political economy by some living mediocrity.
The same fate awaits Helmholtz, Darwin,
Spencer, Huxley, and all the discoverers of
facts or laws. We all talk of Descartes,
yet how wretchedly poor does not his great
book appear to us ! mere truisms which we
knew before we were born. The same
applies to Vico, to Montesquieu, to all
those who have revolutionized thought. The
man who made the very first plough was
certainly one of the most ingenious of
mortals, yet who would care to use such an
instrument ? and who would care to employ
Stephenson's first railway engine, or Ark-
wright's first loom ? Yet their makers were
men of genius, while the makers of the
latest, most desirable improvements in
engines and looms may be mere craftsmen.
Now the case is immediately changed as
soon as the place of the relative elements,
truth and usefulness, is taken by the positive
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 215
element beauty. For a truth is assimilated
and grows, an invention is assimilated and
grows ; but a work of art, when once
beauty has been attained, does not grow.-
You may repeat and re-repeat, and alter and
re-alter it ; you may destroy it, but you
cannot develop it : its value is positive ;
time passes, and it is as delightful to the
man of the nineteenth century as it was to
the man of the fifth century before Christ.
If you would benefit by what was done
by Homer, by Shakespeare, by Phidias,
Michael Angelo, or Mozart, you must have
recourse to themselves. No addition can be
made to their works ; and it is noteworthy
that the only books which are permanently
reprinted are books of mere belles-lettres,
which may be four thousand years old ; the
only objects which are constantly being
copied, without attempt at alteration, are
not useful mechanisms, but works of art.
You may take a plaster cast of a statue of
the time of Pericles ; but who would care
2l6 JUVENILIA.
to have an exact fac-simile of a revolver
made twenty years ago ? If scientific works
continue to be read, it is because the element
of eternity, the element of beauty, has en-
tered into them ; the scientific ideas may be
old, but the artistic forms are not. We
may know more of philosophy than Plato,
or Bacon, or Pascal, but we have not got
the power of writing as they did. And if
any modern historian or philosopher be read
two hundred years hence, it will be not as
a man of science, but as an artist. A con-
solation this, and a great one, for nowadays
much of what artistic instinct remains
is taking refuge in critical writing. Our
men of thought and research, Ruskin,
Michelet, Carlyle, will be known as great
artists to future generations, which will
have let the memory of many of our artists
die out as that of mere obsolete and mis-
taken men of science.
We have wandered a good way from our
original starting-point, and some of you
APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 11J
may ask, What has all this to do with
Raphael's Apollo ? We started with asking
ourselves how it came about that a learned
man like Raphael, an artist above all his
contemporaries, studious, thoughtful, nay,
archaeological, should have deliberately com-
mitted the anachronism of placing a fiddle
in the hands of Apollo. We found that,
in so doing, Raphael had merely followed
the habit of his time, which considered
artistic representation in a manner quite
different from ours. And, proceeding to
examine our own manner of viewing art and
its functions, we found that, on the whole,
the old way, which at first seemed to us
so childish, illogical, and far-fetched, was
simpler, more natural, and more efficacious
than our own ; that perhaps the illogical
men of the Renaissance had more sense of
artistic logic, of the logic of keeping every-
thing to its right place and work, than we
have ; and that there is more anomaly in
painting ' archaeological pictures, writing
VOL. I. II
2l8 JUVENILIA.
historical tragedies, and composing geogra-
phical operas, than there was in showing
Apollo among the Muses and Poets, fiddling
away on the summit of Parnassus.
UNWIN BROTHERS,
THE GRESHAM PRESS,
CHILWORTH AND LONDON.
A Irj J!i (5 '"" ''"I "'" Mill I/ill |
from ^ h was borrowed
APR 1 z Z004
Unr