Chapter 15

Lastly, for the Soldan himself. In a modern work, you would assuredly have had him staring at St. Francis with his eyebrows up, or frowning thunderously at the Magi, with them bent as far down as they would go. Neither of these aspects does he bear according to Giotto. A perfect gentleman and king, he looks on his Magi with quiet eyes of decision; he is much the noblest person in the room--though an infidel, the true hero of the scene, far more so than St. Francis. It is evidently the Soldan whom Giotto wants you to think of mainly, in this picture of Christian missionary work.

He does not altogether take the view of the Heathen which you would get in an Exeter Hall meeting. Does not expatiate on their ignorance, their blackness, or their nakedness. Does not at all think of the Florentine Islington and Pentonville, as inhabited by persons in every respect superior to the Kings of the East; nor does he imagine every other religion but his own to be log-worship. Probably the people who really worship logs--whether in Persia or Pentonville--will be left to worship logs to their hearts' content, thinks Giotto. But to those who worship _God_, and who have obeyed the laws of heaven written in their hearts, and numbered the stars of it visible to them,--to these, a nearer star may rise; and a higher God be revealed.

You are to note, therefore, that Giotto's Soldan is the type of all noblest religion and law, in countries where the name of Christ has not been preached. There was no doubt what king or people should be chosen: the country of the three Magi had already been indicated by the miracle of Bethlehem; and the religion and morality of Zoroaster were the purest, and in spirit the oldest, in the heathen world. Therefore, when Dante in the nineteenth and twentieth books of the Paradise, gives his final interpretation of the law of human and divine justice in relation to the gospel of Christ--the lower and enslaved body of the heathen being represented by St. Philip's convert ("Christians like these the Ethiop shall condemn")--the noblest state of heathenism is at once chosen, as by Giotto: "What may the _Persians_ say unto _your_ kings?" Compare also Milton,--

"At the Soldan's chair, Defied the best of Paynim chivalry."

_Mornings in Florence_ (Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent, 1875).

FOOTNOTES:

[21] The floor has been repainted; but though its grey is now heavy and cold, it cannot kill the splendour of the rest.

[22] _Fors Clavigera_ for September, 1874.

LILITH

(_ROSSETTI_)

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

"Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve), That, ere the snake's her sweet tongue could deceive, And her enchanted hair was the first gold. And still she sits, young while the earth is old, And, subtly by herself contemplative, Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave, Till heart and body and life are in its hold.

"The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent And soft-shed kisses and soft-shed sleep shall snare? Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent And round his heart one strangling golden hair." _Dante Gabriel Rossetti._

It is well-known that the painter of whom I now propose to speak has never suffered exclusion or acceptance at the hand of any academy. To such acceptance or such rejection all other men of any note have been and may be liable. It is not less well known that his work must always hold its place as second in significance and value to no work done by any painter of his time. Among the many great works of Mr. D.G. Rossetti, I know of none greater than his two latest. These are types of sensual beauty and spiritual, the siren and the sibyl. The one is a woman of the type of Adam's first wife; she is a living Lilith with ample splendour of redundant hair;

"She excels All women in the magic of her locks; And when she winds them round a young man's neck She will not ever set him free again."

Clothed in soft white garments, she draws out through a comb the heavy mass of hair like thick spun gold to fullest length; her head leans back half sleepily, superb and satiate with its own beauty; the eyes are languid, without love in them or hate; the sweet luxurious mouth has the patience of pleasure fulfilled and complete, the warm repose of passion sure of its delight. Outside, as seen in the glimmering mirror, there is full summer; the deep and glowing leaves have drunk in the whole strength of the sun. The sleepy splendour of the picture is a fit raiment for the idea incarnate of faultless fleshly beauty and peril of pleasure unavoidable. For this serene and sublime sorceress there is no life but of the body; with spirit (if spirit there be) she can dispense. Were it worth her while for any word to divide those terrible tender lips, she too might say with the hero of the most perfect and exquisite book of modern times--_Mademoiselle de Maupin--"Je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que la correction de la forme est la vertu."_ Of evil desire or evil impulse she has nothing; and nothing of good. She is indifferent, equable, magnetic; she charms and draws down the souls of men by pure force of absorption, in no wise wilful or malignant; outside herself she cannot live, she cannot even see: and because of this she attracts and subdues all men at once in body and in spirit. Beyond the mirror she cares not to look, and could not.

_"Ma mia suora Rahel mai non si smaga, Dal suo miraglio, e siede tutto 'l giorno."_

So, rapt in no spiritual contemplation, she will sit to all time, passive and perfect: the outer light of a sweet spring day flooding and filling the massive gold of her hair. By the reflection in a deep mirror of fervent foliage from without, the chief chord of stronger colour is touched in this picture; next in brilliance and force of relief is the heap of curling and tumbling hair on which the sunshine strikes; the face and head of the siren are withdrawn from the full stroke of the light.

_Essays and Studies_ (London, 1875).

ADORATION OF THE MAGI

(_DÜRER_)

MORIZ THAUSING

Italy, that beautiful enchantress, whose irresistible charms have caused many of Germany's greatest men to forget their native land, and array themselves beneath her colours, did not fail to exercise over Dürer, in the course of the year and more that he spent beyond the Alps, that subtle influence which elevates the understanding and expands the mind. He thought, as did Goethe after him, with a sort of shudder, of his return to cloudy skies, and of the less easy nature of the life which awaited him at home. But, though he enjoyed himself very much at Venice, and gave in willingly in many external things to the prevailing taste there, the essential nature of his art remained untouched by foreign influences, and he returned to Nuremberg unitalianized, and true to his original principles. The fame which his works enjoyed in Italy only encouraged him to continue in the path he had already chosen. Perhaps the exuberance of life displayed in Venetian painting inspired him, even under the altered circumstances of his home life, with the determination to devote all his energies to large easel pictures. To the _Adoration of the Magi_ in 1504, and the _Feast of the Rosary_ in 1506, succeeded the _Adam and Eve_ in 1507, the _Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Saints_ in 1508, the _Assumption of the Virgin_ in 1509, and the All Saints picture or _Adoration of the Trinity_ of 1511. Dürer was at the height of his power when he created these masterpieces, small, indeed, in number, but remarkable for their conception, composition, and entire execution by his own hand. To complete a large picture to his satisfaction, Dürer required the same time as Schiller did for a tragedy, viz., a whole year....

It was in the year 1504 that Dürer finished the first great picture, which, from its excellent state of preservation, must have been entirely executed with the greatest care by his own hand, even to the most minute detail. This picture is the _Adoration of the Magi_, now in the Tribune of the Uffizi at Florence. Mary sits on the left, looking like the happiest of German mothers, with the enchantingly naïve Infant on her knees; the three Wise Men from the East, in magnificent dresses glittering with gold, approach, deeply moved, and with various emotions depicted on their countenances, while the whole creation around seems to share their joyous greeting, even to the flowers and herbs, and to the great stag-beetle and two white butterflies, which are introduced after the manner of Wolgemut. The sunny green on copse and mountain throws up the group better than the conventional nimbus could have done. The fair-haired Virgin, draped entirely in blue with a white veil, recalls vividly the same figure in the Paumgärtner altarpiece. Aërial and linear perspective are still imperfect, but the technical treatment of the figures is as finished as in Dürer's best pictures of the later period. The outlines are sharp, the colours very liquid, laid on without doubt in tempera, and covered with oil glazes; the whole tone exceedingly fresh, clear, and brilliant. If it was Barbari's fine work which incited Dürer to this delicate and careful method of execution, he has certainly far surpassed the Venetian, not only in form and ideas, but also in the solidity of his technique. This technique is undoubtedly of Northern origin, as is also the harmony of colour, which Dürer here realizes, and does not soon again abandon. It must not be forgotten, however, that the difference between this technique and that practised by Giovanni Bellini is one of degree and not of principle; judging at least by the unfinished painting of Giovanni's in the Uffizi, in which the design is sketched either with the pencil or brush, and the colours then laid on in tempera, and afterwards repeatedly covered with oil glazes. Dürer appears to have owed the opportunity of producing this his first masterpiece in painting to a commission from the Elector Frederick of Saxony. Christian II. presented it to the Emperor Rudolph II. in 1603, and in the last century it was sent from the imperial gallery, in exchange for the _Presentation in the Temple_, by Fra Bartolomeo, to Florence, where it now shines as a gem of German art amongst the renowned pictures in the Tribune of the Uffizi.

_The Life and Works of Albert Dürer_, translated from the German and edited by Fred. A. Eaton (London, 1882).

MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE

(_HOGARTH_)

AUSTIN DOBSON

Nevertheless, if the main circumstances of the painter's career should still remain unaltered, there must always be a side of his work which will continue to need interpretation. In addition to painting the faults and follies of his time, he was pre-eminently the pictorial chronicler of its fashions and its furniture. The follies endure; but the fashions pass away. In our day--a day which has witnessed the demolition of Northumberland House, the disappearance of Temple Bar, and the removal of we know not what other time-honoured and venerated landmarks--much in Hogarth's plates must seem as obscure as the cartouches on Cleopatra's Needle. Much more is speedily becoming so; and without some guidance the student will scarcely venture into that dark and doubtful rookery of tortuous streets and unnumbered houses--the London of the Eighteenth Century.

Were it not beyond the reasonable compass of a methodical memoir, it would be a pleasant task to loiter for a while in that vanished London of Hogarth, of Fielding, of Garrick;--that London of Rocque's famous map of 1746, when "cits" had their country-boxes and "gazebos" at Islington and Hackney, and fine gentlemen their villas at _Marybone_ and _Chelsey_; when duels were fought in the "fields" behind the British Museum, and there was a windmill at the bottom of Rathbone Place. We should find the Thames swarming with noisy watermen, and the streets with thick-calved Irish chairmen; we should see the old dusky oil-lamps lighted feebly with the oil that dribbled on the Rake when he went to Court; and the great creaking sign-boards that obscured the sky, and occasionally toppled on the heads of his Majesty's lieges beneath. We should note the sluggish kennels and the ill-paved streets; and rejoice in the additional facilities afforded for foot-passengers at the "new Buildings near _Hanover_ Square." We might watch King George II. yawning in his Chapel Royal of St. James's, or follow Queen Caroline of Anspach in her walk on Constitution Hill. Or we might turn into the Mall, which is filled on summer evenings with a _Beau-Monde_ of cinnamon-coloured coats and pink _négligés_. But the tour of Covent Garden (with its column and dial in the centre) would take at least a chapter, and the pilgrimage of Leicester Fields another. We should certainly assist at the Lord Mayor's Show; and we might, like better folks before us, be hopelessly engulfed in that westward-faring crowd, which, after due warning from the belfry of St. Sepulchre's, swept down the old Tyburn Road on "Execution Day" to see the last of Laurence Shirley, Earl Ferrers, or the highwayman James M'Lean. It is well, perhaps, that our limits are definitely restricted.

Moreover, much that we could do imperfectly with the pen, Hogarth has done imperishably with the graver. Essentially metropolitan in his tastes, there is little notable in the London of his day of which he has not left us some pictorial idea. He has painted the Green Park, the Mall, and Rosamond's Pond. He has shown us Covent Garden and St. James's Street; Cheapside and Charing Cross; Tottenham-Court Road and Hog-Lane, St. Giles. He has shown us Bridewell, Bedlam, and the Fleet Prison. Through a window in one print we see the houses on old London Bridge; in another it is Temple Bar, surmounted by the blackened and ghastly relics of Jacobite traitors. He takes us to a cock-fight in Bird Cage Walk, to a dissection in Surgeons' Hall. He gives us reception-rooms in Arlington Street, counting-houses in St. Mary Axe, sky-parlours in Porridge Island, and night-cellars in Blood-Bowl Alley. He reproduces the decorations of the Rose Tavern or of the Turk's Head Bagnio as scrupulously as the monsters at Dr. Misaubin's museum in St. Martin's Lane, or the cobweb over the poor-box in Mary-le-bone Old Church. The pictures on the walls, the Chinese nondescripts on the shelves, the tables and chairs, the pipes and punch-bowls, nay, the very tobacco and snuff, have all their distinctive physiognomy and prototypes. He gives us, unromanced and unidealized, "the form and pressure," the absolute details and accessories, the actual _mise-en-scène_, of the time in which he lived.[23]

But he has done much more than this. He has peopled his canvas with its _dramatis personæ_,--with vivid portraits of the more strongly-marked actors in that cynical and sensual, brave and boastful, corrupt and patriotic age. Not, be it understood, with its Wolfes and Johnsons,--he was a humourist and a satirist, and goodness was no game for his pencil,--rather with its Lovats and Chartres, its Sarah Malcolms and its Shebbeares. He was a moralist after the manner of eighteenth-century morality, not savage like Swift, not ironical like Fielding, not tender-hearted at times like Johnson and Goldsmith; but unrelenting, uncompromising, uncompassionate. He drew vice and its consequences in a thoroughly literal and business-like way, neither sparing nor extenuating its details, wholly insensible to its seductions, incapable of flattering it even for a moment, preoccupied simply with catching its precise contortion of pleasure or of pain. In all his delineations, as in that famous design of Prud'hon's, we see Justice and Vengeance following hard upon the criminal....

A hint of the new series had already been given in the _Battle of the Pictures_, where the second scene, still inoffensively reposing upon the easel, is wantonly assaulted by a copy of the _Aldobrandini Marriage_. In April following the set of engravings was issued, the subscription ticket being the etching of heads known as _Characters and Caricaturas_. Plates I. and VI. were engraved by Scotin, Plates II. and III. by Baron, and Plates IV. and V. by Ravenet. Exactly two years earlier, Hogarth had heralded them by the following notification in the _London Daily Post, and General Advertiser_ of April 2nd, 1743:

"Mr. HOGARTH intends to publish by Subscription, SIX PRINTS from Copper-Plates, engrav'd by the best Masters in Paris, after his own Paintings; representing a Variety of _Modern Occurrences in High-Life_, and called MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE. Particular Care will be taken, that there may not be the least Objection to the Decency or Elegancy of the whole Work, and that none of the Characters represented shall be personal." Then follow the terms of subscription. The last quoted lines are probably a bark at some forgotten detraction, and if not actually ironical, doubtless about as sincere as Fielding's promise, in the Prologue to his first comedy, not to offend the ladies. Those who had found inelegancy and indecency in the previous productions of the painter, would still discover the same defects in the masterpiece he now submitted to the public. And although it may be said that the "characters" represented are not "personal" in a satirical sense, his precautions, as he himself tells us, "did not prevent a likeness being found for each head, for a general character will always bear some resemblance to a particular one."

But what, no doubt, interested his critical contemporaries even more than these preliminary protestations, was the painter's promise to represent, in his new work, "a variety of modern occurrences in high-life." Here, it may be admitted, was a proposition which certainly savoured of temerity. What could one whose pencil had scarcely travelled beyond the limits of St. Giles's, know of the inner secrets of St. James's? A Hervey or a Beauclerk, or even a Fielding, might have sufficed; but a Hogarth of Leicester Fields, whose only pretence to distinction (as High Life conceives it) was that he had run away with Thornhill's handsome daughter,--what special title had he to depict that charmed region of cards and folly, ringed with its long-resounding knockers, and flambeau-carrying footmen! This was, however, to reckon without genius, which over-leaps loftier barriers than these. It is true that the English Novel of Manners, which has since stimulated so many artists, had only just made its appearance; and _Pamela_ and _Joseph Andrews_ but falteringly foreshadowed _Clarissa_ and _Tom Jones_. Yet there is nothing in the story of _Marriage A-la-Mode_ which was beyond the powers of a _spectator ab extra_, always provided he were fairly acquainted with the Modelys and Wildairs of the stage, and the satires of Johnson and Pope. The plot, like that of all masterpieces, is extremely simple. An impoverished nobleman who marries his son to a rich citizen's daughter; a husband who, pursuing his own equivocal pleasures, resigns his wife to the temptations of opportunity; a foregone sequel and a tragic issue:--this material is of the oldest, and could make but slender claim to originality. Submitted to Colman or Garrick as the _scenario_ of a play for Yates and Mrs. Woffington, it would probably have been rejected as pitifully threadbare. Yet combined and developed under the brush of Hogarth, set in an atmosphere that makes it as vivid as nature itself, decorated with surprising fidelity, and enlivened by all the resources of the keenest humour, it passes out of the line of mere transcripts of life, and, retaining the merits of the specific and particular, becomes a representative and typical work, as articulate to-day, as direct and unhesitating in its teaching, as it was when it was first offered to the world.

How well-preserved, even now, these wonderful pictures are! It would almost seem as if Time, unreasoning in his anger, had determined to ignore in every way the audacious artist who treated him with such persistent indignity. Look at them in the National Gallery. Look, too, at the cracks and fissures in the Wilkies, the soiled rainbows of Turner,--the bituminous riding-habit of Lady Douro in Sir Edwin's _Story of Waterloo_. But these paintings of William Hogarth are well-nigh as fresh to-day as when, new from the easel, they found their fortunate purchaser in Mr. Lane of Hillingdon. They are not worked like a Denner, it is true, and the artist is often less solicitous about his method than about the result of it; yet they are soundly, straight-forwardly, and skilfully executed. Lady Bingley's red hair, Carestini's nostril, are shown in the simplest and directest manner. Everywhere the desired effect is exactly produced, and without effort. Take, as an illustration, the inkstand in the first scene, with its bell and sand-caster. In these days it would be a patient _trompe-l'oeil_, probably better done than the figures using it. Here it is merely indicated, not elaborated; it holds its exact place as a piece of furniture, and nothing more. And at this point it may be observed that if in the ensuing descriptions we should speak of colour, the reader will remember we are describing, not the performances of Messrs. Ravenet and the rest, but Hogarth's original pictures at Trafalgar Square. It is the more necessary to bear this in mind, because, besides being reversed, the paintings frequently differ in detail from the engravings.