Chapter 14

So I arrived at Brussels to exercise the trade of critic, and found myself in the presence of two men who were then making a brilliant debut as painters: De Keyser and Henri Leys. I hope I shall be forgiven if I reproduce my criticism of the latter's 'Massacre of the Magistrates of Louvain.'

"Imagine to yourself a small public square, such as might have existed in Louvain in the fourteenth century; this square filled with angry people demanding satisfaction for the death of their chief, Gautier de Lendes, assassinated by the nobles; the approach to the palace of justice crowded with men armed to the teeth; at the top of the stairs the city magistrates on their way to execution, some as calm as if about to administer justice, others bewailing that the people know not what they do; peasants awaiting them at the foot of the stairs, dagger in hand, a smile upon their lips; here and there fainting women, dead bodies being stripped, dying men being tortured, and an inextricable confusion of monks, burghers, soldiers, children and horses. Then if you fancy this scene painted with the warmth and impetuosity of a Tintoretto, or as Hugo would have written it, you will have an idea of Leys's picture. It may not be prudent to trust an enthusiastic criticism; but my opinion is shared by every one. I may be rash in praising a young man whose wings may melt in the sun; but when, as is the case with M. Leys, the artist possesses exact knowledge of the times and manners, when he has verve, dash, and deep feeling, he needs only to moderate ardor by reflection, and to ripen inspiration by study, in order to become great."

One must admit that the above was not a bad beginning for an apprentice-connoisseur, and that I was fortunate in praising an unknown artist destined to make a great reputation.... There is something more real than reality in what passes in the soul of a great artist!

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DELACROIX'S 'BARK OF DANTE'

From 'Contemporary Artists'

An admirable and altogether new quality is the weird harmony of color which makes the painting vibrate like a drama; or in other words, that sombre harmony itself is the foundation of the tragedy. Lyricism is expressed by mere difference in tones, which, heightened by their contrasts and softened by their analogy, become harmonious while clashing with each other. A new poetry was born of the French school, until then so sober of color, so little inclined to avail itself of the material resources of painting. And yet the expression thus achieved by Delacroix appeals to the soul as much as to the eyes. It is not merely optical beauty, but spiritual beauty of the highest order, that is produced by his superb coloring. In this picture the young painter's genius was revealed unto himself. He then knew that he had guessed the secret of an art which he was to carry to a perfection undreamed of before,--the orchestration of color....

Delacroix was the hero of Romanticism. His life was one long revolt in the name of color against drawing, of flesh against marble, of freedom of attitude against traditionary precision. He is an essentially modern genius inflamed by the poetry of Christianity, and he added tumultuous passions and feverish emotions to the antique serenity of art.

In those days youth was entirely given up to noble aspirations, to dreams of glory, to enthusiasm for beauty of expression and feeling, to an ardent love of liberty. Men were indifferent to stock quotations, but they rated spiritual values high. Mere theories inspired passion; quarrels on the subject of style and painting were common; men became enthusiastic over poetry and beauty--the ideal!

GENESIS OF THE 'GRAMMAR'

At dinner one day with the dignitaries of one of the largest cities of France, conversation turned upon the arts. All of the guests spoke of them, and well; but each intrenched himself behind his own personal views, in virtue of the adage "One cannot argue about tastes." I protested in vain against this false principle, saying that it was inadmissible, and that the classic Brillat-Savarin would have been shocked at such blasphemy. Even his name had no weight, and the guests separated gayly, after uttering heresies that made you shiver. Among the eminent men present there was one, however, who seemed somewhat mortified that he had not the most elementary idea of art; and he asked me if there was not some book in which its principles were presented in a clear and brief form. I replied that no such book existed, and that on leaving college I should have been only too happy to find such a work; and thereupon determined to write one.

MORAL INFLUENCE OF ART

From 'Grammar of Painting and Engraving'

Painting purifies people by its mute eloquence. The philosopher writes his thoughts for those who can think and read. The painter shows his thought to all who have eyes to see. That hidden and naked virgin, Truth, the artist finds without seeking. He throws a veil over her, encourages her to please, proves to her that she is beautiful, and when he has reproduced her image he makes us take her, and takes her himself, for Beauty.

In communicating to us what has been seen and felt by others, the painter gives new strength and compass to the soul. Who can say of how many apparently fugitive impressions a man's morality is composed, and upon what depends the gentleness of his manners, the correctness of his habits, the elevation of his thoughts? If the painter represents acts of cruelty or injustice, he inspires us with horror. The 'Unhappy Family' of Proudhon moves the fibres of charity better than the homilies of a preacher.... Examples of the sublime are rare in painting, as the painter is compelled to imprison every idea in a form. It may happen, nevertheless, that moved by thoughts to which he has given no form, the artist strikes the soul as a thunderbolt would the ear. It is then by virtue of the thought perceived, but not formulated, that the picture becomes sublime.

POUSSIN'S 'SHEPHERDS OF ARCADIA'

From 'Grammar of Painting and Engraving'

In a wide, heavily wooded country, the sojourning-place of that happiness sung by the poets, some peasants have discovered a tomb hidden by a thicket of trees, and bearing this brief inscription: "Et in Arcadia ego" (I too lived in Arcadia). These words, issuing from the tomb, sadden their faces, and the smiles die upon their lips. A young girl, carelessly leaning upon the shoulder of her lover, seems to listen, mute and pensive, to this salutation from the dead. The thought of death has also plunged into reverie a youth who leans over the tomb with bowed head, while the oldest shepherd points out the inscription he has just discovered. The landscape that completes this quiet picture shows reddened leaves upon arid rocks; hillocks that melt in the vague horizon, and in the distance, something ill-defined that resembles the sea. The sublime in this painting is that which we cannot see; it is the thought that hovers over it, the unexpected emotion that fills the soul of the spectator, transported suddenly beyond the tomb into the infinite unknown.

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LANDSCAPE

From 'Grammar of Painting and Engraving'

The poetry of the fields and forests is inseparable from truth. But the painter must idealize this truth by making it express some sentiment; faithfulness of imitation alone would not suffice. The artist, master of reality, enlightens it with his eyes, transfigures it according to his heart, and makes it utter what is not in it--sentiment; and that which it neither possesses nor understands--thought.

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STYLE

From 'Grammar of Painting and Engraving'

Drawing is a work of the mind; every drawing is the expression of a thought or sentiment, and is charged with showing us something superior to the apparent truth when that reveals neither sentiment nor thought. But what is this superior truth? It is sometimes the character of the object drawn, sometimes the character of the designer, and in high art is what we call style.

The artist sees in the creations of nature what he himself carries in the depth of his soul, tints them with the colors of his imagination, lends them the witchery of his genius. The temperament of the artist modifies the character of objects, and even that of living figures. But this power of taking possession is the appanage of great hearts, of great artists, of those whom we call masters,--who, instead of being the slaves of reality, dominate it. These have a style; their imitators have only a manner.

Aside from the style peculiar to every great master, there is in art something still superior and impersonal, which is style proper. Style is truth aggrandized, simplified, freed from all insignificant details, restored to its original essence, its typical aspect. This "style" _par excellence_, in which instead of recognizing the soul of an artist we feel the breath of the universal soul, was realized in the Greek sculpture of the time of Pericles.

THE LAW OF PROPORTION IN ARCHITECTURE

From 'Grammar of Painting and Engraving'

Man, from the fact that he is the only intelligent being in creation, desires to show his intelligence in his works. In order to do so he makes them resemble himself in a measure, by impressing upon them the characteristic of his intelligence, which is logic, and that of his body, which is proportion. Architecture employs inorganic matter alone--stone, marble, brick, iron, wood, when the sap has been dried out of it and it ceases to be an organic substance; and yet, under the hand of the architect, this inert matter expresses sentiments and feelings. By subjecting it to the laws of order, symmetry, and proportion, in a manner which appeals to the eye, he lends them a semblance of life and an organism conceived after his own image. By this artificial proportion, inert matter is raised to the dignity of the animal kingdom; it is rendered eloquent and capable of expressing the soul of the artist, and often that of a race.

But human monuments have still another point in common with the body. Order, symmetry, and proportion are needed rigorously only on the exterior. Within, general beauty no longer dominates, but individual life. If we look at the interior of the human body we find no symmetry, no arrangement but that demanded by the function of the organs. The brain, it is true, has two symmetrical lobes, because the brain is destined to a life of relation, to the life of intelligence. But in their individual functions the life of the internal organs presents another aspect. The stomach is a shapeless bag; the heart is a single muscle which is not even placed in the centre; the left lung is longer and narrower than the right; the spleen is a ganglion placed on the left side without any corresponding organ; but all this mechanism, which scientists consider wonderful in its irregularity, is hidden beneath a layer of similar members which repeat each other and correspond at equal distances from a central line, and constitute symmetry in animals, beauty in man. Similar in this respect to the human body, architectural monuments have a double life and a double aspect.

On the exterior, it is meet that they should be regular, symmetrical--but symmetrical from left to right like man, not from top to bottom nor from face to back. Their resemblance to man is further shown by openings, which are as the eyes and ears of the persons who inhabit them; their entrance occupies the centre of the edifice, as the mouth is placed on the central line of the face; they have rounded or angular forms according as they have been built to express strength, a virile idea, or grace, a feminine one; lastly, they have proportion, for there is a harmonious relation between their apparent members, and a mutual dependence which subordinates the variety of the parts to the unity of the whole, and which constitutes the necessary conditions of the beautiful in art.

The interior is not subjected to the necessity for duplicate members, to regularity of façade, nor to unity of appearance. Thus when the artist who has designed the monument performs its autopsy,--so to say,--we see, as in the human body, unequal dimensions, irregular shapes, disparities which resemble disorder to the eye, but which constitute the individuality of the edifice. Within reigns relative beauty, free, with fixed rule; without reigns a necessary beauty subjected to its own laws.

In man, character is the soul's expression. In architecture, character is the moral physiognomy o£ a building. As a portrait without character is but a vain shadow of the person represented, so a monument which does not appeal to the intelligence, which evokes no thought, is merely a pile of stones, a body without a soul. The soul of architecture is the thought it expresses.

Character tends towards beauty in man as well as in his works. If we glance at human society, we see faces which appear to be nothing more than a sketch. Parsimonious nature has given them only sufficient life to move in a narrow circle; they are mere individuals; they represent nothing but themselves. However, in the midst of the crowd, some men are noticeable for an abundance of vitality, whom favorable events have developed along their natural tendencies: they impersonate many individuals in one; their unity is equal to numbers; for good or evil, they have a character. In proportion as an individuality becomes more enriched, more pronounced, it attains character; in proportion as character loses its roughness it becomes beauty. This is also true of architecture.

STEEN STEENSEN BLICHER

(1782-1848)

Among the men nearest to the heart of the Danish people is Steen Steensen Blicher, who was born in 1782 on the border of the Jutland heath with which his name is so inseparably linked. The descendant of a line of country parsons, he was destined like them to the ministry, and while awaiting his appointment he supported his family by teaching and by farming.

When after years of hardship he finally obtained a parish on the Jutland heath, the salary was too small to support his large family. It was only during the very last years of his life that he was freed from harassing cares by the generosity of three friends, who, grateful for his literary work, paid off his debts.

While he was in college at Copenhagen he heard the lectures of the Norwegian Henrik Steffens, an interpreter of the German philosophic and romantic school. Steffens aroused a reaction against the formalism of the eighteenth century, and introduced romanticism into the North by his powerful influence over men like Oehlenschläger, Grundtvig, and Mynster in Denmark, and Ling and the "Phosphorists" in Sweden. Through these lectures Blicher became much interested in the Ossianic poems, of which he made an. Excellent Danish translation.

The poems and dramas with which he followed this work were of no great importance. It was not until he began to look into the old Danish traditions that he found his true sphere. The study of these quaint and simple legends led him to write those national peasant stories which he began to publish in 1826. They are not only the best of their kind in Danish, but they bear favorable comparison with the same kind of work in other literatures. They are not written as a study of social problems, or of any philosophy of life or moods of nature as they are reflected in human existence; they are merely a reproduction of what the country parson's own eyes beheld--the comedy and tragedy of the commonplace. What a less sensitive observer might have passed in silence--the brown heath, the breakers of the North Sea, the simple heart and life of the peasant--revealed to him the poesy, now merry, now sad, which he renders with so much art and so delicate a sympathy. Behind the believer in romanticism stands the lover of nature and of humanity.

Among his works the best known are 'E Bindstouw' (The Knitting-room), a collection of stories and poems, full of humor, simple and naive, told by the peasants themselves in their own homely Jutland dialect. These, as well as some of his later poems, especially 'Sneklokken' (The Snowbell), and 'Trækfuglene' (Birds of Passage), possess a clear, true, and national lyric quality.

Dying in 1848, Blicher was buried in Jutland, near the heath on which he spent whole days and nights of happy solitude. On one side of the stone above his grave is engraved a golden plover, on the other a pair of heath-larks, and around the foot a garland of heather, in memory of that intimate life with nature which, through his own great love for it, he endeared to all his readers.

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A PICTURE

From the 'Poems'

I lay on my heathery hills alone; The storm-winds rushed o'er me in turbulence loud; My head rested lone on the gray moorland stone; My eyes wandered skyward from cloud unto cloud.

There wandered my eyes, but my thoughts onward passed, Far beyond cloud-track or tempest's career; At times I hummed songs, and the desolate waste Was the first the sad chimes of my spirit to hear.

Gloomy and gray are the moorlands where rest My fathers, yet there doth the wild heather bloom, And amid the old cairns the lark buildeth her nest, And sings in the desert, o'er hill-top and tomb.

From Hewitt's 'Literature of Northern Europe.'

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THE KNITTING-ROOM

It was the eve before Christmas Eve--no, stop! I am lying--it was the eve before that, come to think of it, that there was a knitting-bee going on at the schoolmaster's, Kristen Kornstrup's,--you know him? There were plenty that knew him, for in the winter he was schoolmaster, and in the summer he was mason, and he was alike clever at both. And he could do more than that, for he could stop the flow of blood, and discover stolen goods, and make the wind turn, and read prayers over felons, and much more too. But at this exorcising he was not so good as the parson, for he had not been through the black school.

So we had gathered there from the whole town,--oh, well, Lysgaard town is not so mighty big: there are only six farms and some houses, but then they were there too from Katballe and Testrup, and I think the lads from Knakkeborg had drifted over too--but that doesn't matter. We had got it measured off at last, and all of us had got our yarn over the hook in the ceiling above the table, and had begun to let the five needles work. Then the schoolmaster says, "Isn't there one of you that will sing something or tell something? then it will go so nicely with the work here." Then she began to speak, Kirsten Pedersdatter from Paps,--for she is always forward about speaking:--"I could sing you a little ditty if you cared to hear it--" "That we do," said I, "rattle it off!"--And she sang a ditty--I had never heard it before, but I remember it well enough, and it ran this way:--

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But now I will tell you a story about a Poorman [gipsy] and what happened to him.

"If," said he--Mads Ur--"if you have been in Herning or thereabout, you know that there is a great marsh south of it. That same marsh is not so very nice to cross for those that don't know it well.

"It was the summer I was working for Kristens that a cow sank down out there, and it was one of those I was watching. I took her by the horns and I took her by the tail, but she would not help herself at all, and when one won't do a little bit, what is going to become of one? As I stand there pulling at that same refractory cow, up comes a Poorman from over at Rind, one of those they call knackers. 'I'll have to help you,' said he: 'you take hold of the horns, and I'll lift the tail.' That worked, for he pricked her under the tail with his pikestaff, and she was of a mind to help herself too. 'What do you give me for that now?' said he. 'I have nothing to give you,' said I, 'nothing but thanks.' 'I won't have them,' answered he, 'but if ever I should sink down on one road or another, will you lend me a hand if you are near by?' 'That I will do, indeed,' answered I; and then he tramped up to town, and that was all.

"How was it now that I came to work in Sund's parsonage?--well, that doesn't matter--I could swing a scythe, but how old I was I don't remember, for I don't rightly know how old I am now. The parson was a mighty good man, but God help us for the wife he had! She was as bad to him as any woman could be, and he hadn't a dog's chance with her. I have saved him twice from her grip, for he was a little scared mite of a thing, and she was big and strong, but I was stronger still, and I could get the better of her. Once she chased him around the yard with a knife in her hand, and cried that she would be even with him. I did not like that, so I took the knife from her and warned her to behave herself,--but that wasn't what I meant to say. Well, once while I was working there I stood near the pond looking at the aftermath. And up comes this same customer--this Poorman--drifting along the road toward me, and he had two women following him, and they each had a cradle on their backs and a child in each cradle. 'Good day to you,' said I. 'Same to you,' said he; 'how is your cow? Have you let her get into the marsh since?' 'Oh, no,' said I, 'and here is another thank-ye to you.' 'Are you working in this here bit of a parsonage?' said he. 'That I am,' said I. 'Well, now listen,' said he; 'couldn't you hide me these two with their little ones a day or so? for to-morrow there is to be a raid on our people, and I wouldn't like to have these in Viborghouse; I can stow myself away easy enough.' 'I'll see what I can do,' answered I; 'let them come, say a little after bedtime, to the West house there, and I'll get a ladder ready and help them up on the hayloft,--but have you food and drink yourself?' 'Oh, I shall do well enough,' said he, 'and now farewell to you until the sun is down.' So then they drifted along the road to a one-horse farm, and that evening they came, sure enough, and I hid the two women and the children until the second night; then they slipped away again. Before I parted with them, the Poorman said, 'I'd like to repay you this piece of work: isn't there something you want very much?' 'Yes,' said I.--'What might it be?'--'Hm! The only thing is Morten's Ane Kirstine at the farm where you went last night. But her parents won't let me have her; they say I have too little, and that is true too.' 'Hm, man,' says he, 'you look as if you had a pair of strong arms of your own; that is a good heirloom, and she has some pennies,--in a couple of days you might go and see what the old man's mind is. I'll help along the best I know how.' I listened to that, for evil upon them, those gipsies--they are not such fools. They can tell fortunes and discover stolen goods, and they can do both good and evil as it may happen.