Part 3
A man may possess the advantages that education, training, culture give, yet all these excellent acquirements combined cannot manufacture an artist. It needs the live coal taken from off the altar to kindle the sacred flame which illumines the artist's soul.
The painter's art is subject to this very mysterious law. Philip Gilbert Hamerton describes the working of the artistic spirit in man. He says: "Painting is a pursuit in which thought, scholarship, information, go for little; whereas a strange, unaccountable talent working in obscure ways achieves the only results worth having. Here is a field in which neither birth nor condition is of any use, and wealth itself of exceeding little; here faculty alone avails, and a kind of faculty so subtle and peculiar, so difficult to estimate before years have been spent in developing it, or wasted in the vain attempt to develop where it does not exist."
There are pictures you and I dearly love, and they are priceless treasures in the market; yet there is no deep thought or display of learning in them to win our admiration. They violate facts of history, they outrage the grammar of academic art, and even their drawing may be inaccurate. Why, then, are such works cherished and treasured? Because, with all their faults, they have power, they have feeling; they speak to the heart. The men who painted them were unlearned and ignorant, but they were artists to the finger-tips. There is a spiritual something breathing beneath the surface of the true painter's work which leaps to the eye and draws upon us and bestirs our emotions. Other pictures--laboured, scholastic, monumental, they leave us cold and passionless, and we pass them by on the other side.
A good architect also is to the manner born. The principles of proportion in designing a building are difficult to adjust to give pleasure to the eye. Now, the sense of proportion is a gift which some men possess and others lack; although they are architects by profession, they are amateurs in construction. Without that subtle sense of proportion a man blunders through his designs, and puts no feeling of beauty or joy in the finished structure which is the work of his hands. Ruskin says: "It is just as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how to proportion truly and well by calculating for him the proportions of fine works as it would be to teach him to compare melodies by calculating the mathematical relations of the notes in Beethoven's 'Adelaide' or Mozart's 'Requiem.' The man who has eye and intellect will invent beautiful proportions, and cannot help it; but he can no more tell us how to do it than Wordsworth could tell us how to write a sonnet, or than Scott could have told us how to plan a romance."
What the faculty of feeling is to the artist, what the sense of proportion is to the architect, the gift of style is to the writer. Style is the witchery of words; style is clothing thought in captivating language. Style is the setting of the gem. The gem may be rare, but it needs the aid of the goldsmith's art to make the most of it. It is the skilful setting that holds up the sparkling gem to our admiration. Style is everything in writing; it makes the thoughts sparkle. Niceties of style you cannot explain by rule-of-three, nor dissect its individuality by the drastic deed of vivisection; you cannot slash the heart out of it with a critickin's reckless knife. You can unravel a piece of rare old Flemish tapestry, and destroy the beautiful design and harmonious colouring of it. In fact, you can reduce the tapestry to a heap of valueless threads of worsted fit only for burning; but style in literature you cannot pick to pieces. You cannot find the master-thread on which the secret of the pattern runs, and which reveals the cunning of the workman's craft. By some mysterious process the writer weaves words together that the chambers of our imagination may be hung with tapestries rare and pleasant to behold. No explanation of the gift of penmanship is possible. Moulding words into forms of beauty is not an achievement: it is a gift of the gods, and no handbook of literature, however diligently pursued, can turn an artisan into an artist cunning in gold-minted phrases.
When Castiglione sent the manuscript of his book, "The Perfect Courtier," to Vittoria Colonna for her approval, she replied in a flattering letter thanking the author, saying: "The subject is new and beautiful, but the excellence of the style is such that, with a sweetness never before felt, it leads us up a most pleasant and fertile slope, which we gradually ascend without perceiving that we are no longer on the level ground from which we started; and the way is so well cultivated and adorned that we scarce can tell whether Art or Nature has done most to make it fair."
It is expression that counts, and the writer who expresses himself simply, vividly, concisely, boldly, and plays upon our heart-strings at pleasure, is naturally a "gifted" man. He not only sees in clear, full vision himself, but he brings his vision home to our cloudy brains and makes us see clearly; that is the wonder of it. It needs all the art and magic and persuasion of language to accomplish this difficult task. We _see_ the subject presented as a picture when he writes with a graphic pen; we _feel_ poignantly when his sharp and polished periods pierce like a rapier our understanding; we are _fascinated_ when his impassioned eloquence flows, glittering like running water in the sunlight, dazzling our bewildered brains. And when he scores by his native wit and writes in his trenchant, racy mother-tongue there is a smile in the stalls and loud laughter in the pit.
How mysteriously beauty steals into language and warms up the radiant face of poetry with glowing vitality. There is no beauty in stale prosaic sentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Rubbish may be shot here," because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say and nothing more can be squeezed out of them. There is beauty in a sentence like "The bright day is done. And we are for the night," or "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass," because in them, although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say infinitely more than he can pack into words. It is the effort to do something beyond the power of words; it is the effort to investigate the alluring Infinite with a mind closely fettered within the cramped and narrow finite that can only stretch forth a hand here and there between prison bars and touch the azure of infinitude which is the dreamland of the soul; it is this reaching out that brings beauty into language: it enflames the imagination; it ruffles the emotions; unutterable thoughts linger on the lips and fail to break away. There is a greatness in these winged words feathered with beauty because they mean a thousand times more than speaks on the surface.
When I was young the magic of words took possession of my virgin mind. The first master of language that I served under was John Ruskin. The aim of good writing is to communicate feeling; Ruskin did this intensely. The indefinable richness and power of words as they flowed from his pen, the musical and measured cadence of his prose, and the limpid clearness of his thoughts when cast on paper, placed an hypnotic spell upon me. When reading one of his books, I dwelt in dreamland. Another reading that I enjoyed with avidity in the seventies and eighties of the last century was the long literary leaders, never too long for me, in the _Daily Telegraph_. The best literary talent of the day wrote them. Many of them I cut out and placed in my scrap-book; alas! to be buried in decent sepulchre, for I never see them now. Lord Burnham, the proprietor of the _Daily Telegraph_, put himself into these leaders, although other pens wrote them. They were his special hobby, and grew under his inspiration. His biographer tells us: "He had the rhetorical sense strongly developed. He liked full-blooded writing, and had a tenderness for big words and big adjectives, well-matched and in pairs. He revelled in the warmth and colour of certain words, and the more resonant they were, the better he liked them." Words carry not only meaning, but atmosphere with them. Sometimes a single word well chosen and well placed in a sentence gives feeling, and lights it up with a glow of beauty. J. A. Symonds says: "The right word used in the right place constitutes the perfection of style." In my youth a literary friend was pruning a crude essay I had written; he paused in his reading on the word "fallacious," and he said: "That's a good word and well chosen; it's the right word." It was a revelation to me at the time that one word was better than another if they both meant the same thing. On thinking it over, I saw that no two words do mean exactly the same thing, and that there is only one right word in a hundred to express exactly your meaning and to give life to it. The other ninety-and-nine words are but poor relations--nay! they are all dead corpses.
Perhaps you remember Millais' wonderfully popular picture called "Cinderella." A beautiful healthy English child, with deep dreamy eyes and long wavy golden hair sits on a stool by the kitchen fire holding in her hand a birch broom emblem of her kitchen toil. It is a fascinating picture. At home I look on a coloured print of it nearly every day of the week. The most brilliant thing on the canvas is the patch of scarlet in the dainty cap the child wears. That single dab of red seems to concentrate in itself the whole colour-scheme of the picture. It is the keynote. Now a single word in a sentence sometimes gives a startling effect. It strikes a strong, clear, ringing note which keys the writer's passing mood, fascinates us with its vividness, and sticks in the memory ever after. It is a colour-patch in literary art which dominates the picture and arrests attention, as in Shakespeare's
"Every yesterday hath lighted fools The way to _dusty_ death!"
Or,
"The _primrose_ path to the eternal bonfire."
Or Pope's
"Quick effluvia darting through the brain Die of a rose in _aromatic_ pain."
Also
"Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife, And let me _languish_ into life."
And Gray's inimitable couplet:
"There pipes the song-thrush, and the skylark there Scatters his _loose_ notes in the waste of air."
It is the height of literary skill to gather up your thought into a single word and fling it flaming on canvas. It is more convincing than a long chapter of dull argument which drugs the senses. Tennyson knew the magic of a single epithet in the thought scheme of the moment when he sang: "All the charm of all the muses often flowering in a lonely word." It is not as easily done as eating hot cakes for tea, for it is not the first word that comes sailing into a man's head that is the right word. "The comely phrase, the well-born word," is a prince of high degree, and you may wait in his anteroom days before an audience is granted. The elect word does not sit on the tip of the tongue and drop into its place at call. You may search diligently and not find it, and presently of its own free will it comes to you, a happy thought flashed from the void where whispering spirits dwell. Gray's Elegy is the most perfect poem in the English language. It was not thrown together carelessly in an idle hour one sleepy summer afternoon. Every word and every line of it cost thought, was written and rewritten, and patiently polished over again. For eight years the author held the poem between the hammer and the anvil, beating it into shape before he passed it into print. He damaged reams of paper developing a fair copy of those immortal verses.
*V*
*THE LURE OF AN OLD TUSCAN GARDEN*
A delightful French writer says "to grow old in a garden in sight of softly undulating hills, beneath a sky variable as the human soul, is very sweet, very consoling, very easy. One becomes more of a child and for the first time a philosopher. Poetry and wisdom on every hand permeate the close of life, just as the oblique rays of the setting sun penetrate into the heart of the densest foliage, which is impervious to the vertical beams of noonday." This charming writer touches the spot; experience, tenderness, and sympathy flow from mellowed lips well rounding to the autumn of life. Old age does reflect more discerningly than impatient youth, and in a garden, too, surrounded by a heavenly host of flowers whose blossom is as laughter and whose perfume is a song. Romance sketches wonderful pictures with such a beatific background to inspire it, and imagination wanders into a carnival of dreams. How many pleasant thoughts and noble thoughts have been brought to birth in a garden which afterward grew into brave deeds and gentle lives contributing generously to enrich the sum of human happiness!
I sit under an ilex-tree in an old Tuscan garden which in course of many generations has belonged to many owners. A haunting beauty fills the ancient place, which one can feel, but cannot understand. A friendly atmosphere that pervades old gardens saturates the solitude. It is more than atmosphere, it is influence--a caressing influence almost human that holds us up and tantalizes. Vague ancestral memories of old families flash upon the mind; for more than four hundred years men and women have walked and talked and thought in this Tuscan garden of mine, and tended its flowers and enjoyed its tranquillity. Children have played in it, often going to bed tired and happy after romping in it the livelong day, and so generation after generation mankind repeats itself in the life-story of the old garden on a Tuscan hillside. The spirit of the past haunts it in shadow and in sunshine, because wherever men have been they leave a little of themselves behind in ghostly exhalations.
When one is in a contemplative humour a garden is full of object-lessons interesting to study. By dint of watching leaf replace leaf, insects come into life and die, blossoms change into fruit, fruit ripen and fall, the swallows come with the daffodils and depart when the hunter's moon frightens them away--by watching these things methodically and silently accomplishing their allotted tasks, I have come to think about myself with brave resolution and resigned conformity to natural laws. I grieve less over myself when I regard the change which is universal; the setting sun and the dying summer help me also to decline gently. Life is a splendid heritage to hold in fee, but we quit and deliver up possession when our lease expires. The light must be kept burning if our own little taper flickers into darkness.
A young girl visited us in Florence one spring-time. She lived in the garden among the flowers, caressed them, talked to them, and gathered them by the handful, the armful, the basketful. She decorated the rooms with flowers, filled glass bowls and bronze vases with flowers, and her art touched its zenith in glorifying the dinner-table every evening with the choicest of them all. She chatted, smiled, and sang whilst doing it, for she dearly loved the flowers that she fondled.
We took her to the Uffizi to see the world-renowned Old Masters there; but she yawned in front of masterpieces of art, and her eyes wandered round searching the smart costumes of the ladies in the room. We took her to Rome and showed her the sights of the Eternal City, but Bond Street and Regent Street interested her more than St. Peter's and the Coliseum. We visited the Forum with its ruined temples and triumphal arches, and trod the Via Sacra; but the place was only an old stoneyard to her, devoid of interest, so we left her to herself, and she wandered over the Forum on other pleasure bent, and we found her afterwards picking violets amongst the ruins.
When at home again a friend asked how she enjoyed her visit to Rome, and had she seen the Forum? In blank despair she appealed to me to help her out of it. "Yes," I replied, "you saw the Forum; that is where you picked the violets." The Forum to her was deadly dull and forgotten even by name, but a bunch of wild violets lived vividly in her memory as the crown and flower of her heart's desire, more excellent than all the ruins of Rome.
Dulness comes to us in uncongenial company and occupation. You may be surrounded by objects of interest and beauty which amuse other people, but if these worthy objects do not fit your taste, for you they contain no element of delight, and you are bored utterly with them whoever may sing their praise. It is a question of temperament. The heart is not dull if the head is _triste_. Every eye makes its own beauty and every heart forms its own kinships. Put me in front of a post-impressionist picture and dulness covers me like a funeral pall. The beauties of the glowing picture composed of significant form and bunkum are lost on me completely. Here is something tremendously original that makes demands on my intelligence that I cannot meet. I am mentally bankrupt in front of this maddening art.
Looking at a post-impressionist picture, you see only shapes and forms tangled together within the limited area of a gilt frame; you see relations and quantities of colour splashed on canvas meaning anything you choose to label it, but in the likeness of nothing God made or man ever saw. It distorts nature and scoffs at portraiture. "Creating a work of art," trumpets the evangelist of post-impressionism, "is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching a likeness." "You look at a landscape, and you are not to see it as fields and cottages; instead you are to see it as lines and colours." Yet up against this lucid statement I observe no reason why the portrait of a man should be drawn like a peculiarly shaped market-garden divided into plots for growing vegetables. Nor can I explain why the picture of a village street should look like a fortnight's wash suspended in a cherry orchard, and the policeman standing in front of the village inn at the corner should look like a laundry-maid hanging out the clothes. It requires uncommon genius to work the illusion successfully, and to start an indolent British public frivolling with the captivating puzzle. But it leaves me cold and passionless, for I am slow of understanding these things. They say an impressionist picture of top-note character is a painfully exciting object for the spectator to worship. To do it justice, he must squirm in front of it, for it is a picture that creates a thunderstorm of rhapsody, a deluge of delight, a roaring cataract of aesthetic emotion in the soul of the man who understands its cryptic language. The artist who limned the picture suffers agonies whilst working up significant form, being pricked with pins and needles of excitement, and is continually dancing on the hot-plate of rapture. The spectator's duty when viewing a work of art is to come into touch with the mind of the artist. To do this no wonder the spectator has a bad time when digesting a whole gallery of post-impressionist pictures.
Their religion is as bewildering as their art. For their moral vision is out of kilter, as their eyesight is out of focus. The aforesaid evangelist of the cult says: "I doubt whether the good artist bothers much more about the future than about the past. Why should artists bother about the fate of humanity? If art does not justify itself, aesthetic rapture does.... Rapture suffices. The artist has no more call to look forward than the lover in the arms of his mistress. There are moments in life that are ends to which the whole history of humanity would not be an extravagant means; of such are the moments of aesthetic ecstasy."
We return to the garden, for the lure of a garden relaxes not. The joy of it entangles you in its toils. Each successive season of the year unfolds new developments which lead you on to the next season. So you are handed on from one month to another throughout the gardener's calendar by endless enticements which keep the interest gently simmering. The procession of gay flowers that promenade the sheltered borders and disport themselves with flagrant pride on open beds during spring and summer days, tricked in rainbow colours, dazzle the eye with splendour, win the heart's endearment, and pay in noblest coin full recompense for the chill, dull toil given in grey winter hours.
A lady friend who lived to a ripe old age said to me jocosely, "To be a good gardener you need a wooden back with an iron hinge to it, for you are bending and stooping all day long in the garden." Only by constant labour spent on the good brown earth can you become candidate for possession of this useful garden requisite, a wooden back with an iron hinge to it, or the neatest imitation offered on the market. In the garden you get in touch with Nature, breathe fresh air, cultivate a contented mind, and never stagnate in idleness or degenerate into ennui. Your body, inured to all weathers, escapes many little ills of the flesh, and gradually you harden into an iron constitution, which is the nearest earthly substitute to a wooden back hung on iron hinges.
You never need remain indoors to smoke or sew or yawn because there is nothing doing in the garden: you can weed there the livelong day in the open. This lowly service offers immediate reward; it begets a healthy appetite at meal-times, and develops a night's sound sleep, which is some pleasure no millionaire can buy with his millions. Weeding puzzles my blind gardener Emilio.
I have two brothers gardeners, Enrico and Emilio. Enrico has sight only of one eye, Emilio is blind both eyes. The two brothers work together in brotherly love, and have only one working eye between them, yet it is wonderful how much good work the one eye accomplishes per day. Emilio sees with his hands. It is weeding that puzzles him most. He never pulls a flower instead of a weed--he feels the difference between them. It is the weeds that elude his fingers as he works along the border that grieve him. Weeding is a fascinating occupation to me. Nice people won't profane their hands grubbing in common garden soil, but, being a groundling myself, I enjoy the fun of coming into contact with my native element. Clean, sweet, caressing earth, it is the last flowery coverlet all of us will sleep under; why shun thy friendly touch to-day? There is always an abundant crop of weeds to practise on in an Italian garden, and your fingers itch to uproot them to the very last offender. I suppose it is the ruthlessness and slaughter of the deed, the close handgrip on the enemy, that compels you on; and when the skirmish is over, surveying the ground cleared of the foe and the heaps of the slain withering at your feet gives a pleasurable thrill of excitement in the hour of victory. You exult, for there is something done, and well done, to show for your backache.