Read Ebook: Belcaro; Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions by Lee Vernon

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Hence it is that the child, who will one day become ourselves, rarely cares to return to these sculpture galleries; or, if it care to return to any, it is to mixed galleries like those of Florence, where, instead of the statues, it looks at the pictures. And out of pictures, out of the coarse blurs of colour in picture-books, out of the black, huddled, infinitively suggestive engravings in bible and book of travel; out of fine glossy modern pictures which represent a definite place, or tell a definite story; out of all this, confused with haunting impressions, of things seen or heard of , do we get our original, never really alterable ideas and feelings about art; for much as we may clip, trim, and bedizen our minds with borrowed things, we can never change, never even recast its solid material: a compact, and seemingly homogeneous soul mass, made up of tightly-pressed, crushed odds and ends of impression; broken, confused, pounded bits of the sights and sounds and emotions of our childhood. To the statues we return only quite late, when this long-formed, long-moulded soul of ours has been well steeped in every sort of eclectic and artificial culture; has been saturated with modern art and modern criticism, with mysticism and realism and sentiment and cynicism, with Dante and Zola, and Mozart and Wagner and Offenbach, saturated, with every kind of critically distilled aesthetic essence, till there is not a flavour and not a scent, good or bad, sweet or foul, which may not be perceived in this strange soul of ours. Then we return to the statues; and, having imbibed a certain amount of Hellenic, Pagan, antique feeling, we try also to assimilate the spirit of the statues of Phidias or Praxiteles; we expound the civilisation, the mode of thought; we trace the differences of school, we approve and condemn, we speak marvellously well, with subtlety or passion; we imagine all manner of occult, ineffable virtues and vices in this antique art, we dabble deliciously in alternate purity and impurity , as we even occasionally, for a few moments, feel actual, simple, unreasoning, wholesome pleasure in the sight of the old broken marbles. All this we do, and most often are therewith satisfied. Yet if, weighing our artistic likings and dislikings, comparing together our feelings towards so many and so various manifestations, trying to determine what is fresh and wholesome food to our depraved aesthetic palate, and what is mere highly flavoured, spicy or nauseous drug-stuff, if, in such a moment of doubt, we ask ourselves, overheard by no one, whether in reality this antique art is, in the life of our feelings, at all important, comforting, influential? we shall, for the most part, whisper back to ourselves that it is not so in the very least. But could it ever have been? Could this, or any art have been for us more than merely one of a hundred feebly enjoyed, more or less exotic mental luxuries; than an historic fossil, by study of which, as with the bone of a pterodactyl or an ichthyosaurus, we can amuse ourselves reconstructing the appearance and habits of a long dead, once living civilisation? Or might these statues have been much more to us? Might they, perhaps, have shaped and trained our souls with their unspoken lessons?

Well, once upon a time , a child was brought to the Vatican: just such an one, only perhaps a trifle more wayward, than those we met this morning, demurely led about, or scampering through the galleries: its name signifies nothing, suffice it that it was a child. Now, it so happened, that upon that day the statues are merely stone imprisoned demons, dethroned gods of antiquity, were bent upon getting some small amount of amusement in their dreary lives: all the more dreary since the great joyful hope of restoration in the hearts of men which they had conceived when Winckelmann and Goethe came to them and adored, had been slowly disappointed by seeing that what men cared for was not them, but merely their own impertinent theories and grandiloquent speeches. The Statue-demons were sick of the bitter amusement of watching the follies of their pretended or deluded worshippers. So they sorely wanted excitement, diversion of some sort; and in their idleness, they capriciously determined to amuse themselves, no longer with grown men, but with children. So, as a toy for the moment, they singled out this particular child we are speaking of, who was wandering wearily through the gallery, overpowered like its companions by the sense of negativeness, of greyness, of silence, of want of character and movement and story, and as it passed them, the statue-demons looked at each other with their pupilless eyes, as much as to say: "This is the one we shall take," and determined to cast a spell upon it which would make it theirs. How they did is more than any of us can tell: there was a little gurgling fountain in the garden outside, where a broken-snouted dragon spirted a trickle of water through the maiden-hair choking up the basin, and of this water the child did drink a little in the palm of its hand, the rest running up its sleeve; there was also an old noseless Vertumnus in a corner, on whose pedestal a great tuft of wild grass had shot up, and round whose arms and neck an ivy plant had cast its green trailing leaves; and one of these bitter glossy leaves that child did certainly munch; but whether the charm was in the water or the leaf, or in neither, and only a mysterious spell, a sort of invisible winged seed of passion which they cast direct into that little soul, no one may ever decide. Be it as it may, the child remained for a while conscious of nothing at all, never dreaming that it had in any way come in contact with that demon world imprisoned in the stone. It lived its child life of romping and day dreams and lessons and punishments, and, with its companions, fretted to get away from this dreary, horrible Rome of the popes: this warm, wet place with its sordid houses, its ruins embedded in filth and nettles; its tawdry, stuffy churches, filled with snuffling of monks and jig-quavering of strange, cracked, sickening-sweet voices; its whole atmosphere of decay and sloth, as of a great marsh-pond, sprinkled with bright green weed and starred with flaunting nauseous yellow lilies. The child wondered at all these things: dug bits of porphyry and serpentine out of gutters, collected pieces of potshard from the Palatine; read and re-read the stories of shipwrecks and red Indians and volcanoes: played in dressing-gowns and shawls, at processions of cardinals and prelates, and, with yelling companions in pinafores and napkins, at church music, with tremendous time-beating with rolls of paper; laughed and pouted and quarrelled as children do; quite unconscious of being the chosen one, the changeling, the victim of the statues. But little by little, into its everyday life, stole strange symptoms; sometimes there would come like a sudden stop, as of a boat caught in the rushes, a consciousness of immobility in the midst of swirling, flowing movement, a giddy brain-swimming feeling; and then things went on again just as before. But the symptoms returned, and others with them. What was the matter? A vagueness, a want; a seeking, a clinging, but seeking for, clinging to the unknown. In the evenings of early spring, when the children had returned from their scrambling walks, and were waiting for supper, chattering, looking at books, or strumming tunes; this child would watch the bank of melting colours, crimson, and smoke-purple and gold, left by the sun behind the black dome of St. Peter's; and as the white vapours rose from the town below and gathered on the roofs like a veil, it would feel a vague, acheless pain within it; and at any stray, trifling word or bar of dance music, its eyes and its whole little soul would fill with a mist of tears. The spell cast by the statues was not idle, the mysterious philter which they had poured into it was working throughout that childish soul: the child was in love; in love with what it had hated; in love intensely, passionately, with Rome. And as a part of Rome it loved, blindly, for no other reason, that desolate Vatican; to the statues it returned, and in a way, grew up in their presence. And one day the child looked at itself, and perceived that it was a child no longer; knew all of a sudden, that in those drowsy years of childish passion and day dreams, it had been learning something which others did not know. For it heard one day a few pages of a symphony of Mozart's; the first it had ever heard save much more modern music; and those bars of symphony were intelligible words, conveyed to the child a secret. And the secret was: "we are the brethren, the sounding ones of the statues: and all we who are brethren, whether in stone, or sound, or colour, or written word, shall to thee speak in such a way that thou recognise us, and distinguish us from others; and thou shalt love and believe only in us and those of our kin." Then the child went forth from the Vatican, and went in among the pictures, and among the poems and the music, and did indeed find that all those who were of the same kin as the statues spoke to it intelligible words, and returned its love by making it happy. This came of the statues having had the whim of giving to that child the love potion which had made it love Rome.

All this is a fairy tale, a very meagre one indeed, quite inferior to any told us by nurse or peasant woman; but a fairy tale nevertheless; for, of course, we all know that statues cannot give love philters, nor children fall in love with towns, nor symphonies talk about having brothers in marble or colour. All this is rubbish of the same sort as the dancing water, the singing apple, the dragon Fafner's blood which made Sigurd understand the language of the birds, the enchanted lake into which Charlemagne sat gazing out his life, because of the ring cast into it; mere rubbish, and, consequently, not to be examined into or reasoned about. But as the wise men of to-day tell us that in all our nursery tales there is a hidden, sensible meaning; perhaps, also, there may be one in this absurd little story of the child in the Vatican, and that we may see. And so, now, we must be serious and examine methodically into the matter.

Come and stand at a little distance from the table on which the wooden gable and statues are set. So, now we can get an idea of the general effect of the group. It seems so simple, but it is not: it is in sculpture something like what a fugue is in music: it is a homogeneous form due to the extremely skilful co-ordination of various forms; it is a harmonious whole, because the parts are combined just at the point where their diversities coalesce. For, as the various voices of the fugue, some subtly insinuating themselves half whispered, while the others are thundering their loudest or already dying away into silence, meet and weave together various fragments of the same melody, so also do the figures of the group, some standing, some reclining, some kneeling, some rising, some draped, some nude, meet our sight in various ways so as to constitute in their variety, one great pattern; balance each other on opposite sides of the gable, slope and taper down towards the extremities, grow and rise higher towards the middle where the vertex of the triangular temple front, the triumphant centre of the rhythm and harmony of lines, is formed by the majestic, magnificent mother between her two eldest, most beautiful daughters. And now, think no more of this terra-cotta than, having learned the shape of a hymn by Bach or a psalm by Marcello on the piano, you would think of the poor miserable piano-notes which you hear with your ears, instead of the mass of voices which you hear with your fancy. Think of this Niobe group, twice humansized, standing on the weather-mellowed, delicately painted marble temple front; the amber-tinted figures against the dark hollow formed by the projecting roof; the sunshine drawing on the black back-ground, as with a luminous pencil, the great solemn masses of light and shadow, the powerfully rhythmed attitudes, the beautiful combinations of lines and light and shade produced by the gesture, which now raises, now drops the drapery, opposing to the large folds, heavy and severe, the minute, most supple, and most subtle plaits; and to the strong broken shadows of the drapery, the shining smoothness of the nude. Think of that, and remember then the single figures in their best examples, the mother and eldest daughter of Florence, the headless younger daughter of the Vatican, the exquisite dying boy of Munich; and think, by recollecting these dispersed noblest copies, what must the lost original have been. And thus, looking at the little rough terra-cotta model, and magnifying it in fancy into the great superb group such as it must have stood on the temple, there comes home to us, filling, expanding our mind, an almost ineffable sense of perfection of line and curve, and light and shade, perfection as of the sweeping wave of some great mountain, distant and deep blue against the pale sky; perfection as of the pearled edge of the tiny pink cyclamen petal; as of the single small voice, swelling and diminishing in crisp exquisiteness every little turn and shake, and again as of the many chords of multitudinous voices rolling out in great joyous sound billows; perfection of whole in harmony and graduation of perfect parts: perfection of visible form.

But by the side of this overwhelming positive sense of beauty there creeps into our consciousness an irritating little sense of negation. For the more intense becomes our perception of the form, the vaguer becomes our recollection of the subject; the strong imaginative realization of the story of Niobe, conjured up by the mere mention of her name, dwindles to nothing in the presence of the group representing the chief incident of history; the skrieks and desperate scuffling of feet, which we had heard in our fancy, gradually die into silence; our senses cease to shrink with horror, our sympathies cease to vibrate with pity, as we look upon this visible embodiment of the terrible tragedy. We are no longer feeling emotion; we are merely perceiving beauty. How has this come to pass? Shall we look into ourselves and analyze in the darkness of our consciousness? Nay, rather first look for an explanation in the materially visible, the clear, easily examined work of art. Come and look at the group once more: this time not to understand its beauty, but to understand why there is in it nothing beyond this beauty.

Certainly, the group answers very well to the general idea of the massacre of the Niobides: the figures have the attitudes of men and women overtaken by a sudden danger against which they seek, but vainly, to shield themselves: the mother clasps the cowering, clinging, youngest girl, and tries to cover her with her mantle, her arms, her whole body, to let the child melt into herself and be lost; the youngest son sinks, panting and helpless, on to one knee; the eldest daughter bends forward to throw her veil over a dead brother; the younger daughter mechanically raises her draped arm to ward off the shafts from her face; another son hastens away, looking bewildered around him, trying to see from which side come the arrows, which come from all sides. All this is perfectly correct in expression; we are bound to admit that these are the probable movements and gestures of people situated like Niobe and her children. We cannot find fault with anything, yet we feel a vague sense of unreality. Unreality to ourselves? Nay, rather, unreality to the artist: we perceive, little by little, that everyone of these evident indications of a catastrophe is connected with a grand gesture, a noble fold, a harmonious combination of masses: the mother raising the arm covered with her cloak and clasping the child with the other, produces thereby a magnificent contrast between the round, bunched fold of the mantle, and the straight, narrow folds of her skirt, nay, between the simple and ample drapery covering her own bosom, and the minute clinging crinkles on the back of the little one; the wounded youth sinks down in such a way as to display the grand muscles of his throat and shoulders; the girl covering her naked dead brother, forms with him, a powerfully-balanced mass of brightly-lit nude and broken, shadow-furrowed drapery; and all the remaining children stoop and cower and stretch forth their arms in such a way as to produce the inclination of the two sides of the triangle crowning the temple. Moreover, the pathetic, upward movement of the mother's head, by slightly drawing down the jaw, and in upturning the eyes, contracting the brows into a triangular furrow, accentuates the grandeur of the grand features, and prevents the light from above falling upon a mere flat expanse of cheek and forehead; the eldest daughter stooping tenderly over the dead boy produces, in so doing, an incomparable curve of neck and shoulders; and thus, with all the other figures, the gesture is invariably productive of a definite beauty of form. And, on the other hand, there is not present a single one of the gestures or attitudes which would certainly produce definite ugliness of form, and would yet be as appropriate and inevitable to the situation as these. There is not, in this group, any movement, any effect, of which we could decidedly say that it would not arise in a scene like this; but, in a scene like this, there would certainly be a great many movements and effects which cannot be found in the group. Hence, the dramatic expression of the work is essentially negative: in the mind of the artist the realisation of the scene, the bringing home of the story, has been a purely secondary thing, and therefore the realisation of the scene, the bringing home of the story, is secondary also to us, the spectators. The impression produced in us is exactly corresponding to the interest dominant in the artist: he has cared for the subject only inasmuch as it afforded suggestions for beautiful forms; and we therefore have perceived the beautiful forms, and forgotten the subject. The object of the artist has been, whether or not he formulated it clearly to himself, not to bring home the situation to the fancy; not to awaken an emotion; but to present to the eye and the mind a mere beautiful form. And that such has been his object, is the first and main lesson which we have learned from the Niobe group, as it was the first and main lesson learned by the child of our fairy tale from the innumerable statues which, during those long years in the Vatican, were its silent teachers.

Can the Niobe teach us more? Has your Vatican child learned any more from the statues? you ask, contemptuous at this definition, narrow, as must be all definitions of duty. Perhaps the Niobe may teach us next how this highest artistic quality of beauty, this sole aim of the artist, is to be attained? Be not so contemptuous. The Niobe can teach us something about the mode of attaining to this end; it cannot, indeed, teach us what to do, for the knowledge of that, the knowledge of how to combine lines and curves and lights and shades, is the secret belonging to the artist, to be taught and learned only by himself; but it can teach us what not to do, teach us the conditions without which those combinations of lines and curves and lights and shades, cannot be created. Let us return to the Niobe once more: let us see the group clearly in its general composition, and then, with the group before us, let us ask ourselves what plastic form is conceived in our imagination when there comes home to it the mere abstract idea of the sudden massacre of the Niobides, by Apollo and Artemis. Nothing, perhaps, very clear at first, but clearer if we try to draw what we see or to describe it in words. In the first place, we see, more or less vaguely, according to our imaginative endowment, a scene of very great confusion and horror: figures wildly shuffling to and fro, clutching at each other, writhing, grimacing with convulsed agony, shrieking, yelling, howling; we see horrible wounds, rent, raw flesh, arrows sticking in torn muscles, dragging forth hideous entrails, spirting and gushing and trickling of blood; we see the mother, agonised into almost beast-like rage and terror, the fourteen boys and girls, the god and the goddess adjusting their shafts and drawing their bows; we see all, murderous divinities, writhing victims, impotent, anguished mother. If we see it, how much more fully and more clearly, in every detail, is it not seen in the mind of the sculptor, of the man whose special gift is the conception of visible appearances? Oh, yes, he sees it: here the mother, here the elder daughters, there the other children, further off, Apollo and Artemis, sees how each stands, moves, looks, sees the convulsed features, the rumpled garments, the fear, the pain, the anger, the hopelessness, the pitilessness. He takes three planks, nails together their extremities: this is the gable of the temple, the triangular cavity or box into which he must fit his group; then, with thumb and fingers, roughly moulds a certain number of clay puppets, places them in the triangular box, removes them, alters them, replaces them, takes them out once more, throws some away, elaborates others; works for hours, days, weeks, till we return to his workshop, and find a number of models, tiny moulded dolls in the plank triangle; large statuettes, half-finished, roughly-worked heads--drawings, perhaps, of parts of the group. And we examine it all. It is the rudiment of the Niobe group. But see: of all those things which we saw in our fancy, which the artist, being an artist, must have seen with infinitely more completeness and clearness, only a portion has here been reproduced. Of all the movements and gestures there remain but a very few: the convulsions, the writhings, and grimacings are gone; there is no trampling, no clutching, no howling, no grimacing, there are no quivering limbs, or disembowelled bodies. Why so? Ask the artist. Because, he will answer, all those movements and gestures were radically ugly; because all that howling and grimacing in agony entirely ruined the beauty of the features; because the situation could not be adequately represented, except to the utter detriment of the form. Hence, of all the movements and gestures which had presented themselves to his inner vision, at the first mention of the story of Niobe, the artist has rejected those which were at all detrimental to the beauty of the form, and accepted those others which were conducive thereto. He has cast aside a whole portion of the real appearance of the event, because it interfered with his, perhaps unspoken and unformulated, but instinctively imperious artistic aim: to create beautiful form.

But this is not all. He has left out something else which was a most essential, nay, an all important part of his first mental vision of the scene. He has actually left out--guess what--some son or daughter of Niobe?--has run counter to the tradition of the seven girls and seven boys?--oh, in comparison, that would be nothing. He has actually and absolutely left out the god and goddess--left out the murderers from the representation of the murder. Why in the world has he done this? Granting that he need not transfer to his group all the terrible details he has seen in his mind, why should he leave out Apollo and Artemis? They need not be convulsed, or writhing, or grimacing; on the contrary, they ought to be quite calm and passionless in their cruel beauty. There is nothing unbeautiful in Apollo and Artemis surely. No: not in Apollo and Artemis, taken in themselves; but in Apollo and Artemis considered as part of this group. Listen: we will explain. Since Apollo and Artemis are, between them, slaughtering all the Niobides, closing them in with their arrows, it is obvious that Apollo and Artemis must be placed in such a manner as to command the whole family of Niobides; there must be no Niobides behind them, for that would mean that there are Niobides who are out of danger and can escape. So the god and goddess must be placed in one of three ways: either back to back in the very centre of the group, each shooting down one half of the family; or else entirely separated, each at one extremity of the group, so as to face each other and enclose all the Niobides between them; or else above the Niobides, floating in mid air and raining down arrows like hail. Now, which of these three arrangements shall the sculptor select? He rejects at once the plan of placing the god and goddess back to back in the centre of the group, and we agree with him; for the two figures, thus applied to each other, each more or less in profile, would form the most ludicrous double-headed Janus. Place, then, Apollo at one end and Artemis at the other. There is nothing ugly in that, is there? There would not be were the sculptor modelling the oblong bas-relief of a sarcophagus; but there would be something very ugly now that, as it happens, he is modelling a group for the triangular gable of a temple. For, as the sides of the triangle slope sharply down, the figures beneath them necessarily become smaller and less erect in proportion to their distance from the vertex; so the god and goddess, if placed at the extremity of the group, must be flattened down in the acute angles of the base, must crouch and squat with their bows barely on a level with the knees of their victims. So this arrangement will not do; there remains the third plan of placing Apollo and Artemis above the Niobides. This is an admirable idea: the vertex of the triangle is filled by the floating figures of the gods, who appear calm, beautiful, mysterious, showering down death from inaccessible heaven. Will this do? Alas, much less than either of the others. The arrangement would be beautiful if the triangle of the gable, instead of being filled with a group of statues, were walled up, plastered, and could be painted on in fresco. The colour, light and shade, and perspective of painting, by creating a seeming depth of back-ground, by hiding one figure partially behind another, so as to make them appear not in actual contact, by piling up aetherial clouds or waving light draperies, would permit the artist to show the Niobides on solid ground below, and the gods in the air, high, distant above. But the sculptor, without any such means, could only suspend Apollo and Artemis in such a way that they should seem to be standing on the shoulders of the Niobides; or interpose between them a thick bolster of marble clouds, a massive flutter of streaming marble draperies. Now do you think that the marble clouds and the marble fluttering drapery would be conducive to the beauty of the group, to the perfection of visible forms? Certainly not. And, therefore, Apollo and Artemis, gods though they are and chief actors in the story, have simply been left out in this its artistic representation.

For beauty of form has a double origin: it is not only an intellectual conception, but also a physical embodiment; and the intellectual conception is altered by the nature of the material in which it is embodied. The abstract form which will be infinitely delicate and life-like in the brown clay, which receives every minute dimple and crease from the finger of the artist, which presents a soft, uniform tint to the spectator; this same abstract form will be coarse and lifeless in the purple speckled porphyry, against whose hard grain the chisel is blunted, and the mottled colour and salt-like sparkle of which hide from the eye the real relations of line and curve, of concave and projection. The Mercury who, in the green bronze, floats upwards like a bubble, would jump like a clodhopper in the dingy white plaster. And these, remark, are differences only in one category of material and handling; change the sort of material and manner of handling and the differences become still greater. Statues, whether in clay, bronze, porphyry, or plaster, are always similar in the fact of being wholly free--round as Vasari calls them--of being interfered with by no complications of shadows like the figures of a high, middle or bas-relief; hence, as soon as the figures cease to be round, as soon as they are attached to a back-ground, the whole composition is altered by the consideration how the different degrees of projection, and the consequent play of light and shadow, will affect the apparent shape of the figures. And yet we are still within the domain of sculpture. How great a difference of form will not result when, instead of the tintless, tangible projections of stone, we get to the mere semblance of infinite depth and distance cunningly obtained by light and shade, colour and perspective, on a flat surface; where the light, instead of existing variable and confusing outside the work, is within that very work, inside the picture, combining, graduating every detail, making form melt gently into form, or stand out in triumphant relief? Thus the things which can be done in bronze must not be attempted in porphyry, the group of statues must be conceived differently from the bas-relief; the picture is different from the statue; for the beauty of form depends not only on the conception but upon the embodiment: if the material is violent, the conception is warped; and the same beauty can be obtained in all the arts only by remembering that those arts are different that, with the material and modes of handling, must change the conception.

Thus we have seen that the sculptor of the Niobe deliberately refused to embody his complete mental vision of the scene of massacre; that he selected among the attitudes and gestures and expressions suggested to him by this scene, rejected those which were inherently ugly, and accepted those which were intrinsically beautiful; and that he left out of his representation of the incidents its principal actors, because he could not have introduced them without either violating the nature of the whole composition to which he was bound, or violating the nature of the material in which he was working, and by so doing sacrificing the perfection of visible form which, being the only intrinsic quality to which his art could independently attain, was the one object of his desires and efforts. Such is the logical conclusion which we have consciously and perhaps wearisomely obtained from our analysis of the mode of conception and treatment of the Niobe group; and such the lesson which, unconsciously, vaguely, the child of our fairy tale must have learned from its marble teachers in the Vatican: That the only intrinsic perfection of art is the perfection of form, and that such perfection is obtainable only by boldly altering, or even casting aside, the subject with which this form is only imaginatively, most often arbitrarily, connected; and by humbly considering and obeying the inherent necessities of the material in which this form is made visible or audible. That by such artistic laws they themselves had come into existence, and that all other things which had come into existence by the same laws, were their brethren, was the secret which those statue-demons imparted to that child; the secret which enabled it to understand those symphony notes of Mozart's, when they said: "we also, the sounding ones, are the brethren of the statues; and all we who are brethren, whether in stone, or sound or colour, shall to thee speak in such a way that thou recognize us, and distinguish us from all others; and thou shalt love and believe only in us and those of our kin; in return we will give thee happiness." And this, as we have told you, came to pass solely because the statues took the whim of bewitching that child into falling in love with Rome.

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE.

THE LESSON OF A BAS-RELIEF.

No Greek myth has a greater charm for our mind than that of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the first place, we are told by mythologists that it is a myth of the dawn, one of those melancholy, subdued interpretations of the eternal, hopeless separation of the beautiful light of dawn and the beautiful light of day, which forms the constantly recurring tragedy of nature, as the tremendous struggle between light and darkness forms her never-ending epic, her Iliad and Nibelungenlied. There is more of the purely artistic element in these myths of the dawn than in the sun myths. Those earliest poets, primitive peoples, were interested spectators of the great battle between day and night. The sun-hero was truly their Achilles, their Siegfried. In fighting, he fought for them. When he chained up the powers of darkness the whole earth was hopeful and triumphant; when he sank down dead, a thousand dark, vague, hideous monsters were let loose on the world, filling men's hearts with sickening terror; the solar warfare was waged for and against men. The case is quite different with respect to the dawn tragedy. If men were moved by that, it was from pure, disinterested sympathy. The dawn and the day were equally good and equally beautiful; the day loved the dawn, since it pursued her so closely, and the dawn must have loved the day in return, since she fled so slowly and reluctantly. Why, then, were they forbidden ever to meet? What mysterious fate condemned the one to die at the touch of the other--the beloved to elude the lover, the lover to kill the beloved? This sad, sympathising question, which the primitive peoples repeated vaguely and perhaps scarce consciously, day after day, century after century, at length received an answer. One answer, then another, then yet another, as fancy took more definite shapes. Yes, the dawn and the morning are a pair of lovers over whom hangs an irresistible, inscrutable fate--Cephalus and Procris, Alcestis and Admetus, Orpheus and Eurydice.

And this myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is, to our mind, the most charming of the tales born of that beautiful, disinterested sympathy for the dawn and the morning, the one in which the subdued, mysterious pathos of its origin is most perfectly preserved; in which no fault of infidelity or jealousy, no final remission of doom, breaks the melancholy unity of the story. In it we have the real equivalent of that gentle, melancholy fading away of light into light, of tint into tint. Orpheus loses Eurydice as the day loses the dawn, because he loves her; she has issued from Hades as the dawn has issued from darkness; she melts away beneath her lover's look even as the dawn vanishes beneath the look of the day.

Jamque vale, feror ingenti circumdata nocte, Invalidas tibi tendens, heu! non tua, palmas.

And we look up again at the bas-relief, the whole story of Orpheus laying firmer hold of our imagination; but as our eyes wander wistfully over the marble, they fall, for the first time, upon a scrap of paper pasted at the bottom of it, a wretched, unsightly, scarce legible rag, such as insult some of the antiques in this gallery, and on it is written:--"Antiope coi figli Anfione e Zeto." A sudden, perplexed wonder fills our mind--wonder succeeded by amusement. The bunglers, why, they must have glued the wrong label on the bas-relief. Of course! and we turn out the number of the piece in the catalogue, the solemn, portly catalogue--full of references to Fea, and Visconti, and Winckelmann. Number--yes, here it is, here it is. What, again?

"Antiope urging her sons, Amphion and Zethus, to avenge her by the murder of Dirce."

We have his great work, the work which no amount of additional learning can ever supersede, because no amount of additional learning will ever enable us to feel antique beauty more keenly and profoundly than he made us feel it--we have his great work on our shelf, and as soon as we are back at home, our mind still working on Orpheus and Eurydice, we take it down and search for a reference to our bas-relief. We search all through the index in vain; then turn over the pages where it may possibly be mentioned, again in vain; no Orpheus and Eurydice. Ah! "A bas-relief at the Villa Albani"--let us see what that may be. "A bas-relief," &c., &c.--horror beyond words! The bas-relief--our bas-relief--deliberately set down as Antiope with Amphion and Zethus--set down as Antiope with Amphion and Zethus, by Winckelmann himself!

Yes, and he gravely states his reasons for so doing. The situation is evidently one of great hesitation; there is reluctance on the one hand, persuasion on the other. Moreover, the female figure is that of a mourner, of a supplicant, draped and half-veiled as it is; the figure with the lyre, in the Thracian or Thessalian costume, must necessarily be Amphion, while the other in the loose tunic of a shepherd, must as evidently be his brother, Zethus; and if we put together these facts, we cannot but conclude that the subject of the bas-relief is, as previously stated, Antiope persuading Amphion and Zethus to avenge her on Dirce.

It may have been childish, but it was natural to feel considerable bitterness at this discovery; you may smile, but we had lost something precious, the idea that art was beginning to say more to us than to others, the budding satisfaction of being no longer a stranger to the antique, and this loss was truly bitter; nay, in the first bitterness of the discovery, we had almost taken an aversion to the bas-relief, as people will take an aversion to the things about which they know themselves to have been foolish. However, as this feeling subsided, we began to reflect that the really worthy and dignified course would be to attain to real certainty on the subject, and finding that our recollection of the bas-relief was not so perfectly distinct as to authorise a final decision, we determined coolly to examine the work once more, and to draw our conclusions on the spot.

As we look up perplexedly at the bas-relief, which, after having been as confused, has now become well nigh as blank as our mind, we are startled by hearing our name from a well-known voice behind us. A young painter stands by our side, a creature knowing or thinking very little beyond his pencils and brushes, serenely unconscious of literature and science in his complete devotion to art. A few trivial sentences are exchanged, during which we catch our friend's eye glancing at the bas-relief. "I never noticed that before," he remarks, "Do you know, I like it better than anything else in this room. Strange that I should not have noticed it before."

"It is a very interesting work," we answer; adding, with purposely feigned decision, "Of course you see that it represents Orpheus and Eurydice, not Antiope and her sons."

The painter, whose instinctive impression on the point we have thus tried to elicit, seems wholly unmoved by this remark; the fact literally passes across his mind without in the least touching it.

"Does it? Ah, what a splendid mass of drapery! That grand, round fold and those small, fine vertical ones. I should like to make a sketch of that."

A sort of veil seems suddenly to fall off our mental eyes; these simple, earnest words, this intense admiration seem to have shed new light into our mind.

This fellow, who knows or cares apparently nothing whatever about either Orpheus or Antiope, has not found the bas-relief a blank; it has spoken for him, the clear, unmistakeable language of lines and curves, of light and shade, a language needing no interpreters, no dictionaries; and it has told him the fact, the fact depending on no previous knowledge, irrefutable and eternal, that it is beautiful. And as our eyes follow his, and we listen to his simple, unaffected, unpoetical exclamations of admiration at this combination of lines, or that bend of a limb, we recognise that if poetry has its unchangeable effects, its power which, in order to be felt, requires only the comprehension of words; art also has its unchangeable effects, its power, its supreme virtue, which all can feel who have eyes and minds that can see. The bas-relief does not necessarily tell us the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as Virgil's lines do, that is not inherent in its nature as in theirs; but it tells us the fact of its beauty, and that fact is vital, eternal, and indissolubly connected with it.

To appreciate a work of art means, therefore, to appreciate that work of art itself, as distinguished from appreciating something outside it, something accidentally or arbitrarily connected with it; to appreciate Virgil's lines means to appreciate his telling of the story of Orpheus, his choice of words and his metre; to appreciate the bas-relief means to appreciate the combination of forms and lights and shades; and a person who cared for Virgil's lines because they suggested the bas-relief or for the bas-relief because it suggested Virgil's lines, would equally be appreciating neither, since his pleasure depended on something separate from the work of art itself.

The process of association is even commoner: you have taken interest in some story, or some form, your mind has worked upon it; you are shown a work of art whose name, often nothing more, connects it with this story or poem, and your thoughts being full of the latter, you apply to the work of art the remarks you had made about the story or poem; you see in the work of art the details of that story or poem; you look at it as a mere illustration; very often you do not look at it at all; for although your bodily eyes may be fixed on the picture or statue, your intellectual eyes are busy with some recollection or impression in your mind; it is the case of the bas-relief of the Villa Albani, the pleasure received from Virgil's lines being re-awakened by the mere circumstance of the bas-relief being called, rightly or wrongly, Orpheus and Eurydice; it is the story of a hundred interpretations of works of art, of people seeing a comic expression in a certain group at the Villa Ludovisi because they imagined it to represent Papirius and his mother, while other people found the same group highly tragic, because they fancied it represented Electra and Orestes; it is the old story of violent emotion, attributed to wholly unemotional music, because the words to which it is arbitrarily connected happen to be pathetic; the endless story of delusions of all sorts, of associations of feelings and ideas as accidental as those which make certain tunes or sights depress us because we happened to be in a melancholy mood when we first saw or heard them.

What becomes of the real, inherent effect of the work of art itself in the midst of such concatenations of fancies and associations? How can we listen to its own magic speech, its language of lines and colours and sounds, when our mind is full of confused voices telling us of different and irrelevant things? Where, at such times, is our artistic appreciation, and what is it worth? Should we then, if such a thing were possible, forbid such comparisons, such associations? Should we voluntarily deprive ourselves of all such pleasure as is not given by the work of art itself?

No, but we should restrain such impressions; we should, as far as we can, remain conscious of the fact that they are mere effects of comparison and association, that they are not the work of art, but something distinct from it, and that the work of art itself exists in the lines, tints, lights and shades of the picture or statue, in the modulations and harmonies of a composition, and that all the rest is gratuitously added by ourselves. Nay, we should remember that there could not even have been that very comparison, that very association if there had been no previous real artistic perception; that unless we had first cared for Virgil's Orpheus for its own sake, we could not afterwards have cared for the bas-relief on its account.

We confess that we have ourselves become instinctively jealous of such foreign causes of pleasure in art, jealous because we have been pained by their constant encroachment; the feeling may be an exaggerated one, but it is a natural reaction. We have thus caught ourselves almost regretting that pictures should have any subjects; we have sometimes felt that the adaptation of music to the drama is a sort of profanation; and all this because we have too often observed that the subject seemed to engross so much attention as to make people forget the picture, and that the drama made people misinterpret the music; and that criticism itself, instead of checking this tendency, has done much to further it. Yes, critics, grave and emphatic thinkers, have spoken as if the chief merit of the painter had consisted in clearly expressing some story, which in all probability was not worth expressing, some dull monkish legend which his genius alone could render tolerable; as if the chief aim of the composer were to follow the mazes of some wretched imbecile libretto, which has become endurable thanks only to his notes; as if the immortal were to be chained to the mortal, and mediocrity, inferiority, mere trumpery fact or trumpery utility were to bridle and bestride the divine hippogriff of art, and, like another Astolfo, fly up on its back into the regions of immortality. Artists themselves have been of this way of thinking, we cannot say of feeling, for, as long as they were true artists, their instinctive feelings must have propelled them in a very different direction. Gluck, that great dramatist, who was greatest when least dramatic, thought that music was made for the sake of the drama, that its greatest glory was to express the difference, as he himself wrote, between a princess and a waiting-maid between a Spartan and a Phrygian, to follow the steps of a play as its humble retainer and commentator. Gluck composed his music for the sake of the dramas; but, O irony of art! the dramas are recollected only for the sake of his music. Let the artist be humble, mistrustful of his own art, let him believe it to be subservient to something outside it, devote it magnanimously to some purpose of utility, or some expression of fact, sacrifice it throughout; it will be all in vain; if his work be excellent, it will subordinate all to itself, it will swallow up every other interest, throw into the shade every other utility.

One day the Pope's banker, Agostino Chigi, came to Master Rafael of Urbino, and said to him--"I am building a little pleasure villa in which to entertain my friends. Baldassare Peruzzi has made the plans, Sebastiano del Piombo has designed the arabesques, Nanni da Udine will paint me the garlands of fruit and flowers; it must be perfection. You shall paint me the walls of the open hall looking out on the Tiber, that it may be a fit place wherein to sup and make merry with popes and cardinals and princes." "Very good," answered Rafael.

The object was to obtain a dining-hall, and the fresco was to be there merely as an ornament; but Rafael painted his Galatea, and behold, the hall could no longer be used as a dining-room; every one crowded into it to see the fresco; the hall has now become a gallery, and the real property, less of its owners, who cannot make use of it, than of the whole world, who insist on entering it; the room now exists only for the sake of the fresco, yet the fresco was originally intended to exist only for it. This is the inevitable course of art; we call in beauty as a servant, and see, like some strange daemon, it becomes the master; it may answer our call, but we have to do its bidding.

We have strayed far away from Orpheus and Eurydice, while thus following the train of ideas suggested by the story of the bas-relief. Yet we may return to the subject, and use it as an illustration of our last remark. We have said much against the common tendency towards transporting on to a work of art an interest not originally due to it, because, by this means, we are apt to lose the interest which does belong to the work of art. But, if only each could get its due, each exert its power unimpaired, there could be nothing more delightful than thus to enjoy the joint effect of several works of art; not, according to the notion of certain aesthetic visionaries--who do not see that singers cannot be living Greek statues nor librettists poets, nor scene-painters Poussins--in one clumsy ambiguous monster spectacle, but in our minds, in our fancy; if, conscious of the difference between them, we could unite in one collection the works of various arts: people the glades and dingles of Keats with the divinities we have seen in marble, play upon the reed of the Praxitelian Faun the woodland melodies of Mozart's Tamino. It would thus be the highest reward for self-scrutinising aesthetic humility, for honest appreciation of each art for itself, for brave sacrifice of our own artistic whimsies and vanities, to enable us to bring up simultaneously the recollection of Virgil's nobly pathetic lines, of the exquisitely simple and supple forms of the bas-relief, of the grand and tender music of Gluck, and to unite them in one noble pageant of the imagination, evoked by the spell of those two names: Orpheus and Eurydice.

FAUSTUS AND HELENA.

NOTES ON THE SUPERNATURAL IN ART.

There is a story, well-known throughout the sixteenth century, which tells how Doctor Faustus of Wittemberg, having made over his soul to the fiend, employed him to raise the ghost of Helen of Sparta, in order that she might become his paramour. The story has no historic value, no scientific meaning; it lacks the hoary dignity of the tales of heroes and demi-gods, wrought, vague, and colossal forms, out of cloud and sunbeam, of those tales narrated and heard by generations of men deep hidden in the stratified ruins of lost civilisation, carried in the races from India to Hellas, and to Scandinavia. Compared with them, this tale of Faustus and Helena is paltry and brand-new; it is not a myth, nay, scarcely a legend; it is a mere trifling incident added by humanistic pedantry to the ever-changing mediaeval story of the man who barters his soul for knowledge, the wizard, alchemist, philosopher, printer, Albertus, Bacon, or Faustus. It is a part, an unessential, subordinate fragment, valued in its day neither more nor less than any other part of the history of Doctor Faustus, narrated cursorily by the biographer of the wizard, overlooked by some of the ballad rhymers, alternately used and rejected by the playwrights of puppet-shows; given by Marlowe himself no greater importance than the other marvellous deeds, the juggling tricks and magic journeys of his hero.

But for us, the incident of Faustus and Helena has a meaning, a fascination wholly different from any other portion of the story; the other incidents owe everything to artistic treatment: this one owes nothing. The wizard Faustus, awaiting the hour which will give him over to Hell, is the creation of Marlowe; Gretchen is even more completely the creation of Goethe; the fiend of the Englishman is occasionally grand, the fiend of the German is throughout masterly; in all these cases we are in the presence of true artistic work, of stuff rendered valuable solely by the hand of the artist, of figures well defined and finite, and limited also in their power over the imagination. But the group of Faustus and Helena is different; it belongs neither to Marlowe nor to Goethe, it belongs to the legend. It does not give the complete and limited satisfaction of a work of art; it has the charm of the fantastic and fitful shapes formed by the flickering firelight or the wreathing mists; it haunts like some vague strain of music, drowsily heard in half-sleep. It fills the fancy, it oscillates and transforms itself; the artist may see it, attempt to seize and embody it for evermore in a definite and enduring shape, but it vanishes out of his grasp, and the forms which should have inclosed it are mere empty sepulchres, haunted and charmed merely by the evoking power of our own imagination. If we are fascinated by the Lady Helen of Marlowe, walking, like some Florentine goddess, with embroidered kirtle and madonna face, across the study of the old wizard of Wittemberg; if we are pleased by the stately pseudo-antique Helena of Goethe, draped in the drapery of Thorwaldsen's statues, and speaking the language of Goethe's own Iphigenia, as she meets the very modern Faust, gracefully masqued in mediaeval costume; if we find in these attempts, the one unthinking and imperfect, the other laboured and abortive, something which delights our fancy, it is because our thoughts wander off from them and evoke a Faustus and Helena of our own, different from the creations of Marlowe and of Goethe; it is because in these definite and imperfect artistic forms, there yet remains the suggestion of the subject with all its power over the imagination. We forget Marlowe, and we forget Goethe, to follow up the infinite suggestion of the legend. We cease to see the Elizabethan and the pseudo-antique Helen; we lift our imagination from the book and see the mediaeval street at Wittemberg, the gabled house of Faustus, all sculptured with quaint devices and grotesque forms of apes and cherubs and flowers; we penetrate through the low brown rooms, filled with musty books and mysterious ovens and retorts, redolent with strange scents of alchemy, to that innermost secret chamber, where the old wizard hides, in the depths of his mediaeval house, the immortal woman, the god-born, the fatal, the beloved of Theseus and Paris and Achilles; we are blinded by this sunshine of Antiquity pent up in the oaken-panelled chamber, such as D?rer might have etched; and all around we hear circulating the mysterious rumours of the neighbours, of the burghers and students, whispering shyly of Dr. Faustus and his strange guest, in the beer-cellars and in the cloisters of the old university town. And gazing thus into the fantastic intellectual mist which has risen up between us and the book we were reading, be it Marlowe or Goethe, we cease, after a while, to see Faustus or Helena, we perceive only a chaotic fluctuation of incongruous shapes; scholars in furred robes and caps pulled over their ears, burghers wives with high sugar-loaf coif and slashed boddices, with hands demurely folded over their prayer-books, and knights in armour and immense plumes, and haggling Jews, and tonsured monks, descended out of panels of Wohlgemuth and the engravings of D?rer, mingling with, changing into processions of naked athletes on foaming short-maned horses, of draped Athenian maidens carrying baskets and sickles, and priests bearing oil-jars and torches, all melting into each other, indistinct, confused, like the images in a dream; vague crowds, phantoms following in the wake of the spectre woman of Antiquity, beautiful, unimpassioned, ever young, luring to Hell the wizard of the Middle Ages.

Why does all this vanish as soon as we once more fix our eyes upon the book? Why can our fancy show us more than can the artistic genius of Marlowe and of Goethe? Why does Marlowe, believing in Helen as a satanic reality, and Goethe, striving after her as an artistic vision, equally fail to satisfy us? The question is intricate: it requires a threefold answer, dependent on the fact that this tale of Faustus and Helena is in fact a tale of the supernatural--a weird and colossal ghost-story, in which the actors are the spectre of Antiquity, ever young, beautiful, radiant, though risen from the putrescence of two thousand years; and the Middle Ages, alive, but toothless, palsied, and tottering. Why neither Marlowe nor Goethe have succeeded in giving a satisfactory artistic shape to this tale is explained by the necessary relations between art and the supernatural, between our creative power and our imaginative faculty; why Marlowe has failed in one manner and Goethe in another is explained by the fact that, as we said, for the first the tale was a supernatural reality, for the second a supernatural fiction.

There are in reality two sorts of supernatural, although only one really deserves the name. A great number of beliefs in all mythologies are in reality mere scientific errors--abortive attempts to explain phenomena by causes with which they have no connection--the imagination plays not more part in them than in any other sort of theorising, and the notions that unlucky accidents are due to a certain man's glance, that certain formulae will bring rain or sunshine, that miraculous images will dispel pestilence, and kings of England cure epilepsy, must be classed under the head of mistaken generalizations, not very different in point of fact from exploded scientific theories, such as Descartes' vortices, or the innate ideas of scholasticism. That there was a time when animals spoke with human voice may seem to us a piece of fairy-lore, but it was in its day a scientific hypothesis as brilliant and satisfying as Darwin's theory of evolution. We must, therefore, in examining the relations between art and the supernatural, eliminate as far as possible this species of scientific speculation, and consider only that supernatural which really deserves the name, which is beyond and outside the limits of the possible, the rational, the explicable--that supernatural which is due not to the logical faculties, arguing from wrong premises, but to the imagination wrought upon by certain kinds of physical surroundings. The divinity of the earlier races is in some measure a mistaken scientific hypothesis of the sort we have described, an attempt to explain phenomena otherwise inexplicable. But it is much more: it is the effect on the imagination of certain external impressions, it is those impressions brought to a focus, personified, but personified vaguely, in a fluctuating ever-changing manner; the personification being continually altered, reinforced, blurred out, enlarged, restricted by new series of impressions from without, even as the shape which we puzzle out of congregated cloud-masses fluctuates with their every movement--a shifting vapour now obliterates the form, now compresses it into greater distinctness: the wings of the fantastic monster seem now flapping leisurely, now extending bristling like a griffon's; at one moment it has a beak and talons, at others a mane and hoofs; the breeze, the sunlight, the moonbeam, form, alter, and obliterate it. Thus is it with the supernatural: the gods, moulded out of cloud and sunlight and darkness, are for ever changing, fluctuating between a human or animal shape, god or goddess, cow, ape, or horse, and the mere natural phenomenon which impresses the fancy. Pan is the weird, shaggy, cloven-footed shape which the goat-herd or the huntsman has seen gliding among the bushes in the grey twilight; his is the piping heard in the tangle of reeds, marsh lily, and knotted nightshade by the river side: but Pan is also the wood, with all its sights and noises, the solitude, the gloom, the infinity of rustling leaves, and cracking branches; he is the greenish-yellow light stealing in amid the boughs; he is the breeze in the foliage, the murmur of unseen waters, the mist hanging over the damp sward, the ferns and grasses which entangle the feet, and the briars which catch in the hair and garments are his grasp; and the wanderer dashes through the thickets with a sickening fear in his heart, and sinks down on the outskirts of the forest, gasping, with sweat-clotted hair, overcome by this glimpse of the great god.

In this constant renewal of the impressions on the fancy, in this unceasing shaping and reshaping of its creations, consisted the vitality of the myths of paganism, from the scorching and pestilence-bearing gods of India to the divinities shaped out of tempest and snowdrift of Scandinavia; they were constantly issuing out of the elements, renewed, changed, ever young, under the exorcism not only of the priest and of the poet, but of the village boor; and on this unceasing renovation depended the sway which they maintained, without ethical importance to help them, despite philosophy and Christianity. Christianity, born in an age of speculation and eclecticism, removed its divinities, its mystic figures, out of the cosmic surroundings of paganism; it forbade the imagination to touch or alter them, it regularised, defined, explained, placed the Saviour, the Virgin, the saints and angels, into a kind of supersensuous world of logic, logic adapted to Heaven, and different therefore from the logic of earth, but logic none the less. Christianity endowed them with certain definite attributes, not to be found among mortals, but analogous in a manner to mortal attributes; the Christian supernatural system belongs mainly to the category of mistaken scientific systems; its peculiarities are due, not to overwrought fancy, but to overtaxed reason. Thus the genuine supernatural was well-nigh banished by official Christianity, regulated as it was by a sort of congress of men of science, who eliminated, to the best of their powers, any vagaries of the imagination which might show themselves in their mystico-logic system. But the imagination did work nevertheless, and the supernatural did reappear, both within and without the Christian system of mythology. The Heaven of theology was too ethical, too logical, too positive, too scientific, in accordance with the science of the Middle Ages, for the minds of humanity at large; the scholars and learned clergy might study and expound it, but it was insufficient for the ignorant. The imagination reappeared once more. To the monk arose out of the silence and gloom of the damp, lichen-grown crypt, out of the foetid emanations of the charnal-house, strange forms of horror which lurked in his steps and haunted his sleep after fasting and scourging and vigils; devils and imps horrible and obscene, which the chisel of the stonecutter vainly attempted to reproduce, in their fluctuating abomination, on the capitals and gargoyles of cloister and cathedral. To the artisan, the weaver pent up in some dark cellar into which the daylight stole grey and faint from the narrow strip of blue sky between the overhanging eaves, for him, the hungry and toil-worn and weary of soul, there arose out of the hum of the street above, out of the half-lit dust, the winter damp and summer suffocation of the underground workshop, visions and sounds of sweetness and glory, misty clusters of white-robed angels shedding radiance around them, swaying in mystic linked dances, mingling with the sordid noises of toil seraphic harmonies, now near, now dying away into distance, voices singing of the sunshine and flowers of Paradise. And for others, for the lean and tattered peasant, with the dull, apathetic resignation of the starved and goaded ox or horse, sleeping on the damp clay of his hut and eating strange flourless bread, and stranger carrion flesh, there came a world of the supernatural, different from that of the monk or the artisan, at once terrifying and consoling; the divinities cast out by Christianity, the divinities for ever newly begotten by nature, but begotten of a nature miserably changed, born in exile and obloquy and persecution, fostered by the wretched and the brutified; differing from the gods of antiquity as the desolate heath, barren of all save stones and prickly furze and thistle, differs from the fertile pasture-land; as the forests planted over the cornfield, whence issue wolves, and the Baron's harvest-trampling horses, differ from the forests which gave their oaks and pines to Tyrian ships; divinities warped, and crippled, grown hideous and malignant and unhappy in the likeness of their miserable votaries.

This is the real supernatural, born of the imagination and its surroundings, the vital, the fluctuating, the potent; and it is this which the artist of every age, from Phidias to Giotto, from Giotto to Blake, has been called upon to make known to the multitude. And there had been artistic work going on unnoticed long before the time of any painter or sculptor or poet of whom we have any record; mankind longed from the first to embody, to fix its visions of wonder, it set to work with rough unskilful fingers moulding into shape its divinities. Rude work, ugly, barbarous, blundering scratchings on walls, kneaded clay vessels, notched sticks, nonsense rhymes; but work nevertheless which already showed that art and the supernatural were at variance, the beaked and clawed figures outlined on the wall were compromises between the man and the beast, but definite compromises, so much and no more of the man, so much and no more of the beast; the goddess on the clay vessels became a mere little owl; the divinities even in the nonsense verses were presented now as very distinct cows, now as very distinct clouds, or very distinct men and women; the vague, fluctuating impressions oscillating before the imagination like the colours of a dove's wing, or the pattern of a shot silk, interwoven, unsteady, never completely united into one, never completely separated into several, were rudely seized, disentangled by art; part was taken, part thrown aside; what remained was homogeneous, definite, unchanging; it was what it was and could never be aught else.

Thus, in proportion as the gods were subjected to artistic manipulation, whether by sculptor or poet, they lost their supernatural powers. A period there doubtless was when the gods stood out quite distinct from nature, and yet remained connected with it, as the figures of a high relief stand out from the background; but gradually they were freed from the chaos of impressions which had given them birth, and then, little by little, they ceased to be gods; they were isolated from the world of the wonderful, they were respectfully shelved off into the region of the ideal, where they were contemplated, admired, discussed, but not worshipped even like their statues by Praxiteles and their pictures by Parrhasius. The divinities who continued to be reverenced were the rustic divinities and the foreign gods and goddesses; the divinities which had been safe from the artistic desecration of the cities, and the divinities which were imported from hieratic, unartistic countries like Egypt and Syria; on the one hand, the gods shaped with the pruning-knife out of figwood, and stained with ochre or wine-lees, grotesque mannikins, standing like scarecrows, in orchard or corn-field, to which the peasants crowded in devout procession, leading their cleanly-dressed little ones, and carrying gifts of fruit and milk, while the listless Tibullus, fresh from sceptical Rome, looked on from his doorstep, a vague, childish veneration stealing over his mind; on the other hand, the monstrous goddesses, hundred-breasted or ibis-headed, half hidden in the Syrian and Egyptian temples, surrounded by mysterious priests, swarthy or effeminate, in mitres and tawny robes, jangling their sistra and clashing their cymbals, moving in mystic or frenzied dances, weird, obscene, and unearthly, to the melancholy drone of Phrygian or Egyptian music, sending a shudder through the atheist Catullus, and filling his mind with ghastly visions of victims of the great goddess, bleeding, fainting, lashed on to madness by the wrath of the terrible divinity. These were the last survivors of paganism, and to their protection clung the old gods of Greece and Rome, reduced to human level by art, stripped naked by sculptor and poet and muffling themselves in the homely or barbaric garments of low-born or outlandish usurpers; art had been a worse enemy than scepticism: Apelles and Scopas had done more mischief than Epicurus.

Christian art was, perhaps, more reverent in intention, but not less desecrating in practice; even the Giottesques turned Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints, into mere Florentine men and women; even Angelico himself, although a saint, was unable to show Paradise except as a flowery meadow, under a highly gilded sky, through which moved ladies and youths in most artistic but most earthly embroidered garments; and Hell except as a very hot place where men and women were being boiled and broiled and baked and fried and roasted by very comic little weasel-snouted fiends, which on a carnival car would have made Florentines roar with laughter. The real supernatural was in the cells of fever-stricken, starved visionaries; it was in the contagious awe of the crowd sinking down at the sight of the stained napkin of Bolsena; in that soiled piece of linen was Christ, and God, and Paradise; in that and not in the panels of Angelico and Perugino, or in the frescoes of Signorelli and Filippino.

Call we in our artist, or let us be our own artist; embody, let us see or hear this ghost, let it become visible or audible to others besides ourselves; paint us that vagueness, mould into shape that darkness, modulate into chords that silence--tell us the character and history of those vague beings ... set to work boldly or cunningly. What do we obtain? A picture, a piece of music, a story; but the ghost is gone. In its stead we get oftenest the mere image of a human being; call it a ghost if you will, it is none. And the more complete the artistic work, the less remains of the ghost. Why do those stories affect us most in which the ghost is heard but not seen? Why do those places affect us most of which we merely vaguely know that they are haunted? Why most of all those which look as if they might be haunted? Why, as soon as a figure is seen, is the charm half-lost? And why, even when there is a figure, is it kept so vague and mist-like? Would you know Hamlet's father for a ghost unless he told you he was one? and can you remember it long while he speaks in mortal words? and what would be Hamlet's father without the terrace of Elsinore, the hour, and the moonlight? Do not these embodied ghosts owe what little effect they still possess to their surroundings, and are not the surroundings the real ghost?

Let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul.

Time to repent, time to recoil from the horrible gulf into which he is being sucked; Christ, will Christ's blood not save him? He would leap up to heaven and cling fast, but Lucifer drags him down. He would seek annihilation in nature, be sucked into its senseless, feelingless mass ... and, meanwhile, the time is passing, the interval of respite is shrinking and dwindling. Would that he were a soulless brute and might perish, or that at least eternal hell were finite--a thousand, a hundred thousand years let him suffer, but not for ever and without end! Midnight begins striking. With convulsive agony he exclaims as the rain patters against the window:

O soul, be changed into small water-drops, And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found.

But the twelfth stroke sounds; Lucifer and his crew enter; and when next morning the students, frightened by the horrible tempest and ghastly noises of the night, enter his study, they find Faustus lying dead, torn and mangled by the demon. All this is not supernatural in our sense; such scenes as this were real for Marlowe and his audience. Such cases were surely not unfrequent; more than one man certainly watched through such a night in hopeless agony, conscious, like Faustus, of pact with the fiend--awaiting, with earth and heaven shut and bolted against him, eternal hell.

In this story of Doctor Faustus, which, to Marlowe and his contemporaries, was not a romance but a reality, the episode of the evoking of Helen is extremely secondary in interest. To raise a dead woman was not more wonderful than to turn wisps of straw into horses, and it was perhaps considered the easier of the two miracles; the sense of the ordinary ghostly is absent, and the sense that Helen is the ghost of a whole long-dead civilisation, that sense which is for us the whole charm of the tale, could not exist in the sixteenth century. Goethe's Faust feels for Helen as Goethe himself might have felt, as Winckelmann felt for a lost antique statue, as Schiller felt for the dead Olympus: a passion intensely imaginative and poetic, born of deep appreciation of antiquity, the essentially modern, passionate, nostalgic craving for the past. In Marlowe's play, on the contrary, Faustus and the students evoke Helen from a confused pedantic impression that an ancient lady must be as much superior to a modern lady as an ancient poem, be it even by Statius or Claudian, must be superior to a modern poem--it is a humanistic fancy of the days of the revival of letters. But, by a strange phenomenon, Marlowe, once realising what Helen means, that she is the fairest of women, forgets the scholarly interest in her. Faustus, once in presence of the wonderful woman, forgets that he had summoned her up to gratify his and his friends' pedantry; he sees her, loves her, and bursts out into the splendid tirade full of passionate fancy:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss! Her lips suck forth my soul! See, where it flies! Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena. I will be Paris, and for love of thee, Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked; And I will combat with weak Menelaus, And wear thy colours on my plumed crest; Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel, And then return to Helen for a kiss. Oh! thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars; Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter When he appeared to hapless Semele; More lovely than the monarch of the sky In wanton Arethusa's azure arms; And none but thou shalt be my paramour.

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