A WORD ABOUT ART.

Is there

How can we have great art in our day? We have no faith. Belief of some sort is the life-blood of art. When Athene and Zeus ceased to excite veneration in the minds of men, sculpture and architecture both lost their greatness. When the Madonna and her Son lost that mystery and divinity, which for the simple minds of the early painters they possessed, the soul went out of canvas and of wood. When we carve a Venus now, she is but a frivolous woman; when we paint a Jesus now, it is but a little suckling, or a sorrowful prisoner.

a woman, even in

We want a great inspiration. We ought to find it in the things that are really beautiful, but we are not sure enough, perhaps, what is so. What does dominate us is a passion for nature: for the sea, for the sky, for the mountain, for the forest, for the evening storm, for the break of day. Perhaps when we are thoroughly steeped in this, we shall reach greatness once more. But the artificiality of all modern life is against it, so is its cynicism. Sadness and sarcasm make a great Lucretius and as a great Juvenal; and scorn makes a strong Aristophanes: but they do not make a Praxiteles and an Apelles; they do not even make a Raffaelle or a Flaxman.

Boston,

Art, if it be anything, is the perpetual uplifting of what is beautiful in the sight of the multitude—the perpetual adoration of that loveliness, material and moral, which men in the haste and greed of their lives are everlastingly forgetting: unless it be that, it is empty and useless as a child’s reed-pipe when the reed is snapt and the child’s breath spent.

who can

It must have been such a good life—a painter’s in those days: those early days of art. Fancy the gladness of it then—modern painters can know nothing of it.

produce literature

When all the delicate delights of distance were only half perceived; when the treatment of light and shadow was barely dreamed of; when aerial perspective was just breaking on the mind in all its wonder and power; when it was still regarded as a marvellous boldness to draw from the natural form in a natural fashion—in those early days only fancy the delights of a painter!

equal

Something fresh to be won at each step; something new to be penetrated at each moment; something beautiful and rash to be ventured on with each touch of colour—the painter in those days had all the breathless pleasure of an explorer; without leaving his birthplace he knew the joys of Columbus.

to this?

And one can fancy nothing better than a life such as Spinello led for nigh a century up on the hill here, painting because he loved it, till death took him. Of all lives, perhaps, that this world has ever seen, the lives of painters, I say, in those days were the most perfect.

In quiet places such as Arezzo and Volterra, and Modena and Urbino, and Cortona and Perugia, there would grow up a gentle lad who from infancy most loved to stand and gaze at the missal paintings in his mother’s house, and the coena in the monk’s refectory, and when he had fulfilled some twelve or fifteen years, his people would give in to his wish and send him to some bottega to learn the management of colours.

No, not even

Then he would grow to be a man; and his town would be proud of him, and find him the choicest of all work in its churches and its convents, so that all his days were filled without his ever wandering out of reach of his native vesper bells.

in Boston!

He would make his dwelling in the heart of his birthplace, close under its cathedral, with the tender sadness of the olive hills stretching above and around in the basiliche or the monasteries his labor would daily lie; he would have a docile band of hopeful boyish pupils with innocent eyes of wonder for all he did or said; he would paint his wife’s face for the Madonna’s, and his little son’s for the child Angel’s; he would go out into the fields and gather the olive bow, and the feathery corn, and the golden fruits, and paint them tenderly on ground of gold or blue, in symbol of those heavenly things of which the bells were forever telling all those who chose to hear; he would sit in the lustrous nights in the shade of his own vines and pity those who were not as he was; now and then horsemen would come spurring in across the hills and bring news with them of battles fought, of cities lost and won; and he would listen with the rest in the market-place, and go home through the moonlight thinking that it was well to create the holy things before which the fiercest rider and the rudest free-lance would drop the point of the sword and make the sign of the cross.

It must have been a good life—good to its close in the cathedral crypt—and so common too; there were scores of such lived out in these little towns of Italy, half monastery and half fortress, that were scattered over hill and plain, by sea and river, on marsh and mountain, from the daydawn of Cimabue to the after-glow of the Carracci.

And their work lives after them; the little towns are all grey and still and half peopled now; the iris grows on the ramparts, the canes wave in the moats, the shadows sleep in the silent market-place, the great convents shelter half a dozen monks, the dim majestic churches are damp and desolate, and have the scent of the sepulchre.

But there, above the altars, the wife lives in the Madonna and the child smiles in the Angel, and the olive and the wheat are fadeless on their ground of gold and blue; and by the tomb in the crypt the sacristan will shade his lantern and murmur with a sacred tenderness:

“Here he sleeps.”

Ouida.