distorting personality. To do them justice, direction that the artist's genius avails; his however, this submissiveness to the matter-of-skill in execution is secondary and incidental. fact, with the more gifted at least, is a virtue that is praised and starves. They do it lipservice, and suppose themselves loyal; but when they come to paint, they are under a spell that does not allow them to see in things only material qualities, but, without any violence to nature, raises it to another plane, where other | values and other connections prevail. Art, where it exists to any serious purpose, follows nature, but not the natural-according to Raphael's maxim, that "the artist's aim is to make things not as Nature makes them, but as she intends them." But these audacities, though they make their own excuse in the work itself, do not pass in a statement without a cavil at the arrogance that would exalt the work of men's hands above the work of God. Shall we strive with our pigments to outshine the sun, or teach the secrets of form to the cunning Artificer by whom the world was made? What room for art, except as the feeble reflex of the splendours of the actual world? The root of the difficulty lies in this slippery phrase, "nature." We talk of the "facts of Nature," meaning the existence now and here of the hills, sky, trees, &c., as if these were fixed quantities, as if a house or a tree must be the same at all times and to everybody. But in a child's drawing we see that these things are not the same to us and to him. He is careful to give the doors and windows, the chimneys with their smoke, the lines of the fence, and the walk in front; he insists on the divisions of the bricks and the window-panes: but for what is characteristic and essential he has no eye. He gives what the house is to him, merely a house in general, any house. It would not help it, but only make the defect more prominent, to straighten and complete the lines. An artist with fewer and more careless lines would give more of what we see in it; and if he be a man of high power, he may teach us in turn the limitation of our seeing, by showing that the vague, half-defined sentiment that attaches to it has also a visible expression, if we knew where to look for it. We hear people say they know nothing of art, but that they can judge as well as anybody whether a picture is like nature or not. No doubt Giotto's contemporaries thought so too, and they were grown men, with senses as good as ours; but we smile when Boccaccio says, "There was nothing in nature that Giotto could not depict, whether with the pencil, the pen, or the brush-so like that it seemed not merely like, but the thing itself." We smile superior, but Giotto had as keen an eye and as ready a hand as any man since. The lesson is, that we, too, have not come to the end of even the most familiar objects, but that to another age our view of them may seem as queer as his seems to us. For the facts in nature are not fixed but transcendental quantities, and their value depends on the use that is made of them. It is in this The measure of his ability is the depth to which he has penetrated the world of matter, not the number or the accuracy of his facts. Every landscape wears many faces, as many as there are men and different moods of the same man. To one the forest is so many cords of wood; to another, an arboretum; to another, a workshop or a museum; to another, a pɔem. What each sees is there; the forest exists for beauty and for firewood, and lends itself indifferently to either use. Nature wears this air of impartiality, because her figures are only zeros, deriving all their significance from their position. We do not require a like impartiality in the artist, because what he is to give is not nature, but what nature inspires. His endeavour to be impartial would result only in giving us his opinions or the opinions of others, instead of the utterance of the oracle. For Nature hides her secret, not by silence, but in a Babel of sweet voices, heard by each according to the fineness of sense: by one as mere noise, by another as a jangle of pleasing sounds, by the artist as harmony. They are all of them Nature's voices; he adds nothing and omits nothing, but hears with a pre-occupied attention, the justification being that his hearing is thus most complete, as one who understands a language seizes the sense of words rapidly spoken better than he who from less acquaintance with it strives to follow all the sounds. This deeper interest has its root in nothing arbitrary or personal to the artist. It is not inventing something finer than nature, but seeing more truly what Nature shows, that makes the artistic faculty. This is the lesson taught by the history of art. Take it up where you will, this history is nothing but the successive unfolding of a truer conception of nature, only speaking here the language of form and colour, instead of words. It is this that lies at the bottom of all its revolutions, and appears in its downfall as well as in its prosperity. Where the human form is the theme, the aim must of course be to give its typical perfection. The sculptor does not reproduce the peculiarities of his model, but aims to give ideal form as the most natural form of man. But in painting, and especially in landscape, it seems less easy to fix upon any ideal, not from the multifariousness of the details, but above all from the elusiveness of the standard. We might agree upon an ideal of human beauty, but hardly upon the ideal of any. thing else. The sophist in the Hippios Major was prepared to define the beauty of a maiden, or of a mare; but he was confounded when it was required that the beauty of a pipkin should be deducible from the same principle, and yet worse when it was shown to involve that a wooden spoon was more beautiful than a gold one. What you see in the woods and mountains depends on what you go for and what you carry with you. We may go to them as to a quarry or a wood-pile, or for pleasantness--the cool spring and the plane-tree shade, as the ancients did-or to see fine trees, waterfalls, mountains. To many persons the beauty of any scene is measured by its abundance in such specimens of streams, mountains, waterfalls, &c. Of course the connection is demonstrable enough: one collocation of features is more readily suggestive of beauty than another. We expect to find the scenery of a hill-country more attractive than a sand-desert. But, comparing a landscape with a statue, or even painting generally with sculpture, the connection between a happy effect and any definite arrangement of lines is much looser, and depends on the combination rather than the ingredients. It is in every one's experience that an accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to the meagerest landscape-a bare marsh, a scraggy hill pasture-a charm of which the separate features or the whole, at another time, give no hint. Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a deeper feeling than the most famous scenes. We learn from such experiences that the difference between one patch of earth and another is wholly superficial, and indicates not so much anything in it as a greater or less dulness in us. Mr. Ruskin tells us that Turner did not paint the high Alps, nor the cumulus, the grandest form of cloud. Calane gives us the nooks and lanes, the rocks and hills of Switzerland, rather than the high peaks; Lambinet, an apple-orchard, a row of pollard-elms, or a weedy pond-not cataracts or forests. This is not affectation or timidity, but an instinct that the famous scenes are no breaks in the order of nature-that what is seen in them is visible elsewhere as well, only not so obvious, and that the office of Art is not to parrot what is already distinct, but to reveal it where it is obscure. This makes the inspiration of the artist; this is the source of all his power, and alone distinguishes him from the topographer and view-maker. This transcendentalism is more evident in painting, as the later and more developed form; but it is common to all art, and may be read also in the Greek sculptures. Not the images of their deities alone, but all their statues were gods. The charm of the Lizard-Slayer of Praxiteles, or of those immortal riders that swept along the friezes of the Parthenon, is something quite distinct from the beauty of a naked boy playing with an arrow, or a troop of Athenian citizens on horseback. These are the deathless forms of the happy Olympians, high above the cares and turmoil of the finite, selfcentred, and independent. It is the Paradise age of the world, before the knowledge of good and evil, before sin and death came; the worship of the Visible, when God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Hence the air of repose, of eternal duration, that mark these figures. They have nothing to regret or to hope, no past or future, but only a timeless existence. In modern sculpture this deification of the human form is either expressly banished from the artist's aim, or at least he is not quite in earnest with it. For instance, in Mr. Palmer's White Slave, the sculptor's account of his work is, that it pourtrays an American girl, captured by Indians and bound to a tree. We have to take with us the history and the circumstances: a Christian woman, of the nineteenth century, dragged from her civilized home, and helpless in the hands of savages. This is not at all incidental to the work, but the work is incidental to it. It is a story which the figure helps to tell. This is no universal type of womanhood, nor even American womanhood, American women do not stand naked in the streets, but go about clothed and active on their errands of duty and pleasure; if we must needs represent one naked, we must invent some such accident, some extraordinary dislocation of all usual relations and circumstances. In place of the antique harmony of character and situation, we have here a painful incongruity that no study or skill can obviate. Its Nor has modern sculpture any better success, when, instead of the pretence of history, it adopts the pretence of personification. highest result in this direction is, perhaps, Thorwaldsen's bas-relief of Night, a pretty parlour ornament. There is a fatal sense of unreality about works of this kind that even Thorwaldsen's genius was unable to remove. They are toys, and it seems rather flat to have toys so cumbrous and so costly. The reason of this insipidity is, that the ideality aimed at is all on the outside. There is no soul in these bodies, but only an abstraction; and so the body remains an abstraction too. In each case the radical defect is the same, namely, that the interest is external to the form: they do not coalesce, but are only arbitrarily connected. We cannot have these ideal forms, because we do not believe in them. Such was the fascination of beauty to the Greek mind, that it banished all other considerations. What mattered it to Praxiteles whether his Satyr was a useful member of society or not, or whether the young Apollo stood thus idle and listless for an instant or for a millennium, as long as he was so beautiful? And the charm so penetrated their works that something of it reaches down even to us, and holds us as long as we look upon them. But as soon as we quit the magic circle, the illusion vanishes-Apollo is a handsome vagabond whom we incline to send about his business. ought to be slaying Pythons and drying up swamps, instead of loitering here. He We do not believe in gods, nor quite as the ancients did in heroes, but in representative men-that is, in ideas, and in men as representing them. Wellington is not to us what Achilles or Agamemnon was to the Greeks. The form of Achilles would do as well for a god; the antiquaries do not know whether the Ludovisi Mars was not an Achilles, perhaps nobody ever knew. But in all our admiration of Wellington, it is not his person we revere, but his military genius-precisely the impersonal part of him, or his person only from association. But if we isolate this by making a statue of him, we have only an apotheosis of cocked-hat and smallclothes, in which we see what it really was to us. This awkward prominence of the costume does not come from the accident of modern dress, but from our unconscious repugnance to petrifying the man in one of his aspects. It is a touch of grave humour in the genius of Art, thus to give us just what we ask for, though not what we want. The Greeks could have portrait-statues, because all they looked for in the man they saw in his form, and, seeing it, could portray it. What they saw is there; it is a reality both for them and for us; but the literal identification of it with the form belongs to them, not to us, and our mimicry of it can result only in these abstractions. For us it is elsewhere, beyond these finite shapes, on which, by an illusion, it seemed to rest. The Greek statues are tropes, which we gladly allow in their original use, but, repeated, they become flat and pedantic. Hence the air of caricature in modern portraitstatues; for caricature does not necessarily imply falsification, but only that what is given is insisted on at the expense of more important truth. so, with all his efforts, he gives us only the outside. Is it asked, whence this divorce of flesh and spirit? why not give both at once as Nature does? Then we must do as Nature does, and make our forms as fluid as hers. But this the sculptor contravenes at the outset. Haydon was delighted to find reproduced in the Elgin marbles certain obscure and seeming insignificant details of the anatomy that later schools had overlooked, such as a fold of skin under the armpit of the Neptune, etc. But any beginner at a life-school could have pointed out in the same statue endless deficiencies in anatomical detail. The fold was put in, not because it was there, but because to the mind of the Greek artist it meant something. Sculptors of the present day comfort themselves with the belief that their works are more complete and more accurate in the anatomy than the antique. Very likely, for the ancients did not dissect. But this accuracy, if it is founded on no interest beyond accuracy, is after all an impertinence. The Greek ideal is founded on the exclusion of accident. It is a declaration that the casual shape is not the true form; it is only a step farther to the perception that all shape is casual, the reality seen, not in it, but through it. Henceforth, suggestion only is aimed at, not representation; the coöperation of the spectator is relied upon as the indispensable complement of the design. The Zeus of Phidias seemed to the Greeks, Plotinus says, Zeus himself—as he would be, if he chose to appear to human eyes. But a Crucifixion is of itself not at all what the artist meant. It is not the agony of the flesh, but the triumph of the spirit, that is intended to be portrayed. To the view of the early Christian ages, too, the body is old clothes, ready to be cast off at any moment, good only as means to something higher. It might seem that Christianity should give a higher value to the body, since it was believed to have been inhabited by God himself. But the passion was a fact of equal importance with the Incarnation. This honour could be Christian art, after mere tradition had died allowed to matter only for an instant, and on out-for instance, in the Byzantine and early the condition of immediate resumption. That Italian pictures from the eighth to the middle the Highest should suffer death as a man might of the thirteenth century-presents the strongest well seem to the Greeks foolishness. To the contrast to all that had gone before. The mounderstanding it is the utmost conceivable con- rose and lifeless monotony or barbarous rudetradiction. Yet it is only a more completeness of these figures seems like contempt not statement of what is involved in the Greek worship of beauty. The complete incarnation of Spirit, which is the definition of beauty, demands equally that there be no point it does not inhabit, and none in which it abides. The transience of things is no defect in them, but only the affirmation of their reality through the incessant casting off of its inadequate manifestations. It is not from the excellence, but from the impotence of its nature, that the stone endures and does not pass away as the plant and the animal. The higher the organization, the more rapid and thorough the circulation. The same truth holds in art also, and drives it to forsake these beautiful petrifactions and seek an expression less bound to the material. The Greek ideal is after all a thing, and its impassive perfection a stony death. The justification is, that the sculptor did not say quite what he meant. He said flesh, but he meant spirit, and this is what the Greek statues mean to us. The modern sculptor does not mean spirit, and knows that he does not; and only of beauty, but of all natural expression. They are meaningless of themselves, and quite indifferent to the character they represent, which is appended to them by inscriptions, their relative importance, even, indicated only by size, more or less splendour of costume, etc., but the faces all alike, and no attempt made to adapt the action to the occasion. It is another world they belong to; the present they pointedly renounce and disdain, condescending to communicate with it only indirectly and by signs. The main peculiarities were common to painting and sculpture, though most noticeable in painting. An interest in the actual world seems never so far lost sight of, and earlier revived, in sculpture. Even down to the spring-tide of modern art in the thirteenth century, the "pleasant days" when Guido of Siena was painting his Madonna, the improvement in painting was rather a stirring within the cerements of conventional types, a flush on the cheek of the still rigid form; while in the bas-reliefs of the Pisan sculptors we meet already a realism as much in excess of the antique as the Byzantine | preference of certain forms abitrary, but it folfell short of it. lowed the plain indications written on every particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever it means only, not showing any individuality, or end within itself. But this higher completeness, which is beauty, whether it happen to exist or not, is never the immediate aim of nature. It is everywhere implied, but nowhere expressed; for nature is unwearied in producing, but negligent of the product. As soon as the end seems anywhere about to be attained, it is straightway made means again to something else, and so on forever. The earth and the air hasten to convert themselves into a plant, the flower into fruit, the fruit into flesh, and the animal at last to die and give back again to the air and the earth what they have transmitted to him. Whatever beauty a thing has is by the way, not as the end for which it exists, and so it is left to be baffled and soiled by accident. This is the "jealousy of the gods," that could not endure that anything should exist without some flaw of imperfection to confess its mortal birth. It is commonly said that Nicola Pisano revived art through study of the antique; his models, even, are pointed out, particularly a sarcophagus, said to have been brought to Pisa in the eleventh century from Greece, But this sarcophagus, wherever it came from, is not Greek, but late Roman work; and we find in Nicola no mark of direct Greek influence, but only of the late Roman and early Christian sarcophagus-sculptures. In the reliefs upon his celebrated pulpit at Pisa we have the same short-legged, large-headed, indigenous Italian or Roman figures, and the same arrangement of hair, draperies, etc., as on those sarcophagi. Taken by themselves, his works would, no doubt, indicate a new direction. But by the side of his son Giovanni, or the sculptors of the Northern Cathedrals, he seems to belong to the third century rather than to the thirteenth. In Giovanni Pisano the new era was distinctly announced. The Inferno, usually ascribed to him, among the reliefs on the front of Orvieto Cathedral, and in his noble pulpit at Pistoia, The world is full of beauty, but shows the traces of the antique only in unimpor- as it were hinted, as in the tendency tant details, ornamentation, etc. The antique to make the most conspicuous things served him, no doubt, as a hint to independent study, but the whole intent is different, all the beauties and all the defects arrived at by a different road. In place of the impassive Minos of the Shades, we have a fiend serpent-girt, his judicial impartiality enforced apparently against his will by manacles and anklets of knotted snakes; and throughout, instead of the calm impersonality of the Greek, dealing out the typical forms of things like a law of nature, we have the restless, intense, partisan, modern man, not wanting in tenderness, but full of a noble scorn at the unworthiness of the world, and grasping at a reality beyond it. He is intent, first of all and at all risks, upon vivid expression, upon telling the story, and speedily outruns the possibilities of his material. He must make his creatures alive to the last superficies; and as he cannot give them motion, he puts an emphasis upon all their bones, sinews, veins, and wrinkles: every feather is carved, and even the fishes under the water show their scales. That mere literalness is not the aim is shown by the open disregard of it elsewhere; for instance, the size of each figure is determined, not by natural rules, but by their relative importance, so that in the Nativity, Mary is twice as large as Joseph, and three times as large as the attendants. And the detail is not everywhere equally minute, but follows the intensity of the theme, reaching its height in the lower compartment, where the damned are in suffering, and especially in the figures of the fiends. This is no aim at literalness, but a struggle for an emphasis beyond the reach of sculpture. Ideal form was to the Greeks the highest result, the success of the universe. The end of art was conceived as nature's end as well, whether actually attained or not. Nor was this the most beautiful, as flowers, fruits, birds, the insects of the sunshine, the fishes of the surface, the upper side of the leaf; and perhaps more distinctly (in accordance with Lord Bacon's suggestion that "Nature is rather busy not to err, than labour to produce excellency”) in the tendency to hide those that are ugly, as toads, owls, bats, worms, insects that flee the light, the fishes of the bottom, the intestines of animals. But these are hints only, and Nature, as Mr. Ruskin confesses, will sometimes introduce "not ugliness only, but ugliness in the wrong place." Were beauty the aim, it should be most evident in her chief products; whereas, it is in things transient, minute, subordinateflowers, snow-flakes, the microscopic details of structure-that it meets us most invariably, rather than in the higher animals or in man. Nor in man does it keep pace with his civilization, but obeys laws that belong to the lower regions of his nature. The The Greek ideal is an endeavour to ignore the imperfections of natural existence. The ideal life is to be rich, strong, powerful, eloquent, high-born, famous. It was a glorification of the earthly, not by transcending, but by keeping its limitations out of sight. But this is only making the limitation essential and irrevocable, so that it infects the ideal also, which in this very avoidance submits to recognize it. statue is not less, but more, a thing than the natural body. Life is not mere exclusion of decay, but organization of it, so that the fury of corruption passes into fresh vital power. But sculpture supposes the current checked, and one aspect fit to stand for all the rest. The statue is not only a particle, but an isolated particle, and must first of all divert attention from its fragmentariness. The statue may embody an infinite meaning; but to the artist form and meaning are one. It is not a sentiment that he puts into this shape, but it is the shape itself that inspires him. The symbolism of Greek Art was the discovery of a later age. We know what is meant by Circe and Athene, but Homer did not. It was thus only that the Greek mind could grasp ideasthis is the thoroughly artistic character of that people. Their philosophers were always outlaws. What excited the rage of the Athenians against Socrates was his endeavour to detach religion from the images of the gods. When it comes to comparisons between meaning and expression, as adequate or inadequate, it is evident their unity is gone; the meaning is first, and the expression only adjunct or illustration. It did not impair the sacredness of the Greek deities that they were the work of the poets and sculptors. But the second Nicene Council forbade as impious any images of Christ as God, and allowed only his human nature to be represented a strange decree, if the Church had realized its own doctrine, that the humanity of Christ is as real as his divinity. But the meaning is, that the finite is not there to stand for the infinite, but only to indicate it negatively and indirectly-that its glory is not to persist in its finiteness, not to hold on to its form, but to be transformed. The figure of Thersites would be very unsuitable for Achilles, but is suitable enough for a saint; it was a pardonable exaggeration to make it even more suitable. The hero is now the saint; the ideal-life a life of poverty, humility, weakness, labour-to be long-suffering, to despise and forsake the world. The present life, the heaven of Achilles, is now Hades, the forced abode of phantoms having no reality but what is given to them by religion, and the Hades of the Greek the only true and substantial world. The new church fled the light of the sun, and sought impatiently to bury itself in the tomb. The Roman catacombs were not the mere refuge of a persecuted sect, their use as places of worship continued long after such need had ceased. But "among the graves" they found the point nearest to the happy land beyond; and the silence and the darkness made it easier to ignore for the few miserable moments that yet remained the vain tumult of the surface. In such a mood the beauty of the outward could awaken no delight, but only suspicion and aversion. Not the earth and its glories, but the fading of these before the unseen and eternal, was the only possible inspiration of Art. The extreme of this direction we see in the iconoclasm of the eight century, but it has never completely died out. Gibbon tells us of a Greek priest who refused to receive some pictures that Titian had painted for him, because they were too real: "Your scandalous figures," said he, "stand quite out from the canvas; they are as bad as a group of statues." It is a tenderness towards the idea, lest it should be dishonoured by actuality. re Of the hundreds of statues and liefs that surround the great northern cathedrals (Didron counts eighteen hun. dred upon the outside of Chartres — nine thousand in all, carved or painted, inside and outside) each has its appointed place in the sacred epos in stone, that unfolds about the building from left to right of the beholder the history of the world, from the Creation to the Judgment, and subordinated in parallel symbolism the daily life of the community, whatever occupied and interested men-their virtues and vices, trades and recreations, the seasons and the elements, jokes, even and sharp hits at the great, and at the clergy, scenes from popular romances, and the radicalism of Reynard the Fox-in short, all that touched the mind of the age, an impartial reflex of the great drama of life, wherein all exists alike to the glory of God. It is not the glory of earth that is here celebrated. M. Didron says the statues which the mob pulled down from the churches, at the first French Revolution, as the images of their kings, were the kings and heroes of the Old Testament. Had they known this, it might not have saved the statues, but it shows how wide a gulf separated these men from their fathers, that their hands were not held by some instinct that here was the first hint of the fundamental idea of democracy-the sovereign importance of man, not as powerful, wise, beautiful, not in virtue of any chance advantage of birth, but in virtue of his religious nature, of the infinite possibilities he infolds. The need to indicate that the source of value is not the accident of nature, but nature redeemed, regenerated by spirit, that all values are moral values, led to a certain abstractness of treatment-on one side qualities to be embodied, on the other figures to receive them, so that the character seems adventitious, detachable, not thoroughly at one with the form. For instance, the fiends in the Orvieto Inferno are not terror embodied, as the Jove of Phidias embodied dignity and command; but the terrific is accumulated on the outside of them, as tusks, claws, &c. One can easily believe that the ancient sculptors, had it been lawful, could have put more horror into the calm features of a Medusa than it contained in all this apparatus and grimace. The concreteness of the antique, the form and meaning existing only for each other, is gone; the union is occasional only, and needs to be certified and kept up afresh on every new occasion. The form must assert itself, must show itself alive and quick, not the dead sign of a meaning that has fled. It would have been a poor compliment to a Greek sculptor to say that his work was life-like; he might answer, with the classically disposed visitor of the Elgin marbles in Haydon's anecdote, "Like life! Well, what of that? He meant it for something much better." But during the middle ages this is constantly the highest encomium. Amid the utmost rudeness of conception and of execution, we see the first trace of awakening art in the unmistakable effort to indicate that the figures are alive; and in the cathedralsculpture of the best time this is still a leading |