Part 6
If, with a view to answering this question, we examine, however cursorily, the history of the five great arts, we shall find a somewhat different state of affairs in the case of each. In the end it may be possible to formulate something like a general rule that shall accord with all the facts. Let us begin with the greatest and simplest of the arts, the art of poetry.
In the history of poetry we shall find less evidence of progress than anywhere else, for it will be seen that its acknowledged masterpieces are almost invariably near the beginning of a series rather than near the end. Almost as soon as a clear and flexible language has been formed by any people, a great poem has been composed in that language, which has remained not only unsurpassed, but unequaled, by any subsequent work. Homer is for us, as he was for the Greeks, the greatest of their poets; and if the opinion could be taken of all cultivated readers in those nations that have inherited the Greek tradition, it is doubtful whether he would not be acclaimed the greatest poet of the ages. Dante has remained the first of Italian poets, as he was one of the earliest. Chaucer, who wrote when our language was transforming itself from Anglo-Saxon into English, has still lovers who are willing for his sake to master what is to them almost a foreign tongue, and yet other lovers who ask for new translations of his works into our modern idiom; while Shakspere, who wrote almost as soon as that transformation had been accomplished, is universally reckoned one of the greatest of world-poets. There have, indeed, been true poets at almost all stages of the world’s history, but the preëminence of such masters as these can hardly be questioned, and if we looked to poetry alone for a type of the arts, we should almost be forced to conclude that art is the reverse of progressive. We should think of it as gushing forth in full splendor when the world is ready for it, and as unable ever again to rise to the level of its fount.
The art of architecture is later in its beginning than that of poetry, for it can exist only when men have learned to build solidly and permanently. A nomad may be a poet, but he cannot be an architect; a herdsman might have written the Book of Job, but the great builders are dwellers in cities. But since men first learned to build they have never quite forgotten how to do so. At all times there have been somewhere peoples who knew enough of building to mold its utility into forms of beauty, and the history of architecture may be read more continuously than that of any other art. It is a history of constant change and of continuous development, each people and each age forming out of the old elements a new style which should express its mind, and each style reaching its point of greatest distinctiveness only to begin a further transformation into something else; but is it a history of progress? Building, indeed, has progressed at one time or another. The Romans, with their domes and arches, were more scientific builders than the Greeks, with their simple post and lintel, but were they better architects? We of to-day, with our steel construction, can scrape the sky with erections that would have amazed the boldest of medieval craftsmen; can we equal his art? If we ask where in the history of architecture do its masterpieces appear, the answer must be “Almost anywhere.” Wherever men have had the wealth and the energy to build greatly, they have builded beautifully, and the distinctions are less between style and style or epoch and epoch than between building and building. The masterpieces of one time are as the masterpieces of another, and no man may say that the nave of Amiens is finer than the Parthenon or that the Parthenon is nobler than the nave of Amiens. One may say only that each is perfect in its kind, a supreme expression of the human spirit.
Of the art of music I must speak with the diffidence becoming to the ignorant; but it seems to me to consist of two elements and to contain an inspirational art as direct and as simple as that of poetry, and a science so difficult that its fullest mastery is of very recent achievement. In melodic invention it is so far from progressive that its most brilliant masters are often content to elaborate and to decorate a theme old enough to have no history--a theme the inventor of which has been so entirely forgotten that we think of it as sprung not from the mind of one man, but from that of a whole people, and call it a folk-song. The song is almost as old as the race, but the symphony has had to wait for the invention of many instruments and for a mastery of the laws of harmony, and so symphonic music is a modern art. We are still adding new instruments to the orchestra and admitting to our compositions new combinations of sounds, but have we in a hundred years made any essential progress even in this part of the art? Have we produced anything, I will not say greater, but anything as great as the noblest works of Bach and Beethoven?
Already, and before considering the arts of painting and sculpture, we are coming within sight of our general law. This law seems to be that, so far as an art is dependent upon any form of exact knowledge, so far it partakes of the nature of science and is capable of progress. So far as it is expressive of a mind and soul, its greatness is dependent upon the greatness of that mind and soul, and it is incapable of progress. It may even be the reverse of progressive, because as an art becomes more complicated and makes ever greater demands upon technical mastery, it becomes more difficult as a medium of expression, while the mind to be expressed becomes more sophisticated and less easy of expression in any medium. It would take a greater mind than Homer’s to express modern ideas in modern verse with Homer’s serene perfection; it would take, perhaps, a greater mind than Bach’s to employ all the resources of modern music with his glorious ease and directness. And greater minds than those of Bach and Homer the world has not often the felicity to possess.
The arts of painting and sculpture are imitative arts above all others, and therefore more dependent than any others upon exact knowledge, more tinged with the quality of science. Let us see how they illustrate our supposed law.
Sculpture depends, as does architecture, upon certain laws of proportion in space which are analogous to the laws of proportion in time and in pitch upon which music is founded. But as sculpture represents the human figure, whereas architecture and music represent nothing, sculpture requires for its perfection the mastery of an additional science, which is the knowledge of the structure and movement of the human body. This knowledge may be acquired with some rapidity, especially in times and countries where man is often seen unclothed. So, in the history of civilizations, sculpture developed early, after poetry, but with architecture, and before painting and polyphonic music. It reached the greatest perfection of which it is capable in the age of Pericles, and from that time progress was impossible to it, and for a thousand years its movement was one of decline. After the dark ages sculpture was one of the first arts to revive, and again it develops rapidly, though not so rapidly as before, conditions of custom and climate being less favorable to it, until it reaches, in the first half of the sixteenth century, something near its former perfection. Again it can go no further; and since then it has changed, but has not progressed. In Phidias, by which name I would signify the sculptor of the pediments of the Parthenon, we have the coincidence of a superlatively great artist with the moment of technical and scientific perfection in the art, and a similar coincidence crowns the work of Michelangelo with a peculiar glory. But, apart from the work of these two men, the essential value of a work of sculpture is by no means always equal to its technical and scientific completeness. There are archaic statues that are almost as nobly beautiful as any work by Phidias, and more beautiful than almost any work that has been done since his time. There are bits of Gothic sculpture that are more valuable expressions of human feeling than anything produced by the contemporaries of Buonarroti. Even in times of decadence a great artist has created finer things than could be accomplished by a mediocre talent of the great epochs, and the world could ill spare the “Victory” of Samothrace or the portrait busts of Houdon.
As sculpture is one of the simplest of the arts, painting is one of the most complicated. The harmonies it constructs are composed of almost innumerable elements of lines and forms and colors and degrees of light and dark, and the science it professes is no less than that of the visible aspect of the whole of nature--a science so vast that it never has been and perhaps never can be mastered in its totality. Anything approaching a complete art of painting can exist only in an advanced stage of civilization. An entirely complete art of painting never has existed and probably never will exist. The history of painting, after its early stages, is a history of loss here balancing gain there, of a new means of expression acquired at the cost of an old one.
We know comparatively little of the painting of antiquity, but we have no reason to suppose that that art, however admirable, ever attained to ripeness, and we know that the painting of the Orient has stopped short at a comparatively early stage of development. For our purpose the art to be studied is the painting of modern times in Europe from its origin in the Middle Ages. Even in the beginning, or before the beginning, while painting is a decadent reminiscence of the past rather than a prophecy of the new birth, there are decorative splendors in the Byzantine mosaics hardly to be recaptured. Then comes primitive painting, an art of the line and of pure color with little modulation and no attempt at the rendering of solid form. It gradually attains to some sense of relief by the use of degrees of light and less light; but the instant it admits the true shadow, the old brightness and purity of color have become impossible. The line remains dominant for a time, and is carried to the pitch of refinement and beauty, but the love for solid form gradually overcomes it, and in the art of the high Renaissance it takes a second place. Then light and shade begins to be studied for its own sake; color, no longer pure and bright, but deep and resonant, comes in again; the line vanishes altogether, and even form becomes secondary. The last step is taken by Rembrandt, and even color is subordinated to light and shade, which exists alone in a world of brownness. At every step there has been progress, but there has also been regress. Perhaps the greatest balance of gain against loss, and the nearest approach to a complete art of painting, was with the great Venetians. The transformation is still going on, and in our own day we have conquered some corners of the science of visible aspects which were unexplored by our ancestors. But the balance has turned against us; our loss has been greater than our gain; and our art, even in its scientific aspect, is inferior to that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
And just because there never has been a complete art of painting, entirely rounded and perfected, it is the clearer to us that the final value of a work in that art never has depended on its approach to such completion. There is no one supreme master of painting, but a long succession of masters of different yet equal glory. If the masterpieces of architecture are everywhere because there has often been a complete art of architecture, the masterpieces of painting are everywhere for the opposite reason. And if we do not always value a master the more as his art is more nearly complete, neither do we always value him especially who has placed new scientific conquests at the disposal of art. Palma Vecchio painted by the side of Titian, but he is only a minor master; Botticelli remained of the generation before Leonardo, but he is one of the immortal great. Paolo Ucello, by his study of perspective, made a distinct advance in pictorial science, but his interest for us is purely historic; Fra Angelico made no advance whatever, but he practised consummately the current art as he found it, and his work is eternally delightful. At every stage of its development the art of painting has been a sufficient medium for the expression of a great man’s mind; and wherever and whenever a great man has practised it, the result has been a great and permanently valuable work of art.
For this seems, finally, to be the law of all the arts: the one essential prerequisite to the production of a great work of art is a great man. You cannot have the art without the man, and when you have the man you have the art. His time and his surroundings will color him, his art will not be at one time or place precisely what it might be at another; but at bottom the art is the man, and at all times and in all countries is just as great as the man.
Let us clear our minds, then, of the illusion that there is in any important sense such a thing as progress in the fine arts. We may with a clear conscience judge every new work for what it appears in itself to be, asking of it that it be noble and beautiful and reasonable, not that it be novel or progressive. If it be great art, it will always be novel enough; for there will be a great mind behind it, and no two great minds are alike. And if it be novel without being great, how shall we be the better off? There are enough forms of mediocre or evil art in the world already. Being no longer intimidated by the fetish of progress, when a thing calling itself a work of art seems to us hideous and degraded, indecent and insane, we shall have the courage to say so and shall not care to investigate it further. Detestable things have been produced in the past, and they are none the less detestable because we are able to see how they came to be produced. Detestable things are produced now, and they will be no more admirable if we learn to understand the minds that create them. Even should such things prove to be not the mere freaks of a diseased intellect that they seem, but a necessary outgrowth of the conditions of the age and a true prophecy of “the art of the future,” they are not necessarily the better for that. It is only that the future will be very unlucky in its art.
TO THE EXPERIMENTERS
BY CHARLES BADGER CLARK, JR.
Help me live long, O keen, cool servants of science! Give me a hundred years, for life is good and I love it, And wonders are easy for you. Yet, by a rule that is older than Æsculapius, I still must reckon my time to that luckless day When a ’whelming foe will cross a frontier unguarded Into this myriad nation of cells that bears my name, Storming fort after fort till the swarming defenders have perished And the strangled empire shall fall. My friends, simple folk, will weep and say, “He is dead!” But you will smile at their terrible, black-winged angel, And jot his name and description down in your note-book-- The bitter song of the ages in a line of chemic formula! Aye, and perchance you can take the components of living,-- Provinces, ravaged and waste, of that ruinous empire,-- And cunningly right them again. Then call in the mourners. “Say you your friend is dead? See through that glass how his heart is pulsating steadily. Look there, and there, at the beautiful play of the organs-- All the reactions of life restored by our science! Where is your death?” But I--is there not an I?--catch you that in a test-tube!
[Illustration: Owned by Mr. Hugo Reisinger
NONCHALANCE
FROM THE PAINTING BY JOHN S. SARGENT]
WAR-HORSES OF FAMOUS GENERALS
WASHINGTON--WELLINGTON--NAPOLEON--GRANT--LEE--SHERMAN--SHERIDAN
BY JAMES GRANT WILSON
When Colonel Washington accompanied General Braddock as aide-de-camp in the Virginia campaign against the French and their Indian allies, he took with him three war-horses. Of these his favorite was “Greenway,” a fiery steed of great speed and endurance. In the disastrous battle of July 9, 1755, Braddock was mortally wounded, after having five horses killed under him, a record, so far as the writer is aware, unequaled in the annals of war. Washington lost two horses. One of these was replaced by the dying general, who presented to him his best charger, which had escaped the carnage. A week later the young colonel wrote of the engagement to his brother John:
By the all powerful dispensation of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation: for I have had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was on every side of me.
After the capture of Canada and the close of the war, Washington frequently followed the foxhounds mounted on “Braddock,” as he named that soldier’s powerful dark bay, or on “Greenway,” which was a dark gray, and it was seldom that the Virginian was not in the lead.
On June 20, 1775, Colonel Washington received his commission as Commander-in-Chief of the American Army, and on the following morning, accompanied by Generals Charles Lee and Philip Schuyler, he set out for Cambridge, Massachusetts. He took with him five horses, his favorite being a spirited stallion called “Douglas,” on which Washington first appeared before the army at Cambridge, charming all beholders with his manly grace and military bearing. Jefferson called him “the best horseman of his age.” Before the close of the Revolutionary War the general acquired by gift or purchase seven additional chargers. His bay horse “Fairfax” was so badly wounded at the battle of Trenton that he was left behind. At the battle of Monmouth, Washington rode a white steed presented to him by William Livingston, Governor of New Jersey. Such was the excessive heat on that June day, as well as the deep and sandy nature of the soil, that the spirited charger sank under the general, dying on the spot. His portrait is preserved in Trumbull’s full-length painting of Washington, in the City Hall of New York. He then mounted a high-bred chestnut mare with long, flowing mane and tail named “Dolly.” Lafayette said of her and her rider:
At Monmouth I commanded a division, and it may be supposed I was pretty well occupied; still, I took time, amid the roar and confusion of the conflict, to admire our beloved chief, who, mounted on a splendid charger, rode along the ranks amid the shouts of the soldiers, cheering them by his voice and example, and restoring to our standard the fortunes of the fight. I thought I had never seen so superb a man.
Another of Washington’s war-horses, and the last to be mentioned, was “Nelson,” a light chestnut, sixteen hands high, with white face and legs. He was a gift from Governor Thomas Nelson of Virginia, and was named in his honor. He was used for the last time at the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, afterward leading a life of leisure at Mount Vernon and following Washington’s bier in the funeral procession. Before the Civil War, while on a visit to the general’s adopted son, Mr. Custis of Arlington, I was informed that when a youth he had ridden “Buckskin” and “Nelson,” and that the handsome white horse that fell on the field of Monmouth was painted from memory by Colonel Trumbull. Mr. Custis said:
Among the many troublesome and unbroken horses ridden by Washington, he was never thrown, and he was perhaps the strongest man of his time. Mounted on “Buckskin,” I occasionally accompanied the general when making his daily morning rounds at Mount Vernon, riding “Yorktown,” the youngest of his war-horses, and the last mounted by him, only a few days before his death. On one of those occasions Washington saw with displeasure two stalwart negroes vainly endeavoring to raise a heavy stone to the top of a wall. Throwing “Yorktown’s” bridle to me, he sprang from his saddle, strode forward, pushed the slaves aside, leaned over, and, grasping the huge stone with his large, strong hands, slowly but surely raised it to its place, and remounted without any remark.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON’S FAVORITE WHITE CHARGER “LEXINGTON,” AT THE BATTLE OF MONMOUTH
FROM THE PAINTING BY JOHN TRUMBULL]
* * * * *
At four o’clock on a June morning ninety-eight years ago, when Napoleon was defeated by Wellington in one of the sixteen decisive battles of the world, the illustrious English soldier mounted his celebrated charger “Copenhagen,” remaining in the saddle for eighteen hours. “Copenhagen” was a powerful chestnut, grandson of the famous war-horse “Eclipse,” and the son of “Lady Catherine,” the charger ridden by Field-Marshal Lord Grosvenor at the siege of Copenhagen, when she was in foal with the colt which afterward carried Wellington at Waterloo. The war-horse cost him, in 1813, four hundred guineas. Two years later, when the famous victory was won, and Wellington had held his historic interview with Blücher, the duke dismounted at ten o’clock. As “Copenhagen” was led away by the groom, he playfully threw out his heels as a “good-night” salutation to his successful master. It was Wellington’s last act before leaving Strathfieldsaye for London on public or private business, to walk out to the adjacent paddock to pat his favorite charger, and to feed him with chocolate or other confectionery, of which he was inordinately fond.
[Illustration: NAPOLEON’S FAMOUS WAR-HORSE “MARENGO”
FROM THE PAINTING BY MEISSONIER]
For more than a dozen years before his death “Copenhagen,” leading the easy, comfortable career of a well-pensioned veteran who had retired from all the activities of life, was only twice surreptitiously saddled and ridden by the duke’s eldest son, the Marquis of Douro. The second Duke of Wellington, who died in 1884, erected two monuments on the grounds of Strathfieldsaye, that fine estate of nearly seven thousand acres on which is situated Silchester, the site of a Roman station, presented to the “Iron Duke” by the British government for a day’s work at Waterloo. One of these, a superb and lofty marble column, is to the memory of his illustrious father, the other to that of “Copenhagen.” The former stands just outside the park at the point where, immediately in front of one of the lodges, the London road meets at right angles that which connects Reading with Basingstoke. A simple marble tombstone standing under the shadow of a spreading Turkish oak marks the spot where the brave steed was buried with military honors, and bears the following inscription from the pen of the second duke: