The Germ Part 25

When whoso merely hath a little thought Will plainly think the thought which is in him,-- Not imaging another's bright or dim, Not mangling with new words what others taught; When whoso speaks, from having either sought Or only found,--will speak, not just to skim A shallow surface with words made and trim, But in that very speech the matter brought: Be not too keen to cry--"So this is all!-- A thing I might myself have thought as well, But would not say it, for it was not worth!"

Ask: "Is this truth?" For is it still to tell That, be the theme a point or the whole earth, Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?

London: d.i.c.kINSON & Co., 114, NEW BOND STREET, AND AYLOTT & JONES, 8, PATERNOSTER ROW.

G. F Tupper, Printer, Clement's Lane, Lombard Street.

CONTENTS.

Etching.--Viola and Olivia.

Viola and Olivia 145 A Dialogue.--_John Orchard_ 146 On a Whit-sunday Morn in the Month of May.--_John Orchard_ 167 Modern Giants.--_Laura Savage_ 169 To the Castle Ramparts--_W.M. Rossetti_ 173 Pax Vobis.--_Dante G. Rossetti_ 176 A Modern Idyl.--_Walter H. Deverell_ 177 "Jesus Wept."--_W.M. Rossetti_ 179 Sonnets for Pictures.--_Dante G Rossetti_ 180 Papers of "The M. S. Society,"

No IV. Smoke 183 No. V. Rain 186 Review: Christmas Eve and Easter Day.--_W.M. Rossetti_ 187 The Evil under the Sun 192

The Subscribers to this Work are respectfully informed that the future Numbers will appear on the last day of the Month for which they are dated. Also, that a supplementary, or large-sized Etching will occasionally be given.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Viola and Olivia

When Viola, a servant of the Duke, Of him she loved the page, went, sent by him, To tell Olivia that great love which shook His breast and stopt his tongue; was it a whim, Or jealousy or fear that she must look Upon the face of that Olivia?

'Tis hard to say if it were whim or fear Or jealousy, but it was natural, As natural as what came next, the near Intelligence of hearts: Olivia Loveth, her eye abused by a thin wall Of custom, but her spirit's eyes were clear.

Clear? we have oft been curious to know The after-fortunes of those lovers dear; Having a steady faith some deed must show That they were married souls--unmarried here-- Having an inward faith that love, called so In verity, is of the spirit, clear Of earth and dress and s.e.x--it may be near What Viola returned Olivia?

A Dialogue on Art

[The following paper had been sent as a contribution to this publication scarcely more than a week before its author, Mr. John Orchard, died. It was written to commence a series of "Dialogues on Art," which death has rendered for ever incomplete: nevertheless, the merits of this commencement are such that they seemed to warrant its publication as a fragment; and in order that the chain of argument might be preserved, so far as it goes, uninterrupted, the dialogue is printed entire in the present number, despite its length. Of the writer, but little can be said. He was an artist; but ill health, almost amounting to infirmity--his portion from childhood--rendered him unequal to the bodily labour inseparable from his profession: and in the course of his short life, whose youth was scarcely consummated, he exhibited, from time to time, only a very few small pictures, and these, as regards public recognition, in no way successfully. In art, however, he gave to the "seeing eye," token of that ability and earnestness which the "hearing ear" will not fail to recognize in the dialogue now published; where the vehicle of expression, being more purely intellectual, was more within his grasp than was the physical and toilsome embodiment of art.

It is possible that a search among the papers he has left, may bring to light a few other fugitive pieces, which will, in such event, as the Poem succeeding this Dialogue, be published in these pages.

To the end that the Author's scheme may be, as far as is now possible, understood and appreciated, we subjoin, in his own words, some explanation of his further intent, and of the views and feelings which guided him in the composition of the dialogue:

"I have adopted the form of dialogue for several, to me, cogent reasons; 1st, because it gives the writer the power of exhibiting the question, Art, on all its sides; 2nd, because the great phases of Art could be represented idiosyncratically; and, to make this clear, I have named the several speakers accordingly; 3rd, because dialogue secures the attention; and, that secured, deeper things strike, and go deeper than otherwise they could be made to; and, 4th and last, because all my earliest and most delightful pleasures a.s.sociate themselves with dialogue,--(the old dramatists, Lucian, Walter Savage Landor, &c.)

"You will find that I have not made one speaker say a thing on purpose for another to condemn it; but that I make each one utter his wisest in the very wisest manner he can, or rather, that I can for him.

"The further continuation of this 1st dialogue embraces the question _Nature_, and its processes, invention and imitation,--imitation chiefly. Kosmon begins by showing, in ill.u.s.tration of the truth of Christian's concluding sentences, how imperfectly all the Ancients, excepting the Hebrews, loved, understood, or felt Nature, &c. This is not an unimportant portion of Art knowledge.

"I must not forget to say that the last speech of Kosmon will be answered by Christian when they discourse of imitation. It properly belongs to imitation; and, under that head, it can be most effectively and perfectly confuted. Somewhat after this idea, the "verticalism" and "involution" will be shown to be direct from Nature; the gilding, &c., disposed of on the ground of the old piety using the most precious materials as the most religious and worthy of them; and hence, by a very easy and probable transition, they concluded that that which was most soul-worthy, was also most natural."]

Dialogue I., in the House of Kalon

_Kalon._ Welcome, my friends:--this day above all others; to-day is the first day of spring. May it be the herald of a bountiful year,--not alone in harvests of seeds. Great impulses are moving through man; swift as the steam-shot shuttle, weaving some mighty pattern, goes the new birth of mind. As yet, hidden from eyes is the design: whether it be poetry, or painting, or music, or architecture, or whether it be a divine harmony of all, no manner of mind can tell; but that it is mighty, all manners of minds, moved to involuntary utterance, affirm. The intellect has at last again got to work upon thought: too long fascinated by matter and prisoned to motive geometry, genius--wisdom seem once more to have become human, to have put on man, and to speak with divine simplicity. Kosmon, Sophon, again welcome! your journey is well-timed; Christian, my young friend, of whom I have often written to you, this morning tells me by letter that to-day he will pay me his long-promised visit. You, I know, must rejoice to meet him: this interchange of knowledge cannot fail to improve us, both by knocking down and building up: what is true we shall hold in common; what is false not less in common detest. The debateable ground, if at last equally debateable as it was at first, is yet ploughed; and some after-comer may sow it with seed, and reap therefrom a plentiful harvest.

_Sophon._ Kalon, you speak wisely. Truth hath many sides like a diamond with innumerable facets, each one alike brilliant and piercing. Your information respecting your friend Christian has not a little interested me, and made me desirous of knowing him.

_Kosmon._ And I, no less than Sophon, am delighted to hear that we shall both see and taste your friend.

_Sophon._ Kalon, by what you just now said, you would seem to think a dearth of original thought in the world, at any time, was an evil: perhaps it is not so; nay, perhaps, it is a good! Is not an interregnum of genius necessary somewhere? A great genius, sun-like, compels lesser suns to gravitate with and to him; and this is subversive of originality. Age is as visible in thought as it is in man. Death is indispensably requisite for a _new_ life. Genius is like a tree, sheltering and affording support to numberless creepers and climbers, which latter die and live many times before their protecting tree does; flouris.h.i.+ng even whilst that decays, and thus, lending to it a greenness not its own; but no new life can come out of that expiring tree; it must die: and it is not until it is dead, and fallen, and _rotted into compost_, that another tree can grow there; and many years will elapse before the new birth can increase and occupy the room the previous one occupied, and flourish anew with a greenness all its own. This on one side. On another; genius is essentially imitative, or rather, as I just now said, gravitative; it gravitates towards that point peculiarly important at the moment of its existence; as air, more rarified in some places than in others, causes the winds to rush towards _them_ as toward a centre: so that if poetry, painting, or music slumbers, oratory may ravish the world, or chemistry, or steam-power may seduce and rule, or the sciences sit enthroned. Thus, nature ever compensates one art with another; her balance alone is the always just one; for, like her course of the seasons, she grows, ripens, and lies fallow, only that stronger, larger and better food may be reared.

_Kalon._ By your speaking of chemistry, and the mechanical arts and sciences, as periodically ruling the world along with poetry, painting, and music,--am I to understand that you deem them powers intellectually equal, and to require of their respective professors as mighty, original, and _human_ a genius for their successful practice?

_Kosmon._ Human genius! why not? Are they not equally human?--nay, are they not--especially steam-power, chemistry and the electric telegraph--more--eminently more--useful to man, more radically civilizers, than music, poetry, painting, sculpture, or architecture?

_Kalon._ Stay, Kosmon! whither do you hurry? Between chemistry and the mechanical arts and sciences, and between poetry, painting, and music, there exists the whole totality of genius--of genius as distinguished from talent and industry. To be useful alone is not to be great: _plus_ only is _plus_, and the sum is _minus_ something and _plus_ in nothing if the most unimaginable particle only be absent.

The fine arts, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture, as thought, or idea, Athene-like, are complete, finished, revelations of wisdom at once. Not so the mechanical arts and sciences: they are arts of growth; they are shaped and formed gradually, (and that, more by a blind sort of guessing than by intuition,) and take many men's lives to win even to one true principle. On all sides they are the exact opposites of each other; for, in the former, the principles from the first are mature, and only the manipulation immature; in the latter, it is the principles that are almost always immature, and the manipulation as constantly mature. The fine arts are always grounded upon truth; the mechanical arts and sciences almost always upon hypothesis; the first are unconfined, infinite, immaterial, impossible of reduction into formulas, or of conversion into machines; the last are limited, finite, material, can be uttered through formulas, worked by arithmetic, tabulated and seen in machines.

_Sophon._ Kosmon, you see that Kalon, true to his nature, prefers the beautiful and good, to the good without the beautiful; and you, who love nature, and regard all that she, and what man from her, can produce, with equal delight,--true to your's,--cannot perceive wherefore he limits genius to the fine arts. Let me show you why Kalon's ideas are truer than yours. You say that chemistry, steam-power, and the electric telegraph, are more radically civilizers than poetry, painting, or music: but bethink you: what emotions beyond the common and selfish ones of wonder and fear do the mechanical arts or sciences excite, or communicate? what pity, or love, or other holy and unselfish desires and aspirations, do they elicit? Inert of themselves in all teachable things, they are the agents only whereby teachable things,--the charities, sympathies and love,--may be more swiftly and more certainly conveyed and diffused: and beyond diffusing media the mechanical arts or sciences cannot get; for they are merely simple facts; nothing more: they cannot induct; for they, in or of themselves, have no inductive powers, and their office is confined to that of carrying and spreading abroad the powers which do induct; which powers make a full, complete, and visible existence only in the fine arts. In FACT and THOUGHT we have the whole question of superiority decided. Fact is merely physical record: Thought is the application of that record to something _human_. Without application, the fact is only fact, and nothing more; the application, thought, then, certainly must be superior to the record, fact. Also in thought man gets the clearest glimpse he will ever have of soul, and sees the incorporeal make the nearest approach to the corporeal that it is possible for it to do here upon earth. And hence, these n.o.ble acts of wisdom are--far--far above the mechanical arts and sciences, and are properly called fine arts, because their high and peculiar office is to refine.

_Kosmon._ But, certainly thought is as much exercised in deducting from physical facts the sciences and mechanical arts as ever it is in poetry, painting, or music. The act of inventing print, or of applying steam, is quite as soul-like as the inventing of a picture, poem, or statue.

_Kalon._ Quite. The chemist, poet, engineer, or painter, alike, think. But the things upon which they exercise their several faculties are very widely unlike each other; the chemist or engineer cogitates only the physical; the poet or painter joins to the physical the human, and investigates soul--scans the world in man added to the world without him--takes in universal creation, its sights, sounds, aspects, and ideas. Sophon says that the fine arts are thoughts; but I think I know a more comprehensive word; for they are something more than thoughts; they are things also; that word is NATURE--Nature fully--thorough nature--the world of creation. All that is _in_ man, his mysteries of soul, his thoughts and emotions--deep, wise, holy, loving, touching, and fearful,--or in the world, beautiful, vast, ponderous, gloomy, and awful, moved with rhythmic harmonious utterance--_that_ is Poetry. All that is _of_ man--his triumphs, glory, power, and pa.s.sions; or of the world--its suns.h.i.+ne and clouds, its plains, hills or valleys, its wind-swept mountains and snowy Alps, river and ocean--silent, lonely, severe, and sublime--mocked with living colours, hue and tone,--_that_ is Painting. Man--heroic man, his acts, emotions, loves,--aspirative, tender, deep, and calm,--intensified, purified, colourless,--exhibited peculiarly and directly through his own form;_that_ is sculpture.

All the voices of nature--of man--his bursts of rage, pity, and fear--his cries of joy--his sighs of love; of the winds and the waters--tumultuous, hurrying, surging, tremulous, or gently falling--married to melodious numbers;_that_ is music. And, the music of proportions--of nature and man, and the harmony and opposition of light and shadow, set forth in the ponderous; _that_ is Architecture.

_Christian._ [_as he enters_] Forbear, Kalon! These I know for your dear fiends, Kosmon and Sophon. The moment of discoursing with them has at last arrived: May I profit by it! Kalon, fearful of checking your current of thought, I stood without, and heard that which you said: and, though I agree with you in all your definitions of poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture; yet certainly all things in or of man, or the world, are not, however equally beautiful, equally worthy of being used by the artist. Fine art absolutely rejects all impurities of form; not less absolutely does it reject all impurities of pa.s.sion and expression. Everything throughout a poem, picture, or statue, or in music, may be sensuously beautiful; but nothing must be sensually so. Sins are only paid for in virtues; thus, every sin found is a virtue lost--lost--not only to the artist, but a cause of loss to others--to all who look upon what he does. He should deem his art a sacred treasure, intrusted to him for the common good; and over it he should build, of the most precious materials, in the simplest, chastest, and truest proportions, a temple fit for universal wors.h.i.+p: instead of which, it is too often the case that he raises above it an edifice of clay; which, as mortal as his life, falls, burying both it and himself under a heap of dirt. To preserve him from this corruption of his art, let him erect for his guidance a standard awfully high above himself. Let him think of Christ; and what he would not show to as pure a nature as His, let him never be seduced to work on, or expose to the world.

_Kosmon._ Oh, Kalon, whither do we go! Greek art is condemned, and Satire hath got its death-stroke. The beautiful is not the beautiful unless it is fettered to the moral; and Virtue rejects the physical perfections, lest she should fall in love with herself, and sin and cause sin.

_Christian._ Nay, Kosmon. Nothing pure,--nothing that is innocent, chaste, unsensual,--whether Greek or satirical, is condemned: but everything--every picture, poem, statue, or piece of music--which elicits the sensual, viceful, and unholy desires of our nature--is, and that utterly. The beautiful was created the true, morally as well as physically; vice is a deformment of virtue,--not of form, to which it is a parasitical addition--an accretion which can and must be excised before the beautiful can show itself as it was originally made, morally as well as formally perfect. How we all wish the sensual, indecent, and brutal, away from Hogarth, so that we might show him to the purest virgin without fear or blus.h.i.+ng.

_Sophon._ And as well from Shakspere. Rotten members, though small in themselves, are yet large enough to taint the whole body. And those impurities, like rank growths of vine, may be lopped away without injuring any vital principle. In perfect art the utmost purity of intention, design, and execution, alone is wisdom. Every tree--every flower, in defiance of adverse contingencies, grows with perfect will to be perfect: and, shall man, who hath what they have not, a soul wherewith he may defy all ill, do less?

_Kosmon._ But how may this purity be attained? I see every where close round the p.r.i.c.ks; not a single step may be taken in advance without wounding something vital. Corruption strews thick both earth and ocean; it is only the heavens that are pure, and man cannot live upon manna alone.

_Christian._ Kosmon, you would seem to mistake what Sophon and I mean. Neither he nor I wish nature to be used less, or otherwise than as it appears; on the contrary, we wish it used more--more directly.

Nature itself is comparatively pure; all that we desire is the removal of the fact.i.tious matter that the vice of fas.h.i.+on, evil hearts, and infamous desires, graft upon it. It is not simple innocent nature that we would exile, but the devilish and libidinous corruptions that sully nature.

_Kalon._ But, if your ideas were strictly carried out, there would be but little of worth left in the world for the artist to use; for, if I understand you rightly, you object to his making use of any pa.s.sion, whether heroic, patriotic, or loving, that is not rigidly virtuous.

_Christian._ I do. Without he has a didactic aim; like as Hogarth had. A picture, poem, or statue, unless it speaks some purpose, is mere paint, paper, or stone. A work of art must have a purpose, or it is not a work of _fine_ art: thus, then, if it be a work of fine art, it has a purpose; and, having purpose, it has either a good or an evil one: there is no alternative. An artist's works are his children, his immortal heirs, to his evil as well as to his good; as he hath trained them, so will they teach. Let him ask himself why does a parent so tenderly rear his children. Is it not because he knows that evil is evil, whether it take the shape of angels or devils? And is not the parent's example worthy of the artist's imitation? What advantage has a man over a child? Is there any preservative peculiar to manhood that it alone may see and touch sin, and yet be not defiled? Verily, there is none! All mere battles, a.s.sa.s.sinations, immolations, horrible deaths, and terrible situations used by the artist solely to excite,--every pa.s.sion degrading to man's perfect nature,--should certainly be rejected, and that unhesitatingly.

_Sophon._--Suffer me to extend the just conclusions of Christian.

Art--true art--fine art--cannot be either coa.r.s.e or low.

Innocent-like, no taint will cling to it, and a smock frock is as pure as "virginal-chaste robes." And,--sensualism, indecency, and brutality, excepted--sin is not sin, if not in the act; and, in satire, with the same exceptions, even sin in the act is tolerated when used to point forcibly a moral crime, or to warn society of a crying shame which it can remedy.

_Kalon._ But, my dear Sophon,--and you, Christian,--you do not condemn the oak because of its apples; and, like them, the sin in the poem, picture, or statue, may be a wormy accretion grafted from without. The spectator often makes sin where the artist intended none. For instance, in the nude,--where perhaps, the poet, painter, or sculptor, imagines he has embodied only the purest and chastest ideas and forms, the sensualist sees--what he wills to see; and, serpent-like, previous to devouring his prey, he covers it with his saliva.