_CHERUBINO AT THE SCALA THEATRE_
I
It was a gala night. The opera-house of Milan was one blaze of light and colour. Royalty in field-marshal"s uniform and diamonds, attended by decorated generals and radiant ladies of the court, occupied the great box opposite the stage. The tiers from pit to gallery were filled with brilliantly dressed women. From the third row, where we were fortunately placed, the curves of that most beautiful of theatres presented to my gaze a series of retreating and approaching lines, composed of n.o.ble faces, waving feathers, sparkling jewels, sculptured shoulders, uniforms, robes of costly stuffs and every conceivable bright colour. Light poured from the huge l.u.s.tre in the centre of the roof, ran along the crimson velvet cushions of the boxes, and flashed upon the gilded frame of the proscenium--satyrs and acanthus scrolls carved in the manner of a century ago. Pit and orchestra scarcely contained the crowd of men who stood in lively conversation, their backs turned to the stage, their lorgnettes raised from time to time to sweep the boxes. This surging sea of faces and sober costumes enhanced by contrast the glitter, variety, and luminous tranquillity of the theatre above it.
No one took much thought of the coming spectacle, till the conductor"s rap was heard upon his desk, and the orchestra broke into the overture to Mozart"s _Nozze_. Before they were half through, it was clear that we should not enjoy that evening the delight of perfect music added to the enchantment of so brilliant a scene. The execution of the overture was not exactly bad. But it lacked absolute precision, the complete subordination of all details to the whole. In rendering German music Italians often fail through want of discipline, or through imperfect sympathy with a style they will not take the pains to master. Nor, when the curtain lifted and the play began, was the vocalisation found in all parts satisfactory. The Contessa had a meagre _mezza voce_. Susanna, though she did not sing false, hovered on the verge of discords, owing to the weakness of an organ which had to be strained in order to make any effect on that enormous stage. On the other hand, the part of Almaviva was played with dramatic fire, and Figaro showed a truly Southern sense of comic fun. The scenes were splendidly mounted, and something of a princely grandeur--the largeness of a n.o.ble train of life--was added to the drama by the vast proportions of the theatre. It was a performance which, in spite of drawbacks, yielded pleasure.
And yet it might have left me frigid but for the artist who played Cherubino. This was no other than Pauline Lucca, in the prime of youth and petulance. From her first appearance to the last note she sang, she occupied the stage. The opera seemed to have been written for her.
The mediocrity of the troupe threw her commanding merits--the richness of her voice, the purity of her intonation, her vivid conception of character, her indescribable brusquerie of movement and emotion--into that relief which a sapphire gains from a setting of pearls. I can see her now, after the lapse of nearly twenty years, as she stood there singing in blue doublet and white mantle, with the slouched Spanish hat and plume of ostrich feathers, a tiny rapier at her side, and blue rosettes upon her white silk shoes! The _Nozze di Figaro_ was followed by a Ballo. This had for its theme the favourite legend of a female devil sent from the infernal regions to ruin a young man.
Instead of performing the part a.s.signed her, Satanella falls in love with the hero, sacrifices herself, and is claimed at last by the powers of goodness. _Quia multum amavit_, her lost soul is saved.
If the opera left much to be desired, the Ballo was perfection. That vast stage of the Scala Theatre had almost overwhelmed the actors of the play. Now, thrown open to its inmost depths, crowded with glittering moving figures, it became a fairyland of fantastic loveliness. Italians possess the art of interpreting a serious dramatic action by pantomime. A Ballo with them is no mere affair of dancing--fine dresses, evolutions performed by brigades of pink-legged women with a fixed smile on their faces. It takes the rank of high expressive art. And the motive of this Ballo was consistently worked out in an intelligible sequence of well-ordered scenes. To moralise upon its meaning would be out of place. It had a conflict of pa.s.sions, a rhythmical progression of emotions, a tragic climax in the triumph of good over evil.
II
At the end of the performance there were five persons in our box--the beautiful Miranda, and her husband, a celebrated English man of letters; a German professor of biology; a young Milanese gentleman, whom we called Edoardo; and myself. Edoardo and the professor had joined us just before the ballet. I had occupied a seat behind Miranda and my friend the critic from the commencement. We had indeed dined together first at their hotel, the Rebecchino; and they now proposed that we should all adjourn together there on foot for supper. From the Scala Theatre to the Rebecchino is a walk of some three minutes.
When we were seated at the supper-table and had talked some while upon indifferent topics, the enthusiasm roused in me by Pauline Lucca burst out. I broke a moment"s silence by exclaiming, "What a wonder-world music creates! I have lived this evening in a sphere of intellectual enjoyment raised to rapture. I never lived so fast before!" "Do you really think so?" said Miranda. She had just finished a _beccafico_, and seemed disposed for conversation. "Do you really think so? For my part, music is in a wholly different region from experience, thought, or feeling. What does it communicate to you?" And she hummed to herself the _motif_ of Cherubino"s "Non so piu cosa son cosa faccio."--"What does it teach me?" I broke in upon the melody. "Why, to-night, when I heard the music, and saw her there, and felt the movement of the play, it seemed to me that a new existence was revealed. For the first time I understood what love might be in one most richly gifted for emotion." Miranda bent her eyes on the table-cloth and played with her winegla.s.s. "I don"t follow you at all.
I enjoyed myself to-night. The opera, indeed, might have been better rendered. The ballet, I admit, was splendid. But when I remember the music--even the best of it--even Pauline Lucca"s part"--here she looked up, and shot me a quick glance across the table--"I have mere music in my ears. Nothing more. Mere music!" The professor of biology, who was gifted with, a sense of music and had studied it scientifically, had now crunched his last leaf of salad. Wiping his lips with his napkin, he joined our _tete-a-tete_. "Gracious madam, I agree with you. He who seeks from music more than music gives, is on the quest--how shall I put it?--of the Holy Grail." "And what," I struck in, "is this minimum or maximum that music gives?"
"Dear young friend," replied the professor, "music gives melodies, harmonies, the many beautiful forms to which sound shall be fashioned.
Just as in the case of sh.e.l.ls and fossils, lovely in themselves, interesting for their history and cla.s.sification, so is it with music. You must not seek an intellectual meaning. No; there is no _Inhalt_ in music" And he hummed contentedly the air of "Voi che sapete." While he was humming, Miranda whispered to me across the table, "Separate the Lucca from the music." "But," I answered rather hotly, for I was nettled by Miranda"s argument _ad hominem_, "But it is not possible in an opera to divide the music from the words, the scenery, the play, the actor. Mozart, when he wrote the score to Da Ponte"s libretto, was excited to production by the situations. He did not conceive his melodies out of connection with a certain cast of characters, a given ethical environment." "I do not know, my dear young friend," responded the professor, "whether you have read Mozart"s Life and letters. It is clearly shown in them how he composed airs at times and seasons when he had no words to deal with. These he afterwards used as occasion served. Whence I conclude that music was for him a free and lovely play of tone. The words of our excellent Da Ponte were a scaffolding to introduce his musical creations to the public. But without that carpenter"s work, the melodies of Cherubino are _Selbst-standig_, sufficient in themselves to vindicate their place in art. Do I interpret your meaning, gracious lady?" This he said bending to Miranda. "Yes," she replied. But she still played with her winegla.s.s, and did not look as though she were quite satisfied.
I meanwhile continued: "Of course I have read Mozart"s Life, and know how he went to work. But Mozart was a man of feeling, of experience, of ardent pa.s.sions. How can you prove to me that the melodies he gave to Cherubino had not been evolved from situations similar to those in which Cherubino finds himself? How can you prove he did not feel a natural appropriateness in the _motifs_ he selected from his memory for Cherubino? How can you be certain that the part itself did not stimulate his musical faculty to fresh and still more appropriate creativeness? And if we must fall back on doc.u.ments, do you remember what he said himself about the love-music in _Die Entfuhrung?_ I think he tells us that he meant it to express his own feeling for the woman who had just become his wife." Miranda looked up as though she were almost half-persuaded. Yet she hummed again "Non so piu," then said to herself, "Yes, it is wiser to believe with the professor that these are sequences of sounds, and nothing more." Then she sighed. In the pause which followed, her husband, the famous critic, filled his gla.s.s, stretched his legs out, and began: "You have embarked, I see, upon the ocean of aesthetics. For my part, to-night I was thinking how much better fitted for the stage Beaumarchais" play was than this musical mongrel--this operatic adaptation. The wit, observe, is lost.
And Cherubino--that sparkling little _enfant terrible_--becomes a sentimental fellow--a something I don"t know what--between a girl and a boy--a medley of romance and impudence--anyhow a being quite unlike the sharply outlined playwright"s page. I confess I am not a musician; the drama is my business, and I judge things by their fitness for the stage. My wife agrees with me to differ. She likes music, I like plays. To-night she was better pleased than I was; for she got good music tolerably well rendered, while I got nothing but a mangled comedy."
We bore the critic"s monologue with patience. But once again the spirit, seeking after something which neither Miranda, nor her husband, nor the professor could be got to recognise, moved within me.
I cried out at a venture, "People who go to an opera must forget music pure and simple, must forget the drama pure and simple. You must welcome a third species of art, in which the play, the music, the singers with their voices, the orchestra with its instruments--Pauline Lucca, if you like, with her fascination" (and here I shot a side-glance at Miranda), "are so blent as to create a world beyond the scope of poetry or music or acting taken by themselves. I give Mozart credit for having had insight into this new world, for having brought it near to us. And I hold that every fresh representation of his work is a fresh revelation of its possibilities."
To this the critic answered, "You now seem to me to be confounding the limits of the several arts." "What!" I continued, "is the drama but emotion presented in its most external forms as action? And what is music but emotion, in its most genuine essence, expressed by sound?
Where then can a more complete artistic harmony be found than in the opera?"
"The opera," replied our host, "is a hybrid. You will probably learn to dislike artistic hybrids, if you have the taste and sense I give you credit for. My own opinion has been already expressed. In the _Nozze_, Beaumarchais" _Mariage de Figaro_ is simply spoiled. My friend the professor declares Mozart"s music to be sufficient by itself, and the libretto to be a sort of machinery for its display.
Miranda, I think, agrees with him. You plead eloquently for the hybrid. You have a right to your own view. These things are matters, in the final resort, of individual taste rather than of demonstrable principles. But I repeat that you are very young." The critic drained his Lambrusco, and smiled at me.
"Yes, he is young," added Miranda. "He must learn to distinguish between music, his own imagination, and a pretty woman. At present he mixes them all up together. It is a sort of transcendental omelette.
But I think the pretty woman has more to do with it than metaphysics!"
All this while Edoardo had bestowed devout attention on his supper.
But it appeared that the drift of our discourse had not been lost by him. "Well," he said, "you finely fibred people dissect and a.n.a.lyse.
I am content with the _spettacolo_. That pleases. What does a man want more? The _Nozze_ is a comedy of life and manners. The music is adorable. To-night the women were not bad to look at--the Lucca was divine; the scenes--ingenious. I thought but little. I came away delighted. You could have a better play, Caro Signore!" (with a bow to our host). "That is granted. You might have better music, Cara Signora!" (with a bow to Miranda). "That too is granted. But when the play and the music come together--how shall I say?--the music helps the play, and the play helps the music; and we--well we, I suppose, must help both!"
Edoardo"s little speech was so ingenuous, and, what is more, so true to his Italian temperament, that it made us all laugh and leave the argument just where we found it. The bottles of Lambrusco supplied us each with one more gla.s.s; and while we were drinking them, Miranda, woman-like, taking the last word, but contradicting herself, softly hummed "Non so piu cosa son," and "Ah!" she said, "I shall dream of love to-night!"
We rose and said good-night. But when I had reached my bedroom in the Hotel de la Ville, I sat down, obstinate and unconvinced, and penned this rhapsody, which I have lately found among papers of nearly twenty years ago. I give it as it stands.
III
Mozart has written the two melodramas of love--the one a melo-tragedy, the other a melo-comedy. But in really n.o.ble art, Comedy and Tragedy have faces of equal serenity and beauty. In the Vatican there are marble busts of the two Muses, differing chiefly in their head-dresses: that of Tragedy is an elaborately built-up structure of fillets and flowing hair, piled high above the forehead and descending in long curls upon the shoulders; while Comedy wears a similar adornment, with the addition of a wreath of vine-leaves and grape-bunches. The expression of the sister G.o.ddesses is no less finely discriminated. Over the mouth of Comedy plays a subtle smile, and her eyes are relaxed in a half-merriment. A shadow rests upon the slightly heavier brows of Tragedy, and her lips, though not compressed, are graver. So delicately did the Greek artist indicate the division between two branches of one dramatic art. And since all great art is cla.s.sical, Mozart"s two melodramas, _Don Giovanni_ and the _Nozze di Figaro_, though the one is tragic and the other comic, are twin-sisters, similar in form and feature.
The central figure of the melo-tragedy is Don Juan, the hero of unlimited desire, pursuing the unattainable through tortuous interminable labyrinths, eager in appet.i.te yet never satisfied, "for ever following and for ever foiled." He is the incarnation of l.u.s.t that has become a habit of the soul--rebellious, licentious, selfish, even cruel. His nature, originally n.o.ble and brave, has a.s.sumed the qualities peculiar to l.u.s.t--rebellion, license, cruelty, defiant egotism. Yet, such as he is, doomed to punishment and execration, Don Juan remains a fit subject for poetry and music, because he is complete, because he is impelled by some demonic influence, spurred on by yearnings after an unsearchable delight. In his death, the spirit of chivalry survives, metamorphosed, it is true, into the spirit of revolt, yet still tragic, such as might animate the desperate sinner of a haughty breed.
The central figure of the melo-comedy is Cherubino, the genius of love, no less insatiable, but undetermined to virtue or to vice. This is the point of Cherubino, that the ethical capacities in him are still potential. His pa.s.sion still hovers on the borderland of good and bad. And this undetermined pa.s.sion is beautiful because of extreme freshness; of infinite, immeasurable expansibility. Cherubino is the epitome of all that belongs to the amorous temperament in a state of still ascendant adolescence. He is about sixteen years of age--a boy yesterday, a man to-morrow--to-day both and neither--something beyond boyhood, but not yet limited by man"s responsibility and man"s absorbing pa.s.sions. He partakes of both ages in the primal awakening to self-consciousness. Desire, which in Don Juan has become a fiend, hovers before him like a fairy. His are the sixteen years, not of a Northern climate, but of Spain or Italy, where manhood appears in a flash, and overtakes the child with sudden sunrise of new faculties.
_Nondum amabam, sed amare amabam, quaerebam quod amarem, amans amare_--"I loved not yet, but was in love with loving; I sought what I should love, being in love with loving." That sentence, penned by S. Augustine and consecrated by Sh.e.l.ley, describes the mood of Cherubino. He loves at every moment of his life, with every pulse of his being. His object is not a beloved being, but love itself--the satisfaction of an irresistible desire, the paradise of bliss which merely loving has become for him. What love means he hardly knows. He only knows that he must love. And women love him--half as a plaything to be trifled with, half as a young G.o.d to be wounded by. This rising of the star of love as it ascends into the heaven of youthful fancy, is revealed in the melodies Mozart has written for him. How shall we describe their potency? Who shall translate those curiously perfect words to which tone and rhythm have been indissolubly wedded? _E pur mi piace languir cosi.... E se non ho chi m" oda, parlo d"amor con me._
But if this be so, it may be asked, Who shall be found worthy to act Cherubino on the stage? You cannot have seen and heard Pauline Lucca, or you would not ask this question.
Cherubino is by no means the most important person in the plot of the _Nozze_. But he strikes the keynote of the opera. His love is the standard by which we measure the sad, retrospective, stately love of the Countess, who tries to win back an alienated husband. By Cherubino we measure the libertine love of the Count, who is a kind of Don Juan without cruelty, and the humorous love of Figaro and his sprightly bride Susanna. Each of these characters typifies one of the many species of love. But Cherubino antic.i.p.ates and harmonises all. They are conscious, experienced, world-worn, disillusioned, trivial. He is all love, foreseen, foreshadowed in a dream of life to be; all love, diffused through brain and heart and nerves like electricity; all love, merging the moods of ecstasy, melancholy, triumph, regret, jealousy, joy, expectation, in a hazy sheen, as of some Venetian sunrise. What will Cherubino be after three years? A Romeo, a Lovelace, a Lothario, a Juan? a disillusioned rake, a sentimentalist, an effete fop, a romantic lover? He may become any one of these, for he contains the possibilities of all. As yet, he is the dear glad angel of the May of love, the nightingale of orient emotion.
This moment in the unfolding of character Mozart has arrested and eternalised for us in Cherubino"s melodies; for it is the privilege of art to render things most fugitive and evanescent fixed imperishably in immortal form.
IV
This is indeed a rhapsodical production. Miranda was probably right.
Had it not been for Pauline Lucca, I might not have philosophised the _Nozze_ thus. Yet, in the main, I believe that my instinct was well grounded. Music, especially when wedded to words, more especially when those words are dramatic, cannot separate itself from emotion. It will not do to tell us that a melody is a certain sequence of sounds; that the composer chose it for its beauty of rhythm, form, and tune, and only used the words to get it vocalised. We are forced to go farther back, and ask ourselves, What suggested it in the first place to the composer? why did he use it precisely in connection with this dramatic situation? How can we answer these questions except by supposing that music was for him the utterance through art of some emotion? The final fact of human nature is emotion, crystallising itself in thought and language, externalising itself in action and art. "What," said Novalis, "are thoughts but pale dead feelings?"
Admitting this even in part, we cannot deny to music an emotional content of some kind. I would go farther, and a.s.sert that, while a merely mechanical musician may set inappropriate melodies to words, and render music inexpressive of character, what const.i.tutes a musical dramatist is the conscious intention of fitting to the words of his libretto such melody as shall interpret character, and the power to do this with effect.
That the Cherubino of Mozart"s _Nozze_ is quite different from Beaumarchais" Cherubin does not affect this question. He is a new creation, just because Mozart could not, or would not, conceive the character of the page in Beaumarchais" sprightly superficial spirit.
He used the part to utter something unutterable except by music about the soul of the still adolescent lover. The libretto-part and the melodies, taken together, const.i.tute a new romantic ideal, consistent with experience, but realised with the intensity and universality whereby art is distinguished from life. Don Juan was a myth before Mozart touched him with the magic wand of music. Cherubino became a myth by the same Prospero"s spell. Both characters have the universality, the symbolic potency, which belongs to legendary beings.
That there remains a discrepancy between the boy-page and the music made for him, can be conceded without danger to my theory; for the music made for Cherubino is meant to interpret his psychical condition, and is independent of his boyishness of conduct.
This further explains why there may be so many renderings of Cherubino"s melodies. Mozart idealised an infinite emotion. The singer is forced to define; the actor also is forced to define. Each introduces his own limit on the feeling. When the actor and the singer meet together in one personality, this definition of emotion becomes of necessity doubly specific. The condition of all music is that it depends in a great measure on the temperament of the interpreter for its momentary shade of expression, and this dependence is of course exaggerated when the music is dramatic. Furthermore, the subjectivity of the audience enters into the problem as still another element of definition. It may therefore be fairly said that, in estimating any impression produced by Cherubino"s music, the original character of the page, transplanted from French comedy to Italian opera, Mozart"s conception of that character, Mozart"s specific quality of emotion and specific style of musical utterance, together with the contralto"s interpretation of the character and rendering of the music, according to her intellectual capacity, artistic skill, and timbre of voice, have collaborated with the individuality of the hearer. Some of the const.i.tuents of the ever-varying product--a product which is new each time the part is played--are fixed. Da Ponte"s Cherubino and Mozart"s melodies remain unalterable. All the rest is undecided; the singer and the listener change on each occasion.
To a.s.sert that the musician Mozart meant nothing by his music, to a.s.sert that he only cared about it _qua_ music, is the same as to say that the painter Tintoretto, when he put the Crucifixion upon canvas, the sculptor Michelangelo, when he carved Christ upon the lap of Mary, meant nothing, and only cared about the beauty of their forms and colours. Those who take up this position prove, not that the artist has no meaning to convey, but that for them the artist"s nature is unintelligible, and his meaning is conveyed in an unknown tongue.
It seems superfluous to guard against misinterpretation by saying that to expect clear definition from music--the definition which belongs to poetry--would be absurd. The sphere of music is in sensuous perception; the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. Music, dealing with pure sound, must always be vaguer in significance than poetry, dealing with words. Nevertheless, its effect upon the sentient subject may be more intense and penetrating for this very reason. We cannot fail to understand what words are intended to convey; we may very easily interpret in a hundred different ways the message of sound.
But this is not because words are wider in their reach and more alive; rather because they are more limited, more stereotyped, more dead.
They symbolise something precise and unmistakable; but this precision is itself attenuation of the something symbolised. The exact value of the counter is better understood when it is a word than when it is a chord, because all that a word conveys has already become a thought, while all that musical sounds convey remains within the region of emotion which has not been intellectualised. Poetry touches emotion through the thinking faculty. If music reaches the thinking faculty at all, it is through fibres of emotion. But emotion, when it has become thought, has already lost a portion of its force, and has taken to itself a something alien to its nature. Therefore the message of music can never rightly be translated into words. It is the very largeness and vividness of the sphere of simple feeling which makes its symbolical counterpart in sound so seeming vague. But in spite of this incontestable defect of seeming vagueness, emotion expressed by music is nearer to our sentient self, if we have ears to take it in, than the same emotion limited by language. It is intenser, it is more immediate, as compensation for being less intelligible, less unmistakable in meaning. It is an infinite, an indistinct, where each consciousness defines and sets a limitary form.
V
A train of thought which begins with the concrete not unfrequently finds itself finishing, almost against its will, in abstractions. This is the point to which the performance of Cherubino"s part by Pauline Lucca at the Scala twenty years ago has led me--that I have to settle with myself what I mean by art in general, and what I take to be the proper function of music as one of the fine arts.
"Art," said Goethe, "is but form-giving." We might vary this definition, and say, "Art is a method of expression or presentation."
Then comes the question: If art gives form, if it is a method of expression or presentation, to what does it give form, what does it express or present? The answer certainly must be: Art gives form to human consciousness; expresses or presents the feeling or the thought of man. Whatever else art may do by the way, in the communication of innocent pleasures, in the adornment of life and the softening of manners, in the creation of beautiful shapes and sounds, this, at all events, is its prime function.
While investing thought, the spiritual subject-matter of all art, with form, or finding for it proper modes of presentation, each of the arts employs a special medium, obeying the laws of beauty proper to that medium. The vehicles of the arts, roughly speaking, are material substances (like stone, wood, metal), pigments, sounds, and words.
The masterly handling of these vehicles and the realisation of their characteristic types of beauty have come to be regarded as the craftsman"s paramount concern. And in a certain sense this is a right conclusion; for dexterity in the manipulation of the chosen vehicle and power to create a beautiful object, distinguish the successful artist from the man who may have had like thoughts and feelings. This dexterity, this power, are the properties of the artist _qua_ artist. Yet we must not forget that the form created by the artist for the expression of a thought or feeling is not the final end of art itself. That form, after all, is but the mode of presentation through which the spiritual content manifests itself. Beauty, in like manner, is not the final end of art, but is the indispensable condition under which the artistic manifestation of the spiritual content must he made. It is the business of art to create an ideal world, in which perception, emotion, understanding, action, all elements of human life sublimed by thought, shall reappear in concrete forms as beauty. This being so, the logical criticism of art demands that we should not only estimate the technical skill of artists and their faculty for presenting beauty to the aesthetic sense, but that we should also ask ourselves what portion of the human spirit he has chosen to invest with form, and how he has conceived his subject. It is not necessary that the ideas embodied in a work of art should be the artist"s own. They may be common to the race and age: as, for instance, the conception of sovereign deity expressed in the Olympian Zeus of Pheidias, or the conception of divine maternity expressed in Raphael"s "Madonna di San Sisto." Still the personality of the artist, his own intellectual and moral nature, his peculiar way of thinking and feeling, his individual att.i.tude towards the material given to him in ideas of human consciousness, will modify his choice of subject and of form, and will determine his specific type of beauty. To take an example: supposing that an idea, common to his race and age, is given to the artist for treatment; this will be the final end of the work of art which he produces. But his personal qualities and technical performance determine the degree of success or failure to which he attains in presenting that idea and in expressing it with beauty.
Signorelli fails where Perugino excels, in giving adequate and lovely form to the religious sentiment. Michelangelo is sure of the sublime, and Raphael of the beautiful.
Art is thus the presentation of the human spirit by the artist to his fellow-men. The subject-matter of the arts is commensurate with what man thinks and feels and does. It is as deep as religion, as wide as life. But what distinguishes art from religion or from life is, that this subject-matter must a.s.sume beautiful form, and must be presented directly or indirectly to the senses. Art is not the school or the cathedral, but the playground, the paradise of humanity. It does not teach, it does not preach. Nothing abstract enters into art"s domain.
Truth and goodness are trans.m.u.ted into beauty there, just as in science beauty and goodness a.s.sume the shape of truth, and in religion truth and beauty become goodness. The rigid definitions, the unmistakable laws of science, are not to be found in art. Whatever art has touched acquires a concrete sensuous embodiment, and thus ideas presented to the mind in art have lost a portion of their pure thought-essence. It is on this account that the religious conceptions of the Greeks were so admirably fitted for the art of sculpture, and certain portions of the mediaeval Christian mythology lent themselves so well to painting. For the same reason the metaphysics of ecclesiastical dogma defy the artist"s plastic faculty. Art, in a word, is a middle term between reason and the senses. Its secondary aim, after the prime end of presenting the human spirit in beautiful form has been accomplished, is to give tranquil and innocent enjoyment.
From what has gone before it will be seen that no human being can make or mould a beautiful form without incorporating in that form some portion of the human mind, however crude, however elementary. In other words, there is no work of art without a theme, without a motive, without a subject. The presentation of that theme, that motive, that subject, is the final end of art. The art is good or bad according as the subject has been well or ill presented, consistently with the laws of beauty special to the art itself. Thus we obtain two standards for aesthetic criticism. We judge a statue, for example, both by the sculptor"s intellectual grasp upon his subject, and also by his technical skill and sense of beauty. In a picture of the Last Judgment by Fra Angelico we say that the bliss of the righteous has been more successfully treated than the torments of the wicked, because the former has been better understood, although the painter"s skill in each is equal. In the Perseus of Cellini we admire the sculptor"s spirit, finish of execution, and originality of design, while we deplore that want of sympathy with the heroic character which makes his type of physical beauty slightly vulgar and his facial expression vacuous. If the phrase "Art for art"s sake" has any meaning, this meaning is simply that the artist, having chosen a theme, thinks exclusively in working at it of technical dexterity or the quality of beauty. There are many inducements for the artist thus to narrow his function, and for the critic to a.s.sist him by applying the canons of a soulless connoisseurship to his work; for the conception of the subject is but the starting-point in art-production, and the artist"s difficulties and triumphs as a craftsman lie in the region of technicalities. He knows, moreover, that, however deep or n.o.ble his idea may be, his work of art will be worthless if it fail in skill or be devoid of beauty. What converts a thought into a statue or a picture, is the form found for it; and so the form itself seems all-important. The artist, therefore, too easily imagines that he may neglect his theme; that a fine piece of colouring, a well-balanced composition, or, as Cellini put it, "un bel corpo ignudo," is enough.
And this is especially easy in an age which reflects much upon the arts, and pursues them with enthusiasm, while its deeper thoughts and feelings are not of the kind which translate themselves readily into artistic form. But, after all, a fine piece of colouring, a well-balanced composition, a sonorous stanza, a learned essay in counterpoint, are not enough. They are all excellent good things, yielding delight to the artistic sense and instruction to the student.
Yet when we think of the really great statues, pictures, poems, music of the world, we find that these are really great because of something more--and that more is their theme, their presentation of a n.o.ble portion of the human soul. Artists and art-students may be satisfied with perfect specimens of a craftsman"s skill, independent of his theme; but the ma.s.s of men will not be satisfied; and it is as wrong to suppose that art exists for artists and art-students, as to talk of art for art"s sake. Art exists for humanity. Art trans.m.u.tes thought and feeling into terms of beautiful form. Art is great and lasting in proportion as it appeals to the human consciousness at large, presenting to it portions of itself in adequate and lovely form.
VI
It was necessary in the first place firmly to apprehend the truth that the final end of all art is the presentation of a spiritual content; it is necessary in the next place to remove confusions by considering the special circ.u.mstances of the several arts.