Israel Zangwill

“ The true truth of the symphony comes into being only when it is interpreted by the finest performers to souls whose life it enlarges.
And so with the universe, which is not a dead, complete thing outside of us, but a palpitating spiritual potentiality, for the fullest truth about which the co-operation of our own souls is needed, our souls that create a part of the truth they perceive or aspire to. The universe, in short, is a magic storehouse from which we may draw—or into which put—what we will to the extent of our faith, our emotion, our sense of beauty our righteousness. ”

“ Francis imagined, Magnificence as an ideal will, I fear, always be found to connote defective moral sympathies, as of the Pharaohs building their treasure-cities on the labour of lashed slaves. For how in our world of sorrow and mystery can magnanimity and magnificence meet? What great soul could find expression in gilt, or even in gold? ’Tis a reflection on the character of the Doges of Venice that everywhere in their palace is a sense of over-gilded ceilings. Even when the Masters have made a firmament of frescoes, the massive flamboyant framing weighs like a torrid haze on a weary land. ”

“ The first generation of a Church or a heresy—the terms are synonymous, for every Church starts as a heresy—is full to the brim of vitality, fire, revolt, sincerity, spirituality, self-sacrifice. It is a generation in love, a generation exalted and enkindled by the new truth, a generation that will count life and lucre equally base beside the spreading of the new fire. The second generation has witnessed this fervour of its fathers, it has been nourished in the warmth of the doctrine, its education is imprinted with the true fiery stamp. ”

“ For objects in a museum are dead, their relations with life ended. Objects partake of the lives of their possessors, and when cut off are as dead as finger-nails. A vase dominating the court of a Pompeian house and a vase in the Naples Museum are as a creature to its skeleton. What a stimulation in the one or two houses left with their living reality—their frescoes and their furniture, their kitchens and middens! ’Tis statues that suffer most from their arrangement in ghostly rows. A statue is an æsthetic climax, the crown of a summit, the close of a vista. ”

“ It may be that the knowledge of things through pure intellect is pure delusion, that to pigeon-hole the universe is to make it into a cemetery. Instead of that “love is blind,” the truth may be that only love sees. There is a sense in which every mother’s babe is the most beautiful in the world.
Knowledge, then, as a mere function of the intellect, is only the dead knowledge that appears in school-books. But who shall say that knowledge was meant to be only a function of the intellect, that we do not know with our heart and soul as well as with our brains? ”

“ Damian—not their Medici Palace, despite that joyous Benozzo fresco with its gay glamour of landscape and processions; not the Pitti with its incalculable treasures; not the Villa Medici, nor even the Venus herself, so reeks with the pride of life as all that appertains to their tombs. When I gaze upon the monuments of these serene Magnificences in the Old Sacristy of Florence, with the multiple allusions to the family and its saints—in marble and terra-cotta, in stucco and bronze, in fresco and frieze, in high-relief and low-relief—I feel a mere grave-worm. ”

“ Paradox-mongers have exalted Art above Nature, yet what pen or brush could reproduce Amalfi—that vibrant atmosphere, that shimmer and flicker of clouds, sunshine, and water; the ruined tower on the spit, the low white town, the crescent hills beyond, the blue sky bending over all as over a great glimmering cup? Beethoven, who wrote always with visual images in his mind, might have rendered it in another art, transposing it into the key of music; for is not beauty as mutable as energy, and what were the music of the spheres but the translation of their shining infinitude? ”

“ Despite the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake it remains questionable if any maker of Art has ever escaped a desire to act—massively or diffusively—upon the life of his age. In vain he hides himself in the past, or flies to No-man’s-land, he vibrates throughout to the present, touches living interests with their myriad indirect relations to action, to the third dimension. Every art-product holds, however subtly, something of that topical quality which makes the portrait of a contemporary celebrity, wet from the painter’s brush, very different from the peaceful remoteness of an Old Master. ”

“ Comedy has for us a value quite other than Dante—in his political and prophetic passion—designed. What we see in it is the complete Mappamondo of the mediæval, a complete vision of the world, with its ethics, its philosophy and its science, as it reflected itself in the shining if storm-tossed soul of the poet, whose epic was alike the climax and the conclusion of the Middle Ages. No wonder the Italian quotes it with the finality of a Gospel text. For this epic is less of a people than of humanity. ”

“ I can understand the oppression of all the glorious Italian past, all those massive buildings and masterpieces, and stereotyped forms of thought. Like the son of a genius, modern Italy is cramped and overshadowed. Hence the rabid yearning for some new form of energising, this glorification of the moment and perpetual change. In a fantastic fury of iconoclasm the Futurists demand even the destruction of the creations of ancient genius that overhang their lives—they would make an art-pyre as fervently as Savonarola. ”

“ Look down on Genoa, with its fantasia of spires, campaniles, roof-gardens, green lattices, marble balconies, chimneys decorated with figures of doges and opening out like flowers, and see how the old narrow alleys are almost roofed with telegraph and telephone wires. Go down to the widened harbour and see the warehouses, the American sky-scrapers, the smoking chimneys, the great steamers sailing out for Buenos Ayres and New York, the emigrants with their bundles. The blue bird sings here no more; you hear only the bang of the hammer, which Young Italy declares is the voice of the century. ”

“ The tiny candle standing at the foot of the Madonna’s throne strikes, indeed, a note of bizarrerie, but it is beautiful bizarrerie, and the Madonna, marvellously robed and embowered in fruit and leaves, who is offering a great pear to a charming Child, is less the Mother of God than a crowned queen of faery with an infant prince in a golden robe and a golden halo, and less a queen with a prince than a wonderful decorative pattern, a study in gold and marble and precious stones and brocaded gowns, broidered, rich-dyed, and fantastic with arabesques. ”

“ Such pictures Italy makes for us not only from interiors, but from wayside peep-holes, from clefts in the rock or gaps in the greenery. The country, dark with cypresses or gleaming with domes and campaniles, everywhere composes itself into a beautiful harmony; one needs not eye-points of vantage. The peep-hole simply fixes one’s point of view, frames the scene in one’s horizon of vision, and suggests by its enhancement of Nature the true task of Art in unifying a sprawling chaos of phenomena. ”

“ Are not animals machines? said Descartes. But I ask, Are not machines animals? A vision surges up of Venice at night—out of the darkness of the Grand Canal comes throbbing a creature of the Naples Aquarium—all scattered blobs of flame, cohering through a spidery framework. Through the still, dark water it glides, under the still, starry sky, with San Giorgio for solemn background, and only from the voices of Venetians singing as they float past—an impassioned, sad memory, a trilled and fluted song—could one divine behind the fiery sea-dragon the mere steam-launch. ”

“ Not in marmoreal mausolea, nor in railed-off tombs, with knights and dames couchant, not in Medici chapels nor in the florid monuments of Venetian Doges, not in the columbaria of the Via Appia nor in the Gothic street-tombs of the Scaliger princes, resides death’s true dignity—they are the vain apery of life—but in some stoneless, flowerless grave where only the humped earth tells that here lies the husk of one gathered into the vastness of oblivion.
There are times when one grows impatient for death. There is a sweetness in being gathered to one’s fathers. ”

“ This grand Palace, this costly Cathedral, both built only within the last few years simultaneously with the motor road that has destroyed the last semblance of isolation, seemed like that spasm of self-assertiveness which so often precedes extinction. And I thought that conquering nations might well mark how easily love can melt what hate would only harden. Imagine if Italy had brought her mortars against San Marino instead of presenting them to it, or if she had made a road for her mortars instead of for her motors! ”

“ At last, at last something lives and breathes in this vast wilderness of shadows. Bless you, Barbara, incomparable glory of women, with your strong masculine face; and you, too, Magnificent long-nosed Lodovico. Far have I been driven in my dream—I am wandered even to the adjoining ruin of the Ducal Castle—but now I am with the quick, with pigments whose life, though it has its fading, is a quasi-immortality compared with our transience. Go, get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her to be painted, for this canvas complexion is the sole that will last. ”

“ But for the rest, all these relics are as ugly as the relics of the saints. Beautiful and exalting as are the Museums in reality, with their record of sacrifice and patriotism in one of the most wonderful chapters of history, infinitely touching as is every yellow letter or worn glove, when imagination has transfused it, these glass cases are outwardly depressing to the last degree—a warning to the Realist, and a proof that Art in expressing the soul of a phenomenon is infinitely truer in its beauty than Nature unselected and unadorned. ”

“ Thus the whole world lies serenely in the palms of God, and saints and angels girdle it with circles of holiness.
This is, indeed, the true way to make a map—for the actual shape of the world is only one of the factors of our habitation, just as the actual features of a beloved face do not constitute its total reality for us. ’Tis not eyes or nose one sees so much as those mental circles due to loving habit in which the face swims for us—the dear haloing circles of tender experience. ”

“ The birth and death of planets is stability compared with this mercurial flux, which in the human world is known as movements of thought and religion, growths and decays of language, periods of art and politics. History is the clash of autocosms, and every war is a war of the worlds.
As I walk into Milan Cathedral, the modern autocosm fades out with the buzz and tingle of the electric cars that engirdle the great old building, and the massive walls of the mediæval autocosm shut me into a glowing gloom of unearthly radiance, whose religious hush is accentuated by the sound of soft bells. ”

“ The exquisite appeal of this picture, the uniqueness of the conception, lies in the sweet sorrow of the little angels—a sorrow as of a dog or a child that cannot fathom the greatness of the tragedy, only knows dumbly that here is matter for sadness. The little angels regard the wounds with grave infantile concern. Sacred tragedy is here fused with idyllic poetry in a manner to which I know no parallel in any other painter. The sweet perfection of Giovanni Bellini, too suave for the grim central theme of Christianity, here finds triumphant and enchanting justification. ”

“ Italy has given her blood prodigally enough for the right to be Italy, but she has given it of her own free will. And volunteer armies, self-inspired, are the only sort that a true civilisation can tolerate. Despicable is the nation which sends mercenaries to do its fighting. The soldier like the priest—whose black robe makes the eternal ground-bass of Italy—is one of the unfortunate differentiations of humanity—a type that should never have been evolved. ”

“ But it is only in the falsificatory museums of science that things exist in little cabinets, or that the butterfly is impaled on a pin and ranged in a glass case with other Lepidoptera. In the real universe it flutters alone amid the flowers. It is full of its own vivid life; it does not know it has been classified. This classification exists only in some student’s mind; the truth is in the fluttering butterfly. And Truth really flutters like a butterfly, free and joyous, winged with iridescent splendours and subtle shades. Truth is not a dead formula, but an airy aliveness. ”

“ Hail the ecstasy of the Kermesse! “How good is man’s life, the mere living.” “It is a pleasant thing to have beheld the sun.” These are the notes of Dutch art, which is like a perpetual grace to God for the beauty of common things. And if the painters are concerned so much with the problems of light, if Rembrandt was the poet of light, was it not because the Dutchman had always in his eye varying effects of light, shifting reflections and scintillations in the ubiquitous canals, kaleidoscopic struggles of sunlight with mist and fog? ”

“ Property merely means a potential call upon human service—past or future—and if human service is unwilling or absent, Property shrinks or collapses, like the bag of pearls found by the thirsting Arab in the desert. Finance—like all other branches of science—has been treated as though its subject-matter had absolute existence. But the assets of the world’s bankers incalculably outrun the world’s power of service, and Property is merely a promissory note which can only be redeemed if there is not too great a run upon the labour bank at which it is presented. ”

“ Life, like an infinite nebulous spirit, bursts in through every nook and cranny of matter, squeezing itself into every possible and improbable mould, and even filling a chink in an existing creature rather than remain outside organisation. And each atom of spirit that achieves material existence takes its cramped horizons for the boundaries of the universe and itself as the centre of creation. Woe indeed to the creature that has seen beyond its own boundaries, that can weave no cosy autocosm to nestle in. ”

“ V It is as the Bambino that Christ chiefly lives in Art, and at this extreme, too, we miss his true inwardness. Yet the tenderness of the conception of the Christ-babe makes atonement. What can be more touching than Gentile da Fabriano’s enchanting altar-piece of the Adoration of the Magi, in which—even as the glamorous procession of the Three Kings resteeps the earth in the freshness and dew of the morning—the dominance of holy innocence seems to bathe the tired world in a wistful tenderness that links the naïve ox and ass with the human soul and all the great chain of divine life. ”

“ Humanity herein records its joyous satisfaction and sympathy with that freakish mood of Nature which produced the ornithorhynchus and the elephant, and shaped to uncouthness, instead of to symmetry and beauty. Alas! I fear humanity is only too acquiescent in these deviations of the great mother into the grotesque; the folk-spirit runs more fluently to gross pleasantry and comic tawdriness than to the Beautiful, and many a Carnival procession is a nightmare of concentrated ugliness. ”

“ The aim of Art is creation—creation that stimulates the soul. The artist has not to reproduce his model, but to create something new, living, and stimulating by help of it. He adds new creations to Nature. He marries her facts to his passion and pain, and the offspring is Art—Nature crossed by Man. The great odes of Keats and Wordsworth, the symphonies of Beethoven, the pictures of Bellini, the statues of Michelangelo, transmit to us the artists’ spiritual exaltations, their ideals of beauty and energy. ”

“ There was not in his whole life a moment of divorce between reality and consciousness. In such simplicity, what a unity, what a giant strength! Pitiful ye seem in comparison, ye unshelled æsthetes, wandering in search of an autocosm or yearning to inhabit every one in turn. Imagine it, to live the years of the Patriarch in our complex tortured era, and never to have had an art-emotion, never—save perhaps in childhood—to have known make-believe, never to have sundered vision and idea from actuality! ”