Old Masters

“ May not the magical tints, which are said to be a secret with the old masters, be the effect of time in part? or may not modern artists have their secrets, as well, for future ages to study and admire? Then, besides, how are we to know that our admiration of old masters is genuine, since we can bring our taste to any thing, if we only know we must, and try long enough? ”

“ As for the old masters, they undoubtedly made constant studies from their pupils and apprentices, and even their religious pictures are full of the portraits of their friends and relations, but they do not seem to have had the inestimable advantage of the existence of a class of people whose sole profession is to pose. ”

“ They are business-like, direct, and sensible; not unfrequently they acquire considerable historical interest, and every now and then there is one by an old master born out of due time—who probably wist not so much as even that there were old masters. ”

“ I suppose I've seen about twenty miles of them in my life. As for the old masters they give me nightmares. There is nothing left but society, and I don't like foreigners and should find little novelty in England—and many reminders! ”

“ The same deficiency appears in the paintings of the old masters. Seldom do they attempt landscape. Sometimes a clump of trees, or a glimpse of sky, is introduced as a background for figures, but it is almost always subordinate to the general effect.
Here, then, it seems to me no undue assumption of modern pride to say that the artists of the present day are not only the equals of the old masters, but their superiors. They have learned of the Mighty Mother herself. They have communed with nature. ”

“ RUSSEL LOWELL'S letters, which runs thus:—
"I remember once at a dinner of the Royal Academy, wishing there might be a toast in honour of the Little Masters, such as TENNIEL, DU MAURIER, and their fellows."
He "wished" it, but was the wish a silent one, or did it find expression in a speech? No matter: there are the Old Masters and the Young Masters, there are the Middle-Aged Masters; there are the Great Masters ”

“ The Old Masters got their training as apprentices, not as pampered youths luxuriating in fine schools and exhibitions and incomes and every [Pg 412] luxury; they were patronized and more splendidly than any artists to-day, but not until they had shown reason for it, not until it was an honour to patronize them. The new system is more comfortable, I admit, but great work does not spring from comfort. ”

“ Even if, after the old masters, they can only be granted a place in the third or fourth class, they must nevertheless always take precedence of those others, because they exhibited themselves as they were, instead of making themselves large by standing on the shoulders of the dead. ”

“ You can guess from his works his partiality for the old masters—Perugino, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Memling, Holbein—who, though not the masters in fashion, will always be masters in vigor of outline, directness, in simple grace, and genuine feeling. He has copied in oils, water-colors, pen, or pencil, nearly all the pictures of these masters in the Louvre, in Germany, in Holland, and especially in Italy, where he lived for many years. With tastes such as his came the habit, or rather the fixed determination, never to paint or engrave any but sacred subjects. ”

“ I imagine the glorious Old Masters looking down from their frames on that unhappy assembly of New Masters—the masters of our wealth, our credit, our entire industrial civilisation. I imagine Lorenzo the Magnificent leaning out from the canvas and calling the attention of his neighbour, Grolier, to that white-faced company of great American collectors. The [Pg 55] perspiring gentleman at the head of the table had one of the choicest collections of trust companies in existence. ”

“ Well, they went to a great many masters, but all said that they could make the lad as good as they were themselves, but better than that they could not make him. When the man came home to the old woman with this answer, she said, 'I shall be equally well pleased whatever you do with him ; but this I do say, that you are to have him made a master over all masters.' Then she once more put some food and a roll of tobacco into the bag, and the man and his son had to set out again. ”

“ If he comes forward with plans and views for the good of the Academy and the advancement of art, he is immediately set upon as a visionary, a fanatic, with notions hostile to the interest and credit of the existing members of the society. If he directs the ambition of the scholars to the study of History, this strikes at once at the emoluments of the profession, who are most of them (by God’s will) portrait painters. If he eulogises the Antique, and speaks highly of the Old Masters, he is supposed to be actuated by envy to living painters and native talent. ”

“ There was too often a paralysis of dulness4 in the old lecture, or, rather, in the old lecturer; and written lectures, like history and fashion in dress, have an inveterate tendency to repeat themselves; but, on the contrary, there was often a wealth of power also in the studied discourse of strong men. Masters bent upon instructing and inspiring—and there were many such—had to penetrate that central secret of literature and spoken utterance—the secret of style. ”

“ Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul, have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual loss of sight become casters again,—then head smiths,—then foundery apprentices. ”

“ One is never done hearing about his demand for "fundamental brainwork" in art. But his own poetry is poor enough in brainwork. It is the poetry, of one who, like Keats, hungered for a "life of sensations rather than of thoughts." It is the poetry of grief, of regret—the grief and regret of one who was a master of sensuous beauty, and who reveals sensuous beauty rather than any deeper secret even in touching spiritual themes. Poetry with him is a dyed and embroidered garment which weighs the spirit down rather than winged sandals like Shelley's, which set the spirit free. ”

“ No writer of his day was so shudderingly conscious of every gesture, movement, and intonation with which the spider-woman sets out to lure the mate she is going to devour. It may be that he prophesies against the sins of women rather than subtly analyses and describes them as a better artist would have done. The Confessions of a Fool is less a revelation of the soul of his first wife than an attack on her. But we must, in fairness to Strindberg, remember that in his violences against women he merely gives us a new rendering of an indictment that goes back to the beginning of history. ”

“ It is as if the passion in his verse were again and again entangled in the devices of art. If we take his love-poems as a whole, however, the passion in them is at once vehement and beautiful.
The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the passion that has given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse. The Wind Among the Reeds is a book of love-poetry quite unlike all other books of love-poetry. It utters the same moods of triumph in the beloved's beauty, of despair, of desire, of boastfulness of the poet's immortality, that we find in the love-poetry of other ages. ”

“ Shaw's gift of infuriating people is unfailing. He is one of those rare public men who can hardly express an opinion on potato-culture—and he does express an opinion on everything—without making a multitude of people shake their fists in impotent anger. His life—at least, his public life—has been a jibe opposed to a rage. He has gone about, like a pickpocket of illusions, from the world of literature to the world of morals, and from the world of morals to the world of politics, and, everywhere he has gone, an innumerable growl has followed him. ”

“ So much may be said in definition of Keats's genius. It was essentially an aesthetic genius. It anticipated both William Morris and Oscar Wilde. There is in Keats a passion for the luxury of the world such as we do not find in Wordsworth or Shelley. He had not that bird-like quality of song which they had—that happiness to be alive and singing between the sky and the green earth. He looked on beautiful things with the intense devotion of the temple-worshipper rather than with the winged pleasure of the great poets. ”

“ Conrad's work, I have already suggested, belongs to the literature of confidence. It is the literature of great hearts braving the perils of the darkness. He is imaginatively never so much at home as in the night, but he is aware not only of the night, but of the stars. Like a cheer out of the dark comes that wonderful scene in The Secret Sharer in which, at infinite risk, the ship is sailed in close under the looming land in order that the captain may give the hidden manslayer a chance of escaping unnoticed to the land. ”

“ As a poet, Wordsworth may almost be called the first of the democrats. He brought into literature a fresh vision—a vision bathing the world and its inhabitants in a strange and revolutionary light. He was the first great poet of equality and fraternity in the sense that he portrayed the lives of common country, people in their daily surroundings as faithfully as though they had been kings. ”

“ Squire has escaped finally from the idealist's disgust to the idealist's exaltation. He has learned to express the beautiful mystery of life and he is no longer haunted in his nerves by the ugliness of circumstances. Not that he has shut himself up in an enchanted world: he still remains a poet of this agonizing earth. ”

“ She surpasses the others in the quality of her comedy, however. Not that she is more comic, but that she is more comprehensively true to life. Mr. Birmingham has given us farce with a salt of reality; Miss Somerville and Miss Ross, practical jokers of literature, turned to reality as upper-class patrons of the comic; but Lady Gregory has gone to reality as to a cave of treasure. She is one of the discoverers of Ireland. Her genius, like Synge's, opened its eyes one day and saw spread below it the immense sea of Irish common speech, with its colour, its laughter, and its music. ”

“ Henry James, indeed, is himself the outstanding character in his books. That fine and humorous collector of European ladies and gentlemen, that savourer of the little lives of the Old World and the little adventures of those who have escaped from the New, that artist who brooded over his fellows in the spirit less of a poet than a man of science, that sober and fastidious trifler—this is the image which presides over his books, and which gives them their special character, and will attract tiny but enthusiastic companies of readers to them for many years to come. ”

“ Conrad's genius, his consciousness of his destiny, may be said to have come to birth in that hour. What but the second sight of genius could have told this inland child that he would one day escape from the torturing round of rebellion in which the soul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secret rivers of Africa, where he would find an imperishable booty of wonder and monstrous fear? Many people regard Heart of Darkness as his greatest story. ”

“ Few poets have sung the regret for youth more sincerely and more beautifully, and, with Ronsard, regret for the lost wonder of his own youth was perhaps the acutest emotion he ever knew. He was himself, in his early years, one of those glorious youths who have the genius of charm and comeliness, of grace and strength and the arts. ”

“ Consciousness in artistry can seldom have descended to minuter details with a larger gesture. One would not have missed these games of genius with syllables and consonants for worlds. Is it all an exquisite farce or is it splendidly heroic? Are we here spectators of the incongruous heroism of an artist who puts a hero's earnestness into getting the last perfection of shine on to a boot or the last fine shade of meaning into the manner in which he says, "No, thank you, no sugar"? ”

“ He grew more and more to believe that it was not possible to tell the simple truth except in an involved way. He would define a gesture with as much labour as Shakespeare would devote to the entire portrait of a woman. He was a realist of civilized society in which both speech and action have to be sifted with scientific care before they will yield their grain of motive. The humorous patience with which Henry James seeks for that grain is one of the distinctive features of his genius. ”

“ But it is because it is eternally true as such a dramatization that it is—let us not shrink from praise—one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories in literature. It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than of an unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angels and demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her and time and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters. ”

“ To belittle Browning as an artist after such a poem is to blaspheme against art. To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool with words. Browning was an optimist only in the sense that he believed in what Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things," and that he believed in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devised for it by inquisitors or devils. He was not defiant in a fine attitude like Byron. ”

“ He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still more exciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God. Every oath he loosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; for his characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new in literature. One remembers the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which very young men used to repeat to each other lines like the one in The Ballad of "The Bolivar," which runs—
Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell—rig the winches aft! ”

“ Petit, the Poet Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel—
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens—
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure—
All in the loom, and oh what patterns! ”