The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 04, February, 1858

There can be no more valuable lesson in Art given than that series of Turner drawings in the British collection, both as concerns its progression in the individual and those subtile analogies between painting (color) and music,—analogies often hinted at, but never, that we are aware, fully followed out. Color bears the same relation to form that sound does to language. If a painter sit down before Nature and accurately match all her tints, we have an absolute but prosaic rendering of her; and the analogy to this in music would be found in a passage of ordinary conversational language written down, with its inflections and pauses recorded in musical signs. Both are transcripts of Nature, but neither is in any way poetic, or, strictly speaking, artistic; we cannot, by any addition or refinement, make them so. Now mark that in the two early drawings of Turner we have white and black with only the slightest possible suggestion of blue in the distance;—the corresponding form in language is verse, with its measure of time for measure of space, and just so much inflection of voice as these drawings have of tint,—enough not to be absolutely monotonous. We have in both cases left the idea of mere imitation of Nature, and have entered on Art. Verse grows naturally into music by simple increase of the range of inflection, as Turner's color will grow more melodic and finally harmonic. And in thus beginning Turner has placed his works above the level of prosaic painting of Nature, just as verse is placed above prose by the unanimous consent of mankind. From these simple presages of Art we may diverge and follow his development as a poet by his engravings, without ever making reference to him as a colorist. But beside being a poet, he was a great color-composer. If, leaving poetry as recited, we take the ballad, or poetry made fully melodic, we have the single voice, passing through measured inflections and with measured pauses. Correspondingly, the next in the series of Turner drawings, the "Aysgarth Force," shows no attempt to give the real color of Nature, but a single color governing the whole drawing, a golden brown passing in shadow into its exact negative. There is an absolute tint, full, and inflected through every shade of its tones to the bottom of the scale. The strict analogy is broken in this case by a dash of delicate gray-blue in the sky and gray-red in the figures, the slightest possible accompaniment to his golden-brown melody; but these were not needed, and we find earlier drawings which adhere to the strict monochrome. In the drawing next in date, the "Hastings from the Sea," we have the further step from monochrome to polychrome; we have the distinct trio, the golden yellow in the sky, the blue in the sea, and the red in the figures in the boats,—as in a vocal trio we have the only three possible musical sounds of the human voice, the soprano, the basso, and the falsetto of the child's voice. All these colors are distinctly asserted and perfectly harmonized in a most exquisite play of tints, but it is still no more like Nature than the trio in "I Puritani" is like conversation. Turner never dreamed of painting like Nature, and no sane man ever saw or can see, in this world, Nature in the colors in which he has painted her, any more than he will find men conducting business in operatic notes.

One step farther, and we leave the analogy. In the "Swiss Valley," one of his last works, we are from the first conscious that his harmonies have run away with his theme. In Ole Bull's "Niagara" we have almost as much of matter-of-fact Nature as in Turner's "Swiss Valley." The eye untrained by study of Turner's works finds nothing but a blaze of color with no intelligible object, just as we have, in opera, music of which the words are inaudible;—both are there for practised ear and eye, but in neither case as of primary importance. Turner has even gone farther, and given us pictures of pure color, as in the illustration of Goethe's theory of colors,—a fantasie of the palette. And why shall Turner not orchestrate color as well as Verdi sound? why not give us his synchromies as well as Beethoven his symphonies? You prefer common sense,—Harding and Fripp, Stanfield and Creswick? Well, suppose you like better to hear some familiar voice talking of past times than to hear "Robert le Diable" ever so well sung, or Hawthorne's prose better than Browning's verse,—it proves nothing, save that you do not care for music and poetry so well as some others do.

But after all, Turner was one of the old school of artists. Claude was the first landscape painter of the line, Turner the last; subjective poets both,—the one a child, the other a mighty man. But the poets no longer govern the world as in times past; they give place to the philosophers. The race is no longer content with its inspirations and emotions, but must see and understand. The old school of Art was one of sentiment, the new is one of fact; and out of that English mind from whose seeming common-place level of untrained, unschooled intellect have burst so many of the loftiest souls the world has known,—from that mind more inspired in its want of academic greatness, more self-educated in its wild liberty, than the best-trained nations of Europe, this new school has fittingly had its origin.

We speak of it as a School, though yet in its rudiments, because it has a distinctive character, a real purpose,—and because it is the embodiment of the new-age spirit of truth-seeking, of the spirit of science, rather than that of song. Among the pictures contributed to the English exhibition by the Pre-Raphaelites, there are very few which do not convey the distinct impression of a determined effort to realize certain truths. There are few which succeed entirely; but this is so far from astonishing, that we have only to think that the oldest of these artists has hardly passed his first decade of recognized artistic existence, and that their aims are new in Art, to wonder that so much of fresh and subtile truth is given. There are two respects in which nearly all the works of the school agree, and which have come to be regarded by superficial students of Art as its characteristics, namely, that they are very deficient in drawing and devoid of grace. Both deficiencies are such as might have been expected from the circumstances. Young men filled with earnestness and enthusiasm, and with an artistic purpose full in view, will spend little time in acquiring academic excellences, or trouble themselves much with methods or styles of drawing. They dash at once to their purpose, and let technical excellence follow, as it ought, in the train of the idea of their work. Of course they do not compare, as draughtsmen and technists, with men who have spent years in getting a knowledge of the proportions of the human figure, and the best methods of applying color; but, on the other hand, they are safe from that most alluring and fatal course of study which makes the subject only a lay figure to display artistic capacity on. Of all the pictures of the school, in the collection of which we speak, there is but one of academic excellence in drawing,—the "King Lear" of Ford Madox Brown. All the others have errors, and some of them to a ludicrous degree; but wherever refined drawing is needed to convey the idea of the picture, no school can furnish drawing more subtile and expressive. The head of the "Light of the World" is worthy in this respect to be placed beside Raphael and Da Vinci; and the "Ophelia" of Hughes, though inexcusably incorrect in the figure, has a refinement of drawing in the face, and especially in the lines of the open, chanting mouth, which no draughtsman of the French school can equal. It is where the idea guides the hand that the Pre-Raphaelites are triumphant; everywhere else they fail. But this is a fault which will correct itself as they learn the significance and value of things they do not now understand. They paint well that which they love, and devotion grows and widens its sphere the longer it endures, taking in, little by little, all things which bear relation to the thought or thing it clings to; and the man who draws because he has something to tell, and draws that well, is certain of finally drawing all things well. This very deficiency of Pre-Raphaelitism, then, points to its true excellence, and indicates that singleness of purpose which is an element in all true Art. The want of grace, which is made almost a synonyme with Pre-Raphaelitism, has its origin in the same resolute clinging to truth as the artist comprehends it, and uncompromising determination to express it as perfectly as he has the power,—a feeling which never permits him to think whether his work be graceful, but whether it be just; so that his tremulous and almost fearful conscientiousness—tremulous with desire to see all, and fearful lest some line should wander by a hair's breadth from its fullest expressiveness—makes him lose sight entirely of grace and repose. No form that has the appearance of being painfully drawn can ever be a graceful one; and so the Pre-Raphaelite, until he has something of a master's facility and decision, can never be graceful. The artist who prefers grace to truth will never be remarkable either for grace or truth, while the one who clings to truth at all sacrifices will finally reach the expression of the highest degree of beauty which his soul is capable of conceiving; for the lines of highest beauty and supremest truth are coincident. The Ideal meets the Actual finally in the Real.

If there be one point of feeling in which the Pre-Raphaelites can be said to be more than in all others antagonistic to the schools of painting which preceded them, it would be that indicated by this distinction,—that the new school is one which in all cases places truth before beauty, while the old esteems beauty above truth. The tendency of the one is towards a severe and truth-seeking Art, one in all its characteristics essentially religious in the highest sense of the term, holding truth dearer than all success in popular estimation, or than all attractions of external beauty, reverent, self-forgetting, and humble before Nature; that of the other is towards an Art Epicurean and atheistic, holding the truth as something to be used or neglected at its pleasure, and of no more value than falsehood which is equally beautiful,—making Nature, indeed, something for weak men to lean on and for superstitious men to be enslaved by. This distinction is radical; it cuts the world of Art, as the equator does the earth, with an unswerving line, on one side or the other of which every work of Art falls, and which permits no neutral ground, no chance of compromise;—he who is not for the truth is against it. We will not be so illiberal as to say that Art lies only on one side of this line; to do so were to shut out works which have given us exceeding delight;—so neither could we exclude Epicurus and his philosophy from the company of doers of good;—but the distinction is as inexorable as the line Christ drew between his and those not his; it lies not in the product, which may be mixed good and evil, but in the motive, which is indivisible.

Pre-Raphaelitism must take its position in the world as the beginning of a new Art,—new in motive, new in methods, and new in the forms it puts on. To like it or to dislike it is a matter of mental constitution. The only mistake men can make about it is to consider it as a mature expression of the spirit which animates it. Not one, probably not two or three generations, perhaps not so many centuries, will see it in its full growth. It is a childhood of Art, but a childhood of so huge a portent that its maturity may well call out an expectation of awe. In all its characteristics it is childlike,—in its intensity, its humility, its untutored expressiveness, its marvellous instincts of truth, and in its very profuseness of giving,—filling its caskets with an unchoosing lavishness of pearl and pebble, rose and may-weed, all treasures alike to its newly opened eyes, all so beautiful that there can scarcely be choice among them.

To suppose that a revolution so complete as this could take place without a bitter opposition would be an hypothesis without any justification in the world's experience; for, be it in whatever sphere or form, when a revolution comes, it offends all that is conservative and reverential of tradition in the minds of men, and arouses an apparently inexplicable hostility, the bitterness of which is not at all proportionate to the interest felt by the individual in the subject of the reform, but to his constitutional antipathy to all reform, to all agitation. The conservative at heart hates the reformer because he agitates, not because he disturbs him personally. This is clearly seen in the hostility with which the new Art has been met in England, where conservatism has built its strongest batteries in the way of invading reform. For the moment, the English mind, bending in a surprised deference to the stormy assault of the enthusiasts of the new school, partly carried away by its characteristic admiration of the heroism of their attack and the fiery eloquence of their champion, Ruskin, and perhaps not quite assured of its final effect, forgets to unmask its terrible artillery. But to upset the almost immovable English conservatism, to teach the nation new ways of thought and feeling, in a generation! Cromwell could not do it; and this wave of reform that now surges up against those prejudices, more immovable than the white cliffs of Albion, will break and mingle with the heaving sea again, as did that of the republicanism of the Commonwealth, whose Protector never sat in his seat of government more firmly than Ruskin now holds the protectorate of Art in England. When political reform moved off to American wildernesses for the life it could not preserve in England, it but marked the course reform in Art must follow. The apparent ascendency which it has obtained over the old system will as certainly turn out to be temporary as there is logic in history; because an Art, like a political system, to govern a nation, must be in accordance with its character as a nation,—must, in fact, be the outgrowth of it. The only unfailing line of kings and protectors is the people; with them is no interregnum; and when the English people become fitted by intellectual and moral progress to be protectors of a new and living Art, it will return to them just as surely as republicanism will one day return from its exile,—

  "And all their lands restored to them again,  That were with it exiled."

The philosophic Art will find a soil free from Art-prejudices and open to all seeds of truth; it will find quiet and liberty to grow, not without enemies or struggles, but with no enemies that threaten its safety, nor struggles greater than will strengthen it. The appreciation and frank acceptance it has met on its first appearance here, the number of earnest and intelligent adherents it has already found, are more than its warmest friends hoped for so soon. But in England, while its appreciating admirers will remain adherents to its principles, it will pass out of existence as an independent form of Art, and the elements of good in it will mingle with the Art of the nation, as a leaven of nonconformity and radicalism, breeding agitations enough to keep stagnation away and to secure a steady and irresistible progress. Its truest devotees will remain in principle what they are, losing gradually the external characteristics of the school as it is now known,—while the great mass of its disciples, unthinking, impulsive, will sink back into the ranks of the old school, carrying with them the strength they have acquired by the severe training of the system, so that the whole of English Art will be the better for Pre-Raphaelitism. But with Ruskin's influence ceases the Commonwealth of Art; for Ruskin governs, not represents, English feeling,—governs with a tyranny as absolute, an authority as unquestioned, as did Oliver Cromwell.

Of the men now enlisted in the reform, few are of very great value individually. Millais will probably be the first important recusant. He is a man of quick growth, and his day of power is already past; the reaction will find in him an ally of name, but he has no real greatness. William Holman Hunt and Dante Rosetti are great imaginative artists, and will leave their impress on the age. Ford Madox Brown, as a rational, earnest painter, holds a noble and manly position. But then we have done with great names. Much seed has sprung up on stony ground; but, having little soil, when the sun shines, it will die. The slow growth is the sure one.

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LITERARY NOTICES

History of the Republic of the United States of America, as traced in the Writings of Alexander Hamilton and his Contemporaries. By John C. HAMILTON Vol. I. New York: D. Appleton & Co., Broadway. 1857.

Comic Histories have never been to our taste. The late Mr. Gilbert à Beckett, we always thought, might have employed his vis comica, or force of fun, better than in linking ludicrous images and incongruous associations with the heroes of ancient and modern times. The department of Comic Biography, we believe, has received few contributions, if any, from the frolic quills of wicked wags. The cure, however, of this defect in our literature, if any there be, may be looked upon as begun in the work whose title stands at the head of this notice. The author, indeed, had not the settled purpose of the facetious writers we have just dispraised, of making game of the subject of his book, no more than he has the wit and cleverness which half redeem their naughtinesses. The absence of these latter qualities is supplied in his case by the self-complacent good faith in which he puts forth his monstrous assumptions and the stolid assurance with which he maintains them. But the effect of his labors, as of theirs, is to throw an atmosphere of ludicrous ideas around the memory of a great man, painful to all persons of good taste and correct feelings.

Filial piety is a virtue to which much should be forgiven. And the son of such a father as Alexander Hamilton might well be pardoned for even an undue estimate of his services, if it were kept within the decent bounds of moderate exaggeration. But when he undertakes to make his father the incarnation of the Revolution and of the Republic, and to concentrate all the glories of that heroic age in him as the nucleus from which they radiate, he must pardon us, if we think, that, by long contemplation of the object of his filial admiration, his mental sight has become morbid and distorted, and sees things which are not to be seen. Beginning his book with the assumption that Hamilton was the first to conceive the idea, of "the Union of the People of the United States,"—an assumption which we can by no means admit, though supported (as we learn from a foot note) by the opinion of Mr. George Ticknor Curtis,—the author proceeds "to trace in his life and writings the history of the origin and, early policy of this GREAT REPUBLIC." Through the whole volume, "THE REPUBLIC" stands rubric over the left hand page, and "HAMILTON" over the right, and the identity of the two is sought to be established from the beginning to the end. Now, deep as is the sense we entertain of the services of Hamilton to his country, and scarcely less than filial as is the veneration we have been taught from our earliest days to feel for his memory, we must pronounce this pretension to be as absurd and futile in itself as it is unjust and ungenerous to the other great men of that pregnant period.

We do not know whether or not Mr. John C. Hamilton is of opinion, that, had his illustrious father lived and died a trader in the island of Nevis, the American Revolution would never have taken place, nor the American Republic been founded; but he plainly considers that the great contest began to assume its most momentous gravity from the time Hamilton first entered upon the scene, as an haranguer at popular meetings in New York, as a writer on the earnest topics of the day, as a spectator of the broadside fired by the Asia on the Battery, as a captain of artillery at White Plains, and especially as the aide-de-camp and secretary of Washington. This part of the history of Hamilton, and particularly the testimony about his selection by Washington for this great confidence when scarcely twenty years of age, bears to his eminent qualities, one would think, honor enough to satisfy the most pious of sons. But from this moment, according to the innuendoes, if not the broad assertion of Mr. Hamilton, Washington was chiefly of use to sign the letters and papers prepared by his military secretary, and to carry out the plans he had conceived. On the theatre of the world's history, from this time forth, Washington is to be presented, like Mr. Punch on the ledge of his show-box, squeaking and jerking as the strings are pulled from below by the hand of his boy-aide-de-camp. He writes letters to Congress, to all and singular the American Generals, to the British Generals, to the Governors of States, and to all whom it may concern, "over the signature of Washington," (which detestable Americanism Mr. Hamilton invariably uses,) the whole credit of the correspondence being coolly passed over to the account of the secretary! That Hamilton did his duty excellently well there is no question, but it was a purely ministerial one. He furnished the words and the sentences, but Washington breathed into them the breath of their life. As well might the confidential clerk of Mr. John Jacob Astor claim his estate, in virtue of having written, under the direction of his principal, the business letters by which it was acquired. If we are not mistaken, this Mr. Hamilton some time since included Washington's Farewell Address in the collection of his father's works. Perhaps Mr. Jefferson owes it to the accidents of time and distance, that the Declaration of Independence is not reclaimed as another of Hamilton's estrays. We forbear to characterize this attempt to transfer the credit of the correspondence of Washington from the heart to the hand, in the terms which we think it deserves; for we apprehend the mere statement of the case will enable every right-judging man to form a very competent opinion of it for himself.

Though we cannot conscientiously say, judging from this book, that Mr. Hamilton has inherited the literary skill of his father, it is very clear that he is the faithful depositary of his political antipathies. At the earliest possible moment the hereditary rancor against John Adams bursts forth, and it bubbles up again whenever an opening occurs or can be made. His patriotism, his temper, his manners, his courage, are all in turn made the theme of bitter, and of what is meant for strong denunciation. His journeys from Philadelphia to Braintree, though with the permission of Congress, are "flights"; his not taking the direct road, which would bring him in dangerous vicinity to the enemy, is a proof of cowardice! His free expression of opinion as to the conduct of the campaign in the Jerseys—made before the seal of success had certified to its wisdom—was rancorous hostility to Washington, if not absolute conspiracy against him; and so on to the end of the chapter. As this volume only brings the history of the Republic, as contained in that of Hamilton, then in the twenty-second year of his age, to 1779, we tremble to think of what yet awaits the Second President, as the twain in one grow together from the gristle into the bone. What we have here we conceive to be the mere sockets of the gallows of fifty cubits' height on which this New England Mordecai is to be hanged up as an example to all malefactors of his class. We make no protest against this summary procedure, if the Biographer of the Republic think it due to the memory of his father; but we would submit that he has begun rather early in the day to bind the victim doomed to deck the feralia of his hero.

The literary execution of this book is not better than its substantial merits deserve. The style is generally clumsy, often obscure, and not unseldom harsh and inflated. Take an instance or two, picked out absolutely at random.—"The disaffected, who held throughout the contest the seaboard of the State in abeyance, driven forth, would have felt in their wanderings there would be no parley with them." p. l27. Again, "It became the policy of the Americans, while holding the enemy in check, to draw him into separate detachments, in successive skirmishes to profit of their superior aim and activity, and of their better knowledge of the country, and to keep up its confidence by a system of short and gradual retreats from fastness to fastness,—from river beyond river." p. l29.—These sentences, taken at hap-hazard from two consecutive leaves, are not unfair specimens of the literary merits of this intrepid attempt to convert the history of the nation, at its most critical period, into a collection of Mémoires pour servir to the biography of General Hamilton.