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THE fortress having disappeared—the fortress which is always beautiful, because it is built with a positive end in view—England has no longer an architecture. England has no sculpture: there is too much rain and too much fog, the profiles of the earth are soaked in water, clogged by fields, and clothed with woods and with heather. England has only one century of painting, and the Puritan spirit and the practical spirit are repelled by it and, when it comes, turn it away from its goal.
THE fortress having disappeared—the fortress which is always beautiful, because it is built with a positive end in view—England has no longer an architecture. England has no sculpture: there is too much rain and too much fog, the profiles of the earth are soaked in water, clogged by fields, and clothed with woods and with heather. England has only one century of painting, and the Puritan spirit and the practical spirit are repelled by it and, when it comes, turn it away from its goal.
Here
are mighty trees, cascades, granite cliffs, eternal mist, a wild sea
everywhere, summer nights like an hallucination when the light of the moon,
appearing for a moment among the clouds, bathes ruins and lakes, where the sob
of the nightingales rises above the murmur of the leaves, where the ponds
reflect the trembling phantom of the branches. . . The Celt is sensual and
mystical, the Saxon dreams out loud. Here were born, from Shakespeare to Byron,
from Milton to Shelley, the greatest poets of the world. When aerial space is
not sufficiently subtle, and the planet is not sufficiently pronounced in
aspect to impose beyond all else the love of colors and of forms, when the
world of colors and forms is rich and mysterious, and lacking in that
ungrateful and monotonous quality which drives the spirit back to the inner
domains of sonorous symbols, and when, added to all this, the crowd possesses a
force of accent, and such energy for life and for conquest as it has nowhere
else, man's faculty of words is unchained and seizes kingly command. Here is
Shakespeare, all the voices of the tempest and of the dawn, the treasures
rolled by the sea, the palaces built in the heavens with the tissue of stars
offering themselves to the soul to interpret a confession of love, or the
anguish of an irresolute man, the terror of a murderer, or the wrath of a king.
Here is Milton taking, for the first time since the biblical poems and Michael
Angelo, the wild gardens, the flesh of fruits, the flesh of women, and the dust
of flowers to express to consciousness the tyranny of God. Here is Byron,
raising the damned from their abyss to fire the stars with their fever, and to
cradle it upon the ocean. Here is Shelley, each beat of whose heart sends
harmonies streaming, like a river whose waters trail the reflections of the
Milky Way, and the tremor of plumes and leaves which it has swept along in its
course through the woods.
The
English soul consoles itself for the too practical activity of Englishmen by
constantly widening the spread of its wings. Even English science cannot resign
itself to building its monuments impartially. It has to rise higher than the
eagle, or else it applies itself to satisfying the material needs of man, and
often the man of England. The supreme idea of Newton is a mystic intuition.
Beyond the solar system, whose frontiers are not crossed by Copernicus, Kepler,
or Galileo, it extends to infinitude the power of reason, and, passing over
contradictions of detail which might cause it to stumble, it realizes its
harmony with the immutable order of the world. . . But Bacon assigns to
consciousness an immediate and practical purpose; Hobbes builds up his social
determinism like a geometer. The merchants organized their material Republic
without pity. The Roundheads impose laws of iron upon their moral Republic.
There must be expiation for the lyric orgy by which the great sixteenth
century, in the Occident, burst the theocratic armor from within, and caused
the passion for freedom to rise in the hearts of men. There is only one
book—the Bible—as later, for the Jacobins of France, there will be only one
example—that of Rome. The theater of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, and of Ben Jonson
will be closed. The image will be driven from the cult and swept from the mind.
An easy matter. No one understood Holbein when he came here to earn his bread.
No one looked at Rubens's dazzling ceilings at Whitehall. Here, anyone who is
great must take refuge within his inner life or else outside the country. The
imaginary world of Shakespeare permits him to satisfy his whole soul and
re-create it each day. Milton is blind, Byron and Shelley, later on, will flee
the virtue, the fog, and the cities. When van Dyck arrives, he will work for a
king whose head is to be cut off, and for an aristocracy which is to be deposed
from power. The crowd does not understand him, the theologian curses him.
Charles II must bring back from France easy morals, ordered literature, and
improvident politics before painting can appear without effort, as one of the
wheels of the new system, and as one of the profound and irrepressible needs of
the English people.
And yet
the Puritan imprint has sunk in so sharply and the English people is so strong,
that the first in date of its painters, the one from whom all the others will
come, is the most English of all, and, though he himself is unaware of it, the
most Puritan of all. The morals of William Hogarth are not irreproachable,
perhaps, but his satire is virtuous. He is a contemporary of the first novelists
of the manners and customs of England, and regulates his pace by theirs. Swift
encourages him. Fielding congratulates him on following "the cause of
righteousness," and considers that his engravings "have their
appointed place in every well-kept household." He undertakes sprightly
crusades against debauchery, gambling, drunkenness, and the politics of
elections, and for the protection of animals. He desires the "happiness of
mankind." And his work shows the effects of it. It is encumbered and
confused, orchestrated in almost a haphazard manner. One thinks first of the
subject, and if there is on the canvas a passage of savory painting, one
perceives it only after having had a good laugh. But he has the raciness of the
people. He knows London to its depths. He comes out of them, and he goes back
to them. He is an Englishman, and despises everyone who is not an Englishman.
The fencing-master, and the grotesque swaggerer, and the ceremonious freak
must, of course, be Frenchmen. He has the atrocious raillery and the sad
clearness of vision which are the backbone and the atmosphere of the comic
genius of his nation. He laughs with violence, in the same way that men get
angry. His healthiness will not suffer anyone around him to be in ill health.
Can one
say of a painter that he missed his career as a painter when he has, for once
in that career, looked on the world as a great painter does? If all English
caricature, from Rowlandson to the humorous illustrators of the magazines and
of popular prints, comes from him, he painted—doubtless in a few hours—a thing
that contains the whole spirit and the whole flower of all English painting. In
the splendor of the laugh and of the teeth and of the clear eyes and of the
dimples of a girl of the people, her flesh tingling with the health that comes
of milk, the juice of meats, of air, and of water—he seized, one day, all the
wandering harmonies of this country of moist landscape, and of its cool ocean.
The picture is a sudden flash which lights up, which will grow pale, from one
painter to another, and then burn out, after the poets of landscape have picked
up its silvery trace in the fog and in the heavens.
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