| INTRODUCTORY AND CRITICAL.
perhaps, occur in thinking of such painted poems as the Than
"Triumph of Death," or Raphael's "Calumny." Attention to the
history of art will restore this innovation to the French. It began
with them as soon as they formed a school, and Gerome continues the
effort, we may even suppose, with a sense of national responsibility.
About 164o, Poussin, a French artist, painted the "Et in Arcadia
Ego." Poussin was a student of Dominichino's; but Poussin never
found the hint of such an invention either in Dominichino or in
any Italian. It was his French intelligence, his lucid national rhetoric,
which impelled him to invent a rich and moving lyrical poem, and
to express it in terms of painting. The Italians before him, in the
Pisa—and the Greeks before them, never got beyond the function of
sense of deriving their conceptions—with the doubtful exceptions at
the illustrator. Raphael either illustrates the scenes of the Bible, or
he illustrates the Psyche story of Apuleius, or he and Holbein both
illustrate Lucian 's account of Apelles' "Calumny; " Titian's " Sacred
and Profane Love," probably misnamed, is too obscure of purpose to
be called a poem; if we could find its author's title, we should see
it to be a merely didactic lecture, like Leonardo's "Modesty and
Vanity." The Greek artists only illustrated their legends, and their'
highest efforts at pathos—the "Dying Gauls" of their Pergamus, or
the "Dirce" and "Laocadu" of their Rhodes—were hinted to them by
history. It was for French art, in the person of Poussin, to intrude
into painting precisely like a poet constructing the most moving epic
he is capable of inventing. He imagines the young Arcadians, in
what Balzac calls the insolence of health, stumbling on a tomb; the
tomb cries to them, with the sublime peevishness, the inexpressibly unhappy boast of its tenant, " So was I an Arcadian / "Above all,
who shall celebrate, in terms of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds?" cries Hazlitt, in ecstasy. "The eager curiosity of some, the
expression of others, who start back with fear and surprise, the clear
breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, the 'valleys
low, where the mild zephyrs use,' the distant uninterrupted sunny
prospect, speak, and forever will speak on, of ages past to ages yet
to come." When he thought out this thing of pure invention, not
history but parable, with its musical, lyrical cry, its eloquence of the
ode, and its imagery of created grace, Poussin was not Poussin—he
was beneficent France, enriching the world with a GENRE.
| |
|
