he had come to the ripeness of golden-crowned, sweet youth heavens and it was night' (Myers); or of the start of the Argonauts: "Then their chief, taking in his hands a golden goblet, stood up upon the stern and called on Zeus whose spear is the lightning and on the rush of waves and winds and the nights and paths of the deep. . . And from the clouds a favourable voice of thunder pealed in answer; and there came bright lightning flashes bursting through' (Myers). Tintoretto, as well as Botticelli, is an 'inlet,' though by a very different method, into the Greek temper.' Botticelli interprets the early and unspoiled artistic genius of Greece; Tintoretto reveals to us their ideals of physical beauty and life. He transmits to us through his figures their passionate zest for life and beauty realised in vitality of form rather than in any peculiarity of expression. His type of women is regal but impersonal; their looks are grave and regular; such women could only be the mothers of demi-gods and heroes. Tintoretto possesses the gift of direct imaginative insight on a grand scale and the power to create form, and by these gifts, without any archæological knowledge of the antique world, can naturally reveal to us the spirit of a people whose vision of the world was absolutely direct, undimmed by any tradition or bias inherited from elsewhere. These two artists, by their independence of thought, stand outside the influence of Roman civilisation which the heavier and more sensuous nature of Titian, and still more of Correggio,* could not altogether escape. They feel the necessity of creating a special atmosphere of romance or charm for the presentation of the antique; there is no trace of such 'staging' in the work of Botticelli and Tintoretto. The lesser artists, such as Pintoricchio † or Benozzo Gozzoli, ‡ have not even that power of romantic atmosphere, and depict The Rape of Helen' or the 'Return of Odysseus' in Ovidian fashion; the figures are pretty or quaint or debonair, conceived without the least emotion, animated by nothing more N. G. 90, The Education of Cupid.' † N. G. 911. ‡ N. G. 591. tist sweet substantial than ́ trivial rhetoric. Among these lesser 09 and artists Boltraffio is a remarkable exception. The pecubenea liarity of his genius seems for once to be exactly suited by such a theme as Narcissus,' in which he has expressed in highly individual fashion the dreamlike charm of the beautiful legend. The Dutch and Flemish masters no longer felt the attraction of the antique world, and suggest nothing of it in those pictures which have classical titles. Rembrandt is romantic in the modern sense of the term, and the 'Diana Bathing'† in the National Gallery is only a study of light and shade effects on a nude in water. Rubens either exaggerates the antique element beyond all recognition as in his Satyrs ‡ or places uncomfortable nudes in an elaborate landscape and calls it 'The Judgment of Paris.'§ There is no sympathetic relation between the conception and form of such works and the reference given by the title; they have no illustrative element in them, and it is precisely the lack of those essential Greek qualities, clearness of design and restraint, which so often prevents Rubens's work from being great art. 'Classical myths' reappear largely in the works of two great French artists of the 17th century, Poussin and Claude Gellée. Their lives were mostly spent in Italy, and in an age of classical pedantry they were saved by the strength of their genius from being academically antiquarian. The artists of the Renaissance had been inspired by the freedom and beauty of the ancient life ; Poussin and Claude were inspired by the ruins of the past, and that past belonged to Rome rather than to Greece; they viewed the past through the Renaissance with its high hopes and ruined remains dug from the earth, and its failure. The landscape of Claude, in which some classical figures are placed amid the ruins of the life to which they belonged, possesses the meditative calm and pathos of Virgil; in that serene and spacious atmosphere the life of the world is suspended, and we feel only the significance of the past in which this particular spot may have been the scene of some great issue. His famous Enchanted Castle' is symbolic of all his pictures; the figures in them are powerless to make them anything but landscapes, impressive and * N. G. 2673. † N. G. 2538. ‡ N. G. 853. § N. G. 194. || N. G. 2, 19. artistic by their feeling for space beneath an infinite sky, yet sometimes cloying from an excess of classical sentiment in the buildings, or idyllic calm in the evening light. Sape The genius of Poussin is much more profound and vigorous than that of Claude. Claude was unable to paint the human figure; Poussin is completely master over it and had great power of design as well. His landscape is intense and primeval; his colour is often harsh and strange, striking a constant note of dissonance in his work; his figures have the regular beauty of Greek sculpture. He always remains curiously aloof from his subject, as though he were quite indifferent to or uninspired by it, and accepted classical or biblical themes from the necessity of tradition rather than of free choice. He is a pure artist, free from illustrative or romantic desires, sadly hampered by the conventions of the past, Cupids, Hermes, and empty gestures, and the academic demands of the present. It is curious to find Hazlitt, in his essay on 'A Landscape of Nicolas Poussin,' saying that no one ever told a story half so well.' Hazlitt spoke for the cultured class of his age, who were saturated in the Latin poets at school, and he probably contributed from his own memory five-sixths of the story which he thought Poussin was telling so well. Poussin is dramatic and tragic, but he is no illustrator in the ordinary sense; he realises a significant moment by the dignity of his form and design; he often makes it poignant by the peculiarity of his colour; the learned indifference of his colour,' Hazlitt calls it. These qualities can be enjoyed by the ordinary spectator, who would be sadly troubled to fill out the story of such masterpieces as Cephalus and Aurora'* in the National Gallery, or " Armida and Rinaldo' at Dulwich. Poussin is incredulous about the joy and freedom and reality of the antique. His Satyrs and Nymphs 'have more of the intellectual part of the character and seem vicious on reflexion and of set purpose. . . with bodies less pampered than Rubens's, but with minds more secretly depraved'; their dances are joyless in spite of the vitality of their forms, and the descriptive title-' Happiness subject to Death' which Bellori gave to the picture of Shepherds in Arcadia' is profoundly true of all his work except the * N. G. 65. TE inlandscapes. His genius is most harmonious in landcal scape,* solemn and tragic like the country of the great ing Roman poets Lucretius and Virgil, pregnant with the mysterious presence of Pan and the spirits of lonely na woodlands. Most visitors to the National Gallery know Turner's Ulysses deriding Polyphemus'; † it is the apotheosis of the romantic vision of the ancient world in which, conA trary to all their conceptions of art and life, man has Gdwindled away to almost nothing in the scene and the rom elements of nature are supreme. Amid the gorgeous or hues and clouds of early morning is the ship of Ulysses, ther a marvellous galley, with the hero himself, a very small f figure, upon it, while amid the mist upon a mighty mountain's side the dim form of the giant can be discerned. All that colour can do to make a given moment infinitely suggestive has been done, and the picture really gives the glamour of the sea, the romance of adventure in a wonderful world: 'There's a schooner in the offing, With her topsails shot with fire, Those who approach Greek art or literature in their earlier manifestations, with conceptions formed or suggested by the countless painters who have taken their subject-matter from Greek legend, find themselves often 'moving about in worlds not realised.' For Turner, as for Titian, the simple form or event by itself is not enough; they are romantic in temperament. The Greeks, until their nerve began to fail after the Peloponnesian war, cared only for clear and carefully realised form ; they had an uncompromising preference for what was natural and real and for the beauty of the human body; they were nervous and suspicious of nature; they were indifferent to 'sunset effects'; they preferred the steady sunlight of full morning or afternoon, the dispeller of illusions, typified by Plato as the fountain of truth and knowledge on earth; and in the same clear light they saw the forms and actions of their own legendary past. G. M. SARGEAUNT. Art. 11.-THE AWAKENING OF SPAIN.* ON Sept. 13, 1923, the world was slightly startled to learn that Spain had lost its constitutional régime overnight and provisionally become a one-man government. This sudden break, the upshot not of a bloody rising but of a State-stroke, was planned summarily and carried out jauntily by a military optimist aided by & few staunch comrades. Its avowed object was to save Spain from the pitiable fate that had overtaken Portugal. The man who thus daringly thrust his profane fist into the wheel-spokes of his country's destiny was a humdrum General reputed indeed to be sans peur and sans reproche according to the code of his chivalrous country, but also without any special halo of heroism or haze of romance about him. Indeed, his comrades might have said of him that his future already lay behind him. Primo de Rivera, Marqués de Estella, resembled a hero only in this, that he was unconscious of being in any degree heroic. The first effect of Primo's manifesto was curious: it momentarily unified the masses who had ever been devoid of cohesion, seemingly incapable of it, and wholly indifferent to politics. No sooner had the jovial soldier smitten one string of this vast human instrument than other strings began vibrating tremulously in response, and it looked as though the nation which had long lain he in coma were now about to thrill and throb with life and hope. Very different was the effect on the pro-r fessional politicians, who would fain have gone on playing at parliamentarism while the nation perished. At first stupefied, then incensed, they finally gave vent to their feelings in wordy protests uttered to the winds of heaven. Some foretold the tragic end of the Spanish Monarchy, and by way of contributing to the fulfilment of the prophecy bespoke the services of a band of international propagandists said to be ever at the beck and The reader who wishes to study this subject further would do well to read the excellent article of Salvador Canals, 'L'Espagne, la Monarchie et la Constitution' ('Correspondant,' Jan. 25, 1925); the work of Count Romanones, 'Las Responsabilidades del Antiguo Régimen,' 3rd edition; A. R. de Grijalba, 'Los Enemigos del Rey,' Madrid, 1924; Rafael Altamira, 'Psicologia del Pueblo Espanol.' |