Belcaro; Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions. Vernon Lee

Pagan, antique feeling, we try also to assimilate the spirit of the statues of Phidias or Praxiteles; we expound the civilisation, the mode of thought; we trace the differences of school, we approve and condemn, we speak marvellously well, with subtlety or passion; we imagine all manner of occult, ineffable virtues and vices in this antique art, we dabble deliciously in alternate purity and impurity (this being the perfection of artistic pleasure), as we even occasionally, for a few moments, feel actual, simple, unreasoning, wholesome pleasure in the sight of the old broken marbles. All this we do, and most often are therewith satisfied. Yet if, weighing our artistic likings and dislikings, comparing together our feelings towards so many and so various manifestations, trying to determine what is fresh and wholesome food to our depraved æsthetic (and æsthetico-moral) palate, and what is mere highly flavoured, spicy or nauseous drug-stuff, if, in such a moment of doubt, we ask ourselves, overheard by no one, whether in reality this antique art is, in the life of our feelings, at all important, comforting, influential? we shall, for the most part, whisper back to ourselves that it is not so in the very least. But could it ever have been? Could this, or any art have been for us more than merely one of a hundred feebly enjoyed, more or less exotic mental luxuries; than an historic fossil, by study of which, as with the bone of a pterodactyl or an ichthyosaurus, we can amuse ourselves reconstructing the appearance and habits of a long dead, once living civilisation? Or might these statues have been much more to us? Might they, perhaps, have shaped and trained our souls with their unspoken lessons?

      Well, once upon a time (let us invent a fairy tale), a child was brought to the Vatican: just such an one, only perhaps a trifle more wayward, than those we met this morning, demurely led about, or scampering through the galleries: its name signifies nothing, suffice it that it was a child. Now, it so happened, that upon that day the statues (who, as our forefathers of the middle ages knew) are merely stone imprisoned demons, dethroned gods of antiquity, were bent upon getting some small amount of amusement in their dreary lives: all the more dreary since the great joyful hope of restoration in the hearts of men which they had conceived when Winckelmann and Goethe came to them and adored, had been slowly disappointed by seeing that what men cared for was not them, but merely their own impertinent theories and grandiloquent speeches. The Statue-demons were sick of the bitter amusement of watching the follies of their pretended or deluded worshippers. So they sorely wanted excitement, diversion of some sort; and in their idleness, they capriciously determined to amuse themselves, no longer with grown men, but with children. So, as a toy for the moment, they singled out this particular child we are speaking of, who was wandering wearily through the gallery, overpowered like its companions by the sense of negativeness, of greyness, of silence, of want of character and movement and story, and as it passed them, the statue-demons looked at each other with their pupilless eyes, as much as to say: "This is the one we shall take," and determined to cast a spell upon it which would make it theirs. How they did is more than any of us can tell: there was a little gurgling fountain in the garden outside, where a broken-snouted dragon spirted a trickle of water through the maiden-hair choking up the basin, and of this water the child did drink a little in the palm of its hand, the rest running up its sleeve; there was also an old noseless Vertumnus in a corner, on whose pedestal a great tuft of wild grass had shot up, and round whose arms and neck an ivy plant had cast its green trailing leaves; and one of these bitter glossy leaves that child did certainly munch; but whether the charm was in the water or the leaf, or in neither, and only a mysterious spell, a sort of invisible winged seed of passion which they cast direct into that little soul, no one may ever decide. Be it as it may, the child remained for a while conscious of nothing at all, never dreaming that it had in any way come in contact with that demon world imprisoned in the stone. It lived its child life of romping and day dreams and lessons and punishments, and, with its companions, fretted to get away from this dreary, horrible Rome of the popes: this warm, wet place with its sordid houses, its ruins embedded in filth and nettles; its tawdry, stuffy churches, filled with snuffling of monks and jig-quavering of strange, cracked, sickening-sweet voices; its whole atmosphere of decay and sloth, as of a great marsh-pond, sprinkled with bright green weed and starred with flaunting nauseous yellow lilies. The child wondered at all these things: dug bits of porphyry and serpentine out of gutters, collected pieces of potshard from the Palatine; read and re-read the stories of shipwrecks and red Indians and volcanoes: played in dressing-gowns and shawls, at processions of cardinals and prelates, and, with yelling companions in pinafores and napkins, at church music, with tremendous time-beating with rolls of paper; laughed and pouted and quarrelled as children do; quite unconscious of being the chosen one, the changeling, the victim of the statues. But little by little, into its everyday life, stole strange symptoms; sometimes there would come like a sudden stop, as of a boat caught in the rushes, a consciousness of immobility in the midst of swirling, flowing movement, a giddy brain-swimming feeling; and then things went on again just as before. But the symptoms returned, and others with them. What was the matter? A vagueness, a want; a seeking, a clinging, but seeking for, clinging to the unknown. In the evenings of early spring, when the children had returned from their scrambling walks, and were waiting for supper, chattering, looking at books, or strumming tunes; this child would watch the bank of melting colours, crimson, and smoke-purple and gold, left by the sun behind the black dome of St. Peter's; and as the white vapours rose from the town below and gathered on the roofs like a veil, it would feel a vague, acheless pain within it; and at any stray, trifling word or bar of dance music, its eyes and its whole little soul would fill with a mist of tears. The spell cast by the statues was not idle, the mysterious philter which they had poured into it was working throughout that childish soul: the child was in love; in love with what it had hated; in love intensely, passionately, with Rome. And as a part of Rome it loved, blindly, for no other reason, that desolate Vatican; to the statues it returned, and in a way, grew up in their presence. And one day the child looked at itself, and perceived that it was a child no longer; knew all of a sudden, that in those drowsy years of childish passion and day dreams, it had been learning something which others did not know. For it heard one day a few pages of a symphony of Mozart's; the first it had ever heard save much more modern music; and those bars of symphony were intelligible words, conveyed to the child a secret. And the secret was: "we are the brethren, the sounding ones of the statues: and all we who are brethren, whether in stone, or sound, or colour, or written word, shall to thee speak in such a way that thou recognise us, and distinguish us from others; and thou shalt love and believe only in us and those of our kin." Then the child went forth from the Vatican, and went in among the pictures, and among the poems and the music, and did indeed find that all those who were of the same kin as the statues spoke to it intelligible words, and returned its love by making it happy. This came of the statues having had the whim of giving to that child the love potion which had made it love Rome.

      All this is a fairy tale, a very meagre one indeed, quite inferior to any told us by nurse or peasant woman; but a fairy tale nevertheless; for, of course, we all know that statues cannot give love philters, nor children fall in love with towns, nor symphonies talk about having brothers in marble or colour. All this is rubbish of the same sort as the dancing water, the singing apple, the dragon Fafner's blood which made Sigurd understand the language of the birds, the enchanted lake into which Charlemagne sat gazing out his life, because of the ring cast into it; mere rubbish, and, consequently, not to be examined into or reasoned about. But as the wise men of to-day tell us that in all our nursery tales (Heaven forbid that anything so appalling be true) there is a hidden, sensible meaning; perhaps, also, there may be one in this absurd little story of the child in the Vatican, and that we may see. And so, now, we must be serious and examine methodically into the matter.

      To grow up in the presence of the statues; to become acquainted with antique art long before any other; to perceive the beauty and enjoyableness of a statue before seeking for the beauty and enjoyableness of a picture or a piece of music; this is the reverse of the artistic training which every individual man or woman obtains consciously or unconsciously in our own day; for we begin with the art born nearest our time, then proceed to those further; we go from music to painting, and from painting to sculpture. But humanity at large received the opposite training in the last four-and-twenty centuries, since humanity knew beauty in the statue before knowing beauty in the picture, and beauty in the picture before beauty in music. The first standard of artistic right and wrong (since architecture, being a thing partly for use, and only partly for beauty, has a mixed morality of its own) was the standard of sculpture. Let us see