Part 6 (1/2)

JUDITH

(_SANDRO BOTTICELLI_)

MAURICE HEWLETT

In the days when it was verging on a question whether a ood Christian and an artist the chosen subjects of painting were significant of the approaching crisis--those glaring moral contrasts in history which, for want of a happier term, we call dramatic Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn her more intimate manifestations to await likelier ti to answer The subjects, at any rate, were such as the Greeks, with their surer instincts and saving grace of sanity in matters of this kind, either forbore to meddle with or treated as decoratively as they treated acanthus-wreaths To-day we call them ”effective” subjects; we find they produce shocks and tremors; we think it braces us to shudder, and we think that Art is a kind of emotional pill; we measure it quantitatively, and say that we ”knoe like”

And doubtless there is so produced, for exa helpless in a grey shadow of lust So long as the Bible remained a God that piquancy was found in a _Massacre of the Innocents_; in our own time we find it in a _Faust and Gretchen_, in the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal Academy

It was a like appreciation of the certain effect of vivid contrasts as powerful didactic agents (coupled with, or drowning, a so purer and more devout) which had inspired those most beautiful and distinctive of all the sys_, the Christ-child cycle, and which raised the Holy Child and Maid-Mother to their place above the mystic tapers and the Cross Naturally the Old Testarim tales, proved a sick wine: _David and Golias_, _Susanna and the Elders_, the _Sacrifice of Isaac_, _Jethro's Daughter_ But the story of Judith did not come to be painted in Tuscan sanctuaries until Donatello of Florence had first cast her in bronze at the prayer of Cosih at least: Daered as she spun round the city on her ball Cosirandson were no sooner dead and their brood sent flying, than Donatello's _Judith_ was set up in the Piazza as a fit eorous motto, to make assurance double, ”EXEMPLVM SALVTIS PVBLICAE CIVES POSVERE” Savonarola, who knew his Bible, saw here a keener application of Judith's pious sin A few years later that same _Judith_ saw him burn Thus, as an incarnate cynicism, she will pass; as a work of art she is adhbour _Perseus_ of the Loggia ht mohtness and grip of the fact, has hit upon the wrong It is fatal to freeze aHis _Judith_ will never strike: her ars The Damoclean sword is a fine incident for poetry; but Holofernes was no Damocles, and if he had been, it were intolerable to cast his experience in bronze

Donatello has essayed that thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a moment instead of denote a permanent attribute Art is adjectival, is it not, O Donatello? Her business is to qualify facts, to say what things are, not to state them, to affir afterwards, carved, as we shall see, with a burin on a plate; and the man who so carved her was a painter

[Illustration: JUDITH

_Botticelli_]

Meantime, _pari passu_, al his hand; a y and was equally at hoant to say that you cannot be an artist unless you are at hoy is the swiftest and , so that you can be measured by it as a man is known by his books, or a wo, her amusements, or her charities Forthe spirit of natural fact; and the generic na of essence in(if you will have it) of an object of intuition within the folds of an object of sense Lessing did not dig so deep as his Greek Voltaire (whose ”dazzling antithesis,”

after all, touches the root of the matter), for he did not see that rhythmic extension in time or space, as the case may be, with all that that i incidents of for hich Art's substance olden, irresistible, and inevitable as Nature's pieces are This substance, as I have said, is the spirit of natural fact And so y is Art at its simplest and barest (where the bodily medium is neither word, nor texture of stone, nor dye), the parent art frootten by man's need This much of explanation, I am sorry to say, is necessary, before we turn to our mytho-poet of Florence, to see what he h, what has the story of Judith to do with end, one of the finest of Sereat a gulf as between Jew and Greek I believe there are no oists could contract to the necessary state of awe--and I do not know that there are any legends proper to Greece which are divorced from real myths For where a end is the e A natural fact is permanent and elemental, an historical event is transient and superficial Take one instance out of a score The rainbow links heaven and earth Iris, then, to the er, intermediary between God and Man That is to incarnate a constant, natural fact Plato afterwards, ical, but none the less constant, none the less natural But, to say, as the legend-loving Jew said, that Noah floated his ark over a drowning world and secured for his posterity a standing covenant with God, who then and once for all set his bow in the heavens; that is to indicate, somewhere, in the dim backward and abysm of time, an historical event The rainbow is suffered as the skirt of the robe of Noah, as an ancestor of Israel So the Judith poem may be a decorated event, or it : the point to reend, a subject for creative art The artist, in the language of Neo-Platoniss into life And noill go into the Uffizi

Mr Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of amaze most people have who look for the first tihtly over the hill-country, her steadfastwith intent patient eyes every step she takes

You say it is flippant, affected, pedantic For answer, I refer you to the sage hi ht The prevailing strain of the story is the strength of weakness--_ex dulci fortitudo_, to invert the old enigma ”O God, O my God, hear me also, aBreak down their stateliness by the hand of a woh the whole history of Israel, that reasonable coht destiny And, withal, a streak of savage spite: that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to death There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too So ”she sht, and she took away his head from him, and tumbled his body down fro Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox, ”The Lord hath s, thrilling antithesis insisted on over and over again by the old Hebrew bard ”Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his h his neck” That is the _leit-ht it to the no small comfort of Mr Ruskin and his irl still and three years a , flits horeen and the s herself the doged scimitar, with her pretty blue fal-lals s over her shoulders On her slim feet are the sandals that ravished his eyes; all herlike harebells in the wind Behind her plods the slave girl folded in an orange scarf, bearing that shapeless, nariend itself! For look at the girl's eyes What does their dreamy solemnity mean if not, ”the Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a wo he has allowed himself, which I may not omit You are to see by whom this deed was done: by a woman who has unsexed herself Judith is absorbed in her awful service; her robe trails on the ground and clings about her knees; she is unconscious of the hindrance The gates of Bethulia are in sight; the Chaldean horsemen are abroad, but she has no anxiety to escape She is swift because her life just now courses swiftly; but there is no haste

The maid, you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, and steps out the more lustily for it

So far Botticelli the poet, and so far also Mr Ruskin, reader of pictures What says Botticelli the painter? Had he no instincts to tell hiend? Or that a legend ht be the subject of an epic (here, indeed, was an epic ready ht, under conditions, be the subject of a drama; but could not, under any conditions, be alone the subject of a picture? I don't for a oes to work in this double-entry, methodical way, but are we entitled to say that he was not influenced by his predilections, his deterhtsman, when he squared himself to illustrate the Bible? We say that the subject of a picture is the spirit of natural fact If Botticelli was a painter, _that_ is what he must have looked for, and must have found, in every picture he painted Where, then, was he to get his natural facts in the story of Judith? What is, in that story, the natural, essential (as opposed to the historical, fleeting) fact? It is murder Judith's deed hat the old Scots law incisively calls _slauchter_ It lossed over as assassination or even execution--in fact, in Florence, where Giuliano was soon to be taken off, it did not fail to be so called: it re the position at all, judged murder to be a natural fact, and its spirit or essence swiftness and stealth Chaucer, let us note, had been of the same mind:

”The smyler with the knyf under his cloke,”

and so on, in lines not be estion

Swiftness and stealth, the a elements of murder: pare off all the rest, you co looks, your blood, your ”chirking,” are accidentals They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), but the horror of sudden death is above thehts cleaner than with his pair of hands And as ”matter” is but the stuff ith Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, e flout or nity of Art to insist upon the carrion she must use She will press, here the terror, there the radiance, of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it in her face, to add rown to trust No blood, if you please Therefore, in Botticelli's _Judith_, nothing but the essentials are insisted on; the rest we instantly iine, but it is not there to be sensed The panel is in a tremor So swift and secret is Judith, so furtive thehorsemen to re which shall go throughout all generations to the children of our nation” Sudden death in the air; nature has been outraged But there is no drop of blood--the thin scarlet line along the sword-edge is a sy:” yet we all knohat has been done

_Earthwork out of Tuscany_ (London, 1895)

THE AVENUE OF MIDDELHARNAIS

(_HOBBEMA_)

PAUL LAFOND

Some small and slender trees, branchless almost to their tops, border the two sides of a road, which occupies the centre of the picture, and extend all the way to a village which closes the horizon with several ainst a sky where the sun is veiled; to the right, a nursery-garden of shrubs and rose-trees separated from the road by a wide ditch full of water; then, in the s of a farm; to the left, a clump of trees and another ditch, and further back the spire of a church; a hunts, is walking on the road, and two peasants--a man and a woman--have stopped to chat on the path that leads across to the fararden; and this corner of a landscape has sufficed for Hobbema to produce a masterpiece which the National Gallery of London is justly proud to possess This youngest of the great European Museums is not the poorest and owns very considerable works of every school