Volume Ii Part 31 (2/2)

I escaped from that perilous womb of sound, and ascended still higher.

There was the mystery of that nocturnal minstrelsy. Seventy-three bells in chromatic diapason--with their tinkling, ringing, tolling, knolling peal! Was not that a chime? a chime of chimes? And all these goblin hammers, like hands and feet of sprites, rising and falling, by magic, by hidden mechanism.

Of all German cactus blossoms this is the most ethereal. What head conceived those harmonies, so ghostlike? Every ten minutes, if you lie wakeful, they wind you up in a net of silver wirework, and swing you in the clouds; and the next time they swing you higher, and the next higher, and when the round hour is full the giant bell strikes at the gate of heaven to bring you home!

But this is dreaming. Fie, fie! Let us come down to pictures, ma.s.ses, and common sense. We came down. We entered the room, and sat before the Descent from the Cross, where the dead body of Jesus seems an actual reality before you. The waves of the high ma.s.s came rolling in, m.u.f.fled by intervening walls, columns, corridors, in a low, mysterious murmur. Then organ, orchestra, and choir, with rising voices urged the mighty acclaim, till the waves seemed beating down the barriers upon us. The combined excitement of the chimes, the painting, the music, was too much. I seemed to breathe ether. Treading on clouds, as it were, I entered the cathedral, and the illusion vanished.

Friday, August 19. Antwerp to Paris.

Sat.u.r.day, August 20. H. and I take up our abode at the house of M.

Belloc, where we find every thing so pleasant, that we sigh to think how soon we must leave these dear friends. The rest of our party are at the Hotel Bedford.

LETTER XLVII.

Antwerp.

MY DEAR:--

Of all quaint places this is one of the most charming. I have been rather troubled that antiquity has fled before me where I have gone.

It is a fatality of travelling that the sense of novelty dies away, so that we do not realize that we are seeing any thing extraordinary. I wanted to see something as quaint as Nuremberg in Longfellow's poem, and have but just found it. These high-gabled old Flemish houses, nine steps to each gable! The cathedral, too, affects me more in externals than any yet. And the spire looks as I expected that of Strasbourg would. As to the grammarye of bells and chimes, I deliver that over to Charlie. But--I have seen Rubens's painting! Before I came to Europe, Longfellow said to me, ”You must go to Antwerp, to see Rubens.”

”I do not think I shall like Rubens,” was my reply.

”But you will, though. Yet never judge till you have been to Antwerp.”

So, during our various meanders, I kept my eye with a steady resolve on this place. I confess I went out to see the painting without much enthusiasm. My experience with Correggio's Notte, and some of the celebrities of Dresden, was not encouraging. I was weary, too, with sightseeing. I expected to find an old, dim picture, half spoiled by cleaning, which I should be required to look into shape, by an exercise of my jaded imagination.

Alter coming down from hearing the chimes, we went into a side room, and sat down before the painting. My first sensation was of astonishment, blank, absolute, overwhelming. After all that I had seen, I had no idea of a painting like this. I was lifted off my feet, as much as by Cologne cathedral, or Niagara Falls, so that I could neither reason nor think whether I was pleased or not. It is difficult, even now, to a.n.a.lyze the sources of this wonderful power.

The excellence of this picture does not lie, like Raphael's, in a certain ideal spirituality, by which the scene is raised above earth to the heavenly sphere; but rather in a power, strong, human, almost homely, by which, not an ideal, but the real scene is forced home upon the heart.

_Christ is dead_,--dead to your eye as he was to the eye of Mary and of John. Death absolute, hopeless, is written in the faded majesty of that face, peaceful and weary; death in every relaxed muscle. And, surely, in painting this form, some sentiment of reverence and devotion softened into awestruck tenderness that hand commonly so vigorous; for, instead of the almost coa.r.s.e vitality which usually pervades his manly figures, there is shed over this a spiritualized refinement, not less, but more than human, as if some heavenly voice whispered, ”This is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world!”

The figures of the disciples are real and individual in expression.

The sorrow is homely, earnest, unpicturesque, and grievously heart broken. The cheek of the kneeling Mary at his feet is wet with tears.

You cannot ask yourself whether she is beautiful or not. You only see and sympathize with her sorrow. But the apostle John, who receives into his arms the descending form, is the most wonderful of all.

Painters that I have seen represent him too effeminately. They forget the ardent soul whom Jesus rebuked for wis.h.i.+ng to bring down fire from heaven on his enemies; they forget that it was John who was called the son of thunder, and that his emblem in the early church was the eagle.

From the spiritualized softness of his writings we have formed another picture, forgetting that these are the writings of an aged man, in whom the ardor of existence has been softened by long experience of suffering, and habits of friends.h.i.+p with a suffering Lord.

Rubens's conception of John is that of a vigorous and plenary manhood, whose rush is like that of a torrent, in the very moment when his great heart is breaking. He had loved his Master with a love like an eternity; he had believed him; heart and soul, mind and strength--all had he given to that kingdom which he was to set up; and he had seen him die--die by lingering torture. And at this moment he feels it all.

There is no Christ, no kingdom--nothing! All is over. ”We _trusted_ it had been he who should have redeemed Israel.” With that miraculous, lifelike power that only Rubens has, he shows him to us in this moment of suppressed agony; the blood choking his heart, the veins swollen, and every muscle quivering with the grief to which he will not give way. O, for this wonderful and deep conception, this almost divine insight into the mysteries of that hour, one might love Rubens. This picture cannot be engraved. No engraving is more than a diagram, to show the places of the figures. For, besides its mesmeric life, which no artist can reproduce, there is a balancing of colors, a gorgeousness about it, as if he had learned coloring from the great Master himself. Even in the overpowering human effect of this piece, it is impossible not to perceive that every difficulty which artists vaunt themselves on vanquis.h.i.+ng has in this piece been conquered with apparently instinctive ease, simply because it was habitual to do so, and without in the least distracting the attention from the great moral. Magical foreshortenings and wonderful effects of color appear to be purely incidental to the expression of a great idea. I left this painting as one should leave the work of a great religious master-- thinking more of Jesus and of John than of Rubens.

After this we went through many galleries and churches devoted to his works; for Antwerp is Rubens's shrine. None of them impressed me, as compared with this. One of his Madonnas, however, I must not forget to describe, it was a conceit so just like him. Instead of the pale, downcast, or upturned faces, which form the general types of Madonna, he gives her to us, in one painting, as a gorgeous Oriental sultana, leaning over a balcony, with full, dark eye and jewelled turban, and rounded outlines, sustaining on her hand a brilliant paroquet.

Ludicrous as this conception appears in a scriptural point of view, I liked it because there was life in it; because he had painted it from an internal sympathy, not from a chalky, second-hand tradition.

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