Orion, the subject of this landscape, was the classical Nimrod; and is called by Homer, ‘a hunter of shadows, himself a shade.’ He was the son of Neptune1; and having lost an eve in some affray between the Gods and men, was told that if he would go to meet the rising sun he would recover his sight. He is represented setting out on his journey, with men on his shoulders to guide him, a bow in his hand, and Diana in the clouds greeting him. He stalks along, a giant upon earth, and reels and falters2 in his gait, as if just awakened3 out of sleep, or uncertain of his way; — you see his blindness, though his back is turned. Mists rise around him, and veil the sides of the green forests; earth is dank and fresh with dews, the ‘gray dawn and the Pleiades before him dance,’ and in the distance are seen the blue hills and sullen4 ocean. Nothing was ever more finely conceived or done. It breathes the spirit of the morning; its moisture, its repose6, its obscurity, waiting the miracle of light to kindle7 it into smiles; the whole is, like the principal figure in it, ‘a forerunner8 of the dawn.’ The same atmosphere tinges9 and imbues10 every object, the same dull light ‘shadowy sets off’ the face of nature: one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades11 the painter’s canvas, and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of things. This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time; he alone has a right to be considered as the painter of classical antiquity12. Sir Joshua has done him justice in this respect. He could give to the scenery of his heroic fables13 that unimpaired look of original nature, full, solid, large, luxuriant, teeming15 with life and power; or deck it with all the pomp of art, with tempyles and towers, and mythologic16 groves17. His pictures ‘denote a foregone conclusion.’ He applies Nature to his purposes, works out her images according to the standard of his thoughts, embodies19 high fictions; and the first conception being given, all the rest seems to grow out of and be assimilated to it, by the unfailing process of a studious imagination. Like his own Orion, he overlooks the surrounding scene, appears to ‘take up the isles20 as a very little thing, and to lay the earth in a balance.’ With a laborious21 and mighty22 grasp, he puts nature into the mould of the ideal and antique; and was among painters (more than any one else) what Milton was among poets. There is in both something of the same pedantry23, the same stiffness, the same elevation24, the same grandeur25, the same mixture of art and nature, the same richness of borrowed materials, the same unity26 of character. Neither the poet nor the painter lowered the subjects they treated, but filled up the outline in the fancy, and added strength and reality to it; and thus not only satisfied, but surpassed the expectations of the spectator and the reader. This is held for the triumph and the perfection of works of art. To give us nature, such as we see it, is well and deserving of praise; to give us nature, such as we have never seen, but have often wished to see it, is better, and deserving of higher praise. He who can show the world in its first naked glory, with the hues27 of fancy spread over it, or in its high and palmy state, with the gravity of history stamped on the proud monuments of vanished empire — who, by his ‘so potent28 art,’ can recall time past, transport us to distant places, and join the regions of imagination (a new conquest) to those of reality — who shows us not only what Nature is, but what she has been, and is capable of — he who does this, and does it with simplicity29, with truth, and grandeur, is lord of Nature and her powers; and his mind is universal, and his art the master-art!
There is nothing in this ‘more than natural,’ if criticism could be persuaded to think so. The historic painter does not neglect or contravene30 Nature, but follows her more closely up into her fantastic heights or hidden recesses31. He demonstrates what she would be in conceivable circumstances and under implied conditions. He ‘gives to airy nothing a local habitation,’ not ‘a name.’ At his touch, words start up into images, thoughts become things. He clothes a dream, a phantom32, with form and colour, and the wholesome33 attributes of reality. His art is a second nature; not a different one. There are those, indeed, who think that not to copy nature is the rule for attaining34 perfection. Because they cannot paint the objects which they have they have, they fancy themselves qualified35 to paint the ideas which they have not seen. But it is possible to fail in this latter and more difficult style of imitation, as well as in the former humbler one. The detection, it is true, is not so easy, because the objects are not so nigh at hand to compare, and therefore there is more room both for false pretension36 and for self-deceit. They take an epic37 motto or subject, and conclude that the spirit is implied as a thing of course. They paint inferior portraits, maudlin38 lifeless faces, without ordinary expression, or one look, feature, or particle of nature in them, and think that this is to rise to the truth of history. They vulgarise and degrade whatever is interesting or sacred to the mind, and suppose that they thus add to the dignity of their profession. They represent a face that seems as if no thought or feeling of any kind had ever passed through it, and would have you believe that this is the very sublime39 of expression, such as it would appear in heroes, or demigods of old, when rapture40 or agony was raised to its height. They show you a landscape that looks as if the sun never shone upon it, and tell you that it is not modern — that so earth looked when Titan first kissed it with his rays. This is not the true ideal. It is not to fill the moulds of the imagination, but to deface and injure them; it is not to come up to, but to fall short of the poorest conception in the public mind. Such pictures should not be hung in the same room with that of Orion.56
Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical41. He was the painter of ideas. No one ever told a story half so well, nor so well knew what was capable of being told by the pencil. He seized on, and struck off with grace and precision, just that point of view which would be likely to catch the reader’s fancy. There is a significance, a consciousness in whatever he does (sometimes a vice42, but oftener a virtue) beyond any other painter. His Giants sitting on the tops of craggy mountains, as huge themselves, and playing idly on their Pan’s-pipes, seem to have been seated there these three thousand years, and to know the beginning and the end of their own story. An infant Bacchus or Jupiter is big with his future destiny. Even inanimate and dumb things speak a language of their own. His snakes, the messengers of fate, are inspired with human intellect. His trees grow and expand their leaves in the air, glad of the rain, proud of the sun, awake to the winds of heaven. In his Plague of Athens, the very buildings seem stiff with horror. His picture of the Deluge43 is, perhaps, the finest historical landscape in the world. You see a waste of waters, wide, interminable the sun is labouring, wan44 and weary, up the sky the clouds, dull and leaden, lie like a load upon the eye, and heaven and earth seem commingling45 into one confused mass! His human figures are sometimes ‘o’erinformed’ with this kind of feeling. Their actions have too much gesticulation, and the set expression of the features borders too much on the mechanical and caricatured style. In this respect they form a contrast to Raphael’s, whose figures never appear to be sitting for their pictures, or to be conscious of a spectator, or to have come from the painter’s hand. In Nicolas Poussin, on the contrary, everything seems to have a distinct understanding with the artist; ‘the very stones prate46 of their whereabout’; each object has its part and place assigned, and is in a sort of compact with the rest of the picture. It is this conscious keeping, and, as it were, internal design, that gives their peculiar47 character to the works of this artist. There was a picture of Aurora48 in the British Gallery a year or two ago. It was a suffusion49 of golden light. The Goddess wore her saffron-coloured robes, and appeared just risen from the gloomy bed of old Tithonus. Her very steeds, milk-white, were tinged50 with the yellow dawn. It was a personification of the morning. Poussin succeeded better in classic than in sacred subjects. The latter are comparatively heavy, forced, full of violent contrasts of colour, of red, blue, and black, and without the true prophetic inspiration of the characters. But in his pagan allegories and fables he was quite at home. The native gravity and native levity51 of the Frenchman were combined with Italian scenery and an antique gusto, and gave even to his colouring an air of learned indifference52. He wants, in one respect, grace, form, expression; but he has everywhere sense and meaning, perfect costume and propriety53. His personages always belong to the class and time represented, and are strictly54 versed55 in the business in hand. His grotesque56 compositions in particular, his Nymphs and Fauns, are superior (at least, as far as style is concerned) even to those of Rubens. They are taken more immediately out of fabulous57 history. Rubens’ Satyrs and Bacchantes have a more jovial58 and voluptuous59 aspect, are more drunk with pleasure, more full of animal spirits and riotous60 impulses; they laugh and bound along —
Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring:
but those of Poussin have more of the intellectual part of the character, and seem vicious on reflection, and of set purpose. Rubens’ are noble specimens61 of a class; Poussin’s are allegorical abstractions of the same class, with bodies less pampered62, but with minds more secretly depraved. The Bacchanalian63 groups of the Flemish painter were, however, his masterpieces in composition. Witness those prodigies64 of colour, character, and expression at Blenheim. In the more chaste65 and refined delineation66 of classic fable14, Poussin was without a rival. Rubens, who was a match for him in the wild and picturesque67, could not pretend to vie with the elegance68 and purity of thought in his picture of Apollo giving a poet a cup of water to drink, nor with the gracefulness69 of design in the figure of a nymph squeezing the juice of a bunch of grapes from her fingers (a rosy70 wine-press) which falls into the mouth of a chubby71 infant below. But, above all, who shall celebrate, in terms of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going out in a fine morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription72: ET EGO18 IN ARCADIA VIXI! 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 zephyrs73 use,’ the distant, uninterrupted, sunny prospect74 speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to come!57
Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind, to con5 over the relies of ancient art bound up ‘within the book and volume of the brain, unmixed (if it were possible) with baser matter!’ A life passed among pictures, in the study and the love of art, is a happy noiseless dream: or rather, it is to dream and to be awake at the same time; for it has all ‘the sober certainty of waking bliss,’ with the romantic voluptuousness75 of a visionary and abstracted being. They are the bright consummate76 essences of things, and ‘he who knows of these delights to taste and interpose them oft, is not unwise!’— The Orion, which I have here taken occasion to descant77 upon, is one of a collection of excellent pictures, as this collection is itself one of a series from the old masters, which have for some years back embrowned the walls of the British Gallery, and enriched the public eye. What hues (those of nature mellowed78 by time) breathe around as we enter! What forms are there, woven into the memory! What looks, which only the answering looks of the spectator can express! What intellectual stores have been yearly poured forth79 from the shrine80 of ancient art! The works are various, but the names the same — heaps of Rembrandts frowning from the darkened walls, Rubens’ glad gorgeous groups, Titians more rich and rare, Claudes always exquisite81, sometimes beyond compare, Guido’s endless cloying82 sweetness, the learning of Poussin and the Caracci, and Raphael’s princely magnificence crowning all. We read certain letters and syllables83 in the Catalogue, and at the well-known magic sound a miracle of skill and beauty starts to view. One might think that one year’s prodigal84 display of such perfection would exhaust the labours of one man’s life; but the next year, and the next to that, we find another harvest reaped and gathered in to the great garner85 of art, by the same immortal86 hands —
Old GENIUS the porter of them was;
He letteth in, he letteth out to wend. —
Their works seem endless as their reputation — to be many as they are complete — to multiply with the desire of the mind to see more and more of them; as if there were a living power in the breath of Fame, and in the very names of the great heirs of glory ‘there were propagation to year; to have one last, lingering look yet to come. Pictures are scattered87 like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding88 left, not quite rubbed off, dishonoured89, and defaced. There are plenty of standard works still to be found in this country, in the collections at Blenheim, at Burleigh, and in those belonging to Mr. Angerstein, Lord Grosvenor, the Marquis of Stafford, and others, to keep up this treat to the lovers of art for many years; and it is the more desirable to reserve a privileged sanctuary90 of this sort, where the eye may dote, and the heart take its fill of such pictures as Poussin’s Orion, since the Louvre is stripped of its triumphant91 spoils, and since he who collected it, and wore it as a rich jewel in his Iron Crown, the hunter of greatness and of glory, is himself a shade!
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1
Neptune
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| n.海王星 | |
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falters
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| （嗓音）颤抖( falter的第三人称单数 )； 支吾其词； 蹒跚； 摇晃 | |
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awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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sullen
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| adj.愠怒的，闷闷不乐的，(天气等)阴沉的 | |
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con
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| n.反对的观点，反对者，反对票，肺病；vt.精读，学习，默记；adv.反对地，从反面；adj.欺诈的 | |
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repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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kindle
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| v.点燃，着火 | |
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forerunner
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| n.前身，先驱（者），预兆，祖先 | |
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tinges
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| n.细微的色彩，一丝痕迹( tinge的名词复数 ) | |
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imbues
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| v.使（某人/某事）充满或激起（感情等）( imbue的第三人称单数 )；使充满；灌输；激发（强烈感情或品质等） | |
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pervades
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| v.遍及，弥漫( pervade的第三人称单数 ) | |
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antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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fables
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| n.寓言( fable的名词复数 )；神话，传说 | |
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fable
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| n.寓言；童话；神话 | |
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teeming
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| adj.丰富的v.充满( teem的现在分词 )；到处都是；（指水、雨等）暴降；倾注 | |
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mythologic
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| 神话学的，神话的，虚构的 | |
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groves
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| 树丛，小树林( grove的名词复数 ) | |
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ego
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| n.自我，自己，自尊 | |
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embodies
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| v.表现( embody的第三人称单数 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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isles
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| 岛( isle的名词复数 ) | |
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laborious
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| adj.吃力的，努力的，不流畅 | |
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mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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pedantry
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| n.迂腐，卖弄学问 | |
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elevation
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| n.高度；海拔；高地；上升；提高 | |
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grandeur
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| n.伟大，崇高，宏伟，庄严，豪华 | |
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unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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hues
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| 色彩( hue的名词复数 )； 色调； 信仰； 观点 | |
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potent
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| adj.强有力的，有权势的；有效力的 | |
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simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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contravene
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| v.违反，违背，反驳，反对 | |
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recesses
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| n.壁凹( recess的名词复数 )；（工作或业务活动的）中止或暂停期间；学校的课间休息；某物内部的凹形空间v.把某物放在墙壁的凹处( recess的第三人称单数 )；将（墙）做成凹形，在（墙）上做壁龛；休息，休会，休庭 | |
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phantom
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| n.幻影，虚位，幽灵；adj.错觉的，幻影的，幽灵的 | |
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wholesome
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| adj.适合；卫生的；有益健康的；显示身心健康的 | |
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attaining
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的现在分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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pretension
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| n.要求；自命，自称；自负 | |
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epic
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| n.史诗，叙事诗；adj.史诗般的，壮丽的 | |
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maudlin
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| adj.感情脆弱的，爱哭的 | |
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sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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rapture
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| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
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poetical
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| adj.似诗人的；诗一般的；韵文的；富有诗意的 | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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deluge
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| n./vt.洪水，暴雨，使泛滥 | |
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wan
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| (wide area network)广域网 | |
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commingling
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| v.混合，掺和，合并( commingle的现在分词 ) | |
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prate
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| v.瞎扯，胡说 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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aurora
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| n.极光 | |
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suffusion
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| n.充满 | |
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50
tinged
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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51
levity
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| n.轻率，轻浮，不稳定，多变 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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versed
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| adj. 精通，熟练 | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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fabulous
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| adj.极好的；极为巨大的；寓言中的，传说中的 | |
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jovial
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| adj.快乐的，好交际的 | |
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voluptuous
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| adj.肉欲的，骄奢淫逸的 | |
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riotous
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| adj.骚乱的；狂欢的 | |
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specimens
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| n.样品( specimen的名词复数 )；范例；（化验的）抽样；某种类型的人 | |
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pampered
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| adj.饮食过量的，饮食奢侈的v.纵容，宠，娇养( pamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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bacchanalian
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| adj.闹酒狂饮的；n.发酒疯的人 | |
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prodigies
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| n.奇才，天才（尤指神童）( prodigy的名词复数 ) | |
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chaste
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| adj.贞洁的；有道德的；善良的；简朴的 | |
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delineation
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| n.记述；描写 | |
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picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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elegance
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| n.优雅；优美，雅致；精致，巧妙 | |
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gracefulness
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rosy
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| adj.美好的，乐观的，玫瑰色的 | |
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chubby
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| adj.丰满的，圆胖的 | |
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inscription
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| n.（尤指石块上的）刻印文字，铭文，碑文 | |
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zephyrs
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| n.和风，微风( zephyr的名词复数 ) | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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voluptuousness
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| n.风骚，体态丰满 | |
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consummate
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| adj.完美的；v.成婚；使完美 [反]baffle | |
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descant
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| v.详论，絮说；n.高音部 | |
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mellowed
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| （使）成熟( mellow的过去式和过去分词 )； 使色彩更加柔和，使酒更加醇香 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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exquisite
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| adj.精美的；敏锐的；剧烈的，感觉强烈的 | |
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cloying
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| adj.甜得发腻的 | |
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syllables
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| n.音节( syllable的名词复数 ) | |
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prodigal
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| adj.浪费的，挥霍的，放荡的 | |
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garner
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| v.收藏；取得 | |
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immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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gilding
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| n.贴金箔，镀金 | |
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dishonoured
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| a.不光彩的，不名誉的 | |
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sanctuary
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| n.圣所，圣堂，寺庙；禁猎区，保护区 | |
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triumphant
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| adj.胜利的，成功的；狂欢的，喜悦的 | |
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