THE HISTORY OF OUR LORD AS EXEMPLIFIED IN WORKS OF
ART.* Tare is a posthumous work by Mrs. Jameson—commenced by her, and continued and completed by Lady Eastlake. The part written by the former has been published without alteration, distinguished from the rest by brackets, like a modern edition of Blackstone, a mode of editing which is rather detrimental to the unity of a book. This perhaps is the reason why the first person is so frequently introduced, and the writer's personal im- pressions described. Probably such passages were memoranda, or extracts from a diary, and not intended for publication exactly as they stood.
A book about Art is attractive to very few readers. With pro- fessed artists books and criticisms by writers not bred up to practise any branch of Art are not likely to have much authority, and most other people have a pretty decided opinion of their own as to whether a work of Art is good or bad, and do not care to be preached to by connoisseurs. The very word Art has a sus- picion of humbug about it. What right has the art of painting, or building, or making objects beautiful, to be called Art par excellence, any more than the art of making shoes? A picture at best can only represent faithfully the scene or incident to which it refers, and any one can judge of it who has good eyes and knows the story. Nobody who is without an eye for form or colour can be supplied with one by being perpetually told what he ought and what he ought not to admire ; but a person with a true perception of beauty may fail to appreciate much that is beautiful in art from sheer ignorance of many of the incidents represented, or from being unable to interpret what is symbolic or conventional. Perhaps no man living could explain all the pictures in the National Gallery, with all their details, and with all that is symbolic in them. Good pictures, especially on sacred subjects, have so much story, or rather so many stories in them, that books are wanted simply to tell us these stories. Mrs. Jameson's books are invaluable in so far as they supply this want. The patience and perseverance which she has shown in collecting the vast number of myths and legends which have grown up round sacred subjects have furnished much very valuable information. It is this portion of her writings which is by far the best. Her descriptions of pictures are apt to be too numerous and rather tiresome. The present work, which completes a series, is for this reason less valuable than its predecessors. The " Legends of the Madonna" and "Sacred and Legendary Art" contain much without -which many of the works of art referred to in these books would be to most persons unintelligible. But in the " History of Our Lord" there is comparatively little which is not familiar to even a cursory reader of the Bible. The legends which have been connected with it, as, for instance, those of the Sibyls, are com- paratively unimportant. It is superfluous to tell us that to understand the full force of the parable of the Good Samaritan " we must remember the bitter feuds which existed between • The History of our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art; with that of Hit Types, Bt. John the Baptist, and other Persons of the Old and New Testament. Commenced by the late Mrs. Jameson. Continued an I completed b Lady Eastlake. In Two Volumes. London : Longmans. the Jews and the Samaritans, and that they would not even speak to each other." The book might have been shortened with advantage if credit had been given to the reader for at least a slight knowledge of the Bible.
One topic, the opposition of temporary fact to permanent truth in Art, is interestingly touched upon more than once. Ought we, in looking at a representation of a sacred subject, to see nothing but what we should then have seen had we been present? Should the artist aim at representing nothing but the bare fact, casting aside as rust or cobweb all the ideas which subsequent genera- tions have superadded to the fact, omitting the Eternal and Divine significance, which was true none the less because at the time unseen, unrecognized, and perhaps invisible to human sight? Or should he make it his first object to bring out the main idea prominently and unmistakeably, so that " he who runs may read," and subordinate detail, and, if need be, sacrifice fact itself, if it be only barren fact? For truth may demand shadow where fact shows glitter.
" All will agree that the duty of the Christian artist is to give not only the temporary fact, but the permanent truth. Yet this entails a discrepancy to which something must be sacrificed. For, in the scenes from our Lord's life fact and truth are frequently at variance. That the Maddalene took our Lord for a gardener was a fact ; that He was the Christ is the truth. That the Roman soldiers believed Him to be a criminal, and therefore mocked and buffeted Him without scruple, is the fact ; that we know Him through all these scenes to be the Christ is the truth. Nay, the very cruciform nimbus that encircles Christ's head is an assertion of this principle. As visible to us, it is true ; as visible even to His disciples, it is false."
Early Christian art had for its one aim religious instruction, and, having its power of expression so limited, was obliged to use so many arbitrary symbols as to obscure the reality. As it developed and approached perfection, such assistance was dis- carded, and a reaction of excessive respect for fact succeeded. Sometimes, —as, for instance, in some of Murillo's pictures,—it is difficult to say whether the subject is a sacred one or not. Even the devotional Raphael did not escape this influence. There is a picture of his of "Christ Appearing to Mary Magdalen" (of which we are given a woodcut), where, in order to 'express the fact of His being taken for the gardener, the figure is made " old and clumsy, with disorderly beard and plebeian face, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, and with a pickaxe on his shoulder."
The modern pre-Raphaelites also are in this respect essentially unpre-Raphaelite. The subjects of Holman Hunt's pictures can seldom be guessed without the help of the catalogue. His " Christ in the Temple" attracts the eye to any figure rather than to the one for the sake of which all the others should be there. The underlying truth, the reverential feeling which belongs to the subject, is sacrificed to historically accurate de- lineation of the gorgeously clad Rabbis and of the brilliant magnificence of the Temple.
The following remarks on the subject of the Crucifixion are full of thought and feeling :-
"Unmistakeable at a glance it rears itself up before us, having for centuries enlisted every kind of art, and every class of the artist mind; a monument of the faith which weighed no considerations of art in its prescription of such a scene, and a trophy of the art which relied unquestioning on faith to redeem the unfitness of such a scone for representation—the last thing to which classic art would have devoted its powers, and by no means the first thing which Christian art ventured to bring before the sight; which needed the lapse of centuries of prejudice and timidity before it could be represented at all, but which, setting forth, as it does, the great culminating mystery of our faith,—the head corner-stone of the Theological Temple, The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,' has since abounded in an hundredfold proportion to every other form of Scripture representa- tion. No subject in the whole cycle of art is seen under such peculiar conditions as the Crucifixion. Two causes prevent our viewing it, even if we would, through the medium of common and absolute reality; the reverence of ages, which has invested what is supposed to have been the most dreadful form of death with sanctity, and the disuse of ages
which has consigned its horrors to oblivion. Art furnishes a third cause, for she herself refuses to bring this scene within the conditions of reality. However common and real the other features of the picture, however distorted the figure on the Cross under the disfiguring influence of Byzantine feeling, that figure is always more or less a convention, or the eye could not look upon it."
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