Looking at Pictures
By PAMELA HANSFORD JOHNSON Sometimes when I am particularly troubled or restless or when there is an ordeal of some sort in store, I go there for release of spirit; for the ataraxis that comes from feeling Time Regained. I go to look at French and Flemish primitive paint- ings because of the peace and humanity preserved in them; these early artists made their notations of life as directly as a child draws a flower in a pot. Their thought is easily com- municable because it is not addressed to artists, because it is, in the best sense, unsophisticated. Their religious belief was simple. Heaven was above, Hell was below, man was sus- pended between. Their idea of God and of the Devil was anthropomorphic; they would have recognised either at sight, and the praying donor, in awe before the Virgin, knelt never- theless in the presence of someone whom he knew.
The contemplation of time past makes the present and the thought of the future easier to endure. The spectator who is well acquainted with these quiet, experienced men and women hundreds of years dead, feels a solidarity with them. As I live, so did they : as the world passed away for them, so will it for me. This is a reflection for the dark moments : and for the joyful ones—" What a piece of work is man ! . . . in action, how like an angel ! in apprehension, how like a god ! the beauty of the world ! " I went there last week to see three paintings. The first is a panel by Simon Marmion, the painter of Valenciennes (1458- 1489). He was an illuminator—prince d'enluminure he was called, and Grete Ring, in her introduction to the Phaidon Century of French Painting (1400-1500) speaks of his " wit and elegance." Elegance, yes : it was natural to his being; but his work is no more witty than Uccello's rocking horses could be called witty, though to a modern mind suspending historical reflection they might well seem so.
We look through the picture-frame as through a window upon the roof of a church. It is a still and apple-coloured evening, rheure verte; the sort of evening for walking in love by rivers. But above the spires a prim-faced, naked saint is being borne upwards, kneeling in a napkin, by two angels, civil servants of Heaven, whose robes crinkle up. Over the sky as their wings strike up to the darkness at the core of which sits God the Father. The surrgalistes used to claim, as their forerunners, Breughel and Bosch: I have never heard them claim Marmion. Yet any frisson evoked by saucepan-hatted fish and walking eggs is to me othing beside the frisson this panel sends from my scalp to y spine. We are unprepared to meet this God. A plump, ld, calm little man, robed in vermilion, a mitre on his head, e sits in the small, stuffy room of eternity, upon an enormous throne. He is ready for Saint Bertin : and the saint, though he looks a little apprehensive, appears to be ready for him. There is something terrible in the ordinariness of this God; one feels he is terrible as only a human being could be, as un- feeling, as inflexible, as merciless. Nevertheless, he is serene as the green sky is serene, and in his own fashion as majestic.
If we could lean further across the frame we might see, in the shadow of the great church, the street below, the men and women going about their evening business unconcerned with heaven, having no idea of the apotheosis taking place above their heads; yet, if they could see this mitred God as Marmion saw him, they would recognise him without surprise as the Judge and Creator to whose small brown study they, too, at last, must come to give account of themselves.
This is rheure verte: hanging to the left of it is l'heure bleue. The painter is Netherlandish, unknown : the date about 1500. Imagine that you have entered a wood of tall straight trees, geometrically planted. It is about nine o'clock of a summer's night. Between the trunks the sky is the intense and luminous blue that Poussin set behind his fauns and satyrs. It is a breathless sky, a breathless wood. Not a leaf stirs. You walk slowly, in the magic of expectancy : expecting what? (The moment of love, the miraculous fulfilment of desire?) Cer- tainly not to come abruptly upon a clearing, in which is a tall church made of carved wood, the doors and windows blazing with yellow light, and before the church a plain little Virgin sitting contentedly with her court of plain little angels, lady and angels enjoying the sensuous coolness of night after the hot day. The angels are making music and eating cherries; the baby, comfortable on a velvet cushion, in one hand holds a little blue bird and stretches out the other for a sweet.
Here, as it were, are the hosts of Heaven unbuttoned, informal, off-duty, ugly and quiet and charming in the depths of their private forest, for once having nothing whatsoever to do with us, and not for a moment suspecting that they are observed by their children on earth. It is the peace of the comfortingly commonplace at the heart of mystery; as Seurat's bowler-hatted, commonplace bathers are at peace within the mystery of light split into separate wavelengths. If the angels in this Netherlandish wood were represented in their paradisal beauty, their charm would not be so close to us; it is close now because they are like us, because, for a moment, we are taken into the secret of their ordinariness—for even angels must seem ordinary to themselves when they are among equals.
This is not a great picture; but it has, for me, the comfort of a resting place in which no time exists, in which only God exists, friendly, in the garden, in the cool of an eternal evening which is as lovely as the most lovely of all the evenings we have remembered On earth.
The third painting is the " Virgin and Child with Firescreen," by Robert Campin (1378-1444). She is a heavy, charmless woman, with melon-shaped face, a little severe, and hair of lambswool; yet she is completely at ease with Heaven and with earth. In her plainness she is noble and universal; not simply the mother of God, but the mother of any one of us, The child is lean and has a cunning look. His hands are blackened at the joints as though he has been playing in the coal-box. All the sad future is in his wise and wizened face. Beyond the window there is the Flemish street, with men and women going 'about their daily business—butcher, baker, candlestick-maker—having no idea that God's mother is sitting in a house in their own town, simple and homely as bread within the body of the community.
How does this house, look from the street? It may seem to us that the bricks should have been transformed into gold, that the holy light should prick like golden needles through the mortar; yet in fact there is nothing at all to tell the townspeople that the Virgin can hear their raised voices, the rattle of their carts, the cries of the street-sellers. Thus God was brought: into daily life by the Flemish primitive painters, dwelling with men corporeally as well as spiritually, so that men could think then of Heaven with an intimacy lost for us, which we can never regain, although it strengthens and refreshes us now to share for .a moment, through their art, the spirit of those who knew it five hundred years ago.
It is not, in the true sense, a religious feeling that I try to experience through these three paintings; it is the comfort of being in touch, for a little while, with the certainties of others. For it is one thing to have faith and quite another to be certain : and the Time Regained by the art of the middle ages is the time when men were not only sure of the life to come but were sure of its nature; when they knew what dress the angels would wear and were familiar with the botany of paradise.
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