THE " ISABEL " OF BOCCACIO, HOLMAN HUNT, AND MR.
CRACROFT.
IN the new number of the Fortnightly Review there is a paper by Mr. Bernard Cracroft, on Holman Hunt's picture of " Isabel" and her pot of sweet basil, which seems to us rather a re- markable specimen of subtle writing and erroneous criticism. Mr. Cracroft speaks of himself with so much elaborate disrespect as a " nobody " who has no right to be heard on a question of Art except as one of that general public by reference to whose taste all pictures must, in the end, find their fame or their oblivion, that we cannot but reply that his published essays, and especially those which touch critical and msthetic subjects, are, in fact, of a class to lift him quite above the level of this general public, and to entitle his voice to be regarded as a very influential one in guiding, and even in prepossessing, the minds of ordinary picture-gazers. Mr. Cracroft, beginning with humility, ends almost with self -humi- liation, and both the humility and humiliation are evidently per- fectly simple and sincere,—if, also, a little Grandisonian ;—but so little did these qualities seem to us to be in place, that though the present writer has admired Mr. Holman Hunt's pictures,—one or two excepted,—more than any other pictures of the present day, and though he gazes on pictures with perfectly unpurged, un- trained, and almost uncultivated eyes,—eyes by no means blind to the superficial and popular charm of what Mr. Cracroft finely calls " biting and ahnost terrible colour,"—he confesses that he accepted Mr. Cracroft's guidance with implicit deference, and having read his criticism before seeing the object of it, went to gaze on Mr. Holman Hunt's picture in a state of mind that can only be described as intellectually retained for the prosecution,—pre- occupied with the force of Mr. Cracroft's description of Holman Hunt's " Isabel," and completely subdued by the weight of Mr. Cracroft's argument. Nor was the weight of his authority,—we are speaking seriously, and not ironically, as all who have enjoyed the fine flavour of his subtle and delicate essays may well believe,— in the least diminished by that humble confession that he had written " just what comes into my mind when I sit in my slippers, with my pipe in my mouth," with which his criticism concludes. If there is a frame of mind and body in which the perceptive taste -of a man of fine perceptive taste is at its best, it is, we imagine, when he sits at ease in his slippers, with his pipe in his mouth. That spontaneous and unconstrained attitude of mind and body is ,precisely the one in which Mr. Cracroft must be at once most natural, and therefore also, at all events to diffident souls, most formidable, as a critic. It is not the high-strung nerve, but the indolent, unschooled, spontaneous receptive states of a mind like Mr. Cracroft's, that we should most perfectly trust in a matter of taste. The images of the slippers and the pipe, instead of diminishing, increased our confidence in the critic ; and before we reached King Street, St. James's, we found our- selves deploring bitterly that so great an artist should have treated so fine a subject so ill.
Let us first quote Mr. Cracroft's picture of what Keats's Isabel ought to have been, and then give his description of what she is. After speaking finely and justly of Mr. Holman Hunt's glorious .picture of "The Afterglow" in Egypt, and especially of "the repose, and life, and lazy energy pent up" in the " lovely animal- ism" of the Egyptian girl's figure, Mr. Cracroft goes on :—
" How different the theme in 'Isabel How opposite upon any theory -of representation whatsoever! Could painter hit upon a more intricate, -a finer subject for analytic art, a more subtle and manifold crux and test of true conception and higher knowledge ? Harrowing love; per- waited gentleness ; distorted idealism, twisted to the uses of a horrible craft and hideous satisfaction ; mystery; a raging lust to snatch even -death from out the hands of fate, to defy the grave ; revenge, as in hyper-delicate natures, turned not outwardly upon others, but inwardly to self-torture; the lunacy of moral grief with intellectual self-possession ; eold, slow, lasting passion in a frame burning fiercely unto death after the wild fever of a happy love, the wilder frenzy of bereavement ; and all this in the nature alone capable of the highest forms of idealistic per- -version—the nervous delicate, fiery, headlong, restrained, yet simple all- in-all nature—ice without, volcano within ; is this Mr. Holman Hunt's 'conception? The answer is that Mr. Hunt's Isabel ' has all the health, .all the vigorous superabundant animalism of his Egyptian girl in the Afterglow ;' that is to say, without quite the same animal gloss, the same, if I may use the expression, animal sheen and brilliancy. Both .are splendid animals, but one a pleasing animal, the other marred by an -effort to embody some sort of meaning which is utterly foreign to her .nature."
And then, after analyzing at length Keats's conception of " Fair Isabel, poor, simple Isabel," and declining to refer to Boccacio, Keats's authority, on the ground that Mr. Holman Hunt has taken his motto, not from Boccacio, but from Keats, Mr. ,Cracroft thus describes what he saw, or thought he saw, in the " Isabel" of Mr. Holman Hunt :- "First, as to colours—a strange, sharp contrast of opaline white • drapery on a large pink figure, with hard, dark blues, lurid yellows, -as of some poison plant, and livid greens. Starting out of the canvas a magnificent girl draped in white, with the lines and muscles of an -athlete, turns a full face upon a spectator, with her head inclined upon a majolica flower-pot, out of which a splendid plant of basil grows aloft. Her raven hair streams all round the roots of the plant ; one arm -embraces the vase, letting the hand droop idly over the rim ; the other .arm gathered against the fore-shortened bosom rests its bent fingers against the opposite side of the beloved vase. The vase itself rests upon wooden prie dies, upon which, half drawn up, a miracle of painting, the left leg reposes. The right foot, well planted, stands full upon the -.marble floor of curious device. The whole attitude is one of lazy, half- waking, staring, unconcern—the health and richness of the hands and feet, a perfect wealth of blood and velvet, aro not to bo surpassed. The meek and shoulders are those of a girl who might walk twenty miles -every day of her life. And the face? The undeveloped face of a pos- _sible shrew and terrible vixen. Large black or brown eyes vacantly glaring out of the canvas, with a possibility of very vicious and very -violent temper in the whites ; no sentiment, no idealism—pouting lips, firm, ripe, unblanched (as for the critic who thinks ha sees a quiver in the upper lip, I envy his imagination); a general look of faint disgust, -as if she had had a tiff with mamma about some pet project the night before, and was lazily recalling it; a turbid brow indicative of possible -violence, but not a trace of the labyrinthine web of ideal emotions, and the terrible frenzy of ideal attachment which alone could dictate an -action at once so horrible, so harrowing, yet so exquisitely and poetically tender—the tenderness and poetry of a love which swallows up even .death. In a word, Mr. Holman Hunt has painted a shrew in her teens ,before her trials, and so to speak, in the green tree. Keats has painted an exquisitely tender and headlong nature after a long course of heart- rending frenzy, and in the fallen and disintegrating fruit. If I were to suggest the type of character that would suit the picture, I should -unhesitatingly say that of the celebrated Rachelle when dying of illicit 'love in Phmdra. Mr. Hunt has painted a common-place, violent-tempered Italian girl, with a vicious eye and a muddy brow."
Now, if Mr. Holman Hunt's "Isabel" had been at all like what we expected from Mr. Cracroft's description, we should have simply ratified the whole gist of his condemnation. It is not so easy for us to conceive what Isabel should have been, but what we might have acquiesced in Mr. Cracroft's finely expressed though, we must say, rather unpaintable ideal. It was at all events clear that no conceivable view of the story could justify the sort of Isabel he had described, and we confess to having no sufficient wealth of imagination to portray an original for ourselves. If Mr. Holman Hunt's picture had answered to Mr. Cracroft's pen-and- ink copy of it, our imagination was so far to let about the true Isabel, that we should have at once done our best to surrender occupation to the fine mental, but not perhaps very distinct physical, portrait of her, which Mr. Cracroft had drawn.
But to our minds, nothing could be less true to the impression which this marvellous and, we are inclined to say for ourselves, greatest of modern pictures, made upon us, than Mr. Cracroft's portraiture. " Lazy, half-waking, staring unconcern " seems to us about as true a description of the Madonna di San Sisto as of Mr. Holman Hunt's Isabel. " Faint disgust, as if she had had a tiff with mamma,"—" a shrew in her teens before her trials," "a violent-tempered Italian girl, with a vicious eye and a muddy brow," — these were descriptions which, preoccupying the mind, as they naturally must, made the reviewer rub his eyes as if he had suddenly awakened from a fantastic dream, to see an image before him as unlike the subject of it, as Shakespeare's Oplielia to the half-dozen or so execrable attempts of modern artists to render her which nearly every year produces. That Isabel is an Italian with a fine physique cannot be denied, nor do we see why it should be denied. But to us the first, last, and ineffaceable impression stamped on the face, is one of lost reason, and of childish tenderness towards the plant which was nourished by her lover's decaying head. tier eyes are wild and prominent,—as Boccacio says, "fled out of her head,"—and shine with that unnatural light which seems to come from a little superficial mind still lingering behind the retina, but not from the memory, not from the brain. There are tear-stained hollows under the eyes; but for the moment the mouth is dimpled with a half- babyish peace ; and the head rests fondly on the idolized plant, the object of her monomania. The face is really the face of " fair Isabel, poor, simple Isabel," a line which, we submit, applies exceedingly ill to Mr. Cracroft's subtle and complex conception. There is certainly no " perverted gentleness," no " distorted idealism," no "hyper-delicacy" of nature inclining to "self-tor- ture," no "delicate, fiery, headlong, restrained, yet simple, all-in-all nature,"—nothing of the sort, only " fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel," with mind utterly unhinged by the blow she has received, gazing with starting eyes one knows not where, but clinging childishly to the living thing which represents her murdered lover. Does Mr. Cracroft mean that it takes the infinitely complex nature he sug- gests to be mentally unhinged by such a tragedy,—revealed, we must remember, in a ghastly dream, and verified under such horri- ble circumstances? Might not the simplest of loving Italian girls, without any " idealism " of any sort in her, have been driven into monomania by such a blow, aud,—her reason once undermined, have been as likely to sow the head in a pot of basil as the most refined and complex of " hyper-delicate " natures ? Mr. Cracroft can have seen little of the eyes of the insane, of the extraordinary lustre which expresses that terrible incoherency of thought, of the childish curves of the lines about the mouth and lips which so often accompany it, if he can seriously doubt what the lurid gleam in those eyes and the helpless movement about that mouth, really mean. The first glance at the picture struck the writer with the saddest memories earth can ever bring. And the comparative plumpness and strength of Isabel's figure, so far from diminishing, to us appear greatly to increase the tragic effect. It is, we believe, a matter of fact that mental disease often diverts for a time all wasting effect from the mere assimilative functions of the body ;—at all events, this very plumpness of body is in the saddest and most effective contrast to the condition of the mind ; and common or uncommon, it has unquestionable precedent in its favour.
Well, but as to Keats's conception ? We should say that this is Keats's real conception. That he intends to delineate real insanity we do not feel a doubt, and, as we believe, the insanity of a simple loving girl, not of a " hyper-delicate " nature turned to "inward self-torture." Indeed, we believe that Keats uses " poor simple Isabel " in the people's sense of " simple," as ex- pressing infinite pity for a lost reason. Keats's " habel " is so wrapped up in her pot of basil, that though she cries incessantly over it, it contents her, as a baby contents a mad mother ;— "She had no knowledge when the day was done, And the now moon she saw not ; but in peace Hung over her sweet basil evermore, And moistened it with tears unto the core."
Of her absolute insanity in Keats's conception nothing can speak more strongly than the following verse, describing her state after the pot of basil is taken from her,— "Piteous she looked on dead and senseless things, Asking for her lost basil amorously ; And, with melodious chuckle in the strings Of her lorn voice, she oftentimes would cry After the Pilgrim in his wanderings, To ask him where her basil was ; and why 'Twas bid from her ; ' For cruel 'tis,' said she, 'To steal my basil pot away from me ! ' "
And Boccacio,—from whom we should say that Mr. Holman Hunt has taken more than from Keats,—conveys still more strongly the same conception of Isabel. He, and not Keats, is Mr. Holman Hunt's authority for the beauty of the flower-pot in which she deposited her treasure,—" prese un grande e un bel testo,"—Keats says only " a garden-pot,"—and Boccacio, too, is clearly Mr. Holman Hunt's general authority for the insane desire to lavish beauty on everything connected with the pot. He insists,—and here Keats follows him,—on the beauty of the silken scarf in which the bead was wrapped before being deposited in the pot,--from which, doubtless, Mr. Holman Hunt has derived the idea of the exqui- sitely painted cloth on which the pot is placed, since he could not paint what the pot concealed, and yet wished to convey the effect of Isabel's wild lavishness to the eye. Again, Boccacio alone,—Keats here deserting him,—has told us that Isabel chose cuttings of the finest basil of Salerno" (" di bellissimo basilico Salernitano "), and that she watered her basil not only with her tears, but with rose and orange water,- " e quegli di niuna altra acqua che o rosata, o di fior d'aranci, o delle sue lagrime, non innafliava giammai,"—all elaborate observ- ances of delirious love, whence Mr. Holman Hunt derives the idea of his rich clusters of the sweet basil, and his exquisitely beautiful watering-pot,—the latter a mere superfluity, according to Keats's poem, which tells only of her watering the basil withher tears. Again, Boccacio conveys the idea of insanity more perfectly than Keats, in the sentence which seems to us the true mo ttofor Mr. Holman Hunt's picture, in which he describes Isabel as positively wooing the pot of basil, as she would have wooed her lover. " E per usanza avea presto di sedersi sempre a questo testo vicina, e quello con tutto it suo desidero vagheggiare siccome quello che it suo Lorenzo teneva nascoso." Again, as to the mere physical state of Isabel, Boccacio is evidently Mr. Holman Hunt's authority, for though he expressly speaks of her " ruined beauty " (" guasta bellezza "), and says that " her eyes appeared to be starting out of her head,"—precisely the expression which Mr. Holman Hunt gives them,—he represents her as only actually falling sick after she loses her loved basil pot. Till then the fever of monomania has itself supported her.
We can scarcely understand how Mr. Cracroft can speak of Isabel's appearance as indicating " health." The dark, unhealthy pallor of her skin, contrasted as it is with her plumpness and strength of figure, is one of the most striking effects of the picture, —indeed, Mr. Cracroft, in speaking of her " muddy brow" virtually admits this against himself. On the whole, we must say that a subtler bit of criticism than Mr. Cracroft's never, in our opinion, missed its mark so completely. We have never seen a picture which impressed us so profoundly. Mr. Holman Hunt, in "The Scapegoat" and in " The Light of the World," has shown his won- derful power of apprehending the supernatural both on the brighter anddarker side of life ;—but that power, great as it was, seems to us nothing to his power of expressing the preternatural, the distracted sideof the simplest human life and love, as shownin this picture. It is the contrast between the fertile luxuriance of tender monomaniac re- source bestowed on the basil pot, and the evident simplicity of nature in "fair Isabel, poor, simple Isabel," which constitutes to our minds both the power of the tale, and the marvel of the painting.
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