History of Art - vol. IV by Elie Faure

Author:Elie Faure
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harper's & Brothers
Published: 2012-09-20T15:54:33+00:00

Chapter VI. ENGLAND

I

THE fortress having disappeared—the fortress which is always beautiful, because it is built with a positive end in view—England has no longer an architecture. England has no sculpture: there is too much rain and too much fog, the profiles of the earth are soaked in water, clogged by fields, and clothed with woods and with heather. England has only one century of painting, and the Puritan spirit and the practical spirit are repelled by it and, when it comes, turn it away from its goal.

Here are mighty trees, cascades, granite cliffs, eternal mist, a wild sea everywhere, summer nights like an hallucination when the light of the moon, appearing for a moment among the clouds, bathes ruins and lakes, where the sob of the nightingales rises above the murmur of the leaves, where the ponds reflect the trembling phantom of the branches. . . The Celt is sensual and mystical, the Saxon dreams out loud. Here were born, from Shakespeare to Byron, from Milton to Shelley, the greatest poets of the world. When aerial space is not sufficiently subtle, and the planet is not sufficiently pronounced in aspect to impose beyond all else the love of colors and of forms, when the world of colors and forms is rich and mysterious, and lacking in that ungrateful and monotonous quality which drives the spirit back to the inner domains of sonorous symbols, and when, added to all this, the crowd possesses a force of accent, and such energy for life and for conquest as it has nowhere else, man's faculty of words is unchained and seizes kingly command. Here is Shakespeare, all the voices of the tempest and of the dawn, the treasures rolled by the sea, the palaces built in the heavens with the tissue of stars offering themselves to the soul to interpret a confession of love, or the anguish of an irresolute man, the terror of a murderer, or the wrath of a king. Here is Milton taking, for the first time since the biblical poems and Michael Angelo, the wild gardens, the flesh of fruits, the flesh of women, and the dust of flowers to express to consciousness the tyranny of God. Here is Byron, raising the damned from their abyss to fire the stars with their fever, and to cradle it upon the ocean. Here is Shelley, each beat of whose heart sends harmonies streaming, like a river whose waters trail the reflections of the Milky Way, and the tremor of plumes and leaves which it has swept along in its course through the woods.

The English soul consoles itself for the too practical activity of Englishmen by constantly widening the spread of its wings. Even English science cannot resign itself to building its monuments impartially. It has to rise higher than the eagle, or else it applies itself to satisfying the material needs of man, and often the man of England. The supreme idea of Newton is a mystic intuition. Beyond the solar system,

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