Chapter LI (2)

Accordingly, it is seen that some subjects well described in some accounts, are either not at all, or not so fully, taken up in others; while yet the occasion may be much the same. The climate of some districts, for instance, is well illustrated by careful observations from the rain-gage and thermometer; in some parishes we are informed of the size of the agricultural possessions, the number of ploughs, the rent of land; in some, manufactories, mines, and other kinds of industry, are viewed in all their aspects. But, for other districts or parishes, reports on these subjects are wanting; and the disadvantage is, not merely that such desirable information is not given for such places, but that the means are not furnished of making any general computations for the whole country. It is plain there have been special reasons for the less satisfactory representation of particular parishes in these respects: but for all such faults, both of omission and imperfection, we understand the _New Statistical Account_ to have one general apology; which is this.

Two distinct efforts are requisite to the preparation of a comprehensive work of statistics. There is first, the investigation of facts; and next, the task of arranging and presenting them in the report. One of the theorists before-mentioned, views it as a necessary division of labour, that both things should not be attempted by one and the same party,--especially as the first, when the subjects are numerous, is not to be accomplished but by the assistance of many hands--all of which, as he observes, must be at once skilful and suitably rewarded. Now, here, the task of inquiring and reporting was not divided; the whole of it was placed, by the necessities of the case, in the hands of the reverend contributors. But, as no private society had the means or authority to investigate the facts completely, it is urged that the defects to which we have alluded, were for the most part inevitable.

We believe it; and, recognising how much the clergy had thus to do, which could only be done completely by the government, we only advert to the sources of information to which they could have recourse.

_Public documents_ seem to have been consulted, when information of a later date could not be had,--and chiefly the parliamentary reports on population, crime, education, and municipal affairs, from which the parish accounts appear to have been supplemented with whatever was necessary to the completion of the county summaries. Much has also been derived from the reports of Societies, Boards, and mercantile companies; of this there is evidence in the account of every considerable town.

_Public records_ appear also to have been examined, and chiefly the parish registers. Every parish has a record of the transactions of its kirk-session,--sometimes extending to distant periods. Extracts from these occasionally show, in a clear light, the state and manners of the country in former times; more of which authentic illustration we could have wished, and more the same sources might possibly have supplied. Most parishes have also records of births or baptisms, marriages and deaths. From these, and these only, this work could derive the elements of its important section of vital statistics; but how far were they fitted to serve that purpose? It is certain that they nowhere form a complete register of these occurrences, and that for the most part they are very defective. Baptisms appear to have been entered, in the parish register, regularly till the year 1783, when the imposition of a small tax first broke the custom of registration; and, when that tax was removed, dissenting bodies were unwilling to resume the practice. The proportion of registered baptisms to births, for instance, is at the present time not more than one fourth in Edinburgh, and one third in Glasgow. The marriage register is also unavailable to statistical purposes, by reason of the practice of double enrolment--in the parish of each party. In many parishes no record of burials exists: in others, those of paupers are omitted. In short, there is scarcely a country in Europe that does not, by proper arrangements, furnish better information on these important points; and no industry of individuals can remedy that defect. It is therefore among the postulates of a work like this, for Scotland, that its vital statistics should be imperfect.

_Books_ relating to the history, civil or natural, the institutions or manners of the country, have in many instances been well consulted; in some, not at all; but probably as much from want of opportunity as from any other cause.

Still much occasion for inquiry remained after all the use that could be made of reports, registers, and books. Much of what related to the institutions of Religion, education, and the poor, might be supposed to come readily to hand, the clergy themselves being most conversant with such matters. But they appear to have charged themselves with the toil of very different investigations. Some have been at the pains to ascertain the amount and occupations of the population, betwixt the decennial terms of the parliamentary census. Few have omitted to state, in connexion with the agriculture of the parish, the quantities of land under tillage or under wood, in pasture or in moor, and the amount respectively of the different kinds of produce--facts that imply not a little correspondence with land-owners and land-occupiers, and much industry in the collation of returns. They have had recourse, frequently, to mineralogists, botanists, overseers of mining and manufacturing works, whose contributions are of as much value as the fullest and ripest knowledge can give. Picture-galleries are sometimes described by their owners; family papers occasionally disclose facts of some interest in the history of the country. Throughout the work there are signs not to be mistaken, of much private and unwonted inquiry on the part of the reverend authors, to do, in a creditable way, a work that, from the nature of it, ought to have been apportioned to at least two different parties.

The defects which remain only suggest to us the hope which was thus expressed in similar circumstances, that "the circulation of this work, by bringing the deficiencies in the means of statistical information under the public view, and drawing attention to them, may, in this respect, also contribute to the advancement of the science." It is implied, of course, that the work, to be useful in this indirect way, must have merits of another kind. On these the _New Statistical Account_ may stand. No other book affords the same insight into the various natural resources of the country; none describes so well, and so skilfully, the most considerable branches of industry, and the methods of conducting them; none has brought together the same variety of statistics, with the same ample means of speculating upon their mutual relations. It is still more remarkable, that such a work, embracing, as it does, so much beyond the usual sphere of their observation, should proceed from the clergy; but the explanation is, that the position and character of that body open to them the best means of information on many subjects with which they are themselves not at all conversant. They have produced here a work, which, as a collection of parochial statistics, stands alone, without either rival or resemblance in any other country, representing the state of Scotland, at the period to which it refers, in all its aspects, and so affording the means of a definite comparison between the past and the present, such as, in all cases, it is at once natural and profitable to make. A peculiar interest arises from the unusual diversity of the matter, and the familiarity of the writers with the bounds which they describe. It is a useful work, and will continue long to be so, in as many ways as it throws light upon the condition of the country--and, not least, in the local improvements to which its suggestions may give rise. But, if its uses were less than they are, it would still leave an impression of respect for the general intelligence and the readiness to employ their opportunities for the public good, which its authors have known to unite with exemplary devotion to the duties of their calling.

THE POETRY OF SACRED AND LEGENDARY ART.

_The Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art._ By Mrs JAMESON.

We are of the belief that art without poetry is worthless--dead, and deadening; or, if it have vitality, there is no music in its speech--no command in its beauty. We treat it with a kind of contempt, and make apology for the pleasure it has afforded. _Sacred and Legendary Art!_ How different--how precious--how life-bestowing! The material and immaterial world linked, as it were, together by a new sympathy, working out a tissue of beautiful ideas from the golden threads of a Divine revelation! By _Sacred and Legendary Art_ is meant the treatment of religions subjects, commencing with the Old Testament, and terminating in traditionary tales and legends. It is from the latter that the old painters have, for the most part, taken that rich poetry, which, glowing on the canvass, shows, even amidst the wild errors of fable, a truth of sentiment belonging to a purer faith.

By the Protestant mind, nursed, perhaps, in an undue contempt of histories of saints and martyrs of the Romish Church, the treasures of art of the best period are rarely understood, and still more rarely felt, in the spirit in which they were conceived. Those for whom they were painted needed no cold inquiry into the subjects. They accepted them as things universally known and religiously to be received, with a veneration which we but little comprehend. With them pictures and statues were among their sacred things, and, together with architecture, spoke and taught with an authority that books, which then were rare in the people's hands, have since scarcely ever obtained. Men of genius felt this respect paid to their works, if denied too often to themselves; and thus to their own devotion was added a kind of ministerial importance. Their work became a duty, and was very frequently prosecuted as such by the inmates of monasteries. Besides their works on a large scale, upon the walls and in their cloisters, the ornamenting and illustrating missals embodied a religious feeling, if in some degree peculiar to the condition of the workers, of a vital form and beauty. Treasures of this kind there are beyond number; but they have been hidden treasures for ages. A Protestant contempt for their legends has persecuted, with long hatred, and subsequent long indifference, the art which glorified them. And now that we awake from this dull state, and begin to estimate the poetry of religious art, we stand before the noblest productions amazed and ignorant, and looking for interpreters, and lose the opportunity of enjoyment in the inquiry. Art is too valuable for all it gives, to allow this entire ignorance of the subjects of its favourite treatment. If, for the better understanding of heathen art, an acquaintance with classical literature is thought to be a worthy attainment, the excellence of what we may term Christian art surely renders it of importance that we should know something about the subjects of which it treats. The inquiry will repay us also in other respects, as well as with regard to taste. If we would know ourselves, it is well to see the workings of the human mind, under its every phase, its every condition. And in such a study we shall be gratified, perhaps unexpectedly, to find the good and the beautiful still shining through the obscurity of many errors, predominant and influential upon our own hearts, and scarcely wish the fabulous altogether removed from the minds of those who receive it in devotion, lest great truth in feeling be removed also. Indeed, the legends themselves are mostly harmless, and, even as they become discredited, may be interpreted as not unprofitable allegories. Had we not, in a Puritanic zeal, discarded art with an iconoclast persecution, _The Pilgrim's Progress_ had long ere this been a "golden legend" for the people, and spoken to them in worthy illustration; nor would they have been religiously or morally the worse had they been imbued with a thorough taste for the graceful, the beautiful, and the sublime, which it is in the power of well cultivated art to convey to every willing recipient. It is a great mistake of a portion of the religious world to look upon ornament as a sin or a superstition. Religion is not a bare and unadorned thing, nor can it be so received without debasing, without making too low and mean the worshipper for the worship. The "wedding garment" was not the every-day wear. The poorest must not, of a choice, appear in rags before the throne of Him who is clothed in glory, nor with less respect of their own person than they would use in the presence of their betters. It was originally of God's doing, command, and dictation, to sanctify the beautiful in art, by making his worship a subject for all embellishment. For such a purport were the minute directions for the building of His temple. And yet how many "religious" of our day contradict this feeling, which seems to come to us, not only by a natural instinct, but with the authority of a command! It is a deteriorated worship that prefers four bare, unadorned, whitened walls of a mean conventicle to the lofty and arched majesty and profuse enrichment of a Gothic minster. We want every aid to lift every sense above our daily grovelling cares, and ought to feel that we are acceptable and invited guests in a house far too great, spacious, and magnificent for ourselves alone. Even our humility should be sublime, as all true worship is, for we would fain lift it up as an offering to the Heaven of heavens. It has its aspect towards Him who deigns to receive, together with consciousness of the lowliness of him that offers. It is good that the eye and the ear should see and hear other sounds and sights than concern things, not only of time, but of that poor portion of it which hems in our daily wants and businesses. Beauty and music are of and for eternity, and will never die; and in our perception of them we make ourselves a part of all that is undying. These are senses that the spiritualised body will not lose. Their cultivation is a thing for ever; we are now even here the greater for their possession in their human perfection. The wondrous pile so elaborately finished; the choral service, the pealing organ, and the low voice of prayer, and, it may be, angel forms and beatified saints in richly-painted windows:--we do not believe all this to be solely of man's invention, but of inspiration; how given we ask not, seeing what is, and acknowledging a greatness around us far greater than ourselves, and lifting up the full mind to a magnitude emulous of angelic stature. Yes--poetic genius is a high gift, by which the gifted make discoveries, and show high and great truths, and present them, palpable and visible, before the world--by architecture, by painting, by sculpture, by music--rendering religion itself more holy by the inspiration of its service. Take a man out of his common, so to speak, irreverent habit, and place him here to live for a few moments in this religious atmosphere--how unlike is he to himself, and how conscious of this self-unlikeness! Would that our cathedrals were open at all times! Even when there is no service, though that might be more frequent, there would be much good communing with a man's own heart, when, turning away for a while from worldly troubles and speculations, in midst of that great solemn monument, erected to his Maker's praise, and with the dead under his feet--the dead who as busily walked the streets and ways he has just left--he would weigh the character of his doings, and in a sanctified place breathe a prayer for direction. Nor would it be amiss that he should be led to contemplate the "storied pane" and religious emblems which abound; he will not fail, in the end, to sympathise with the sentiment even where he bows not to the legend. He may know the fact that there have been saints and martyrs--that faith, hope, and charity are realities--that patience and love may be here best learnt to be practised in the world without.

It is curious that the saints, those _Dii minores_, to whom so many of our churches are dedicated, still retain their holding. Beyond the evangelists and the apostles, little do the people know of the other many saints while they enter the churches that bear their names. Few of a congregation, we suspect, could give much account of St Pancras, St Margaret, St Werburgh, St Dunstan, St Clement, nor even of St George, but that he is pictured slaying a dragon, and is the patron saint of England. Yet were they once "household gods" in the land. It is a curious speculation this of patron saints, and how every family and person had his own. There is a great fondness in this old personal attachment of his own angel to every man. That notion preceded Christianity, and was easily engrafted upon it: and the angel that attended from the birth was but supplanted by some holy dead whom the Church canonised. And a corrupt church humoured the superstition, and attached miracles to relics; and thus, as of old, these came, in latter times, to be "gods many." And what were these but over again the thirty thousand deities who, Hesiod said, inhabited the earth, and were guardians of men? Yet, it must be confessed, there has been a popular purification of them. They are not the panders to vice that infested the morals of the heathen world.

But how came the heathen world by them? Did they invent, or where find them? And how came their characteristics to be so universal, in all countries differing rather in name than personality? The most intellectually-gifted people under the sun, the ancient Greeks, give nowhere any rational account how they came by the gods they worshipped. They take them as personifications from their poets. There is the theogony of Hesiod, and the gods as Homer paints them. They have called forth the glory of art; and wonderful were the periods that stamped on earth their statues, as if all men's intellect had been tasked to the work, that they should leave a mark and memorial of beauty than which no age hereafter should show a greater. We acknowledge the perfection in the remains that are left to us. Greek art stills sways the mind of every country--all the world mistrusts every attempt in a contrary direction. The excellence of Greek sculpture is reflected back again upon Greek fable, the heathen mythology from which it was taken; and perhaps a greater partiality is bestowed upon that than it deserves,--at least, we may say so in comparison with any other. We must be cautious how we take the excellence of art for the excellence of its subject. The Greeks were formed for art beyond every other people; had their creed been hideous--and indeed it was obscene--they would have adorned it with every beauty of ideal form. And this is worthy of note here, that their poetry in art was infinitely more beautiful than their written poetry. Their sculptors, and perhaps their painters, of whom we are not entitled to speak but by conjecture, and from the opinions formed by no bad judges of their day, did aim at the portraying a kind of divine humanity. If their sculptured deities have not a holy repose, they are singularly freed from display of human passions; whereas, in their poetry, it is rarely that even decent repose is allowed them; they are generally too active, without dignity, and without respect to the moral code of a not very scrupulous age. Yet have these very heathen gods, even as their historians the poets paint them--for it would disgrace them to speak of their biographers--a trace of a better origin than we can gather out of the whimsical theogony. There are some particulars in the heathen mythology that point to a visible track in the strange road of history. Much we know was had from Egypt; more, probably, came with the Cadmean letters from Phœnicia--a name including Palestine itself. Inventions went only to corruptions--the original of all creeds of divinity is from revelation. We may not be required to point out the direct road nor the resting-places of this "_santa casa_," holding all the gods of Greece, so beautiful in their personal portraiture, that we love to gaze with the feeling of Schiller, though their histories will not bear the scrutiny: but it will suffice to note some similitudes that cannot be accidental. Somehow or other, both the historic and prophetic writings of the Bible, or narratives from them, had reached Greece as well as other distant lands. The Greeks had, at a very early period, embodied in their myths even the personal characters as shown in those writings. Let us, for example, without referring to their Zeus in a particular manner, find in the Hermes or Mercury of the Greeks the identity with Moses. What are the characteristics of both? If Moses descended from the Mount with the commands of God, and was emphatically God's messenger, so was Hermes the messenger from Olympus: his chief office was that of messenger. If Moses is known as the slayer of the Egyptian, so is Hermes, (and so is he more frequently called in Homer,) Αργειφοντης, the slayer of Argus, the overseer of a hundred eyes. Moses conducted through the wilderness to the Jordan those who died and reached not the promised land; nor did he pass the Jordan. So was Hermes the conductor of the dead, delivering them over to Charon, (and here note the resemblance of name with Aaron, the associate of Moses); nor was he to pass to the Elysian fields.

Then the rod, the serpents,--the Caduceus of Hermes, with the serpents twining round the rod. The appearance of Moses, and the shining from his head, as it is commonly figured, is again represented in the winged cap of Hermes. There are other minute circumstances, especially some noted in the hymn of Hermes, ascribed to Homer, which we forbear to enumerate, thinking the coincidences already mentioned are sufficiently striking.

Then, again, the idea of the serpent of the Greek mythology, whence did it come, and the slaying of it by the son of Zeus--and its very name, the Python, the serpent of corruption? And in that sense it has been carried down to this day as an emblem in Christian art. But, to go back a moment, this departure of the Israelites from Egypt, is there no notice of it in Homer? We think there is a hint which indicates a knowledge of at least a part of that history--the previous slavery, the being put to work, and the after-readiness of the Egyptians to be "spoiled." Ulysses, giving a false account of himself, if we remember rightly, to Eumæus, says he came from Egypt, where he had been a merchant, that the king of that country seized him and all his men, whom _he put to work_, but that at length he found favour, and was allowed to depart with his people; adding that he collected much property from the people of Egypt, "for all of them gave."

"Πολλὰ αγειρα,
Χρηματ' Αἰγυπτίους ἄνδρας, διδοσαν γαρ ἄπαντες."

We do not mean to lay any great stress upon this quotation, and but think at least that it shows a characteristic of the Egyptians as narrated by Moses; and never having met with any allusion to it, nor indeed to our parallel between Moses and Hermes, which it may seem to support, we have thought it worthy this brief notice.

We fancy we trace the history of the cause of the fall of man, in the eating of the pomegranate seed which doomed Proserpine to half an existence in the infernal regions. Can there be anything more striking than the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus? Whence could such a notion come, that a man-god would, for his love to mankind, (for bringing down fire from heaven,) suffer agonies, nailed not upon a cross indeed, but on a rock, and, in the description, crucified? "It is, after a manner," says Mr Swayne, who has with great power translated this strange play of Æschylus, "a Christian poem by a pagan author, foreshadowing the opposition and reconciliation of Divine justice and Divine love. Whence the sublime conception of the subject of this drama could have been obtained, it is useless to speculate. Some even suppose that its author must have been acquainted with the old Hebrew prophets."

Even the introduction of Io in the tale is suggestive--the virgin-mother who was so strangely to conceive (and this too given in a prophecy) miraculously.

"Jove at length shall give thee back thy mind,
With one light touch of his unquailing hand,
And, from that fertilising touch, a son
Shall call thee mother."

Her whom Prometheus thus addresses,--

"In that the son shall overmatch the sire."
--"Of thine own stem the strong one shall be born."

Then again Sampson passes into the Egyptian or Tyrian Hercules, to lose his life by another Delilah in Dejaneira. Whence the prophetic Sybils, whence and what the Eleusinian mysteries? and that strange glimpse of them in the significant passage of the Alcestis, where the restored from the dead must abstain from speech till the third day--the duration of her consecration to Hades!

Ὁύπω δέμις σοι τησδε προσφωνηματων,
Κλύειν, πρίν ἄν θεωισι τοῖσι νερτέροις
Αφαγνῖσηται, καὶτρίτον μολῃ φαος.

We might enter largely into the mysteries of heathen mythology, and discover strange coincidences and resemblances, but it would take us too wide from our present subject. Our present purpose is to show that we are apt to attribute too much to the Grecian fable, when we ascribe to it all the beauty which Grecian art has elaborated from it. For, in fact, the origin of that fabulous poetry is beyond them in far-off time; and by them how corrupted, shorn of its real grandeur, and at once magnificent and lovely beauty! How much more, then, is it ours than theirs, as it is deducible from that high revelation which is part of the Christian religion. We overlook, in the excellence of Grecian art, the far better materials for all art, which we in our religion possess, and have ever possessed. With the Greeks it was an instinct to love the beautiful, sensual and intellectual: it was a part of their nature to discover it or to create it. They would have fabricated it out of any materials; and deteriorated, indeed, were those which came to their hands. And even this excess of their love, at least in their poets, made the sensuous to overcome the intellectual; but the far higher than intellectual--the celestial, the spiritual--they had not: their highest reach in the moral sense was a sublime pride: they had no conception of a sublime humility. Their highest divinity was how much lower than the lowest order of angels that wait around the heavenly throne and adore,--low as is their Olympus, where they placed their Zeus and all his band, to the Christian "heaven of heavens," which yet cannot contain the universal Maker. It is bad taste, indeed, in us, as some do, to give them the palm of the possession of a better field--poetic field for the exercise of art. "Christian and Legendary art" has a principle which no other art could have, and which theirs certainly had not; they were sensuous from a necessity of their nature, lacking this principle. We ought to ascribe all which they have left us to their skill, their genius: wonderful it was, and wonderful things did it perform; but, after all, we admire more than we love. Their divine was but a grand and stern repose; their loveliness, but the perfection of the human form. And so great were they in this their genius, that the monuments of heathen art are beyond the heathen creed; for in those the unsensuous prevailed.

Let us suppose the gift of their genius to have been delayed to the Christian era--as poetical subjects, their whole mythology would have been set aside for a far better adoption; and we should be now universally acknowledging how lovely and how great, how full and bountiful, for poetry and for art, are the ever-flowing fountains, gushing in life, giving exuberance from that high mount, to the sight of which Pindus cannot lift its head, nor show its poor Castalian rills. The "gods of Greece," the far-famed "gods of Greece," what are they to the hierarchy of heaven--angels and archangels, and all the host--powers, dominions, hailing the admission to the blissful regions of saints spiritualised, and after death to die no more--glorified? What loveliness is like that of throned chastity? Graces and Muses in their perfectness of marbled beauty--what are they to faith, hope, and charity, and the veiled virtues that like our angels shroud themselves? When these became subjects for our Christian art, then was true expression first invented in drapery. "Christian and legendary art" is not denied the nude; but no other has so made drapery a living, speaking poetry. There is a dignity, a grace, a sweetness, in the drapery of mediæval sculpture, that equally commands our admiration, and more our reverence and our love, than ancient statues, draped or nude. And this is the expression of Scripture poetry--the represented language, the "clothing with power," the "garment of righteousness." We often loiter about our old cathedrals, and look up with wonder at the mutilated remains as a new type of beauty, beaming through the obscurity of the so-called dark ages. Lovers of art, as we profess to be, in all its forms, we profess without hesitation that we would not exchange these--that is, lose them as never to have existed--for all that Grecian art has left us. Even now, what power have we to restore these specimens of expressive workmanship, broken and mutilated as they have been by a low and misbegotten zeal? We maintain further, generally, that the works of "Christian and legendary art," in painting, sculpture, and architecture, are as infinitely superior to the works of all Grecian antiquity, as is the source of their inspiration higher and purer: we are, too, astonished at the perfect agreement of the one with the other, showing one mind, one spirit--devotion. We strongly insist upon this, that there has been a far higher character and equal power in Christian art compared with heathen. It ought to be so, and it is so. It has been too long set aside in the world's opinion (often temporary and ill-formed) to establish the inferior. This country, in particular, has yielded a cold neglect of these beautiful things, in shameful and indolent compliance with the mean, tasteless, degrading Puritanism, that mutilated and would have destroyed them utterly if it could, as it would have treated every and all the beautiful.

Even at the first rise of this Christian art, the superiority of the principle which moved the artists was visible through their defect of knowledge of art, as art. The devotional spirit is evident; a sense of purity, that spiritualised humanity with its heavenly brightness, dims the imperfections of style, casting out of observation minor and uncouth parts. Often, in the incongruous presence of things vulgar in detail of habit and manners, an angelic sentiment stands embodied, pure and untouched, as if the artist, when he came to that, felt holy ground, and took his shoes from off his feet. It was not long before the art was equal to the whole work. There are productions of even an early time that are yet unequalled, and, for power over the heart and the judgment, are much above comparison with any preceding works of boasted antiquity.

Take only the full embodying of all angelic nature: what is there like to it out of Christian art? How unlike the cold personifications of "Victories" winged,--though even these were borrowed,--are the ministering and adoring angels of our art--now bringing celestial paradise down to saints on earth, and now accompanying them, and worshipping with them, in their upward way, amid the receding and glorious clouds of heaven! Look at the sepulchral monuments of Grecian art--the frigid mysteries, the abhorrent ghost, yet too corporeal, shrinking from Lethé; and the dismal boat--the unpromising, unpitying aspect of Charon: then turn to some of the sublime Christian monuments of art, that speak so differently of that death--the Coronation of the Virgin, the Ascension of Saints. The dismal and the doleful earth has vanished--choirs of angels rush to welcome and to support the beatified, the released: death is no more, but life breathing no atmosphere of earth, but all freshness, and all joy, and all music; the now changed body glowing, like an increasing light, into its spirituality of form and beauty, and thrilling with

"That undisturbed song of pure consent,
Aye sung before the sapphire-colour'd throne
To Him that sits thereon;
With saintly shout and solemn jubilee,
Where the bright seraphim, in burning row,
Their loud uplifted angel-trumpets blow;
And the cherubic host, in thousand choirs,
Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,
With those just spirits that wear victorious palms,
Hymns devout and holy psalms
Singing everlastingly."

Then shall we doubt, and not dare to pronounce the superior capabilities of Christian art, arising out of its subject--poetry? We prefer, as a great poetic conception, Raffaelle's Archangel, Michael, with his victorious foot upon his prostrate adversary, to the far-famed Apollo Belvidere, who has slain his Python; and his St Margaret, in her sweet, her innocent, and clothed grace, to that perfect model of woman's form, the Venus de Medici. Not that we venture a careless or misgiving thought of the perfectness of those great antique works: their perfectness was according to their purpose. Higher purposes make a higher perfectness. Nor would we have them viewed irreverently; for even in them, and the genius that produced them, the Creator, as in "times past, left not Himself without witness." In showing forth the glory of the human form, they show forth the glory of Him who made it--who is thus glorified in the witnesses; and so we accept and love them. But to a certain degree they must stand dethroned--their influence faded. Lowly unassuming virtues--virtues of the soul, far greater in their humility, in the sacred poetry of our Christian faith, shine like stars, even in their smallness, on the dark night of our humanity; and they are to take their places in the celestial of art; and we feel that it is His will, who, as the hymn of the blessed Virgin--that type of all these united virtues--declares, "hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek."

We trust yet to see sacred art resumed; for the more we consider its poetry, the more inexhaustible appears the mine. Nor do we require to search and gather in the field of fabulous legends; though in a poetic view, and for their intention, and resumed merely as a fabulous allegory, they are not to be set aside. But sure we are that, whatever can move the heart, can excite to the greatest degree our pity, our love, or convey the greatest delight through scenes for which the term beautiful is but a poor describer, and personages for whose magnificence languages have no name--all is within the volume and the history of our suffering and triumphant religion.

Would that we could stir but one of our painters to this, which should be his great business! Genius is bestowed for no selfish gratification, but for service, and for a "witness," to bear which let the gifted offer only a willing heart, and his lamp will not be suffered to go out for lack of oil. Why is the tenderness of Mr Eastlake's pencil in abeyance? That portion of the sacred history which commences with his "Christ weeping over Jerusalem," might well be continued in a series. Even still more power has he shown in the creative and symbolic, as exemplified in his poetic conception of Virtue from Milton--

"She can teach you how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her."

If we believe genius to be an inspiring spirit, we may contemplate it hereafter as an accusing angel. With such a paradise of subjects before them, why do so many of our painters run to the kennel and the stable, or plunge their pencils into the gaudy hues of meretricious enticement? We do verily believe that the world is waiting for better things. It is taking a greater interest in higher subjects, and those of a pure sentiment. It is that our artists are behind the feeling, and not, as they should be, in the advance. It is a great fact that there is such a growing feeling. The resumption of sacred art in Germany is not without its effect, and is making its way here in prints. Most of these are from the Aller Heiligen Kapelle at Munich, the result of the taste of at least one crowned head in Europe, who, with more limited means and power, has set an example of a better patronage, which would have well become Courts of greater splendour, and more imperial influence. Must it be asked what our own artists--the Academy, with all its staff--are doing?

We must stay our hand; for we took up the pen to notice the two volumes just published of Mrs Jameson's _Sacred and Legendary Art_. They have excited, in the reading, an enthusiastic pleasure, and led the fancy wandering in the delightful fields sanctified by heavenly sunshine, and trod by sainted feet; and, like a traveller in a desert, having found an oasis, we feel loath to leave it, and would fain linger and drink again of its refreshing springs. These volumes have reached us most seasonably, at a period of the year when the mind is more especially directed to contemplate the main subjects of which they treat, and to anticipate only by days the vision of joy and glory which will be scripturally put before us--to see the Virgin Mother and the Holy Babe--

"And all about the courtly stable,
Bright harness'd angels sit in order serviceable."

Mrs Jameson disclaims in this work any other object than the poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art; and to enable those who are, or wish to be, conversant with the innumerable productions of Italian and other schools, in an artistic view, likewise at once to know the subjects upon which they treat. Even as a handbook, therefore, these volumes are valuable. Much of the early painting was symbolical. Ignorance of the symbols rejects the sentiment, or at least the intention, and at the same time makes what is only quaint appear absurd.

"The first volume contains the legends of the Scripture personages, and the primitive fathers. The second volume contains those sainted personages who lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the first ages of Christianity, and whose real history, founded on fact or tradition, has been so disguised by poetical embroidery, that they have in some sort the air of ideal beings." Possibly this poetical disguise is favourable upon the whole to art, but it renders a key necessary, and that Mrs Jameson has supplied--not pretending, however, to more than a selection of the most interesting; and, what is extremely valuable, there are marginal references to pictures, and in what places they are to be met with, and by whom painted, of the subjects given in the text, and of the view the artists had in so painting them. The emblems are amply noted with their meanings; and even the significance of colours, which has been so commonly overlooked, and is yet so important for the comprehension of the full subject of a picture, is clearly laid down. It is well said:

"All the productions of art, from the time it has been directed
and developed by the Christian influences, may be regarded
under three different aspects:--1st, The purely religious
aspect, which belongs to one mode of faith; 2d, The poetical
aspect, which belongs to all; 3d, The artistic, which is the
individual point of view, and has reference only to the action
of the intellect on the means and material employed. There is
a pleasure, an intense pleasure, merely in the consideration
of art, as art; in the faculties of comparison and nice
discrimination brought to bear on objects of beauty; in the
exercise of a cultivated and refined taste on the productions
of mind in any form whatever. But a threefold, or rather a
thousandfold, pleasure is theirs, who to a sense of the poetical
unite a sympathy with the spiritual in art, and who combine with
a delicacy of perception and technical knowledge, more elevated
sources of pleasure, more variety of association, habits of more
excursive thought. Let none imagine, however, that in placing
before the uninitiated these unpretending volumes, I assume
any such superiority as is here implied. Like a child that
has sprang on a little way before its playmates, and caught a
glimpse through an opening portal of some varied Eden within,
all gay with flowers, and musical with birds, and haunted by
divine shapes which beckon forward, and, after one rapturous
survey, runs back and catches its companions by the hand, and
hurries them forwards to share the new-found pleasure, the yet
unexplored region of delight: even so it is with me: I am on the
outside, not the inside, of the door I open."

This is a happy introduction to that which immediately follows of angels and archangels.

Mrs Jameson has so managed to open the door as to frame in her subject to the best advantage; and the reader is willing to stand for a moment with her to gaze upon the inward brightness of the garden, ere he ventures in to see what is around and what is above. It is on the first downward step that we stand breathless with Aladdin, and feel the influence of the first--the partial and framed-in picture--glowing in the unearthly illumination of its magical creation.

There is nothing more interesting than these few pages upon angels. The information we receive is very curious. It is beautiful poetry to see orders, and degrees, and ministrations various, types of an embodied, a ministering church here, and ordained, together with the saints of earth, to make one glorified triumphant church hereafter. Without entering upon the theological question, as to the extension and mystification of the ideas of angels after the Captivity, (yet we think it might be shown that there was originally no Chaldaic belief on the subject not taken, first or last, from the Jews themselves,) it may not be unworthy of remark, that the word "angel," signifying messenger, could scarcely with propriety have been at the first applied to Satan, the deceiving serpent, until, in the after-development of the history of the human race, the ministering offices gave the general title, which, when established, included all who had not "kept their first estate." Nor do we think, with Mrs Jameson, that Chaldea had anything to do with the introduction of the worship of angels into the Christian church. The "gods many" of the heathen countries in which Christianity established itself, will sufficiently account for the readiness of the people to transfer the multifarious worship to which they had been accustomed to names more suitable to the new religion. It is with the poetical development we have here to do; and what ground is there for that full development in the New Testament, wherein they are represented as "countless--as superior to all human wants and weaknesses--as deputed messengers of God? They rejoice over the repentant sinner; they take deep interest in the mission of Christ; they are present with those who pray; they bear the souls of the just to heaven; they minister to Christ on earth, and will be present at his second coming." From such authority, from such a sacred theatre of scenes and celestial personages, arose the beautiful, the magnificent visions of the workers of sacred art. Heresy, however, reached it, as might have been expected; and the agency of angels, in the creation of the world and of man, has been represented, to the deterioration of its great poetry. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, a great change seems to have taken place in the representation of the angel with reference to the Virgin: the feeling is changed; "the veneration paid to the Virgin demanded another treatment. She becomes not merely the principal person, but the superior being; she is the 'regina angelorum,' and the angel bows to her, or kneels before her, as to a queen. Thus, in the famous altar-piece at Cologne, the angel kneels; he bears the sceptre, and also a sealed roll, as if he were a celestial ambassador delivering his credentials. About the same period we sometimes see the angel merely with his hands folded over his breast, and his head inclined, delivering his message as if to a superior being."

It is a great merit in this work of Mrs Jameson's, that we are not only referred to the most curious and to the best specimens of art, but have likewise beautiful woodcuts, and some etchings admirably executed by Mrs Jameson's own hand in illustration. There is a greatness in the simplicity of Blake's angels: "The morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." Poor Blake! Yet why say poor? he was happy in his visions--a little before his time, and one of whom the world (of art) in his day were not worthy: though, with a wild extravagance of fancy, his creations were his faith, often great, and always gentle. Exquisitely beautiful are the "angels of the planets" from Raffaelle, and copied by Mrs Jameson from Gruner's engravings of the frescoes of the Capella Chigiana. That great painter of mystery, Rembrandt, whom the mere lovers of form would have mistakenly thought it a profanation to commission with an angelic subject, is justly appreciated. A perfect master of light, and of darkness, and of colour, it mattered not what were the forms, so that they were unearthly, that plunged into or broke through his luminous or opaque. Of the picture in the Louvre it is thus remarked: "Miraculous for true and spirited expression, and for the action of the soaring angel, who parts the clouds and strikes through the air like a strong swimmer through the waves of the sea." Strange--but so it is--we cannot conceive an alteration of his pictures, all parts so agree. Attention to the more beautiful in form would have appeared to him a mistrust in his great gift of colour and chiaroscuro; and, stranger still, that without, and seemingly in a marked defiance of mere beauty, he is, we would almost say never, vulgar, never misses the intended sentiment, nor fails where it is of tenderness, even of feminine tenderness, for which, if he does not give beauty, he gives its equivalent in the fulness of the feeling. We instance his Salutation--Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary. There is something terrifically grand in the crouching angel in the Campo Santo,--not in the form, nor in the face, which is mostly hid, but in the conception of the attitude of horror with which he beholds the awful scene. It is from the Last Judgment of Orcagua in the Campo Santo. We must not speak of Rubens as a painter of angels; and, for real angelic expression, perhaps the earlier painters are the best. It is surprising that Mrs Jameson, from whose refined taste, and from whose sense of the beautiful and the graceful in their highest qualities, we should have expected another judgment, could have ventured to name together Raffaelle and Murillo as angel painters. It is true, in speaking of the Visit to Abraham, she admits that the painter has set aside the angelic and mystic character, and merely represented three young men travellers; but she generally, throughout these volumes, speaks of that favourite Spaniard in terms of the highest admiration,--terms, as we think, little merited. The angels in the Sutherland Collection are as vulgar figures as can well be, and quite antagonistic in feeling to a heavenly mission. We confess that we dislike almost all the pictures by this so much esteemed master: their artistic manner is to us uncertain and unpleasing,--disagreeable in colour, deficient in grace. We often wonder at the excess of present admiration. We look upon his vulgarity in scriptural subjects as quite profane. His highest power was in a peasant gentleness; he could not embody a sacred feeling: yet thus is he praised for a performance beyond his power:--"St Andrew is suspended on the high cross, formed not of planks, but of the trunks of trees laid transversely. He is bound with cords, undraped, except by a linen cloth, his silver hair and beard loosely streaming on the air, his aged countenance illuminated by a heavenly transport, as he looks up to the opening skies, whence two angels, of really celestial beauty, like almost all Murillo's angels, descend with the crown and palm." The angels of Correggio are certainly peculiar: they are not quite celestial, but perhaps are sympathetically more lovely from their touch of humanity; they are ever pure. Those in the Ascension of the the Virgin, in the Cupola at Parma, seem to be rather adopted angels than of the "first estate;" for they are of several ages, and, if we mistake not, many of them are feminine, and, we suspect, are meant really to represent the loveliest of earth beatified, adopted into the heavenly choir. Those who have seen Signor Toschi's fine drawings of the Parma frescoes, (now in progress of engraving), will readily give assent to this impression. We remember this feeling crossing our mind, and as it were lightly touching the heart with angelic wings--if we have lost a daughter of that sweet age, let us fondly see her there. We cannot forbear quoting the passage upon the angels of Titian:--"And Titian's angels impress me in a similar manner: I mean those in the glorious Assumption at Venice, with their childish forms and features, but an expression caught from beholding the face of 'our Father which is in heaven:' it is glorified infancy. I remember standing before this picture, contemplating those lovely spirits one after another, until a thrill came over me, like that which I felt when Mendelssohn played the organ: I became music while I listened. The face of one of those angels is to the face of a child, just what that of the Virgin, in the same picture, is, compared with the fairest daughter of earth. It is not here superiority of beauty, but mind, and music, and love, kneaded together, as it were, into form and colour." This is very eloquent, but it was not _the thought_ which supplied that ill word "kneaded."

It is remarked by Mrs Jameson, as a singular fact, that neither Leonardo da Vinci, nor Michael Angelo, nor Raffaelle, have given representations of the Four Evangelists. In very early art they are mostly symbolised, and sometimes oddly and uncouthly; and even so by Angelico da Fiesole. In Greek art, the Tetramorph, or union of the four attributes in one figure, is seen winged. "The Tetramorph, in Western art, in some instances became monstrous, instead of mystic and poetical." The animal symbols of the Evangelists, however familiarised in the eyes of the people, and therefore sanctioned to their feeling, required the greatest judgment to bring within the poetic of art. We must look also to the most mysterious subjects for the elucidation, such as Raffaelle's Vision of Ezekiel. There we view in the symbols a great prophetic, subservient to the creating and redeeming power, set forth and coming out of that blaze of the clouds of heaven that surround the sublime Majesty.

The earlier painters were fond of representing everything symbolically: hence the twelve apostles are so treated. In the descending scale, to the naturalists, the mystic poetry was reduced to its lowest element. The set of the apostles by Agostino Caracci, though, as Mrs Jameson observes, famous as works of art, are condemned as absolutely vulgar. "St John is drinking out of a cup, an idea which might strike some people as picturesque, but it is in vile taste. It is about the eighth century that the keys first appear in the hand of St Peter. In the old churches at Ravenna, it is remarked, St Peter and St Paul do not often appear." Ravenna, in the fifth century, did not look to Rome for her saints.