Chapter XII: Part 12

There is as absolute an instinct in the human mind for the definite, the palpable, and the emphatic, as there is for the mysterious, the versatile, and the elusive. With some, method is a law, and taste severe in affairs, costume, exercise, social intercourse, and faith. The simplicity, directness, uniformity, and pure emphasis or grace of Sculpture have analogies in literature and character; the terse despatch of a brave soldier, the concentrated dialogue of Alfieri, some proverbs, aphorisms, and poetic lines, that have become household words, puritanic consistency, silent fortitude, are but so many vigorous outlines, and impress us by virtue of the same colourless intensity as a masterpiece of the statuary. How sculpturesque is Dante, even in metaphor, as when he writes,--

'Ella non ci diceva alcuna cosa;
Ma lasciavane gir, solo guardando,
A guisa di leon quando si posa.'

Nature, too, hints the art, when her landscape tints are covered with snow, and the forms of tree, rock, and mountain are clearly defined by the universal whiteness. Death, in its pale, still, fixed image,--always solemn, sometimes beautiful,--would have inspired primeval humanity to mould and chisel the lineaments of clay. Even New Zealanders elaborately carve their war-clubs; and from the 'graven images' prohibited by Decalogue as objects of worship, through the mysterious granite effigies of ancient Egypt, the brutal anomalies in Chinese porcelain, the gay and gilded figures on a ship's prow,--whether emblems of rude ingenuity, tasteless caprice, retrospective sentiment, or embodiments of the highest physical and mental culture, as in the Greek statues,--there is no art whose origin is more instructive and progress more historically significant. The vases of Etruria are the best evidence of her degree of civilization; the designs of Flaxman on Wedgwood ware redeem the economical art of England; the Bears at Berne and the Wolf in the Roman Capitol are the most venerable local insignia; the carvings of Gibbons, in old English manor-houses, outrival all the luxurious charms of modern upholstery; Phidias is a more familiar element in Grecian history than Pericles; the moral energy of the old Italian republics is more impressively shadowed forth and conserved in the bold and vigorous creations of Michael Angelo than in the political annals of Macchiavelli; and it is the massive, uncouth sculptures, half buried in sylvan vegetation, which mythically transmit the ancient people of Central America.

We confess a faith in, and a love for, the 'testimony of the rocks,'--not only as interpreted by the sagacious Scotchman, as he excavated the 'old red sandstone,' but as shaped into forms of truth, beauty, and power by the hand of man through all generations. We love to catch a glimpse of these silent memorials of our race, whether as Nymphs half shaded at noonday with summer foliage in a garden, or as Heroes gleaming with startling distinctness in the moonlit city square; as the similitudes of illustrious men gathered in the halls of nations and crowned with a benignant fame, or as prone effigies on sepulchres, for ever proclaiming the calm without the respiration of slumber, so as to tempt us to exclaim, with the enamoured gazer on the Egyptian queen, when the asp had done its work,--

'She looks like sleep,
As she would catch another Antony
In her strong _toil of grace_.'

Although Dr. Johnson undervalued sculpture, partly because of an inadequate sense of the beautiful, and partly from ignorance of its greatest trophies, he expressed unqualified assent to its awe-inspiring influence in 'the monumental caves of death,' as described by Congreve. Sir Joshua truly declares that 'all arts address themselves to the sensibility and imagination;' and no one thus alive to the appeal of sculpture, will marvel that the infuriated mob spared the statues of the Tuileries at the bloody climax of the French Revolution; that a 'love of the antique,' knit in bonds of lifelong friendship Winckelmann and Cardinal Albani; that among the most salient of childhood's memories should be Memnon's image and the Colossus of Rhodes; that an imaginative girl of exalted temperament died of love for the Apollo Belvidere, and that Carrara should win many a pilgrimage because its quarries have peopled earth with grace.

To a sympathetic eye there are few more pleasing tableaux than a gifted sculptor engaged in his work. How absorbed he is!--standing erect by the mass of clay,--with graduated touch moulding into delicate undulations or expressive lines the inert mass; now stepping back to see the effect, now bending forward, almost lovingly, to add a master indentation or detach a thin layer; and so, hour after hour, working on, every muscle in action, each perception active, oblivious of time, happy in the gradual approximation, under patient and thoughtful manipulation, of what was a dense heap of earth, to a form of vital expression or beauty.

Much has been said and written of the limits of sculpture; but it is the sphere, rather than the art itself, which is thus bounded; and one of its most glorious distinctions, like that of the human form and face, which are its highest subject, is the vast possible variety within what seems, at first thought, to be so narrow a field. That the same number and kind of limbs and features should, under the plastic touch of genius, have given birth to so many and totally diverse forms, memorable for ages, and endeared to humanity, is in itself an infinite marvel, which vindicates, as a beautiful wonder, the statuary's art from the more Protean rivalry of pictorial skill. If we call to mind even a few of the sculptured creations which are 'a joy for ever,' even to retrospection, haunting by their pure individuality the temple of memory, permanently enshrined in heartfelt admiration as illustrations of what is noble in man and woman, significant in history, powerful in expression, or irresistible in grace,--we feel what a world of varied interest is hinted by the very name of Sculpture. Through it the most just and clear idea of Grecian culture is revealed. The solemn mystery of Egyptian, and the grand scale of Assyrian, civilization are best attested by the same trophies. How a Sphinx typifies the land of the Pyramids and all its associations, mythological, scientific, natural, and sacred,--its reverence for the dead, and its dim and portentous traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh's palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of mediæval piety and patience exist than the elaborate and grotesque carvings of Albert Dürer's day? The colossal Brahma in the temple of Elephanta, near Bombay, is the visible acme of Asiatic superstition. And can an illustration of the revival of art in the fifteenth century, so exuberant, aspiring, and sublime, be imagined, to surpass the Day and Night, the Moses, and other statues of Angelo? But such general inferences are less impressive than the personal experience of every European traveller with the least passion for the beautiful or reverence for genius. Is there any sphere of observation and enjoyment, to such a one, more prolific of individual suggestions than this so-called limited art? From the soulful glow of expression in the inspired countenance of the Apollo, to the womanly contours so exquisite in the armless figure of the Venus de Milo,--from the aërial posture of John of Bologna's Mercury, to the inimitable and firm dignity in the attitude of Aristides in the Museum of Naples,--from the delicate lines which teach how grace can chasten nudity in the Goddess of the Tribune at Florence, to the embodied melancholy of Hamlet in the brooding Lorenzo of the Medici Chapel,--from the stone despair, the frozen tears, as it were, of all bereaved maternity, in the very bend of Niobe's body and yearning gesture, to the _abandon_ gleaming from every muscle of the Dancing Faun,--from the stern brow of the Knife-grinder, and the bleeding frame of the Gladiator, whereon are written for ever the inhumanities of ancient civilization, to the triumphant beauty, and firm, light, enjoyable aspect of Dannecker's Ariadne,--from the unutterable joy of Cupid and Psyche's embrace, to the grand authority of Moses,--how many separate phases of human emotion 'live in stone'! What greater contrast to eye or imagination, in our knowledge of facts, and in our consciousness of sentiment, can be exemplified, than those so distinctly, memorably, and gracefully moulded in the apostolic figures of Thorwaldsen, the Hero and Leander of Steinhaüser, the lovely funereal monument, inspired by gratitude, which Rauch reared to Louise of Prussia, Chantrey's Sleeping Children, Canova's Lions in St. Peter's, the bas-reliefs of Ghiberti on the Baptistery doors at Florence, and Gibson's Horses of the Sun?

The last time Heine went out of doors, before succumbing to his fearful malady, he says: 'With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and almost sank down as I entered that magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her feet I lay long and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time disconsolately, as if she would say: Dost thou not see that I have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?'

Have you ever strolled from the inn at Lucerne, on a pleasant afternoon, along the Zurich road, to the old General's garden, where stands the colossal lion designed by Thorwaldsen, to keep fresh the brave renown of the Swiss guard who perished in defence of the royal family of France during the massacre of the Revolution? Carved from the massive sandstone, the majestic animal, with the fatal spear in his side, yet loyal in his vigil over the royal shield, is a grand image of fidelity unto death. The stillness, the isolation, the vivid creepers festooning the rocks, the clear mirror of the basin, into which trickle pellucid streams, reflecting the vast proportions of the enormous lion, the veteran Swiss, who acts as _cicerone_, the adjacent chapel with its altar-cloth wrought by one of the fair decendants of the Bourbon king and queen for whom these victims perished, the hour, the memories, the admixture of Nature and Art, convey a unique impression, in absolute contrast with such white effigies, for instance, as in the dusky precincts of Santa Croce droop over the sepulchre of Alfieri, or with the famous bronze boar in the Mercato Nuovo of Florence, or the ethereal loveliness of that sweet scion of the English nobility, moulded by Chantrey in all the soft and lithe grace of childhood, holding a contented dove to her bosom.

Even as the subject of taste, independently of historical diversities, sculpture presents every degree of the meretricious, the grotesque, and the beautiful,--more emphatically, because more palpably, than is observable in painting. The inimitable Grecian standard is an immortal precedent; the mediæval carvings embody the rude Teutonic truthfulness; where Canova provoked comparison with the antique, as in the Perseus and Venus, his more gross ideal is painfully evident. How artificial seems Bernini in contrast with Angelo! How minutely expressive are the terra cotta images of Spain! What a climax of absurdity teases the eye in the monstrosities in stone which draw travellers in Sicily to the eccentric nobleman's villa, near Palermo! Who does not shrink from the French allegory, and horrible melodrama, of Roubillac's monument to Miss Nightingale, in Westminster Abbey? How like Horace Walpole to dote on Ann Conway's canine groups! We actually feel sleepy as we examine the little black marble Somnus of the Florence Gallery, and electrified with the first sight of the Apollo, and won to sweet emotion in the presence of Nymphs, Graces, and the Goddess of Beauty, when, shaped by the hand of genius, they seem the ethereal types of that

'Common clay ta'en from the common earth,
Moulded by God and tempered by the tears
Of angels to the perfect form of woman.'

Calm and fixed as is the natural language of Sculpture, it is the artistic illustration of life's normal activity and character in the economy not less than in the ideal and heroic phase. 'Our statues,' says one of the quaint personages of Richter's _Titan_, 'are no idle, dawdling citizens, but all drive a trade. Such as are caryates hold up houses; and heathen water-gods labour at the public fountains, and pour out water into the pitchers of the maidens. Such as are angels bear up baptismal vessels.'

Yet the distinctive element in the pleasure afforded by sculpture is tranquillity,--a quiet, contemplative delight; somewhat of awe chastens admiration; a feeling of peace hallows sympathy; and we echo the poet's sentiment,--

'I feel a mighty calmness creep
Over my heart, which can no longer borrow
Its hues from chance or change,--those children of to-morrow.'

It is this fixedness and placidity, conveying the impression of fate, death, repose, or immortality, which render sculpture so congenial as commemorative of the departed. Even quaint wooden effigies, like those in St. Mary's Church at Chester, with the obsolete peaked beards, ruffs, and broadswords, accord with the venerable associations of a mediæval tomb; while marble figures, typifying Grief, Poetry, Fame, or Hope, brooding over the lineaments of the illustrious dead, seem, of all sepulchral decorations, the most apt and impressive. We remember, after exploring the plain of Ravenna on an autumn day, and rehearsing the famous battle in which the brave young Gaston de Foix fell, how the associations of the scene and story were defined and deepened as we gazed on the sculptured form of a recumbent knight in armour, preserved in the academy of the old city; it seemed to bring back and stamp with brave renown for ever the gallant soldier who so long ago perished there in battle. In Cathedral and Parthenon, under the dome of the Invalides, in the sequestered parish church or the rural cemetery, what image so accords with the sad reality and the serene hope of humanity, as the adequate marble personification on sarcophagus and beneath shrine, in mausoleum or on turf-mound?

'His palms enfolded on his breast,
There is no other thought express'd
But long disquiet merged in rest.'

In truth, it is for want of comprehensive perception that we take so readily for granted the limited scope of this glorious art. There is in the Grecian mythology alone a remarkable variety of character and expression, as perpetuated by the statuary; and when to her deities we add the athletes, charioteers, and marble portraits, a realm of diverse creations is opened. Indeed, to the average modern mind, it is the statues of Grecian divinities that constitute the poetic charm of her history; abstractly, we regard them with the poet:--

'Their gods? what were their gods?
There's Mars, all bloody-haired; and Hercules,
Whose soul was in his sinews; Pluto, blacker
Than his own hell; Vulcan, who shook his horns
At every limp he took; great Bacchus rode
Upon a barrel; and in a cockle-shell
Neptune kept state; then Mercury was a thief;
Juno a shrew; Pallas a prude, at best;
And Venus walked the clouds in search of lovers;
Only great Jove, the lord and thunderer,
Sat in the circle of his starry power
And frowned "I will!" to all.'

Not in their marble beauty do they thus ignobly impress us,--but calm, fair, strong, and immortal. 'They seem,' wrote Hazlitt, 'to have no sympathy with us, and not to want our admiration. In their faultless excellence, they appear sufficient to themselves.'

In the sculptor's art, more than on the historian's page, lives the most glorious memory of the classic past. A visit to the Vatican by torchlight endears even these poor traditional deities for ever.

On lofty ceilings vivid frescoes glow,
Auroras beam,
The steeds of Neptune through the waters go,
Or Sibyls dream.

As in the flickering torchlight shadows weaved
Illusions wild,
Methought Apollo's bosom slightly heaved,
And Juno smiled.

Aërial Mercuries in bronze upspring,
Dianas fly,
And marble Cupids to the Psyches cling
Without a sigh.

The absence of complexity in the language and intent of sculpture is always obvious in the expositions of its votaries. In no class of men have we found such distinct and scientific views of Art. One lovely evening in spring we stood with Bartolini beside the corpse of a beautiful child. Bereavement in a foreign land has a desolation of its own, and the afflicted mother desired to carry home a statue of her loved and lost. We conducted the sculptor to the chamber of death, that he might superintend the casts from the body. No sooner did his eyes fall upon it, than they glowed with admiration and filled with tears. He waved the assistants aside, clasped his hands, and gazed spell-bound upon the dead child. Its brow was ideal in contour, the hair of wavy gold, the cheeks of angelic outline. 'How beautiful!' exclaimed Bartolini; and drawing us to the bedside, with a mingled awe and intelligence, he pointed out how the rigidity of death coincided, in this fair young creature, with the standard of Art;--the very hands, he declared, had stiffened into lines of beauty; and over the beautiful clay we thus learned, from the lips of a venerable sculptor, how intimate and minute is the cognizance this noble art takes of the language of the human form. Greenough would unfold by the hour the exquisite relation between function and beauty, organization and use, tracing therein a profound law and an illimitable truth. No more genial spectacle greeted us in Rome than Thorwaldsen at his Sunday-noon receptions;--his white hair, kindly smile, urbane manners, and unpretending simplicity, gave an added charm to the wise and liberal sentiments he expressed on Art, reminding us, in his frank eclecticism, of the spirit in which Humboldt cultivated science, and Sismondi history. Nor less indicative of this clear apprehension was the thorough solution we have heard Powers give, over the mask taken from a dead face, of the problem, how its living aspect was to modify its sculptured reproduction; or the original views expressed by Palmer as to the treatment of the eyes and hair in marble.

Appropriate and inspiring as are statues as memorials of character, in no department of art is there more need of a pure and just sense of the appropriate than in the choice of subject, locality, and treatment in statuary embellishment. Many greatly-endeared human benefactors cannot thus be wisely or genially celebrated. Of late years there has been a mania on the subject; and even popular sentiment recognized the impropriety of setting up a statue in the marketplace, of pious, retiring Izaak Walton.

Shelley used to say that a Roman peasant is as good a judge of sculpture as the best academician or anatomist. It is this direct appeal, this elemental simplicity, which constitutes the great distinction and charm of the art. There is nothing evasive and mysterious; in dealing with form and expression through features and attitude, average observation is a reliable test. The same English poet was right in declaring that the Greek sculptors did not find their inspiration in the dissecting-room; yet upon no subject has criticism displayed greater insight on the one hand and pedantry on the other, than in the discussion of these very _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of antiquity. While Michael Angelo was at Rome when the Laocoön was discovered, hailed it as 'the wonder of Art,' and scholars identified the group with a famous one described by Pliny, Canova thought that the right arm of the father was not in its right position, and the other restorations in the work have all been objected to. Goëthe recognized a profound sagacity in the artist. 'If,' he wrote, 'we try to place the bite in some different position, the whole action is changed, and we find it impossible to conceive one more fitting; the situation of the bite renders necessary the whole action of the limbs.' And another critic says, 'In the group of the Laocoön, the breast is expanded and the throat contracted to show that the agonies that convulse the frame are borne in silence.' In striking contrast with such testimonies to the scientific truth to Nature in Grecian Art, was the objection I once heard an American backwoods mechanic make to this celebrated work. He asked why the figures were seated in a row on a dry-goods box, and declared that the serpent was not of a size to coil round so small an arm as the child's without breaking its vertebræ. So disgusted was Titian with the critical pedantry elicited by this group, that, in ridicule thereof, he painted a caricature,--three monkeys writhing in the folds of a little snake.

Few statues at Rome excite the imagination, apart from intrinsic beauty, like that of Pompey, at whose base, tradition says, 'great Cæsar fell.' It was discovered lying across the boundary line of two estates, and claimed by both proprietors. Shrewd Cardinal Spada decided the head belonged to one, and the body to another. It was decapitated, and sold in fragments for a small sum, and by this device was added to his famous collection, by the wily churchman.

Yet, despite the jargon of connoisseurship, against which Byron, while contemplating the Venus de Medici, utters so eloquent an invective, sculpture is a grand, serene, and intelligible art,--more so than architecture and painting,--and, as such, justly consecrated to the heroic and the beautiful in man and history. It is pre-eminently commemorative. How the old cities of Europe are peopled to the imagination, as well as the eye, by the statues of their traditional rulers or illustrious children, keeping, as it were, a warning sign, or a sublime vigil, silent, yet expressive, in the heart of busy life and through the lapse of ages! We could never pass Duke Cosmo's imposing effigy in the old square of Florence, without the magnificent patronage and the despotic perfidy of the Medicean family being revived to memory with intense local association,--nor note the ugly mitred and cloaked papal figures, with hands extended, in the mockery of benediction, over the beggars in the piazzas of Romagna, without Ranke's frightful picture of church abuses reappearing, as if to crown these brazen forms with infamy. There was always a gleam of poetry--however sad--on the most foggy day, in the glimpse afforded from our window, in Trafalgar Square, of that patient horseman, Charles the Martyr. How alive old Neptune sometimes looked, by moonlight, in Rome, as we passed his plashing fountain. And those German poets--Goëthe, Schiller, and Jean Paul,--what to modern eyes were Frankfort, Stuttgart, and Baireuth, unconsecrated by their endeared forms? The most pleasant association Versailles yielded us of the Bourbon dynasty was that inspired by Jeanne d'Arc, graceful in her marble sleep, as sculptured by Marie d'Orléans; and the most impressive token of Napoleon's downfall we saw in Europe was his colossal image intended for the square of Leghorn, but thrown permanently on the sculptor's hands by the waning of his proud star. The statue of Heber, to Christian vision, hallows Calcutta. The Perseus of Cellini breathes of the months of artistic suspense, inspiration, and experiment so graphically described in that clever egotist's memoirs. One feels like blessing the grief-bowed figures at the tomb of the Princess Charlotte, so truly do their attitudes express our sympathy with the love and the sorrow her name excites. Would not Sterne have felt a thrill of complacency, had he beheld his tableau of the Widow Wadman and Uncle Toby so genially embodied by Ball Hughes? What more spirited symbol of prosperous conquest can be imagined than the gilded horses of St. Mark's? How natural was Michael Angelo's exclamation, 'March!' as he gazed on Donatello's San Giorgio, in the Church of San Michele,--one mailed hand on a shield, bare head, complete armour, and the foot advanced, like a sentinel who hears the challenge, or a knight listening for the charge! Tenerani's Descent from the Cross, in the Torlonia Chapel, outlives in remembrance the brilliant assemblies of that financial house. The outlines of Flaxman, essentially statuesque, seem alone adequate to illustrate to the eye the great mediæval poet, whose verse seems often cut from stone in the quarries of infernal destiny. How grandly sleep the lions of Canova at Pope Clement's tomb!

A census of the statues of the world, past and present, would indicate an enormous marble population: in every Greek and Roman house, temple, public square, cemetery, these effigies abounded. According to Pliny the number of memorable statues in Athens exceeded three thousand; the number brought to Rome from conquered provinces was so great that the record seems incredible; add to these the countless statues we know to have been destroyed, the innumerable fragmentary images encountered in Italy, and the variety of modern works--from those which people the cathedral roof to those which adorn private galleries and favourite studios,--and the mind is bewildered by the extent not less than the beauty of the products of the chisel.

We have sometimes wondered that some æsthetic philosopher has not analyzed the vital relation of the arts to each other, and given a popular exposition of their mutual dependence. Drawing from the antique has long been an acknowledged initiation for the limner; and Campbell, in his terse description of the histrionic art, says that therein 'verse ceases to be airy thought, and sculpture to be dumb.' How much of their peculiar effects did Talma, Kemble, and Rachel owe to the attitudes, gestures, and drapery of the Grecian statues! Kean adopted the 'dying fall' of General Abercrombie's figure in St. Paul's as the model of his own. Some of the memorable scenes and votaries of the drama are directly associated with the sculptor's art,--as, for instance, the last act of _Don Giovanni_, wherein the expressive music of Mozart breathes a pleasing terror in connection with the spectral nod of the marble horseman; and Shakspeare has availed himself of this art, with beautiful wisdom, in that melting scene where remorseful love pleads with the motionless heroine of the _Winter's Tale_,--

'Her natural posture!
Chide me, dear stone, that I may say, indeed,
Thou art Hermione; or rather thou art she,
In thy not chiding: for she was as tender
As infancy and grace.'

Garrick imitated to the life, in _Abel Drugger_, the vacant stare peculiar to Nollekens, the sculptor; and Colley Cibber's father was a devotee of the chisel, and adorned Chatsworth with freestone Sea-Nymphs.

In view of the great historical value, comparative authenticity, and possible significance and beauty of busts, this department of sculpture has a peculiar interest and charm. The most distinct idea we have of the Roman emperors, even in regard to their individual characters, is derived from their busts at the Vatican and elsewhere. The benignity of Trajan, the animal development of Nero, and the classic vigour of young Augustus, are best apprehended through these memorable effigies which Time has spared and Art transmitted. And a similar permanence and distinctness of impression associate most of our illustrious moderns with their sculptured features; the ironical grimace of Voltaire is perpetuated by Houdon's bust; the sympathetic intellectuality of Schiller by Dannecker's; Handel's countenance is familiar through the elaborate chisel of Roubillac; Nollekens moulded Sterne's delicate and unimpassioned but keen physiognomy, and Chantrey the lofty cranium of Scott. Who has not blessed the rude but conscientious artist who carved the head of Shakspeare, preserved at Stratford? How quaintly appropriate to the old house in Nuremberg is Albert Dürer's bust over the door! Our best knowledge of Alexander Hamilton's aspect is obtained from the expressive marble head of him by that ardent republican sculptor, Ceracchi. It was appropriate for Mrs. Damer, the daughter of a gallant field-marshal, to portray in marble, as heroic idols, Fox, Nelson, and Napoleon. We were never more convinced of the intrinsic grace and solemnity of this form of 'counterfeit presentment' than when exploring the Baciocchi _palazzo_ at Bologna. In the centre of a circular room, lighted from above, and draped as well as carpeted with purple, stood on a simple pedestal the bust of Napoleon's sister, thus enshrined after death by her husband. The profound stillness, the relief of this isolated head against a mass of dark tints, and its consequent emphatic individuality, made the sequestered chamber seem a holy place, where communion with the departed, so spiritually represented by the exquisite image, appeared not only natural, but inevitable. Our countryman, Powers, has eminently illustrated the possible excellence of this branch of Art. In mathematical correctness of detail, unrivalled finish of texture, and with these, in many cases, the highest characterization, busts from his hand have an absolute artistic value, independent of likeness, like a portrait by Vandyke or Titian. When the subject is favourable, his achievements in this regard are memorable, and fill the eye and mind with ideas of beauty and meaning undreamed of by those who consider marble portraits as wholly imitative and mechanical. Was there ever a human face which so completely reflected inward experience and individual genius as the bust which haunts us throughout Italy, broods over the monument in Santa Croce, gazes pensively from library niche, seems to awe the more radiant images of boudoir and gallery, and sternly looks melancholy reproach from the Ravenna tomb?

'The lips, as Cumæ's cavern close;
The cheeks, with fast and sorrow thin;
The rigid front, almost morose,
But for the patient hope within;
Declare a life whose course hath been
Unsullied still, though still severe,
Which, through the wavering days of sin,
Kept itself icy chaste and clear.'

National characters become, as it were, household gods through the sculptor's portrait; the duplicates of Canova's head of Napoleon seem as appropriate in the _salons_ and shops of France, as the heads of Washington and Franklin in America, or the antique images of Scipio Africanus and Ceres in Sicily, and Wellington and Byron in London.

It is to us a source of noble delight, that with these permanent trophies of the sculptor's art may now be mingled our national fame. Twenty years ago, the address in Murray's Guide-Book,--_Crawford, an American Sculptor, Piazza Barberini_,--would have been unique; now that name is enrolled on the list of the world's benefactors in the patrimony of Art. Greenough, by his pen, his presence, and his chisel, gave an impulse to taste and knowledge in sculpture and architecture not destined soon to pass away; no more eloquent and original advocate of the beautiful and the true in the higher social economies has blest our day; his Cherubs and Medora overflow with the poetry of form; his essays are a valuable legacy of philosophic thought. The Greek Slave of Powers was invariably surrounded by visitors at the London World's Fair and the Manchester Exhibition. Story's Cleopatra was the nucleus of charmed observation at Sydenham. The Pearl Diver of Paul Akers is his own most beautiful monument. Palmer has sent forth from his isolated studio at Albany a series of ideal busts, of a pure type of original and exquisite beauty; and many others might be named who have honourably illustrated an American claim to distinction in an art eminently republican in its perpetuation of national worth, and the identity of its highest achievements with social progress.

BRIDGES.

'I stood on the bridge at midnight,
As the clocks were striking the hour,
And the moon rose over the city,
Behind the dark church-tower.
And like those waters rushing
Among the wooden piers,
A flood of thoughts came o'er me,
That filled my eyes with tears.'
LONGFELLOW.

Instinctively, Treason, in this vast land, aimed its first blow at the Genius of Communication,--the benign and potent means and method of American civilization and nationality. The great problem Watt and Fulton, Clinton and Morse, so gloriously solved, a barbaric necessity thus reduced back to chaos; and not the least sad and significant of the bulletins whereby the most base of civic mutinies found current record, is that entitled _Destruction of the Bridges_; and (melancholy contrast!) simultaneously we hear of constructive energy in the same direction, on the Italian peninsula,--an engineer having submitted to Victor Emmanuel proposals for throwing a bridge across the Straits of Messina, 'binding Scylla to Charybdis, and thus clinching Italian unity with bonds of iron.'[46] Bonds of nationality, in more than a physical sense, indeed, are bridges; even cynical Heine found an endeared outlook to his native Rhine on the bastion of a familiar bridge. Tennyson makes one an essential feature of his English summer-picture, wherein for ever glows the sweet image of the 'Gardener's Daughter;' and Bunyan found no better similitude for Christian's passage from Time to Eternity than the 'river where there is no bridge.'

The primitive need, the possible genius, the science, and the sentiment of a bridge, endear its aspect and associations beyond those of any other economical structure. There is, indeed, something genially picturesque about a mill, as Constable's pencil and Tennyson's muse have aptly demonstrated; there is an artistic miracle possible in a sculptured gate, as those of Ghiberti so elaborately evidence; science, poetry, and human enterprise consecrate a lighthouse; sacred feelings hallow a spire, and mediæval towers stand forth in noble relief against the sunset sky; but around none of these familiar objects cluster the same thoroughly human associations which make a bridge attractive to the sight and memory. In its most remote suggestion it typifies man's primal relation to Nature, his first instinctive effort to circumvent or avail himself of her resources; indeed, he might take his hint of a bridge from Nature herself,--her fallen monarchs of the forest athwart a stream, 'the testimony of the rocks,' the curving shores, cavern roofs, and pendent branches, and the prismatic bow in the heavens, which a poet well calls 'a bridge to tempt the angels down.'

A bridge of the simplest kind is often charmingly effective as a landscape-accessory; there is a short plank one in a glen of the White Mountains, which, seen through a vista of woodland, makes out the picture so aptly that it is sketched by every artist who haunts the region. What lines of grace are added to the night-view of a great city by the lights on the bridges! What subtile principles enter into the building of such a bridge as the Britannia, where even the metallic contraction of the enormous tubes is provided for by supporting them on cannon-balls! How venerable seems the most graceful of Tuscan bridges, when we remember it was erected in the fifteenth century,--and the Rialto, when we think of Shylock and Portia; and how signal an instance is it of the progressive application of a true principle in science, that the contrivance whereby the South Americans bridge the gorges of their mountains, by a pendulous causeway of twisted osiers and bamboo,--one of which, crossed by Humboldt, was a hundred and twenty feet long,--is identical with that which sustains the magnificent structure over the Niagara river! The chasms and streams thus spanned by a rope of seven strands have a fairy-like aspect. Artist and engineer alike delight in this feature of tropical scenery. In some cases the stone structures built by the Spaniards, and half destroyed by earthquakes, are repaired with bamboo, and often with an effective grace. In a bridge the arch is triumphal, both for practical and commemorative ends. Unknown to the Greeks and Egyptians, even the ancient Romans, it is said by modern architects, did not appreciate its true mechanical principle, but ascribed the marvellous strength thereof to the cement which kept intact their semicircle. In Cæsar's _Commentaries_, the bridge transit and vigilance form no small part of military tactics,--boats and baskets serving the same purpose in ancient and modern warfare. The church of old originated and consecrated bridges; religion, royalty, and art celebrate their advent; the opening of Waterloo Bridge is the subject of one of the best pictures of a modern English painter; and Cockney visitors to the peerless bridge of Telford still ask the guide where the Queen stood at its inauguration. But it is when we turn from the historical and scientific to the familiar and personal that we realize the spontaneous interest attached to a bridge. It is as a feature of our native landscape, the goal of habitual excursions, the rendezvous, the observatory, the favourite haunt or transit, that it wins the gaze and the heart. There the musing angler sits content; there the echoes of the horse's hoofs rouse to expectancy the dozing traveller; there the glad lover dreams, and the despairing wretch seeks a watery grave, and the song of the poet finds a response in the universal heart,--

'How often, oh, how often,
In the days that have gone by,
Have I stood on that bridge at midnight,
And gazed on the wave and sky!'

One of the most primitive tokens of civilization is a bridge; and yet no artificial object is more picturesquely associated with its ultimate symbols. The fallen tree whereon the pioneer crosses a stream in the wilderness is not more significant of human isolation than the fragmentary arch in an ancient city of the vanished home of thousands. Thus, by its necessity and its survival, a bridge suggests the first exigency and the last relic of civilized life. The old explorers of our Western Continent record the savage expedients whereby watercourses were passed,--coils of grape-vine carried between the teeth of an aboriginal swimmer and attached to the opposite bank, a floating log, or, in shallow streams, a series of stepping-stones; and the most popular historian of England, when delineating to the eye of fancy the hour of her capital's venerable decay, can find no more impressive illustration than to make a broken arch of London Bridge the observatory of the speculative reminiscent.

The bridge is, accordingly, of all economical inventions, that which is most inevitable to humanity, signalizing the first steps of man amid the solitude of Nature, and accompanying his progress through every stage of civic life; its crude form makes the wanderer's heart beat in the lonely forest, as a sign of the vicinity or the track of his kind; and its massive remains excite the reverent curiosity of the archæologist, who seeks among the ruins of Art for trophies of a bygone race. Few indications of Roman supremacy are more striking than the unexpected sight of one of those bridges of solid and symmetrical masonry which the traveller in Italy encounters, when emerging from a mountain-pass or a squalid town upon the ancient highway. The permanent method herein apparent suggests an energetic and pervasive race whose constructive instinct was imperial; such an evidence of their pathway over water is as suggestive of national power as the evanescent trail of the savage is of his casual domain. In the bridge, as in no other structure, use combines with beauty by an instinctive law; and the stone arch, more or less elaborate in detail, is as essential now to the function and the grace of a bridge, as when it was first thrown, invincible and harmonious, athwart the rivers Cæsar's legions crossed.

As I stood on the scattered planks which afford a precarious foothold amid the rapids of St. Anthony, methought these frail bridges of hewn timber accorded with the reminiscence of the missionary pioneer who discovered and named the picturesque waters, more than an elaborate and ancient causeway. Even those long, inelegant structures which lead the pedestrian over our own Charles river, or the broad inlets of the adjacent bay, have their peculiar charm as the scene of many a gorgeous autumnal sunset and many a patient 'constitutional' walk. It is a homely but significant proverb, 'Never find fault with the bridge that carries you safe over.' What beautiful shadows graceful bridges cast, when the twilight deepens and the waves are calm! How mysteriously sleep the moonbeams there! What a suggestive vocation is a toll-keeper's! Patriarchs in this calling will tell of methodical and eccentric characters known for years.

Bridges have their legends. There is one in Lombardy whence a jilted lover sprang with his faithless bride as she passed to church with her new lover; it is yet called the 'Bridge of the Betrothed.' On the mountain range, near Serravazza, in Tuscany, is a natural bridge which unites two of the lofty peaks; narrow and aërial, it is believed by the peasantry to have miraculously formed itself to give foothold to the Madonna as she passed over the mountains, and it bears her name. An old traveller, describing New York amusements, tells us of a favourite ride from the city to the suburban country, and says,--'In the way there is a bridge, about three miles distant, which you always pass as you return, called the 'Kissing Bridge,' where it is part of the etiquette to salute the lady who has put herself under your protection.'[47] A curious lawsuit was lately instituted by the proprietor of a menagerie who lost an elephant by a bridge giving way beneath his unaccustomed weight; the authorities protested against damages, as they never undertook to give safe passage to so large an animal.

The office of a bridge is prolific of metaphor, whereof an amusing instance is Boswell's comparison of himself, when translating Paoli's talk to Dr. Johnson, to a 'narrow isthmus connecting two continents.' It has been aptly said of Dante's great poem, that, in the world of letters, it is a mediæval bridge over that vast chasm which divides classical from modern times. All conciliating authors bridge select severed intelligences, and even national feeling: as Irving's writings brought more near to each other the alienated sympathies of England and America, and Carlyle made a trysting-place for British and German thought; as Sydney Smith's talk threw a suspension-bridge from Conservative to Reformer, and Lord Bacon's (in the hour of bitter alienation between Crown and Commons) 'reconciling genius spanned the dividing stream of party.'

How quaint, yet effective, Jean Paul's illustration of an alienated state of human feeling, '_the drawbridge of countenances_, whereupon once the two souls met, stood suddenly raised, high in air.' Nor less significant is a modern historian's definition of an Englishman, as 'an island surrounded by a misty and tumultuous sea of prejudices and hatreds, generally unapproachable, and at all times _utterly repudiative of a bridge_.' Pontifex Maximus has long ceased to wear the great spiritual title whose unchallenged attribute was to bridge the chasm between earth and heaven. What humour may be evolved from a nose-bridge, _Punch_ in his dealings with the great Duke, and Sterne in his record of Tristram Shandy's infancy, have notably chronicled; while the infinite delicacy of tension in the bridge of Paganini's violin, indicates the relation thereof to exquisite gradations of sound. 'The Mohammedans,' says Scott, 'have a fanciful idea that the believer, in his passage to Paradise, is under the necessity of passing barefoot over a bridge composed of red-hot iron plates. All the pieces of paper which the Moslem has preserved during his life, lest some holy thing being written upon them might be profaned, arrange themselves between his feet and the burning metal, and so save him from injury.' In the 'Vision' of Mirza, a bridge is typical of human life. That was a ludicrous incident related of poor, obstinate, crazy George the Third,--that encountering some boys near a bridge early one morning, he asked them what bridge it was. 'The Bridge of Kew,' they replied; whereupon the king proposed and gave three vociferous cheers for the Bridge of Kew, as a newly-discovered wonder. Amusing, too, was the warm dispute of the two errant lake poets whether a certain acutely-angular bridge in the Alps was called great A from its resemblance to that letter, or as the first of its kind.

How isolated and bewildered are villagers, when, after a tempest, the news spreads that a freshet has carried away the bridge! Every time we shake hands we make a human bridge of courtesy or love; and that was a graceful fancy of one of our ingenious writers to give expression to his thoughts in _Letters from under a Bridge_. With an eye and an ear for Nature's poetry, the gleam of lamps from a bridge, the figures that pass and repass thereon, the rush and the lull of waters beneath, the perspective of the arch, the weather-stains on the parapet, the sunshine and the cloud-shadows around, are phases and sounds fraught with meaning and mystery.

It is an acknowledged truth in the philosophy of Art, that Beauty is the handmaid of Use; and as the grace of the swan and the horse results from a conformation whose _rationale_ is movement, so the pillar that supports the roof, and the arch that spans the current, by their serviceable fitness, wed grace of form to wise utility. The laws of architecture illustrate this principle copiously; but in no single and familiar product of human skill is it more striking than in bridges; if lightness, symmetry, elegance, proportion, charm the ideal sense, not less are the economy and adaptation of the structure impressive to the eye of science. Perhaps the ideas of use and beauty, of convenience and taste, in no instance coalesce more obviously; and therefore, of all human inventions, the bridge lends the most undisputed charm to the landscape. It is one of those symbols of humanity which spring from and are not grafted upon Nature; it proclaims her affinity with man, and links her spontaneous benefits with his invention and his needs; it seems to celebrate the stream over which it rises, and to wed the wayward waters to the order and the mystery of life. There is no hint of superfluity or impertinence in a bridge; it blends with the wildest and the most cultivated scene with singular aptitude, and is a feature of both rural and metropolitan landscape that strikes the mind as essential. A striking confirmation of this idea offers itself in a recent critic's definition of a classic style of writing: 'A bridge,' he says, '_completes_ river landscape; it _stiffens_ the scenery which was before too soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such is the effect of pure style in literary art.'[48] The most usual form has its counterpart in those rocky arches which flood and fire have excavated or penned up in many picturesque regions--the segments of caverns or the ribs of strata,--so that, without the instinctive suggestion of the mind itself, Nature furnishes complete models of a bridge whereon neither Art nor Science can improve. Herein the most advanced and the most rude peoples own a common skill; bridges, of some kind, and all adapted to their respective countries, being the familiar invention of savage necessity and architectural genius. The explorer finds them in Africa as well as the artist in Rome; swung, like huge hammocks of ox-hide, over the rapid streams of South America; spanning in fragile cane-platforms the gorges of the Andes; crossing vast chasms of the Alleghanies with the slender iron viaduct of the American railways; and jutting, a crumbling segment of the ancient world, over the yellow Tiber: as familiar on the Chinese tea-caddy as on Canaletto's canvas; as traditional a local feature of London as of Florence; as significant of the onward march of civilization in Wales to-day as in Liguria during the middle ages. Where men dwell and wander, and water flows, these beautiful and enduring, or curious and casual expedients are found, as memorable triumphs of architecture, crowned with historical associations, or as primitive inventions that unconsciously mark the first faltering steps of humanity in the course of empire; for, on this continent, where the French missionary crossed the narrow log supported by his Indian convert in the midst of a wilderness, massive stone arches shadow broad streams that flow through populous cities; and the history of civilization may be traced from the loose stones whereon the lone settler fords the watercourse, to such grand, graceful, and permanent monuments of human prosperity as the elaborate and ancient stone bridges of European capitals.

When we look forth upon a grand or lovely scene of Nature--mountain, river, meadow, and forest,--what a fine central object, what an harmonious artificial feature of the picture, is a bridge, whether rustic and simple, a mere rude passage-way over a brook, or a curve of gray stone throwing broad shadows upon the bright surface of a river! Nor less effective is the same object amid the crowded walls, spires, streets, and chimney-stacks of a city. There the bridge is the least conventional structure, the suggestive point, the favourite locality; it seems to reunite the working-day world with the freedom of Nature; it is, perhaps, the one spot in the dense array of edifices and thoroughfares which 'gives us pause.' There, if anywhere, our gaze and our feet linger; people have a relief against the sky, as they pass over it; artists look patiently thither; lovers, the sad, the humorous, and the meditative, stop there to observe and to muse; they lean over the parapet and watch the flowing tide; they look thence around as from a pleasant vantage-ground. The bridge, in populous old towns, is the rendezvous, the familiar landmark, the traditional nucleus of the place, and perhaps the only picturesque framework in all those marts and homes, more free, open, and suggestive of a common lot than temple, square, or palace; for there pass and repass noble and peasant, regal equipage and humble caravan; children plead to stay, and veterans moralize there; the privileged beggar finds a standing-place for charity to bless; a shrine hallows or a sentry guards, history consecrates or art glorifies; and trade, pleasure, or battle, perchance, lend to it the spell of fame. The dearest associations of a life are described in one of Jean Ingelow's most elaborate poems, as revolving around and identified with 'Four Bridges:'--

'Our brattling river tumbles through the one;
The second spans a shallow, weedy brook;
Beneath the others, and beneath the sun,
Lie two long stilly pools, and on their breasts
Picture their wooden piles, encased in swallows' nests.
And round about them grows a fringe of weeds,
And then a floating crown of lily flowers,
And yet within small silver-budded weeds;
But each clear centre evermore embowers
A deeper sky, where stooping, you may see
The little minnows twirling restlessly.'

In the neighbourhood of Aberdeen, the picturesque bridge over the Don, with its adjacent rocks, trees, and deep, dark stream, is known as the 'brig of Balgownie.' Thomas the Rhymer uttered many prophecies about 'Balgownie's brig black wa';' and it figures among the scenes of Byron's boyhood. Let any one recall his sojourn in a foreign city, and conjure to his mind's eye the scenes, and prominent to his fancy, distinct to his memory, will be the bridge. He will think of Florence as intersected by the Arno, and with the very name of that river reappears the peerless grace of the Ponte Santa Trinità with its moss-grown escutcheons and aërial curves. He will recall the Pont du Gard with the vicinage of Nismes; the Pont Neuf, at Paris, with its soldiers and priests, its boot-blacks and grisettes, the gay streets on one side, and the studious quarter on the other, typifies and concentrates for him the associations of the French capital; and what a complete symbol of Venice--its canals, its marbles, its mysterious polity, its romance of glory and woe--is a good photograph of the Bridge of Sighs! Her history is, indeed, singularly identified with bridges. One, as her exchange, is permanently associated with the palmiest days of mediæval commerce; another with the darker records of her criminal law; while on one of her bridges, Sarpi, the 'terrible friar' Paolo was waylaid and nearly killed by Papal assassins, whence dates the most efficient protest against ecclesiastical tyranny.

The history of Rome is written on her bridges. The Ponte Rotto is Art's favourite trophy of her decay; two-thirds of it has disappeared; and the last Pope has ineffectively repaired it, by a platform sustained by iron wire: yet who that has stood thereon in the sunset, and looked from the dome of St. Peter's to the islands projected at that hour so distinctly from the river's surface, glanced along the flushed dwellings upon its bank, with their intervals of green terraces; or gazed, in the other direction, upon the Cloaca of Tarquin, Vesta's dome, and the Aventine Hill, with its palaces, convents, vineyards, and gardens, has not felt that the Ponte Rotto was the most suggestive observatory in the Eternal City? The Ponte Molle brings back Constantine and his vision of the Cross; and the statues on Sant' Angelo mutely attest the vicissitudes of ecclesiastical eras.

England boasts no monument of her modern victories so impressive as the bridge named for the most memorable of them. The best view of Prague and its people is from the long series of stone arches which span the Moldau. The solitude and serenity of genius are rarely better realized than by musing of Klopstock and Gessner, Lavater and Zimmermann, on the Bridge of Rapperschwyl on the Lake of Zurich, where they dwelt and wrote or died. From the Bridge of St. Martin we have the first view of Mont Blanc. The Suspension Bridge at Niagara is an artificial wonder as great, in its degree, as the natural miracle of the mighty cataract which thunders for ever at its side; while no triumph of inventive economy could more aptly lead the imaginative stranger into the picturesque beauties of Wales than the extraordinary tubular bridge across the Menai Strait. The aqueduct-bridge at Lisbon, the long causeway over Cayuga Lake in our own country, and the bridge over the Loire at Orléans, are memorable in every traveller's retrospect.