prayer or of a complaint, becomes oratorical: no longer low and even and subdued, it assumes a more emphatic rhythm, a more rapidly returning accent; instead of a few slow, equal notes, following one after another at regular intervals, it crowds note upon note, and often assumes a hurry and bustle like joy. Those who are familiar with some of the best of Rossini's serious compositions, such as the air 'Tu che i miseri conforti,'8 in the opera of 'Tancredi,' or the duet 'Ebben per mia memoria,'9 in 'La Gazza Ladra,' will at once understand and feel our meaning. Both are highly tragic and passionate: the passion of both
6. Gioacchino Rossini (1792?1868), composer of deus Mozart (1756-1791). operas. 8. You, who give comfort to the wretched (Italian); 7. Where are fled [the lovely moments?] (Italian); soprano aria from Rossini's Tancredi (1813). soprano aria from act 3 of The Marriage of Figaro 9. Indeed according to my memory (Italian); (1786), by the Austrian composer Wolfgang Ama-soprano aria from Rossini's La Gazza Ladra (1817).
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is that of oratory, not poetry. The like may be said of that most moving invocation in Beethoven's 'Fidelio,'
'Komm, Hoffnung, lass das letzte Stern Der Miide nicht erbleichen'?1
in which Madame Schroder Devrient exhibited such consummate powers of pathetic expression. How different from Winter's beautiful 'Paga fui,'2 the very soul of melancholy exhaling itself in solitude! fuller of meaning, and therefore more profoundly poetical, than the words for which it was composed; for it seems to express, not simple melancholy, but the melancholy of remorse.
If from vocal music we now pass to instrumental, we may have a specimen of musical oratory in any fine military symphony or march; while the poetry of music seems to have attained its consummation in Beethoven's 'Overture to Egmont,' so wonderful in its mixed expression of grandeur and melancholy.
In the arts which speak to the eye, the same distinctions will be found to hold, not only between poetry and oratory, but between poetry, oratory, narrative, and simple imitation or description.
Pure description is exemplified in a mere portrait or a mere landscape, productions of art, it is true, but of the mechanical rather than of the fine arts; being works of simple imitation, not creation. We say, a mere portrait or a mere landscape; because it is possible for a portrait or a landscape, without ceasing to be such, to be also a picture, like Turner's landscapes, and the great portraits by Titian or Vandyke.3
Whatever in painting or sculpture expresses human feeling?or character, which is only a certain state of feeling grown habitual?may be called, according to circumstances, the poetry or the eloquence of the painter's or the sculptor's art: the poetry, if the feeling declares itself by such signs as escape from us when we are unconscious of being seen; the oratory, if the signs are those we use for the purpose of voluntary communication.
The narrative style answers to what is called historical painting, which it is the fashion among connoisseurs to treat as the climax of the pictorial art. That it is the most difficult branch of the art, we do not doubt, because, in its perfection, it includes the perfection of all the other branches; as, in like manner, an epic poem, though, in so far as it is epic (i.e. narrative), it is not poetry at all, is yet esteemed the greatest effort of poetic genius, because there is no kind whatever of poetry which may not appropriately find a place in it. But an historical picture as such, that is, as the representation of an incident, must necessarily, as it seems to us, be poor and ineffective. The narrative powers of painting are extremely limited. Scarcely any picture, scarcely even any series of pictures, tells its own story without the aid of an interpreter. But it is the single figures, which, to us, are the great charm even of an historical picture. It is in these that the power of the art is really seen. In the attempt to narrate, visible and permanent signs are too far behind the fugitive audible ones, which follow so fast one after another; while the faces and figures in a narrative picture, even though they be Titian's, stand still. Who would not
1. Come, Hope, let not the weary person's last star Winter (1754?1825), first performed in London in fade out (German); aria from Fidelio (1805), by the 1804. German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770? 3. Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641), Flemish 1827). Mill seems to be quoting from memory. The painter who produced more than five hundred porpassage should read: 'Komm, Hoffnung, lass den traits. J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), British landletzten Stem / Der Miiden nicht erbleichen.' scape painter. Titian (Tiziano Vicelli, ca. 14882. I have been contented (Italian); aria from the 1576), master painter of the Venetian school. once-popular opera II Ratio di Proserpina, by Peter
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prefer one 'Virgin and Child' of Raphael to all the pictures which Rubens,4 with his fat, frouzy Dutch Venuses, ever painted??though Rubens, besides excelling almost everyone in his mastery over the mechanical parts of his art, often shows real genius in grouping his figures, the peculiar problem of historical painting. But then, who, except a mere student of drawing and coloring, ever cared to look twice at any of the figures themselves? The power of painting lies in poetry, of which Rubens had not the slightest tincture, not in narrative, wherein he might have excelled.
The single figures, however, in an historical picture, are rather the eloquence of painting than the poetry. They mostly (unless they are quite out of place in the picture) express the feelings of one person as modified by the presence of others. Accordingly, the minds whose bent leads them rather to eloquence than to poetry rush to historical painting. The French painters, for instance, seldom attempt, because they could make nothing of, single heads, like those glorious ones of the Italian masters with which they might feed themselves day after day in their own Louvre.5 They must all be historical; and they are, almost to a man, attitudinizers. If we wished to give any young artist the most impressive warning our imagination could devise against that kind of vice in the pictorial which corresponds to rant in the histrionic art, we would advise him to walk once up and once down the gallery of the Luxembourg.6 Every figure in French painting or statuary seems to be showing itself off before spectators. They are not poetical, but in the worst style of corrupted eloquence.
1833,1859
From On Liberty
From Chapter 3. Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being
Few persons, out of Germany, even comprehend the meaning of the doctrine which Wilhelm von Humboldt, so eminent both as a savant and as a politician, made the text of a treatise?that 'the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole'; that, therefore, the object 'towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts, and on which especially those who design to influence their fellow men must ever keep their eyes, is the individuality of power and development'; that for this there are two requisites, 'freedom, and variety of situations'; and that from the union of these arise
