Sincerity and constancy
will the artist, indeed, have always; but sincerity in art is
merely that plastic perfection of execution without which a poem or
a painting, however noble its sentiment or human its origin, is but
wasted and unreal work, and the constancy of the artist cannot be
to any definite rule or system of living, but to that principle of
beauty only through which the inconstant shadows of his life are in
their most fleeting moment arrested and made permanent. He will
not, for instance, in intellectual matters acquiesce in that facile
orthodoxy of our day which is so reasonable and so artistically
uninteresting, nor yet will he desire that fiery faith of the
antique time which, while it intensified, yet limited the vision;
still less will he allow the calm of his culture to be marred by
the discordant despair of doubt or the sadness of a sterile
scepticism; for the Valley Perilous, where ignorant armies clash by
night, is no resting-place meet for her to whom the gods have
assigned the clear upland, the serene height, and the sunlit air,--
rather will he be always curiously testing new forms of belief,
tinging his nature with the sentiment that still lingers about some
beautiful creeds, and searching for experience itself, and not for
the fruits of experience; when he has got its secret, he will leave
without regret much that was once very precious to him. "I am
always insincere," says Emerson somewhere, "as knowing that there
are other moods": "Les emotions," wrote Theophile Gautier once in
a review of Arsene Houssaye, "Les emotions, ne se ressemblent pas,
mais etre emu--voila l'important."
Now, this is the secret of the art of the modern romantic school,
and gives one the right keynote for its apprehension; but the real
quality of all work which, like Mr. Rodd's, aims, as I said, at a
purely artistic effect, cannot be described in terms of
intellectual criticism; it is too intangible for that. One can
perhaps convey it best in terms of the other arts, and by reference
to them; and, indeed, some of these poems are as iridescent and as
exquisite as a lovely fragment of Venetian glass; others as
delicate in perfect workmanship and as single in natural motive as
an etching by Whistler is, or one of those beautiful little Greek
figures which in the olive woods round Tanagra men can still find,
with the faint gilding and the fading crimson not yet fled from
hair and lips and raiment; and many of them seem like one of
Corot's twilights just passing into music; for not merely in
visible colour, but in sentiment also--which is the colour of
poetry--may there be a kind of tone.
But I think that the best likeness to the quality of this young
poet's work I ever saw was in the landscape by the Loire. We were
staying once, he and I, at Amboise, that little village with its
grey slate roofs and steep streets and gaunt, grim gateway, where
the quiet cottages nestle like white pigeons into the sombre clefts
of the great bastioned rock, and the stately Renaissance houses
stand silent and apart--very desolate now, but with some memory of
the old days still lingering about the delicately-twisted pillars,
and the carved doorways, with their grotesque animals, and laughing
masks, and quaint heraldic devices, all reminding one of a people
who could not think life real till they had made it fantastic.
