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 Phoenicia—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,) ???e?f??t??, 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."

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.

Her whom Prometheus thus addresses,—

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!

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

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—

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—

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.

After his martyrdom, St Paul was, it is said, buried in the spot where was erected the magnificent church known as St Paolo fuorÈ-le mura. "I saw the church a few months before it was consumed by fire in 1823. I saw it again in 1847, when the restoration was far advanced. Its cold magnificence, compared with the impressions left by the former structure, rich with inestimable remains of ancient art, and venerable from a thousand associations, saddened and chilled me." We well remember visiting this noble church in 1816. A singular coincidence of fact and prophecy has imprinted this visit on our memory. Those who have seen it before it was burnt down, must remember the series of portraits of popes, and that there was room but for one more. We looked to the vacant place, as directed by our cicerone, whilst he told us that there was a prophecy concerning it to this effect, that when that space was filled up there would be no more popes. The prophecy was fulfilled, at least with regard to that church, for it was burnt down after that vacant space had been occupied by the papal portrait.

The subject of the Last Supper is treated of in a separate chapter. There has been a fresco lately discovered at Florence, in the refectory of Saint Onofrio, said to have been painted by Raffaelle in his twenty-third year. Some have thought it to be the work of Neri de Bicci. Mrs Jameson, without hesitation, pronounces it to be by Raffaelle, "full of sentiment and grace, but deficient, it appears to me, in that depth and discrimination of character displayed in his later works. It is evident that he had studied Giotto's fresco in the neighbouring Santa Croce. The arrangement is nearly the same." All the apostles have glories, but that round the head of Judas is smaller than the others. Does the prejudice against thirteen at table arise from this betrayal by Judas, or from the legend of St Gregory, who, when a monk in the monastery of St Andrew, was so charitable, that at length, having nothing else to bestow, he gave to an old beggar a silver porringer which had belonged to his mother? When pope, it was his custom to entertain twelve poor men. On one occasion he observed thirteen, and remonstrated with his steward, who, counting the guests, could see no more than twelve. After removal from the table, St Gregory called the unbidden guest, thus visible, like the ghost of Banquo, to the master of the feast only. The old man, on being questioned, declared himself to be the old beggar to whom the silver porringer had been given, adding, "But my name is Wonderful, and through me thou shalt obtain whatever thou shalt ask of God." There is a famous fresco on this subject by Paul Veronese, in which the stranger is represented to be our Saviour. To entertain even angels unknowingly, and at convivial entertainments, and visible perhaps but to one, as a messenger of good or of evil, would be little congenial with the purport of such meetings.

Mrs Jameson objects to the introduction of dogs in such a subject as the Last Supper, but remarks that it is supposed to show that the supper is over, and the paschal lamb eaten. It is so common that we should rather refer it to a more evident and more important signification, to show that this institution was not for the Jews only, and alluding to the passage showing that "dogs eat of the crumbs which fell from their masters' table." The large dogs, however, of Paul Veronese, gnawing bones, do not with propriety represent the passage; for there is reason to believe that the word "crumbs" describes the small pet dogs, which its was the fashion for the rich to carry about with them. The early painters introduced Satan in person tempting Judas. When Baroccio, with little taste, adopted the same treatment, the pope, Clement VIII., ordered the figure to be obliterated—"Che non gli piaceva il demonio si dimÉsticasse tanto con Gesu Christo." We know not where Mrs Jameson has found the anecdote which relates that Andrea del Castagno, called the Infamous, after he had assassinated Dominico his friend, who had intrusted him with Van Eyck's secret, painted his own portrait in the character of Judas, from remorse of conscience. We are not sure of the story at all respecting Andrea del Castagno: there may be other grounds for doubting it, but this anecdote, if true to the fact, would rather indicate insanity than guilt. The farther we advance in the history and practice of art, the more we find it suffering in sentiment from the infusion of the classical. In the Pitti Palace is a picture by Vasari of St Jerome as a penitent, in which he has introduced Venus and cupids, one of whom is taking aim at the saint. It is true that, as we proceed, legends crowd in upon us, and the painters find rather scope for fancy than subjects for faith and resting-places for devotion. Art, ever fond of female forms, readily seized upon the legends of Mary Magdalene. Her penitence has ever been a favourite subject, and has given opportunity for the introduction of grand landscape backgrounds in the lonely solitudes and wildernesses of a rocky desert. The individuality of the characters of Mary and Martha in Scripture history was too striking not to be taken advantage of by painters. There is a legend of an Egyptian penitent Mary, anterior to that of Mary Magdalene, which is curious. Whether this was another Mary or not, she is represented as a female anchoret; and we are reminded thereby of the double story of Helen of Troy, whom a real or fabulous history has deposited in Egypt, while the great poet of the Iliad has introduced her as so visible and palpable an agent in the Trojan war, and not without a touch of penitence, not quite characteristic of that age. Accounts say that it was her double, or eidolon, which figured at Troy.

Mrs Jameson makes a good conjecture with regard to the famous picture by Leonardo da Vinci, known as Modesty and Vanity, and that it is Mary Magdalene rebuked by her sister Martha for vanity and luxury, which exactly corresponds with the legend respecting her. We cannot forbear quoting the following eloquent passage:—

"On reviewing generally the infinite variety which has been given to these favourite subjects, the life and penance of the Magdalene, I must end where I began. In how few instances has the result been satisfactory to mind, or heart, or soul, or sense! Many have well represented the particular situation, the appropriate sentiment, the sorrow, the hope, the devotion; but who has given us the character? A noble creature, with strong sympathies and a strong will, with powerful faculties of every kind, working for good or evil. Such a woman Mary Magdalene must have been, even in her humiliation; and the feeble, girlish, commonplace, and even vulgar women, who appear to have been usually selected as models by the artists, turned into Magdalenes by throwing up their eyes and letting down their hair, ill represent the enthusiastic convert, or the majestic patroness!"

The second volume commences with the patron saints of Christendom. These were delightful fables in the credulous age of first youth, when feeling was a greater truth than fact; and we confess that we read these legends now with some regret at our abated faith, which we would not even "now have shaken in the chivalric characters of the seven champions of Christendom."

The Romish Church (we say not the Catholic, as Mrs Jameson so frequently improperly terms her) readily acted that part, to the people at large, which nurses assume for the amusement of their children; and in both cases, the more improbable the story the greater the fascination; and the people, like children, are more credulous than critical. Had we not known in our own times, and nearly at the present day, stories as absurd as any in these legends, gravely asserted, circulated, and credited, and maintained by men of responsible station and education—to instance only the garment of Treves—we should have pronounced the aurea legenda to have been a creation of the fancy, arising, not without their illumination, from the fogs and fens of the Middle Ages, adapted solely for minds of that period. But the sanction of them by the Church of Rome leads us to view them as ignes fatui of another character, meant to amuse and to bewilder. We must even think it possible now for people to be brought to believe such a story as this:—"It is related that a certain man, who was afflicted with a cancer in his leg, went to perform his devotions in the church of St Cosmo and St Damian at Rome, and he prayed most earnestly that these beneficent saints would be pleased to aid him. When he had prayed, a deep sleep fell upon him. Then he beheld St Cosmo and St Damian, who stood beside him; and one carried a box of ointment, the other a sharp knife. And one said, 'What shall we do to replace this diseased leg, when we have cut it off?' And the other replied, 'There is a Moor who has been buried just now in San Pietro in Vincolo; let us take his leg for the purpose!' Then they brought the leg of the dead man, and with it they replaced the leg of the sick man—anointing it with celestial ointment, so that he remained whole. When he awoke, he almost doubted whether it could be himself; but his neighbours, seeing that he was healed, looked into the tomb of the Moor, and found that there had been an exchange of legs; and thus the truth of this great miracle was proved to all beholders." It is, however, rather a hazardous demand upon credulity to serve up again the feast of Thyestes, cooked in a caldron of even more miraculous efficacy than Medea's. Such is the stupendous power of St Nicholas:—"As he was travelling through his diocese, to visit and comfort his people, he lodged in the house of a certain host, who was a son of Satan. This man, in the scarcity of provisions, was accustomed to steal little children, whom he murdered, and served up their limbs as meat to his guests. On the arrival of the Bishop and his retinue, he had the audacity to serve up the dismembered limbs of these unhappy children before the man of God, who had no sooner cast his eyes on them than he was aware of the fraud. He reproached the host with his abominable crime; and, going to the tub where their remains were salted down, he made over them the sign of the cross, and they rose up whole and well. The people who witnessed this great wonder were struck with astonishment; and the three children, who were the sons of a poor widow, were restored to their weeping mother."

But what shall we say to an entire new saint of a modern day, who has already found his way to Venice, Bologna, and Lombardy,—even to Tuscany and Paris, not only in pictures and statues, but even in chapels dedicated to her? The reader may be curious to know something of a saint of this century. In the year 1802 the skeleton of a young female was discovered in some excavations in the catacomb of Priscilla at Rome; the remains of an inscription were, "Lumena Pax Te Cum Tri." A priest in the train of a Neapolitan prelate, who was sent to congratulate Pius VII. on his return from France, begged some relics. The newly-discovered treasure was given to him, and the inscription thus translated—"Filomena, rest in peace." "Another priest, whose name is suppressed because of his great humility, was favoured by a vision in the broad noonday, in which he beheld the glorious virgin Filomena, who was pleased to reveal to him that she had suffered death for preferring the Christian faith, and her vow of chastity, to the addresses of the emperor, who wished to make her his wife. This vision leaving much of her history obscure, a certain young artist, whose name is also suppressed—perhaps because of his great humility—was informed in a vision that the emperor alluded to was Diocletian; and at the same time the torments and persecutions suffered by the Christian virgin Filomena, as well as her wonderful constancy, were also revealed to him. There were some difficulties in the way of the Emperor Diocletian, which inclines the writer of the historical account to adopt the opinion that the young artist in his vision may have made a mistake, and that the emperor may have been his colleague, Maximian. The facts, however, now admitted of no doubt; and the relics were carried by the priest Francesco da Lucia to Naples; they were inclosed in a case of wood, resembling in form the human body. This figure was habited in a petticoat of white satin, and over it a crimson tunic, after the Greek fashion; the face was painted to represent nature; a garland of flowers was placed on the head, and in the hands a lily and a javelin—with the point reversed, to express her purity and her martyrdom; then she was laid in a half sitting posture in a sarcophagus, of which the sides were glass; and after lying for some time in state, in the chapel of the Torres family in the Church of Saint Angiolo, she was carried in procession to Magnano, a little town about twenty miles from Naples, amid the acclamations of the people, working many and surprising miracles by the way. Such is the legend of St Filomena, and such the authority on which she has become, within the last twenty years, one of the most fashionable saints in Italy. Jewels to the value of many thousand crowns have been offered at her shrine, and solemnly placed round the neck of her image, or suspended to her girdle."

We dare not in candour charge the Romanists with being the only fabricators or receivers of such goods, remembering our own Saint Joanna, and Huntingdon's Autobiography. There are aurea legenda in a certain class of our sectarian literature, presenting a large list of claimants of very high pretensions to saintship, only waiting for power and an established authority to be canonised.

It is not surprising, as the world is—working often in the dark places of ignorance—if a few glossy threads of a coarser material, and deteriorating quality, be taken up by no wilful mistake, and be interwoven into the true golden tissue. Nevertheless the mantle may be still beautiful, and fit a Christian to wear and walk in not unbecomingly. There are worse things than religious superstition, whose badness is of degrees. In the minds of all nations and people there is a vacuum for the craving appetite of credulity to fill. The great interests of life lie in politics and religion. There are bigots in both: but we look upon a little superstition on the one point as far safer than upon the other, especially in modern times; whereas political bigotry, however often duped, is credulous still, and becomes hating and ferocious. We fear even the legends are losing their authority in the Roman States, whose history may yet have to be filled with far worse tales. A generous, though we deem it a mistaken feeling, has induced Mrs Jameson to make what we would almost venture to call the only mistake in her volumes: the following passage is certainly not in good taste, quite out of the intention of her book, and very unfortunately timed—"But Peter is certainly the democratical apostle par excellence, and his representative in our time seems to have awakened to a consciousness of this truth, and to have thrown himself—as St Peter would most certainly have done, were he living—on the side of the people and of freedom." A democratical successor to St Peter! He is, then, the first of that character. With him the "side of freedom" seems to have been the inside of his prison, and his "side of the people" a precipitate flight from contact with them in their liberty—and for his tiara the disguise of a valet. We more than pardon Mrs Jameson—we love the virtue that gives rise to her error; for it is peculiarly the nature of woman to be credulous, and to be deceived. We admire, and more than admire, women equally well, whether they are right or wrong in politics: these are the business of men, for they have to do with the sword, and are out of the tenderer impulses of woman. But we are amused when we find grave strong men in the same predicament of ill conjectures. We smile as we remember a certain dedication "To Pio Nono," which by its simple grandeur and magnificent beauty will live splendide mendax to excuse its prophetic inaccuracy. It is not wise to foretell events to happen whilst we live. Take a "long range," or a studied ambiguity that will fit either way. The example of Dr Primrose may be followed with advantage, who in every case of domestic doubt and difficulty concluded the matter thus—"I wish it may turn out well this day six months;" by which, in his simple family, he attained the character of a true prophet.

We fear we are losing sight of the "Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art," and gladly turn from the thought of what is to be, to those beautiful personified ideas of the past, whether fabulous or historical, in which we are ready to take Mrs Jameson as our willing and sure guide. The four virgin patronesses and the female martyrs are favourite subjects, which she enters into with more than her usual spirit and feeling. These two have chiefly engaged and fascinated the genius of the painters of the best period, and will ever interest the world of taste by their sentiment, as well as by their grace of form and beauty, and why not say improved them too? The really beautiful is always true. It is not amiss that we should be continually reminded, or, as Mrs Jameson better expresses it—"It is not a thing to be set aside or forgotten, that generous men and meek women, strong in the strength, and elevated by the sacrifice of a Redeemer, did suffer, did endure, did triumph for the truth's sake; did leave us an example which ought to make our hearts glow within us." The memory of Christian heroism should never be lost sight of in a Christian country, and we earnestly recommend this part of Mrs Jameson's volumes to the attention of our painters: they will find not unfrequent instances of fine subjects yet untouched, which may sanctify art, and dignify the profession by making it the teacher of a purer taste—not that true genius will ever lack materials, for materials are but suggestive to an innate inventive power. It is curious that the authoress should not yet have satisfied our expectation with regard to the legends of the Virgin. Whatever the motive of her forbearance, we hope this subject will take the lead in the promised third volume, which is to treat of the legends of the monastic orders, considered, as she cautiously observes, "merely in their connexion with the development of the fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries."

The numerous pictures in Italy which represent parts of the legends of the Virgin render this work incomplete without a full development of the subject. If her forbearance arises from a fear that at this particular time, when mariolatry is dreaded by a large portion of the religious world, we would remind her that the Virgin Mother is still "the blessed" of our own church.

It is a question if the list of sainted martyrs in repute has not been left to the arbitrament of the painters; for we find many deposed, and the adopted favourites of art not found in the early list, as represented in their processions. We find a Saint Reparata, after having been the patroness saint of Florence for six hundred years, deposed, and the city placed under the tutelage of the Virgin and St John the Baptist.

Yet these were early times for the influence of art; but, at a period when pictures were thought to have a kind of miraculous power, it is not improbable that some potent work of art representing the Virgin and St John may have caused the new devotional dedication—as was the case in modern times, when the imaged Madonna de los Dolores was appointed general-in-chief of the Carlist army. Painters were what the poets had been—Vates sacri. Events and the memory of saints may have perished, Carent quia vate sacro. We wish our own painters were more fully sensible of the power of art to perpetuate, and that it is its province to teach. With us it has been too long disconnected with our religion. It will be a glorious day for art, and for the people that shall witness the reunion.

In taking leave of these two fascinating volumes, we do so with the less regret, knowing that they will be often in our hands, as most valuable for instant reference. No one who wishes to know the subjects and feel the sentiment of the finest works in the world, will think of going abroad without Mrs Jameson's book. We must again thank her for the beautiful woodcuts and etchings; the latter, in particular, are lightly and gracefully executed, we presume mostly (to speak technically) in dry point. Mrs Jameson writes as an enthusiast, her feeling flows from her pen. Her style is fascinating to a degree, forcible and graceful; but there is no mistaking its character—feminine. We know no other hand that could so happily have set forth the Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art.