The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 23, September, 1859. Various
and pain of love still struggling in the young girl's heart, while conscience begins to make its chiding voice heard."
The "Mignons" are the best known of all Scheffer's works of this period. The youngest one, "Mignon regrettant sa Patrie," is the most satisfactory in its simple, unconscious expression. The wonderful child stands in the most natural attitude, absorbed in her own thought, and struggling to recall those dim memories, floating in beauty before her mind, which seem almost to belong to a previous state of existence. There is less of the weird and fantastic than Goethe has given to her,—but the central, deep nature is beautifully reproduced. "Mignon aspirant au Ciel," although full of spiritual beauty, is a little more constrained; the longing after her heavenly home is less naturally expressed than her childish regret; the pose is a little mannered; and the feeling is more conscious, but less deep. "Mignon with the Old Harper" is far less interesting; the old man's head does not express that mixture of inspiration and insanity, the result of a life of love, misery, and wrong, which Goethe has portrayed in this strange character.
A very different picture, painted at this period, is peculiarly interesting to us as our first acquaintance among Scheffer's works. An excellent copy or duplicate of it belongs to the Boston Athenæum. The original is in the Luxembourg at Paris. The subject is taken from Schiller's ballad of "Count Eberhard." After the victory in which his son has fallen, though the old Count has said to those who would have paused to mourn his death, "My son is like another man; on, comrades, to the foe!"—yet now he sits alone in his tent and looks upon the dead body of his child. The silent grief of the stern old man is very touching. This sorrow, so contrary to Nature, when old age stands by the grave of youth, always moves the deepest feeling; and Scheffer, in the noble old man and the brave and beautiful boy before him, has given it its simplest and most appropriate expression. This picture was painted in 1834. At that period Scheffer was engaged in some experiments in color, and this sad subject led him to employ the dark tints of Rembrandt. In 1850 he painted a duplicate of it, lighter and more agreeable in tone. He painted "The Giaour" and "Medora," from Byron, which pictures we have never seen. The wayward and morbid Muse of the English Lord does not seem to us a fit inspiration for the pure pencil of Scheffer.
The well-known composition of "Francesca da Rimini" may well conclude our brief notice of the pictures of this second epoch. M. Vitet regards it as the most harmonious and complete of all his works; but we think it has taken less hold on the popular heart than the "Mignons" and "Margaret." Yet it is a work of great skill and beauty. The difficult theme is managed with that moderation and good taste which recognize the true limits of the art. The crowd of spirits which Dante so powerfully describes as driven by the wind without rest are only dimly seen in the background. The horrors of hell are shown only in the anguish of those faces, in the despairing languor of the attitude, which not even mutual love can lighten. The love which made them one in guilt, one in condemnation, is stronger than death, stronger than hell; but it cannot bring peace and joy to these souls shut out from heaven and God.
" Se fosse amico il Re dell' universo,
Noi pregheremmo."
But even prayer is denied to him who feels that he has not God for a friend. There is no mark of physical torture; it is pure spiritual suffering,—restless, aimless weariness,—the loss of hope; it is death,—and love demands life. How strangely appropriate is this punishment of spirits driven hither and thither by the winds, with no hope of rest, to those who reject the firm anchorage of duty and principle, and allow themselves to float at the mercy of their impulses and passions! The overpowering compassion and sympathy of the poets is shown in their earnest faces. Neither here, nor in the well-known "Dante and Beatrice," which is too familiar to need description, does Scheffer quite do justice to our ideal of the sublime poet of Heaven and Hell; but neither do the portraits which remain of him. The picture was first exhibited in 1835. As it had suffered very much in 1850, Scheffer painted a repetition of it, with a few slight alterations, in which, however, his progress in his art during twenty years was very evident. This copy is very far superior to the engraving.
About this period Scheffer seems to have wandered a little from the true mission of Art, and to have esteemed it her province to represent abstract theological truths. His religious feeling seems to have become morbid, and his natural melancholy intensified. The death of his wife, and consequent loneliness, may have given this ascetic tinge to his feelings. But we must acknowledge, if it were so, that the sorrow which oppressed did not embitter his heart, and that a brave and humane spirit appears even in those works which have the least artistic merit to recommend them. The "Christus Consolator" is the best known of this class of pictures. It is cold, abstract, and inharmonious; but its religious spirit and the beautiful truth which it expresses have won for it a welcome which it seems hardly to merit. Yet it has touching beauty in the separate figures. The woman who leans so trustingly on her Saviour's arm has a very high and holy face, whose type we recognize in more than one of his pictures; and the mother and her dead child form a very touching group. But the various persons are not connected by any common story or mutual relation, and we feel a want of unity in the whole work. Perhaps the strongest tribute to its power of expression is the story, that religious publishers found it necessary to blot out the figure of the slave who takes his place among the recipients of Christ's blessing, in order to fit their reprint for a Southern market. As a companion to it, he painted the "Christus Remunerator," which is less interesting. To this same class of pictures we should probably refer "The Lamentations of Earth to Heaven," which we have never seen, but which is thus described by M. Anatole de la Lorge:—
"There are also treasures of disappointed pleasure and of bitterness in this picture of 'The Lamentations of Earth to Heaven,'—dim symbol of human suffering. How does one, in the presence of this poem, feel filled with the spirit of St. Augustine, the nothingness of what we call joy, happiness, glory, here below,—delights of a moment, which at most only aid us to traverse in a dream this valley of tears! Certain pages of 'The City of God,' funeral prayers of Bossuet, can alone serve us for a comparison, in order to express the effect produced upon those who have visited this chef d'oeuvre in Ary Scheffer's atelier. Before producing it, the artist must have thought long, suffered long; for each stroke of the pencil seems to hide a grief, each figure speaks to you in passing, and utters a complaint, a sigh, a prayer,—sad echoes of the despair of life! The religious tendency of the thinker is here fully shown; his poetic sympathy, his aspirations, his dreams, have found a free course. We must mark, also, with what freedom his lamentations spring from the ground, to carry even to the feet of the Creator the overwhelming weight of earthly woe. Ary Scheffer's picture is like the epitaph destined some day for the obsequies of the world; it breathes of death, and has the sombre harmony of the Miserere. And nevertheless,—a strange thing!—this dreaming painter, who seizes and afflicts us, is the same man who at the same time reassures and consoles us,—without doubt, because by dint of spiritualizing our thoughts he raises them above our sufferings, by showing the consoling light of eternity to those whom he would sever from the deceitful joys of earth."
If the picture be not overcolored by the critic's eye, we must believe this to be the culmination of the morbidly spiritualistic tendency which we meet in Scheffer's works. Yet it never exists unrelieved by redeeming qualities. Many will remember the original picture of the "Dead Christ," which was exhibited here by an Art Union about ten years ago. The engraving gives but a faint idea of the touching expression of the whole group. The deathly pallor of the corpse was in strange harmony with the face of the mother which bent over it, her whole being dissolved in grief and love. No picture of this scene recalls to us more fully the simple account in the Gospels. The cold, wan color of the whole scene seems like that gray pall which a public grief will draw across the sky, even when the meridian sun is shining in its glory. We have seen such days even in Boston. No wonder that darkness covered the land to the believing disciples even until the ninth hour.
His "St. Monica," which appeared in 1846, met with great success. "Ruth and Naomi" is yet unknown to us, but it seems to be a subject specially adapted to his powers. Of those works which he produced within the last twelve years, very few are yet engraved. When thus placed before the public, we believe the popular estimate of Scheffer will be raised even higher than at present.
His pictures of Christ are of very superior merit. His representation of the person of Jesus was not formal and conventional, but fresh in expression