Kenneth Clark

The artist grows old Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021

“What is it to grow old?” asked Mat- Festers the dull remembrance of a thew Arnold, and gave a depressing an- change, swer: But no emotion–none! . . . ’Tis not to have our life Arnold was about forty when he wrote Mellowed and softened as with sunset- these melancholy lines, and his experi- glow ence of old age was presumably drawn . . . ’Tis not to see the world from his father’s friends or his fellow As from a height, with rapt prophetic civil servants. He wrote in a reaction eyes, against the conventional picture of a And heart profoundly stirred. golden old age which had been current . . . It is to spend long days in antiquity from Sophocles to Cicero’s And not once feel that we were ever de Senectute. Everyone remembers Ceph- young; alus, Plato’s dear old man at the begin- . . . Deep in our hidden heart ning of the Republic: ‘Old age has a great sense of peace and freedom. When the passions have lost their hold, you have Kenneth Clark, a Foreign Honorary Member of escaped, as Sophocles says, not only the American Academy from 1964 until his death from one mad master, but from many!’ in 1983, was a preeminent art historian of his Arnold was justi½ed in refuting this clas- generation. He was a director of the National sical myth of a golden sunset. But all the Gallery, a Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, Slade same, his diagnosis is not entirely cor- Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, and the author rect. ‘No emotion–none!’ On the con- of many books, including “Leonardo da Vinci” trary, elderly people feel emotion, and (1939), “Landscape Painting” (1950), “The tend to weep more than young ones. But Nude” (1956), and “Civilization” (1969), a best- bbc is it the kind of emotion that can be ex- selling companion to his renowned television pressed in memorable words? A few series of the same name. “The artist grows old” minutes’ reflection shows that it is not. was originally delivered in 1970, when Clark was The number of poets who have written Sir Robert Rede’s Lecturer at Cambridge Univer- memorable verse over the age of seven- sity. ty is very small indeed, and to write tol- © 1972 by Cambridge University Press. Re- erably over the age of sixty-½ve is excep- printed with the permission of Cambridge tional. This decline in the poetic faculty University Press. in old age must be distinguished from

Dædalus Winter 2006 77 Kenneth the loss of inspiration that may afflict a some unforeseeable Open Sesame, can Clark poet at any age. But the two are obvious- bring them out of bondage. In 1835 on aging ly connected. However desirable it may Wordsworth heard of the death of James be, in the conduct of life, to be free from Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd. He went in- passion, the mad masters have been re- to the next room. He thought of Chatter- sponsible for at least three-quarters of ton, that marvellous boy; he thought of the great poetry in the world. And old his lost friends; and in less than an hour age, although it does not put an end to he returned with an extempore effusion: our emotions, dulls the intensity of all Nor has the rolling year twice measured our responses. The romantic poets rec- From sign to sign its stedfast course, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ognised that this was the cause of declin- Since every mortal power of Coleridge ing inspiration; and, as we know from Had frozen at its marvellous source. Coleridge, it could happen quite early. The rapt one, of the Godlike forehead, He was only thirty-two when he wrote The heaven eyed creature sleeps in earth. that long and moving letter in verse to And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Sarah Hutchinson from which he later Has vanished from his lonely hearth. extracted his ‘Ode to Dejection’: A parallel instance can be quoted from I see them all, so excellently fair, Tennyson; he had long been deprived I see, not feel, how beautiful they are. of poetic inspiration, and had just ½n- And he went on to de½ne more precisely ished writing ‘Romney’s Remorse’, the feeling that he had lost: which even the most fervent Tenny- sonians do not defend, when, crossing Joy is the strong voice, joy the luminous to the Isle of Wight in October 1889, cloud. he was struck by an exceptionally high We in ourselves rejoice. tide, which seemed for some reason to This is a much more accurate descrip- symbolise his recent recovery from a tion of the loss that befalls us in old age serious illness. Open Sesame. When he than Arnold’s ‘no emotion–none!’ El- returned to Faringford he went straight derly people do not, and perhaps should to his room and in twenty minutes not, rejoice in themselves. Coleridge emerged with a poem: read this letter to the Wordsworths on But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 21 April 1802. At that time William had Too full for sound and foam, not lost the faculty of joy: in fact he When that which drew from out the was at work on the ‘Immortality’ ode. boundless deep He was so shocked by Coleridge’s pes- Turns again home. simism that he added one (or perhaps two) stanzas to the ‘Ode’ in order to re- He knew what had happened, and fute it. Alas, a few years later he suffered knew that it wouldn’t happen again. the same fate. He continued to write po- He gave instructions that ‘Crossing the etry; he wrote on high themes, with con- Bar’ should always be placed last in any scientious skill. ‘But emotion–none!’ collection of his works. Of course, the As most of you will know, there was an trouble about these flashes from the exception, and I will quote it to prove, depths of an elderly poet’s buried life is if proof were needed, that our feelings that they cannot be sustained. To do so do not die, but are buried so deeply in requires the kind of concentration that our memories that only some shock, is a physical attribute. ‘I can no longer

78 Dædalus Winter 2006 expect to be revisited by the continu- on a vigorous use of memory, with its The artist ous excitement under which I wrote my resulting confluence of ideas, is usually grows old other book’, said A. E. Housman in his in decline. The most ironic instance is preface to Last Poems, ‘nor indeed could that of Bernard Shaw, who believed that I well sustain it if it came.’ man would become wise if he could live If, for obvious reasons, elderly writers to be over 100 and to prove it wrote a dif- cannot sing with the same fervour as fuse and unreadable play that lacks all young ones, are there not other branches the intellectual vigour of his maturity. of literature in which they can excel? Such are the facts that must be faced One poet, who himself wrote movingly if we are to consider the old age of writ- in old age, tried to put a case for his fel- ers and artists. But they do not by any Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 low ancients: means exhaust the subject. I believe that old, even very old, artists, have added And yet, though ours be failing frames, something of immense value to the sum Gentlemen, of human experience. There is undoubt- So were some others’ history names edly what I may call, translating from the Who trod their track light-limbed and fast German, an old-age style, a special char- As these youth, and not alien acter common to nearly all their work; From enterprise, to their long last, and during the rest of the lecture I shall Gentlemen. try to discover what it is. For some reason which is rather hard Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, to analyse, painters and sculptors do Gentlemen, not suffer from the same loss of creative Pythagoras, Thucydides, power that afflicts writers. Indeed the Herodotus and Homer–yea, very greatest artists–Michelangelo, Clement, Augustin, Origen, Titian, Rembrandt, Donatello, Turner Burnt brightlier towards their setting day, and Cézanne–seem to us to have pro- Gentlemen. duced their most impressive work in It is a valiant effort, but I do not ½nd the last ten or ½fteen years of fairly long Hardy’s roll-call wholly convincing. lives. I say seem to us because this was Sophocles is the classic instance, and not formerly the accepted opinion. In we must allow it. But we have no means the nineteenth century Turner’s later of knowing whether the late works of paintings were considered the work of Homer and Pythagoras were superior a madman, and Rembrandt’s Conspiracy to their early ones. I am ashamed to say of Claudius Civilis was called a grotesque that I have not compared the late and masquerade. The lack of polish in Tit- early works of Clement and Origen; but ian’s later canvases was excused on the I have compared St Augustine’s Confes- grounds that the painter was over nine- sions with the City of God, and have no ty, and John Addington Symonds said hesitation in saying that the Confessions, of Michelangelo’s Capella Paolina, ‘the written twenty years earlier, is the more frigidity of old age had fallen on his brightly burning of the two. I fear that imagination and faculties–one cannot after the age of seventy, or at most sev- help regretting that seven years . . . should enty-½ve, not only is the spring of lyric have been devoted to a work so obvious- poetry sealed up in the depths which ly indicative of decaying faculties.’ cannot be tapped, but the ordering, or That we should now admire these late architectonic faculty, which depends works so highly, often ½nding in them

Dædalus Winter 2006 79 Kenneth some anticipation of the tastes and feel- The Ark stood ½rm on Ararat; th’ return- Clark ings of the present day, tells us two ing Sun on aging things about them–that they are pes- Exhaled earth’s humid bubbles, and emu- simistic and that they are not concerned lous of light, with the imitation of natural appear- Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic ances. Contrary to the Sophoclean or guise Ciceronian myth, it is evident that those Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral as the sum- who have retained their creative pow- mer fly ers into old age take a very poor view Which rises, flits, expands and dies. of human life, and develop as their on- Turner could express his sense of trag- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ly defence a kind of transcendental pes- edy only through red clouds and a men- simism. We need only think of the eyes acing vortex of sea and sky. His ½gures, that look out on us from the late self- although not insigni½cant, are ridicu- portraits of Rembrandt to realise how lous. But in the great period of ½gure deeply this great lover of life became painting the aged artists chose tragic disenchanted by life. Michelangelo’s themes, and treated them in such a way head becomes, in Daniele da Volterra’s as to bring out their most disturbing portrait bust, an emblem of spiritual possibilities. As far as I know the ½rst suffering as poignant as his own Jere- artist to develop what I have called the miah; and when he portrayed himself old-age style was Donatello. Already in it was as the flayed skin of St Barthol- the St Anthony reliefs in Padua he had omew in the Last Judgement. Mantegna, moved a long way from the Hadrianic a name that can be added to the list of beauty of the David or the Dionysiac aged painters, looks in his bronze bust rapture of the dancing putti. The scenes more indignantly pessimistic than Mi- are vehemently dramatic, but the char- chelangelo, but he left in the corner of acter of St Anthony prohibits tragedy. one of his last pictures, the S. Sebastian By the time he came to the pulpits of in the Ca’ d’Oro, the emblem of his be- S. Lorenzo–he worked on them till his liefs, a smoking candle, with a scroll on death at the age of eighty–he was no which are written the words Nihil nisi div- longer persuaded by the comforting inum stabile est, coetera fumus. beliefs of humanism, so beautifully ex- This at least suggests a belief in God, pressed by the arcaded aisles beneath which has been denied to pessimists which the pulpits are placed. The rough, since the Enlightenment. ‘He was with- passionate, hirsute ½gures who surround out hope’, said Ruskin of Turner, one Christ in the Harrowing of Hell and seem can imagine how reluctantly. By the time to menace him with their angular ges- that the author of Modern Painters had tures, have no interest in reason and de- met his hero, Turner had grown almost corum. They are like a new race of Lan- completely monosyllabic in conversa- gobardi; and Christ himself, as he rises tion, but he continued to pour his feel- from the tomb in the next panel, is like a ings about human life into the formless, shipwrecked sailor, only just able to drag ungrammatical verses of The Fallacies himself ashore. The means by which this of Hope, and celebrated the salvation of ½erce new world of the aged imagination mankind after the Flood with these lines is made visible are equally remote from (which, incidentally, are the best he ever the humanist tradition of decorum. The wrote):

80 Dædalus Winter 2006 scenes are crowded, a reckless perspec- come for them a torture. Michelangelo The artist tive is used intermittently in order to is, perhaps, not a good example, because grows old heighten emotional effect, and the actu- he grumbled about every job he under- al modelling (or rather the carving, for took; but when he wrote beneath a late almost the whole surface has been cut in drawing of the Pietà ‘Dio sa che sangue the bronze) is as free and expressive as costa’, he was surely thinking of himself the stroke of a pen in an impassioned as well as of his Redeemer. drawing. At the opposite end of the spectrum As with many works of the old-age of art, Claude Monet, whose skill in style (Titian will provide another exam- rendering a visual experience has never ple) the S. Lorenzo reliefs are so far out- been surpassed, created his own marvel- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 side the humanist norm that an earlier lous and unforeseeable late manner, out generation of critics questioned their of in½nite pain. He wrote of his water- authenticity. And when they were done garden canvases, ‘in the night I am con- –in the light-footed youth of Lorenzo stantly haunted by what I am trying to de’ Medici–Donatello must have felt realise. I rise broken with fatigue each completely isolated from his contem- morning. The coming of dawn gives me poraries. Old artists are solitary; like all courage, but my anxiety returns as soon old people they are bored and irritated as I set foot in my studio . . . Painting is by the company of their fellow bipeds so dif½cult and torturing. Last autumn I and yet ½nd their isolation depressing. burned six canvases along with the dead They are also suspicious of interference. leaves in my garden.’ Gone the same way Vasari describes how, late one night, he as Christ’s torso in the Rondanini Pietà. was sent by Pope Paul III to Michelange- The aged Degas wrote in almost identi- lo in order to obtain from him a certain cal terms. drawing. Michelangelo, recognising his So the aged artist’s pessimism ex- knock, came to the door carrying a lamp, tends from human life to his own cre- and Vasari just had time to see that he ative powers. He can no longer enter was working on a marble pietà; but sympathetically into what he sees, when Michelangelo noticed that his visi- and he no longer has any con½dence tor was looking at it, he dropped his lan- in human reason. This, as I have said, tern, and they remained in the dark, till is something that we can understand Michelangelo’s servant, Urbino, a feeble more easily than could our grandfathers. candle in his hand, returned with the They loved the art of the renaissance be- drawing. Then, as if to excuse himself, cause it was based on naturalism, a love Michelangelo said, ‘I am so old that of- of physical beauty and rational order. ten death tugs at my sleeve, and soon I Berenson, no less than John Addington shall fall like this lantern and my light Symonds, speaks with real hatred of Mi- will go out.’ The reason, says Vasari, why chelangelo’s Last Judgement and (as far as Michelangelo dilettassi della solitudine was I know) never even mentions the fres- his great love of his art. But it would be coes in the Capella Paolina. Yet for those a mistake to suppose that great artists who have the good fortune to see them, escape the pains of old age through the these two extraordinary works provide joys of creative labour. On the contra- an experience as moving as anything in ry, all old artists who have left us a writ- art, as moving as the storm scenes of ten record of their experiences, have de- King Lear, and as rich in layer upon layer scribed how the act of creation has be- of meaning.

Dædalus Winter 2006 81 Kenneth As usual Michelangelo had undertaken this drama some of his greatest formal Clark them reluctantly. ‘I cannot refuse any- inventions, many of which would have on aging thing to Pope Paul; but I am ill-pleased had a special meaning for his contem- to do them and they will please nobody.’ poraries. For example, the pose of Saul ‘The art of fresco’, he complained, ‘was extended on the ground is clearly rem- not work for old men.’ But, as he said iniscent of Raphael’s Heliodorus, the in the same year, ‘one paints with the would-be despoiler of the Temple. Paul brain and not with the hands’, and hav- III would have instantly recognised his ing once started on the work, his whole allusion. He would have thought of the mind and spirit were engaged. The sub- contrast between the avengers of Helio- jects selected for him were the Conver- dorus and the divine apparition that re- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 sion of Saul and the Cruci½xion of St directs Saul; and would also have no- Peter, episodes which had a particular ticed that Michelangelo’s age-old enmity theological and doctrinal importance with Raphael had at last been reconciled. to Paul III. The Conversion of Saul was Another example: Saul’s horse, whose the supreme example of grace, and in panic leap away from us is, so to say, the Rome of the 1540s the doctrine of justi- most massive fragment of the exploded ½cation by grace was a topic of heart- world, is one of the antique horses of the searching and earnest discussion. The Quirinal, seen from below, as Michelan- most learned and devout of the Cardi- gelo must have seen it almost every day nals, Contarini, Morone and Pole, who when he made his way to Vittoria Colon- had been the associates of Paul III before na’s apartment. Almost every ½gure has his elevation, were deeply impressed by a resonance of this kind. the arguments of Luther, and at the cen- But marvellous as it is, the Conversion tre of their discussions was Michelange- of Saul is a less moving work than the lo’s dearest friend, Vittoria Colonna. Cruci½xion of St Peter, and I may add a Thus the Conversion of Saul became for less complete example of the old-age Michelangelo almost a personal experi- style. The Conversion is still full of en- ence, and he has made Saul’s head an ergy and the intervention of the heav- idealised self-portrait. There are many enly powers gives us reason for hope. representations in art of ecstasy, of suf- The Cruci½xion of St Peter portrays the fering, and of enlightenment; but none human lot as hopelessly and monoto- that equal this portrayal of the painful nously tragic. Instead of an explosion, transition through blindness to spiritual with its possibility of a new life, the sight. Saul lies on the ground protected Cruci½xion of St Peter is a wheel of life, a by the encircling arms of one of his com- rond des prisonniers, revolving round the panions, an ordinary man. The rest of central ½gure, in and out of the frame. his troop breaks up in confusion. Their On the left-hand side Roman legionar- world seems to have exploded, as Chris- ies, inspired by Trajan’s column, move tendom had just exploded, touched off upwards; on the right, conquered and by the doctrine of faith. The cause of this disinherited people move downwards. explosion, the ½gure of Christ, swoops Their leader, a barbarian giant with head down from the sky. With one hand he bowed and arms folded in resignation, con½rms Saul in his new belief; with is one of Michelangelo’s noblest inven- the other he points to the world beyond tions, a piece of visionary art that was Damascus, in which St Paul will preach to inspire Blake’s ½rst dated engraving. His Gospel. Michelangelo has put into Two groups are not part of the wheel.

82 Dædalus Winter 2006 One represents the forces of law and technique or facture. The aged artist The artist order, who have condemned St Peter usually employs a less circumscribed grows old to death, and have been ordered to see and rougher style. In fact parts of the that the sentence is being carried out. frescoes are painted with considerable They are led by a captain, who is the freedom; but as a whole Michelangelo pitiless embodiment of action, and has maintained the ½rm outlines of ev- closely resembles one of those ideal ery form, either because the medium heads which Michelangelo had drawn seemed to demand it, or because he felt twenty-½ve years earlier for presenta- that great truths must, in Blake’s words, tion to those handsome young men be bounded by the wiry line of rectitude. who so troubled his peace of mind. Bal- This clarity of enunciation (even when Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 ancing these active participants is a the statements are themselves obscure) group of four women, two of them look- the old-age style tends to reject. To illus- ing at the Martyrdom, one gazing wild- trate this characteristic we must turn to ly into space, one looking directly at us. the only artist of equal greatness whose They are like a Sophoclean chorus. Inci- lifespan probably equalled Michelange- dentally, technicians tell us that this was lo’s eighty-nine years–Titian. the last day’s work on the wet plaster of Nobody knows when Titian was born. the fresco, and so the last piece of paint- Renaissance artists were in the habit of ing ever executed by Michelangelo. lying about their birthdays for ½nancial Within the circle of life is an inner reasons, and the tradition that Titian circle formed by St Peter’s arms, and was born in 1477 is hardly credible. But the men who are raising his cross, and when he painted the pictures in which it, too, has an appendage–the young he develops his old-age style, he was cer- man who, with mindless concentration, tainly over eighty. Three of them, the digs the hole in which the cross will be Martyrdom of St Lawrence in the Escorial, placed. He is innocent, the air-force pi- the Crowning with Thorns in Munich and lot who releases the bomb. The saint the Flaying of Marsyas in Kromeresz, are himself is one of Michelangelo’s most reworkings of pictures that Titian had formidable embodiments of faith and painted earlier, and it is remarkable that will. Unlike Saul, who receives his pain- he chose to repeat three of the most vio- ful enlightenment with a kind of grati- lent and tragic subjects in the whole of tude, St Peter is not at all resigned to his œuvre. In the later versions of all his fate, and glares at us angrily. He will three the sense of tragedy and its univer- break through the circle of human bon- sal application to human life is enhanced dage if he can. It is no accident that Mi- by purely pictorial means. The earlier chelangelo has given his body the same Crowning with Thorns is a superb academ- form that we ½nd in his magni½cent ic exercise, but visitors to the Louvre do drawings of Prometheus. not look at it for long. We have all grown Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Pauline too suspicious of rhetoric, and Christ’s Chapel exhibit almost every characteris- anguished movement has a chilling ef- tic of the old-age style: its pessimism, fect. Translated into the old-age style it its saeva indignatio, its feeling of hermetic is subordinated to a single passionate cry isolation; and on the formal side its anti- made through the medium of colour and realism, and its accumulation of symbol- design. The central theme is no longer ic motives. In one respect, however, they the expression of Christ’s head, but the do not entirely conform: in the actual cruel geometry of the soldiers’ sticks. A

Dædalus Winter 2006 83 Kenneth powerful diagonal leads up to a basket vour on Olympus because the goddess Clark full of flames, and we suddenly realise Athena, having invented it, found that on aging how great a part ½re and flame play in it distorted her features and threw it Titian’s later work. It became an obses- away. It was picked up by Marsyas, who sion similar to the ageing Leonardo’s learned to play the instrument so skilful- obsession with destruction by water; ly that he was emboldened to challenge and we ½nd it again in the Escorial St Apollo to a musical contest. The judge Lawrence, where the ½re that lights up the was King Midas, who, as King of Phry- evil faces of his executioners is, for the gia, decided in favour of Marsyas; but saint, a source of ecstasy. I am reminded the Muses reversed his decision, and or- of some lines by one of the rare poets dered that as a punishment for his inso- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 who continued to write great poetry in lence, Marsyas should be flayed. It is one advanced age, W. B. Yeats: of those offsprings of the Greek imagi- nation in which the forces of divine or- Saeva indignatio and the labourer’s hire der assert themselves by an act of cruel- The strength that gives our blood and ty and we are left horri½ed by the price state magnanimity of its own desire that it seemed worth paying for Olym- Everything that is not God consumed pian harmony and reason. The antique with intellectual ½re. world does not seem to have questioned Throughout his life, Titian had been it, and two groups of statuary, one of the supreme master of fruitfulness. He them by Myron, were amongst the most had used his skill in the cuisine of paint- frequently copied sculptures of the an- ing to render the smooth, full pressure cient world. The hanging Marsyas from of flesh on skin, or pulp on rind. In the one of these groups was, in fact, known work of his old age these sensual and to Michelangelo and provided a model vegetable images are replaced by ½re, for those late drawings of a Cruci½xion flame and smoke. Titian, like Turner, which are amongst his most moving ex- did not put his thoughts into words, amples of the old-age style. Titian saw but even his earlier paintings leave us the myth in less simple terms. To begin in no doubt that he had a powerful and with his Marsyas is hung up by the feet, well-stored mind; and in his last pic- like a dead animal in a butcher’s shop– tures he becomes a profound philoso- or like St Peter who would not be cruci- pher. The most complete expression of ½ed in the same position as his Saviour. his philosophy is to be found, after con- All the other protagonists crowd round siderable search, in the Moravian town him in a circle, giving the design that of Kromeresz. It represents one of the uninterrupted fullness which is a mark cruellest myths of antiquity, the Flaying of the old-age style. Titian understands of Marsyas. As with the St Lawrence, we that this sacri½ce is questionable. Mi- know that he had painted a version of das sits beside the central ½gure, sunk the subject in his maturity, but the pic- in reverie, and behind him a satyr who ture at Kromeresz is one of those left in has come to help his tortured sovereign, his studio on his death, and sold by his starts back with pity and astonishment. great-nephew, Tizianello, to the Earl of The flaying goes on as a ritual act, ac- Arundel. In case the story of Marsyas is companied by the music of Apollo’s not fresh in your minds, let me remind cithara. He plays as if in ecstasy, and vi- you that he was a satyr who excelled in brations of sound seem to ½ll the whole playing the flute. The flute was out of fa- canvas. We are ravished, and yet we feel

84 Dædalus Winter 2006 that beauty achieved at the expense of the subject alone would not achieve. Tit- The artist life is outrageous. This is a kind of cruci- ian’s subject is horrifying, Rembrandt’s grows old ½xion, a sacri½ce of pure instinct to rea- grotesque, yet both arouse in me a sim- son, and if all that reason can achieve is ilar emotion. For a second I feel that I the hideous shedding of blood, why not have had a glimpse of some irrational leave the Dionysiac impulses to follow and absolute truth, that could be re- their own course? An answer is given by vealed only by a great artist in his old another masterpiece of the old-age style, age. the Bacchae of Euripides. The triumph of Clouds of affection from our younger eyes the irrational produces its own kind of Conceal the emptiness which age descries. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 catastrophe, as cruel as the triumph of The soul’s dark cottage, battered and reason. decayed, This bare description of Titian’s imag- Lets in new light through chinks that time ery suggests a wealth of visual metaphor hath made. almost as great as is to be found in Mi- chelangelo’s Pauline frescoes. But what The Rembrantesque image of Edmund I cannot convey in words is the extraor- Waller is irresistible. But it is only part- dinary freedom with which it is painted. ly accurate, because the light that en- Every stroke of the brush is itself a meta- trances us in these old-age pictures is morphosis, in its ½rst dictionary sense, not the result of exhaustion or decay, ‘the action of changing in form or sub- but is communicated to us by the inde- stance, especially by magic.’ Paint is no structible vitality of the painter’s hand. longer a solid sticky substance, but pre- Nearly all the painters who have grown cious, volatile and alive. greater in old age have retained an as- The transformation of paint into an tonishing vitality of touch. As their han- endless series of direct messages from dling has grown freer, so have strokes the painter’s imagination appears in of the brush developed an independent another great masterpiece of the old- life. Cézanne, who in middle life painted age style, Rembrandt’s Conspiracy of with the delicacy of a water-colourist, Claudius Civilis. As with Titian, this is and was almost afraid, as he said, to sul- the reworking of an earlier invention, ly the whiteness of a canvas, ended by only in this instance Rembrandt has attacking it with heavy and passionate painted over a fragment of the original strokes. The increased vitality of an aged canvas which, for some unexplained hand is hard to explain. Does it mean reason, had been rejected by his patrons, that a long assimilation of life has so the City Fathers of Amsterdam. He has ½lled the painter with a sense of natural felt free to please himself and in the Cy- energy that it communicates itself invol- clopean hero and his grotesque atten- untarily through his touch? Such would dants has produced a world so bizarre seem to be the implication of the famous that one cannot but admire the courage words of Hokusai in the preface to his of the seventeenth-century connoisseurs Hundred Views of Fuji: who saved the picture from destruction. All I have produced before the age of sev- But these strange ½gures have the inev- enty is not worth taking into account. itability of Macbeth’s porter or Ham- At seventy-three I learned a little about let’s gravedigger. And the freedom with the real structure of nature, of animals, which every form is translated in the plants, trees, birds, ½shes and insects. colour holds us spellbound in a way that

Dædalus Winter 2006 85 Kenneth In consequence when I am eighty, I shall Christ’s head is twisted in agony, like Clark have made still more progress. At ninety Laocoon; in the later version he sits on aging I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at motionless with downcast eyes. His last a hundred I shall certainly have reached great Pietà in the Venice Academy unites a marvellous stage; and when I am a hun- both the elements of the ‘old-age style’; dred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot Mary Magdalene steps forward from the or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live platform, passionate, enraged, like an ac- as long as I to see if I do not keep my word. tress who can no longer endure her role, Written at the age of seventy-½ve by me, but must break out of the scene and ap- once Hokusai, to-day Gwakio Rojin, the peal to the audience; but the Virgin and old man mad about drawing. St Jerome are resigned. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Incidentally, we may suppose that ‘Everything I do, be it but a dot or a line, this sublime work was originally in the will be alive.’ Rembrandt could have said same style as the Marsyas, and perhaps the same, and so, before his loss of man- for that reason was refused by the monks ual skill, could Leonardo. There is noth- of the Frari. Palma Giovane, who ½n- ing more mysterious than the power of ished it with skill and understanding, an aged artist to give life to a blot or a added an inscription, saying that it had scribble; it is as inexplicable as the pow- been inchoatum. We cannot blame him, er of a young poet to give life to a word. but if it had come down to us as Titian Another reason for the reckless free- left it, I think it would have been one of dom of facture in the old-age style is the greatest pictures in the world. the feeling of imminent departure. ‘I Writers on Titian have long accepted haven’t long to wait. I shall say what I that St Jerome who kneels before the like, how I like, and as forcefully as pos- Virgin is an idealised self-portrait, and, sible.’ Maer Grafe put it more vividly as I have said, the Midas in the Flaying in his description of Van Gogh’s style: of Marsyas is almost identical. Twenty ‘He paints as one whose house is beset years earlier Michelangelo had included by burglars, and pushes his furniture his idealised self-portrait, as Nicodemus, and everything he can lay his hands on in the marble pietà now in the cathedral against the door.’ Van Gogh was in his of Florence. It may have been the piece thirties. Cézanne and Monet did not ar- which Michelangelo was carving when rive at this state of desperation till their Vasari paid his nocturnal call, and short- last years. Then they began their furious ly afterwards Michelangelo broke it up; battle with time, not staining, but scar- just as Rembrandt cut up his canvases, ring the white canvas of eternity. But in and Monet burned his. Later Michelan- contrast to this grandiose impatience is gelo was persuaded to sell the pieces to an ultimate feeling of resignation and a friend named Bandini, and it was re- total understanding. In Rembrandt’s stored by the sculptor Calcagni. It was Prodigal Son in the Hermitage we feel really inchoatum and Calcagni was more that the whole of humanity has been en- ambitious and less sensitive than Palma folded in an act of forgiveness, beyond Giovane. But fortunately he died before good and evil. completing his work. The ½gure of Nico- Titian, the sensualist, courtier and lib- demus remains unrestored, and as one ertine, reveals himself in his latest pic- looks at his noble head from different tures, the master of resignation. In the angles and in different lights one ½nds ½rst version of his Crowning with Thorns, a whole range of human emotion be-

86 Dædalus Winter 2006 ginning with unutterable grief, passing Turning back to writers of equal stature, The artist through practical solicitude (specially one cannot but be struck by the differ- grows old praised by Vasari), and ending with ence between the two arts. calm and an almost beati½c resignation. One of the ½nest critical essays in I do not think that Titian was inspired by English begins with the words, ‘It is a this precedent, and indeed it is most un- mistake of much popular criticism to likely that he had seen the group. Nor do regard poetry, music and painting–all I think that the desire of an aged artist the various products of art–as but trans- to include himself in his last great work lations into different languages of one was a piece of egotism. Rather, I would and the same ½xed quantity of imagina- suppose that he has come to think of the tive thought, supplemented by certain Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 great tragic myths of the human imagi- technical qualities.’ Pater’s warning is nation as almost his private property. always in my mind. Nevertheless the el- He sees them with a mixture of heartfelt derly great do seem to have a good deal participation and detachment that re- in common, and it is worth speculating quires his actual presence in the drama. on the reasons why they can express Now let me try to summarise the char- themselves so much more movingly in acteristics of the old-age style as they ap- painting and sculpture than in poetry. pear, with remarkable consistency, in the Perhaps a clue is given by Coleridge’s work of the greatest painters and sculp- words, ‘we in ourselves rejoice’ togeth- tors. A sense of isolation, a feeling of er with the word vitality. The painter holy rage, developing into what I have is dealing with something outside him- called transcendental pessimism; a mis- self, and is positively drawing strength trust of reason, a belief in instinct. And from what he sees. The act of painting is in a few rare instances the old-age myth a physical act, and retains some element of classical antiquity–the feeling that of physical satisfaction. No writer enjoys the crimes and follies of mankind must the movement of his pen, still less the be accepted with resignation. All this click of his typewriter. But in the actual is revealed by the imagery of old men’s laying on of a touch of colour, or in the pictures, and to some extent by the treat- stroke of a mallet on a chisel, there is a ment. If we consider old-age art from moment of self-forgetfulness. Harassed a more narrowly stylistic point of view, public servants–presidents, statesmen we ½nd a retreat from realism, an impa- and generals–take up painting; they do tience with established technique and not (with the exception of Lord Wavell) a craving for complete unity of treat- write poetry. It may seem ridiculous to ment, as if the picture were an organism compare the therapeutic activities of in which every member shared in the life these amateurs to the struggles of Titian of the whole. or Rembrandt; but I think that they do I have mentioned a few of the artists indicate a fundamental difference be- in whose late work these characteristics tween the two arts. A visual experience can be found. I could have extended it to is vitalising. Although it may almost im- almost every great painter who has lived mediately become a spiritual experience beyond the age of 65 or 70. Indeed I can (with all the pain which that involves), it think of only one exception, Piero della provides a kind of nourishment. Where- Francesca; and there a physical cause, as to write great poetry, to draw continu- cataract or partial blindness, prevented ously on one’s inner life, is not merely him in his old age from painting at all. exhausting, it is to keep alight a consum-

Dædalus Winter 2006 87 Kenneth ing ½re. What in old age feeds this ½re? was half enchanted by visions of beauty Clark Memories of past emotions; only very and half bored to death’, although it has on aging occasionally fresh experiences which, if been rejected with horror by most schol- they are strong enough to generate poet- ars of Shakespeare, seems to me sub- ry, cannot as Housman said, be endured stantially true. No man has ever burnt for any length of time. himself up more gloriously. But The Tem- Before trying to discover instances of pest does seem to show some character- the old-age style in literature and music, istics that only an artist who has lived I ought perhaps to consider the question his life could give. Far more than the ear- of what, in a creative artist, is meant by lier plays it creates a private world of the ‘old.’ Painters and sculptors tend to live imagination. Shakespeare, who had in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 much longer than writers or musicians, the past written so immediately for his and their work shows no sign of old age actors and his audiences, now seems to till their last years. Mr Henry Moore is be writing only for himself. And Pros- seventy-three, but neither in himself pero’s last speech could surely not have nor in his carving is there the slightest been written by a young man, even the sign of old age. Matisse became bedrid- young Shakespeare. den, but his art remained as fresh as a I have hesitated to quote the example daisy. Conversely, Beethoven was under of Shakespeare in The Artist Grows Old; ½fty when he entered what critics agree and I would de½nitely exclude Racine, to call his last period, and the quartets, for, in spite of the enormous change that written when he was ½fty-½ve, are clas- took place in his life during the twelve sic examples of the old-age style in their years’ silence between Phèdre and Esther, freedom from established forms and and the considerable difference of style their mixture of remoteness and urgent of his last two plays, they do not seem personal appeal. Like the last works of to reflect the liberation of old age. But Michelangelo and Titian, they seem to I have no such hesitation in including go beyond our reach, and yet there is an a third–I might say the third–great Eu- ultimate reconciliation. One should, I ropean dramatist: Ibsen. His last plays, suppose, add that Beethoven’s isolation from The Master Builder to When We Dead may have been increased by his deafness. Awaken, are perhaps the most complete But there are other examples of an old- illustration in literature of the character- age style in a great artist under ½fty for istics of the old-age style as we have seen which there is no such simple explana- them more consistently revealed in the tion. How do we explain Shakespeare’s visual arts. last four plays? Critics tend to write of First, isolation. In the 1890s Ibsen was them as if they were the work of an old the most famous writer in Europe, but man, although Shakespeare was in his after his return to Norway he lived in a middle forties when he wrote them. Peri- solitude of his own making. He was as cles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale do lonely as Michelangelo, and if anything indeed show some of the negative char- rather grumpier. Then the flight from acteristics of the old-age style–the im- realism. Viewed as a realistic drama The patience, the recklessness and the bitter- Master Builder is unconvincing, and in ness. But these seem to me symptoms of When We Dead Awaken all pretence of exhaustion rather than of a new direc- naturalism is abandoned. Both plays are tion. Lytton Strachey’s notorious judge- still based on marvellous and embarrass- ment that ‘Shakespeare in his last years ing psychological insights; but in form

88 Dædalus Winter 2006 they are allegories of guilt and redemp- Goethe in his list. Perhaps he could The artist tion. They are full, perhaps too full, of not bring himself to say (and we sym- grows old symbols; and as usual with the old-age pathise with him) that the second part style, these symbols can be interpreted of Faust burned brightlier than the ½rst. differently and leave us with an uneasy The numerous lyrics that Goethe wrote feeling that we can decipher only half in his last years at the drop of a hat may the message. They are intensely person- be better than Longfellow. I cannot tell. al; in fact it can be argued that the hero- What is certain is that they might have villain of each play is Ibsen himself, the been written by any middle-aged poet man who sacri½ced life to art and came conscious of his powers, and of his re- to believe that life is the more impor- sponsibilities to a rather conventional Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 tant. Michelangelo, when asked to de- notion of poetry. sign the reverse side of his portrait med- In the present century, as opposed al by Leone Leoni, chose as his emblem to the last, poets have tended to gain an old blind pilgrim, led by a mongrel in power as they grew older, and a num- dog, trotting along con½dently with tail ber of them have written movingly in erect. Ibsen would have agreed. But soli- the old-age style–Yeats, Rilke, Thomas tude and physical inaction do not imply Hardy himself. Yeats and Rilke used the a lack of vitality, and during the years freedom of address and the almost im- in which his last play was being written, penetrable symbolism of aged painters. Ibsen was constantly falling in love with Thomas Hardy in such a poem as After- young girls. Hilde Wangel and Irene math spoke more simply, but with a feel- were real experiences and few things ing of isolation and imminent depar- gave him more satisfaction than to read ture. But with no disrespect to these about the aged Goethe’s love affair with ½ne poets, I think one must allow that Mariana von Wilmer. Only instead of they are in a different category to Mi- his young ladies inspiring him to write chelangelo, Titian and Rembrandt. Can poems to the rising moon, as Goethe we name an aged poet of this stature? did, whether effectively or not it is hard Although he arouses no enthusiasm to say, Ibsen saw them as a new kind of among modern critics, I hope I may be Eumenides, playing on his sense of guilt allowed to pronounce the name of Mil- and driving him on to self-destruction. ton. Samson Agonistes is, so to say, a dou- On the name of Goethe, I must con- ble distilled example of old-age writing, fess that the greatest and most proli½c because it is undisguisedly modelled on of septuagenarian poets does not illus- the Oedipus at Colonus which Sophocles trate the characteristics of an old-age is supposed to have written after the age style, which seems to me so evident in of 87. Like the other examples I have the work of painters and sculptors. It is quoted, it is deeply personal. Milton true that the second part of Faust ends was himself blind; his hopes had been with symbolic utterances as mysterious shattered, his cause betrayed, and al- as the last speeches in When We Dead though his relations with the opposite Awaken. But Goethe’s respect for con- sex were certainly not as simple as those formity (what is usually referred to as of Samson and Delilah, he felt that his his wisdom) led to a tone of vague op- love of women was in some way con- timism, which his fellow ancients have nected with his failure. Samson Agonistes not usually shared. It is remarkable is almost as autobiographical as the last that Thomas Hardy does not include plays by Ibsen. But it differs from them

Dædalus Winter 2006 89 Kenneth in that Samson discovers a humility that ½ery pessimism of Michelangelo and Clark Ibsen’s guilt-ridden characters cannot Titian, and is perhaps the least painful on aging achieve, and so unlike the questionable expression of growing old. victories of Solness and Rubeck, he ends The fact is that Arnold was not far his career with an apotheosis which is wrong. The outstanding poet of our also the highest victory of old age. own day, Mr T. S. Eliot, has ampli½ed Samson Agonistes, like Paradise Regained, his statement with more subtlety and also ends on a note of resignation; and even greater bitterness: in its actual diction it introduces one Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age more aspect of the old-age style–a stoic To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/1/77/1829050/001152606775321068.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 austerity which denies any appeal to the First, the cold friction of expiring sense emotions made through the sensuous Without enchantment, offering no prom- quality of the medium. Michelangelo, ise Titian, Rembrandt, Donatello, Cézanne, But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit all continued to use their media with an As body and soul begin to fall asunder. added sense of its material possibilities. Second, the conscious impotence of rage But at least two great artists of the seven- At human folly, and the laceration teenth century voluntarily rejected that Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. charm of colour, light and joy in the use And last, the rending pain of re-enactment of paint which captivates us in their ear- Of all that you have done, and been; the ly work. These are Poussin and Claude. shame Poussin had equalled the great Venetians Of motives late revealed, and the aware- in his richness of colour and had sought ness for subjects that might allow him such Of things ill done and done to others’ sensuous delights. But by the time he harm had come to paint his second series of Which once you took for exercise of the Seven Sacraments, he had come to feel, virtue. as did Milton in Paradise Regained, that to display any pleasure in sensation would Any elderly person can vouch for the be to deprive the subject of its high seri- accuracy of those lines. They record ousness. Poussin by the intellectual pow- the common lot of homo sapiens. And er of his invention seems to me to have the miraculous fact, which I have tried justi½ed his puritanical renunciation. to describe in this lecture, is that many But a poem, which has to hold our atten- artists and some writers have, with in- tion and keep our faculties warm for a ½nite pain, created great works of art longer time than a picture, may suffer out of these miserable conditions. Their more severely from the exclusion of or- rage at human folly has not been impo- nament and graphic invention. The old- tent, their re-enactment of things done age style of Claude was less calculated. has been a means of re-creating them In his latest landscapes he did not delib- as part of a life-preserving myth, and erately exclude the enchantments of they have arrested the moment when light and distance; but he retreated in- the body and soul fall asunder, caught to a remote world of his own creation, enough of the body to make the moment where colour is subdued to a near mono- comprehensible, and seen how its disin- chrome and events take place in a sort of tegration reveals the soul. trance. This gentle, dreamlike departure from reality is very different from the

90 Dædalus Winter 2006