History is said to be a series of reactions. Society, like a pendulum,
first drives one way, and then swings back in the opposite direction.
At present, we may be said to be returning at full speed towards a
taste for everything old, neglected, and for ages despised. Science
and refinement have had their day, and now rude nature and the
elemental are to be in the ascendant. In our boyhood, we learned the
Roman alphabet; but youngsters now had need to add a knowledge of
black-letter, which is rapidly getting back into fashion. Perfection
is only to be found in the darkness and ignorance of the middle ages.
It is proper, no doubt, to get rid of what is tame and spiritless in
art; and it must be owned that nearly everything that was done in
architecture and decoration during the Georgian era was detestable.
But it is one thing to reform, and another to revolutionise. Let us by
all means go to nature for instruction; but nature under the exercise
of cultivated feeling--selecting what tends to ennoble and refine, not
that which degrades and sends us back to forms and ideas totally out
of place in the nineteenth century, and which, for that very reason,
can have nothing but a temporary reign, to be followed in the
succeeding age by a violent reaction.
On a former occasion, we drew attention to this tendency towards
mediævalism as regards ornamental design, and took the Great
Exhibition to witness the fact. We have also pointed to that strange
phenomenon, the rise anew of monastic institutions among us, long
after their object is accomplished, giving a spectre-like expression
to an obsolete idea; we have exposed, likewise, the inclination of the
working-classes to trust to the protection, and, on every emergency,
claim as a matter of right the aid of the wealthy, thus wilfully and
deliberately returning to the condition of serfdom: we have now to
trace the mediæval mania in a department where, notwithstanding all
this ominous conjunction of symptoms, its appearance is truly
surprising--in the department of high art in painting.
Our readers need not fear that we are about to inflict on them a
scientific dissertation. All we wish to do, is to explain to them a
word, with the meaning of which many of them are very imperfectly
acquainted, and by the mere explanation, to enable them to determine
upon its claims to designate--not merely _a_ school, but _the_ school
of art, destined, if founded in truth and nature, to overturn every
other. This word--Pre-Raphaelitism--is taken from the name of one of
the Italian masters, and it is necessary, in order to understand the
question, to ascertain what were the circumstances and the genius that
have thus set him up as a landmark in the history of art.
After the fall of the Western Empire, the fine arts were lost, and
their productions literally buried in the wreck. The minds of the
composite nations that arose in Europe had no guide. Men were left to
their own instincts, only faintly aided by the ruins and traditions of
degenerate Rome; and each series of countries had its own style of
art, framed or adopted by the genius of the people. During the middle
ages, the style most general in Northern Europe was the Gothic; and by
that term the whole system of art during the period is popularly known
in England. The state of painting, under the Gothic régime, may be
seen in the stained windows of the cathedrals; in which strong
outlines and bright colours are laid down without any reference to
chiaro-scuro, or the scientific arrangement of light and shadow. This
seems a natural stage in art-development, and at the same moment it
was seen in equal perfection in China and Europe. In the former
region, the people are now beginning to advance a step beyond, through
their imitation of English pictures; although, but a few years ago,
they burst into fits of laughter on seeing the shadow of the nose in a
portrait. In Europe, a gigantic and almost sudden stride was made,
towards the close of the fifteenth century, under an influence from
which the Chinese were debarred, and the nature of which we shall
presently explain.
Let us first, however, just notice, that the charms of gaudy
inartistic colouring frequently exercise a powerful sway even over
minds familiar with better things; although that sway is always
indicative of the decay of intellectual or moral freshness. Thus, it
is remarked by an old Greek author (Dionysius of Halicarnassus), that
the perfection to which painting had been brought by Apelles, had
degenerated under Augustus; the painters being so much fascinated by
the new art of colouring, that they neglected design, and preferred
the brilliant or gaudy to the solid, and counterfeit to natural
beauty. What this 'perfection' of Apelles was, we cannot now tell; but
the probability is, that it existed only in design, and that the union
of this with artistic colouring was reserved for the modern masters.
Before these masters appeared, and before the influence we are about
to refer to was felt in Europe, some efforts were made by unassisted
genius to rise beyond the conventionalities of the time; in the latter
half of the thirteenth century, Cimabue already surpassed his modern
Greek preceptors; and his disciple Giotto was considered so natural
and original, that his style could not be referred to any existing
school, but was called the _maniera di Giotto_. 'Instead of the harsh
outline,' says Vasari, 'circumscribing the whole figure, the glaring
eyes, the pointed hands and feet, and all the defects arising from a
total want of shadow, the figures of Giotto exhibit a better attitude;
the heads have an air of life and freedom, the drapery is more
natural, and there are even some attempts at fore-shortening the
limbs.' All this, however, although a decided improvement on mediæval
art, was rude and imperfect--it was only the first faint dawn of a
better light. 'As yet,' to use the words of Roscoe, 'the characters
rarely excelled the daily prototypes of common life; and their forms,
although at times sufficiently accurate, were often vulgar and
heavy.... To everything great and elevated, the art was yet a
stranger: even the celebrated picture of Pollajuolo exhibits only a
group of half-naked and vulgar wretches, discharging their arrows at a
miserable fellow-creature, who, by changing places with one of his
murderers, might with equal propriety become a murderer himself.'
But the time at length came when that stimulus was to be communicated
to taste which sent a thrill throughout the general heart of Europe.
The pictures of the old Greeks were lost for ever, dead and gone; but
their statues were only buried--buried alive--and now, at the command
of wealth and genius, they were dug out of their tomb of ages, and
came forth, unharmed, in their enchanted life and immortal beauty.
Yes, unharmed; for in the head, the torso, the limb, the hand, the
finger, the same principle of life existed as in the entire figure;
and, owing to the sublime law of proportion, which bound all together,
the minutest fragment indicated a perfect whole. The palace of Lorenzo
de Medici was the assembling-place, and the ideal beauty of the Greeks
found a new shrine in the groves of Florence. These became a true
academia, where genius studied and taught, and where the presiding
spirit of the place was Michael Angelo Buonarotti,[A] the
sculptor--painter--architect--poet, whose universal mind appeared to
fit him, not so much to shine in any one department--although shine he
did in all--as to give an impetus to the whole Revival. But Michael
Angelo, as a painter, excelled chiefly in design; while one who was
his contemporary, and being a few years later in the field, has been
supposed by some to be his imitator, was the painter _par excellence_
of the new era--the first great painter of the moderns. This was
RAPHAEL. He was the pupil of Perugino; and while such, contented
himself with imitating, with the utmost fidelity, the works of that
artist; till at length emancipating himself from tutelage, he went for
inspiration to the cartoons of Michael Angelo, to the sculptures of
the Medici gardens, and to nature herself. Vasari makes Michael Angelo
the magnus Apollo of Raphael; but Quatremère de Quincy assigns to the
latter artist a holier worship. In a letter from him, which he quotes,
respecting his famous picture of the Galatea, Raphael says, that in
order to paint a beautiful woman, he must see many, but that, after
all, he must work upon a certain ideal image present in his mind. 'We
thus see,' says the French critic, 'that he really sought after the
beautiful which Nature presents to art, but which the imagination of
the artist alone can seize, and genius alone realise.'
Raphael was the first of the moderns to idealise beauty, or, in other
words, to represent nature in the form she is striving, in her
infinite progression, to attain, but which as yet she only indicates
here and there in those hints and parts that prophetic genius combines
and moulds into a whole. He softened the harsh outlines, mellowed the
glaring colours, and harmonised the awkward proportions of mediæval
art. With him, a new epoch commenced, adorned by many illustrious
names, from Julio Romano, the poet of painters, to Titian, who clipped
his pencil in the rainbow. The Lombard school of Titian was the third
of the three first great schools of the Revival, in which taste,
emancipated from the darkness of the middle ages, sought inspiration
in nature and the Greek sculptures. What would be thought if a school
were to arise three hundred years later, not merely discarding the
experience and teachings of the great masters, but claiming by its
very name to return into the gulf from which these had been
emancipated? This school of decline has, in fact, made its appearance
among the other symptoms of the mediæval mania, and we now gravely
hang up in our exhibitions the productions of the _Pre_-Raphaelites!
The name at first provoked so much ridicule in England, that their
friends were at pains to inform the world, that it was assumed merely
for the purpose of intimating their entire separation from the
_schools_ of Raphael and his successors, and their exclusive devotion
to nature. The artists of Germany, however, with whom the mania
commenced, were less scrupulous.[1] They imitated, purposely, the
rudeness of the early painters, and even favourably distinguished the
juvenile works of Raphael when he was as yet the mere copyist of
Perugino. It is thus only the reformed schools the Pre-Raphaelists
avoid; for Mr Ruskin's notion, that there were no schools at all
before Raphael, is quite too wild for answer.[2] The name, however, is
of little consequence. The nature returned to is obviously, to any one
who has eyes in his head, the nature of the middle ages; and if our
readers will look again at the quotations we have made above--which
were not taken at random--they will find, in the words of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Vasari, and William Roscoe, a pretty accurate
description of the genius and manner of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Nor could the fact be otherwise. We have noticed the identity of taste
between the Chinese and the unawakened Europeans, as pointing to a
natural stage in art-development; and if we allot to the new school a
position one degree higher than that of Cimabue and Giotto, it is all
that can be claimed by artists, who have even attempted to dismiss
from their minds a later and nobler experience. Their rule is--to have
no rule; to copy nature, just as she happens to be before them; to
select nothing, reject nothing, subordinate nothing, and thus to have
no composition and no chiaro-scuro. They recognise no inequality, no
relationship of objects: a pin in a lady's dress, and the nose on the
lady's face, are treated with the same even-handed justice. The
harmony of colours is a mere dream: let them only be as bright as a
stained-glass window, and all is well.
At this moment, there are two specimens of Pre-Raphaelitism to be seen
at the Exhibition of the Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. They are both
distinguished, like the philosopher in Andersen's Drop of Ditchwater,
by having no name; but a quotation is appended to each of the numbers
in the catalogue, and is to be supposed to indicate, the subject. No.
9, in the Great Room, has this quatrain from Tennyson--
'She only said: "My life is dreary--
He cometh not!" she said;
She said: "I'm aweary, aweary--
I would that I were dead."'
In illustration of this awkwardly-constructed stanza, a female,
uncomely and ungraceful, is represented as standing in the attitude of
a yawn, not indicated by the gaping mouth, but by the contorted
person, and arms twisted behind the back. She is close to a
stained-glass window, whose gaudy colours are challenged by her own
bright blue dress, the object of the artist throughout appearing to be
violent opposition, not harmony. The picture, with its violent
dislocations, both of bones and impressions, conveys the idea of
anything but repose, although a mouse on the floor bids us notice,
that notwithstanding appearances, the ungainly lady stretches herself
in silence. There cannot well be anything more inelegant and untrue
than this piece; yet there is clever painting here and there; and some
of the accessories, if taken without reference to the design, in which
they are blots, are models of their kind. The thought belongs to the
middle ages; the mechanical touch to the post-Raphaelite era.
The other picture, No. 93, in the same room, is larger and more
ambitious. It represents a carpenter's workshop, with a mechanic at
each end of the long bench; one of these, a half-starved, hideous
wretch, with hardly a trace of the human anatomy in his composition;
and the other, a respectable and rather sagacious-looking person, with
immeasurable legs. Behind the bench is a frightful old woman, of the
lowest class; and before it another, younger, but repulsively ugly and
vulgar, examining, in conjunction with the respectable workman--and
with her brow knotted in an awful congeries of wrinkles up to her
fiery hair--the hand of a little boy. This little boy, though plebeian
and red-haired, is not unpleasing: he has apparently cut his hand
while playing with some of the edge-tools lying about the shop; while
his brother, a better-figured as well as better-behaved boy, with a
hairy apron round him, is making himself useful in carrying a basin of
some dark-coloured stuff--probably carpenter's glue. But let us see
what the legend attached to the number says: 'And one shall say unto
him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those
with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.'--Zechariah,
xiii. 6. What does this mean? It means, innocent reader, that the
piece we have described in its principal features is the Holy Family
of the Pre-Raphaelites! This is their mode of going to nature,
selecting nothing but the mean and repulsive, and rejecting nothing
but poetical and religious feeling and common decency.
But if the theory of the Pre-Raphaelites is just as regards painting,
it must be just as regards the other departments of taste. Suppose it
applied to musical composition. Let us throw overboard everything that
degrades music to a science, and 'go to nature,' as Mr Ruskin
counsels, 'rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning
nothing.' What would be the result? The result would be the torture of
everybody in the country who had the misfortune to possess a
cultivated ear. And yet the music of that time would not be absolutely
disagreeable in itself: it would merely involve the deprivation of
what had become a necessary to the taste; for nature would still
inspire simple sounds, connected more or less with the feelings.
Nature, in fact, proceeds in music upon laws that are merely
elaborated and carried out by science; while in painting, she offers
an endless variety of objects and effects, to be selected, grouped,
and made into a picture by the artist. We all feel this when gazing on
natural scenery. We are actuated by an unconscious eclecticism, and
make the composition for ourselves. To some natural scenes, no skill
could impart interest of any kind; others attain to a certain
character of the picturesque; while others, again, combine in
themselves all the elements of a good picture. But even with these
last, mere imitation will not do. Nature, as Hazlitt observes, 'has a
larger canvas than man'--a canvas immensely larger; and the artist,
since he cannot copy, must select. The same reasoning applies to
figure and group-painting, and its accessories. Nature rarely forms a
perfect group, because it is not her purpose to embody a single
expression. As for small accessorial objects, such as a pin or a leaf,
being painted with the same care and accuracy as principal objects,
this is a defect in drawing, that argues a singular want of
reflection. In nature, we see distinctly the figure and its more
prominent parts, but we see the minute accessorial parts so
indistinctly, that sometimes we can scarcely tell what they are. The
precise detailing of these objects, therefore, may have the truth of
fact, but it is destitute of the truth of nature.
What would be the effect of the new system, if applied to romantic
fiction? But the question is unnecessary; for the new system ignores
romance, which is the truth of nature not of fact. A pre-Raphaelite
story, taken from real life, might be romantic in its incidents and
striking in its catastrophe; but it would want coherence in the
design, and therefore produce no sustained emotion; and its characters
being drawn, without selection, from vulgar prototypes, would excite
more disgust than interest. The drama?--but there the new theory of
art becomes too ridiculous: a tragedy on such a plan would be received
with alternate yawns of ennui and shouts of laughter. All these are
pertinent questions; for fine art, in literature, music, sculpture,
painting, architecture, forms a homogeneous circle under one law of
taste.
It may be supposed that we are ascribing too much importance to the
department of the mediæval mania under examination; but, for our part,
we 'scorn nothing' that presents a bar, however slight, to the
progress of civilisation and refinement. Pre-Raphaelitism is only one
form of a degradation of taste which appears to keep pace with the
utilities of the time, and we shall never be slow in lending our aid
to cleanse the temple of its desecrators. L.R.