Many technical questions beset a true revival which are of deeper
interest to the actors in it than to the public at large. Such was the
question of the introduction of oil as a medium in the old days; such
was the question of the proper way to render brightness in our air.
"You vagabond!" said Millais--as he watched Hunt painting in transparent
colour, with light sable brushes, over a ground of half-moist white,
the landscape of "The Hireling Shepherd"--"that's just the way I paint
flowers!" They had arrived at this method by independent lines of
thought. To them, and to their brother artists, it was most important.
Millais, delighted, proposed that they should keep it a secret--and
instantly confided it to Ford Madox Brown. The outer world was more
concerned with the fact that the sun could be made to shine upon canvas
than with the way in which it was brought about. The one inevitable
condition of the truth of a revival is always, by one method or by
another, a return to Nature. This had been accomplished; and the world,
as ever, divided--the few hailing what they saw as a revelation, the
many denouncing it as heresy.
When a picture by the first Pre-Raphaelite was carried in triumph
through the streets of Florence there were those who named that
quarter Borgo Allegri; but there were those who declared that art
was at an end now the Byzantine tradition had been broken. When the
pictures of the last Pre-Raphaelite shone out at Burlington House,
there were happy people who vowed they looked like "openings in the
wall"; there were also those who declared that art had come to an
end now the tradition of Raphael was ignored. Steadily, through evil
report and good report, the painter went his way. He did not hold--as
Millais came to hold in after years--that it was the business of the
artist to find out what most people wanted, and to paint that. He did
not hold--as Rossetti held--that it was the business of the artist to
impose his will on a select band of followers, trained by himself to
believe that the age of Dante was the Golden Age, and that colour
should be based on the principles of illumination. He held that an
artist was accountable to God. He held that an Englishman should study
those minds, those words, which have more power over England than any
others--should help to make those clear.
Shakespeare had led him to "rate lightly that kind of art devised only
for the initiated, and to suspect all philosophies which assume that the
vulgar are to be left for ever unredeemed."
He hated newspapers because "the influence of writers who have had no
other qualification to judge of art matters than the possession of more
or less literary facility, has been deterrent and ever fatal to a steady
advance of taste."
There are two aspects. Art "presents the form of a nation's spirit,
exactly as the sounding atoms on a vibrating plane make a constant and
distinct pattern to the sound of a given note." Likewise, "All art from
the beginning served for the higher development of men's minds. It has
ever been valued as good to sustain strength for noble resolves."
Determined to serve his generation, not as a playfellow, not as a tyrant,
but as a master, he followed singly and faithfully that conviction which
had led him from childhood to think of the Bible as the great factor in
human existence. To the interpretation of the Life of Christ he gave
the best years of his manhood. In order to understand it more thoroughly
he broke away from comfort, he risked success at the moment when first
she smiled on him, he left the friend whom he loved. It was not enough
to paint "The Light of the World," to set before the eyes of his
countrymen the eternal King, the eternal Priest, knocking at the door of
the human heart, barred darkly in behind the weeds of selfishness. He
would go to the country where the King dwelt. He would show:
(1) The coming of God to earth, as it was seen by the dim eyes of
tradition, of mortal learnedness, when there was found within the
precincts of the Temple, among the Rabbis, a Child who had forgotten
to return to his parents.
(2) The oneness of Creation in the form of the suffering creature
dying by the Dead Sea shore--the Goat, the type of the Lamb.
(3) The sacredness of labour, in the form of the Son of Man resting
from toil in that low workshop where the Virgin Mother hoarded the
gifts of regal wisdom.
(4) The young immortal beauty ever to be seen by the Child of God, by
the spirit of maiden purity, turning the torrent of death into the
river of life, making the darkness as the noon-day.
To the Bible, Holman Hunt gave his manhood--to Shakespeare, his youth!
No one who desires to add to the store of England's thought but must,
at one time or another, plunge deep into the mind of her greatest
thinker. It is a sign of the unthinking nature of English art that,
before this time, there were no illustrations of Shakespeare worth the
name. It is characteristic of the pre-eminently thoughtful nature of
this artist that he should have chosen two subjects that are often
misunderstood, from two plays that are hardly ever acted--the subject
of _Forgiveness_ from the "Two Gentlemen of Verona;" the subject
_Death-to-be-preferred-before-slavery_ from "Measure for Measure."
The duty of the Forgiveness of Sins--which has been well defined in the
one word, _Affection_--a duty canvassed and discussed everywhere--is, in
Shakespeare, deprived of the very aspect of a duty. It seems to have
appeared to him not only natural but inevitable that anybody should
forgive anybody anything. The most astounding of all his reconciliations
is that of the "Two Gentlemen." Valentine has to forgive Proteus;
Sylvia has to forgive Proteus and Valentine into the bargain; Julia has
to forgive Proteus; and Proteus has to forgive himself. Upon the stage
we have seen an actress, in despair at the difficulty of the thing,
turn her back to the audience and lean against a tree while the
discussion was going on; but in the picture Sylvia kneels, her hand
left trustingly in that of Valentine, and we have no sooner looked at
it than we believe and understand. It is the same with that difficult
moment of "Measure for Measure," when the two sides of life speak in
the brother and sister:
"Death is a fearful thing,"
"And shamed life a hateful."
The nun, we are sometimes told, is a repellent person; what business
had she to urge her brother to die when she could save him by doing
wrong herself? To look at "Claudio and Isabella" is to believe her and
to understand.
Another picture owes its motto to one of Edgar's mad bursts of song in
"King Lear."
"Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd?
Thy sheep be in the corn;
And yet one blast of thy minnikin mouth,
Thy sheep shall take no harm."
It is not an actual shepherd and shepherdess who are seated in this
leafy English landscape, among the green pastures and by the still
waters. Still less is it the kind of shepherd and shepherdess that
Watteau, Fragonard, and the china manufactory of Dresden have accustomed
us to associate with the words. Who and what are they, those careless
people in the bright sunshine, letting the sheep eat the corn that kills
them and the unripe apples? The shepherd's crook lies idle on the
ground. He has found a death's-head moth; he is too busy showing it to
his companion to have any use for that. She is flattered and pleased
that he should attend to her rather than to the sheep.
When this picture was painted, the Oxford Movement was in the air; the
shepherd and the shepherdess were alike busy with the death's-head moth.
Turning to modern minds, the poet whose word weighed most with England
at the time was undoubtedly Tennyson. A verse from "In Memoriam"
describes "The Ship." "The Lady of Shalott" gave the subject of a work
which took twelve years in painting. It was enlarged from a small design
in a volume of Tennyson illustrated by Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti;
and by several other artists, not of their persuasion. This particular
illustration did not find favour with the poet, he objected to the
lady's hair, to her manner of wearing it. The dream has been changed
into a profound allegory. The lady is--if we mistake not--the artist
who, through neglect of the divine gift of reflective imagination, has
failed in the high purpose of art. It was hers to weave the Quest of the
Holy Grail, as she saw it in the magic mirror. If she had stayed at her
appointed work, all had gone well. But she looked out of window to
see Sir Lancelot--not the Sir Lancelot of Tennyson, but a boastful,
pleasure-loving knight, going on his way in the sunlight, with two
trumpeters before him. Then came the curse upon her, for the order of
the world was broken, the order of the world all about her, in the
flower of the earth, in the bird of the air, in the stars, governed and
guided each by its own angel. On one side of her room order is strength
as seen in Hercules--on the other submission, as typified in the earlier
design by the Cross, in the later by the Nativity. This order she has
broken, against this order she has sinned. The lovely picture of her
weaving the likeness of the Holy Grail itself will come to naught. But
up above there chimes the one word, _Spes_; even for those who have
failed there is hope.
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--MAY MORNING
"This subject was the ceremony of May Morning, Magdalen
Tower, Oxford, at sunrise, when the choristers, in
perpetuation of a service which is a survival of
primitive Sun-worship--perhaps Druidical--sing a hymn
as the sun appears above the horizon.... For several
weeks I mounted to the Tower roof about four in the
morning with my small canvas to watch for the first
rays of the rising sun, and to choose the sky which
was most suitable for the subject. When all was
settled I repeated the composition upon a larger
canvas." _W. H. H._