To speak of English Art was, ten years ago, to speak of something
formless, chaotic, indeed, so far as any order or organization of
principles was concerned,--a mass of individual results, felt out,
often, under the most glorious artistic inspiration, but much oftener
the expression of merely ignorant whim, or still more empty academic
knowledge,--a waste of uncultivated, unpruned brushwood, with here and
there a solitary tree towering into unapproachable and inexplicable
symmetry and beauty. Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Turner are great names
in Art-history; but to deduce their development from the English culture
of Art, one must use the same processes as in proving Cromwell to have
been called up by the loyalty of Englishmen. They towered the higher
from contempt for the abasement around them. If there was greatness in
measure in English Art, it was greatness subjected to tradition and
conventionalism. The three artists we have just named were the only
great freemen, in the realm of Art England had known down to the close
of the first half of the nineteenth century; and of these, Turner alone
has left his impress on the Art succeeding his.
With the commencement of the present half-century there began a
systematic movement in revolt from the degradation of Art in England,
which, unfortunately, so far as significance was concerned, assumed the
name of Pre-Raphaelitism. It extended itself rapidly, absorbing most of
the young painters of any force or earnestness, and attracting some who
already held high places in public esteem. Being something new, it
was sure of its full measure of derision while it was considered
unimportant, and of bitter and violent antagonism when it became evident
that it was strong enough to make its way. This hostility, beaten down
for the moment by the rhetoric of Ruskin and the inherent earnestness
of the new Art, is, however, as sure to prevail again as the English
character is at once conservative of old forms, reverential of
authorities, and subject to enthusiasms for new things, whose very
extravagance tends to reaction. If Pre-Raphaelitism now holds its own in
England, it is simply because it is neither thoroughly understood nor
completely defined. It is an absolutely revolutionary movement, and
must, therefore, be rejected by the English mind when seen as such,--and
this all the more certainly and speedily because Ruskin with his
imaginative enthusiasm has raised it to a higher position than it really
deserves at present. That cause is unfortunate which retains as its
advocate one whose rhetoric persuades all, while his logic convinces
none; and the too readily believing converts of his enthusiasm and
splendid diction, their sympathetic fire abated, revert with an
implacable bitterness to their former traditions. With all our respect
for Ruskin, we think that he has asserted many things, but proved next
to nothing. He has utterly misunderstood and misstated Pre-Raphaelitism,
which will thus be one day the weaker for his support.
But, pending this inevitable decline in favor at home, Pre-Raphaelitism
colonizes. During the past year, some lovers of Art in England organized
an association, having as its purpose the introduction of English Art to
the American public,--partly, it was to be expected, with the view of
opening this El Dorado to the English painter, but still more with the
desire to extend the knowledge of what was to them a new and important
revelation of Art. In its inception the plan was almost exclusively
Pre-Raphaelite, but extended itself, on after-consideration, so far as
to admit the worthiest artists of the conventional stamp. We have the
first fruits of the undertaking in an exhibition which has achieved a
success in New York, and which will probably visit the principal cities
of the Union before its return home in the spring to make way for a
second which will open in the autumn.
It is not as a collection of pictures merely that we purpose to notice
this exhibition. Out of nearly four hundred pictures, the great
proportion are mere conventionalisms,--many of them choice, but most of
them in no wise to be compared with the pictures of the same class by
French and German painters, since neither just drawing nor impressive
color redeems their inanity of conception. There are some curious
water-color drawings by Lance, remarkable mainly as forcibly painted,
some exquisite color-pieces by William Hunt, and a number of fine
examples of the matter-of-fact common-place which forms the great mass
of pictures in the London exhibitions. Two drawings deserve especial,
though brief, notice; one a coast bit by Copley Fielding,--a sultry,
hazy afternoon on the seashore, where sea and sky, distance and
foreground, are fused into one golden, slumberous silence, in which
neither wave laps nor breeze fans, and only the blinding sun moves,
sinking slowly down to where heaven and ocean mingle again in a happy
dream of their old unity before the waters under the firmament were
divided from the waters above the firmament, and the stranded ships lie
with sails drooping and listless on a beach from which the last tide
seems to have ebbed, leaving the ooze glistening and gleaming in the
sunlight,--a picture of rare sentiment and artistic refinement;--the
other is a waterfall by Nesfield,--a dreamy, careless, wayward plunge
of waters over ledge after ledge of massive rock, the merry cascade
enveloping itself in a robe of spray and mist, on the skirt of which
flashes the faintest vision of a rainbow, which wavers and flits,
almost, as you look at it, while the jets of foam plash up from the pool
at the foot of the fall, a tranquil pause of the waters in a depth of
uncertain blue, in which a suggestion of emerald flashes, and from
which they dance on in less frantic mood over the brown and water-worn
boulders to follow their further whims; everything that is most charming
and _spirituelle_ in the water-fall is given, and with a delicacy of
color and subtilty of execution fitting the subject. These are not the
only good drawings, but there is in them a simplicity and singleness
of purpose, a total subordination of all minor matters to the great
impression, which makes them points of poetic value in the collection.
There are some drawings by Finch, scarcely less noticeable for their
rendering of solemn twilight, tender and touching as the memory of a
loved one long dead. The water-color representation is, indeed, complete
and interesting; but we have only present use with five of these
drawings, by Turner, and from different stages of his progress.
Ruskin, in his pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism, has drawn such a comparison
between Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites as to make them only different
manifestations of the same spirit in Art. Nothing, it seems to us, could
be more mistaken than this; for, in all that concerns either the end of
Art or its paths of approach, its purposes or its methods, Turner and
the Pre-Raphaelites are diametrically opposed. Turner was intensely
subjective,--the Pre-Raphaelites are as intensely objective. There is
no evidence whatever in Turner's works that he ever made the slightest
attempt to reproduce Nature in such guise as the Pre-Raphaelites paint
her in; on the contrary, the early drawings of Turner are as inattentive
to absolute truth of detail as they could well be. His course of study
was one of memory. He commenced by expressing in his drawing such
palpable facts and truths as were most strongly retained, and in which
he conveyed the great impression of the scene, with the most complete
indifference to all facts not essential to the telling of his story.
From this, as his memory grew stronger and his perception more minute
and comprehensive, he widened his circle of ideas and facts, always
working from feeling rather than from what Nature set before him. His
mind thus sifting his perceptions, retaining always only those which
constituted the essential features of the impression, and with
a distinctness proportioned to their relative importance, there
necessarily resulted a subjective unity like that of an absolute
creation. The Pre-Raphaelites, on the other hand, endeavor to paint
everything that they see just as they see it; and doing this without
permitting the slightest liberty of choice to their feeling, where
they _have_ feeling, their Art is, of course, in all its early stages,
destitute of that singleness of purpose which marked Turner's works
from the beginning. Turner felt an emotion before Nature, and used the
objects from which he had received the emotion as symbols to
convey it again;--the Pre-Raphaelites look at Nature as full
of beautiful facts, and, like children amid the flowers, they
gather their hands full, "indifferent of worst or best," and when their
hands are full, crowd their laps and bosoms, and even drop some
already picked, to make room for others which beckon from their
stems,--insatiable with beauty. This is delightful,--but childlike,
nevertheless. Turner was, above all, an artist; with him Art stood
first, facts secondary;--with the Pre-Raphaelites it is the reverse; it
is far less important to them that their facts should be broadly stated
and in keeping in their pictures, than that they should be there and
comprehensible. To him a fact that was out of keeping was a nuisance,
and he treated it as such; while any falsehood that was in keeping was
as unhesitatingly admitted, if he needed it to strengthen the impression
of his picture. Turner would put a rainbow by the side of the sun, if he
wanted one there;--a Pre-Raphaelite would paint with a stop-watch, to
get the rainbow in the right place. In brief, Turner's was the purely
subjective method of study, a method fatal to any artist of the opposite
quality of mind;--that of the Pre-Raphaelites is the purely objective,
absolutely enslaving to a subjective artist, and no critic capable of
following out the first principles of Art to logical deductions could
confound the two. The one leads to a sentimental, the other to a
philosophic Art; and the only advice to be given to an artist as to his
choice of method is, that, until he knows that he can trust himself in
the liberty of the subjective, he had better remain in the discipline
of the objective. The fascination of the former, once felt, forbids all
return to the latter. If he be happy in the Pre-Raphaelite fidelity, let
him thank the Muse and tempt her no farther.
There can be no more valuable lesson in Art given than that series
of Turner drawings in the British collection, both as concerns its
progression in the individual and those subtile analogies between
painting (color) and music,--analogies often hinted at, but never, that
we are aware, fully followed out. Color bears the same relation to form
that sound does to language. If a painter sit down before Nature
and accurately match all her tints, we have an absolute but prosaic
rendering of her; and the analogy to this in music would be found in
a passage of ordinary conversational language written down, with its
inflections and pauses recorded in musical signs. Both are transcripts
of Nature, but neither is in any way poetic, or, strictly speaking,
artistic; we cannot, by any addition or refinement, make them so. Now
mark that in the two early drawings of Turner we have white and
black with only the slightest possible suggestion of blue in the
distance;--the corresponding form in language is verse, with its measure
of time for measure of space, and just so much inflection of voice as
these drawings have of tint,--enough not to be absolutely monotonous. We
have in both cases left the idea of mere imitation of Nature, and have
entered on Art. Verse grows naturally into music by simple increase of
the range of inflection, as Turner's color will grow more melodic and
finally harmonic. And in thus beginning Turner has placed his works
above the level of prosaic painting of Nature, just as verse is placed
above prose by the unanimous consent of mankind. From these simple
presages of Art we may diverge and follow his development as a poet by
his engravings, without ever making reference to him as a colorist. But
beside being a poet, he was a great color-composer. If, leaving poetry
as recited, we take the ballad, or poetry made fully melodic, we have
the single voice, passing through measured inflections and with measured
pauses. Correspondingly, the next in the series of Turner drawings, the
"Aysgarth Force," shows no attempt to give the real color of Nature, but
a single color governing the whole drawing, a golden brown passing in
shadow into its exact negative. There is an absolute tint, full, and
inflected through every shade of its tones to the bottom of the scale.
The strict analogy is broken in this case by a dash of delicate
gray-blue in the sky and gray-red in the figures, the slightest possible
accompaniment to his golden-brown melody; but these were not needed, and
we find earlier drawings which adhere to the strict monochrome. In the
drawing next in date, the "Hastings from the Sea," we have the further
step from monochrome to polychrome; we have the distinct trio, the
golden yellow in the sky, the blue in the sea, and the red in the
figures in the boats,--as in a vocal trio we have the only three
possible musical sounds of the human voice, the soprano, the basso,
and the falsetto of the child's voice. All these colors are distinctly
asserted and perfectly harmonized in a most exquisite play of tints, but
it is still no more like Nature than the trio in "I Puritani" is like
conversation. Turner never dreamed of painting _like_ Nature, and no
sane man ever saw or can see, in this world, Nature in the colors in
which he has painted her, any more than he will find men conducting
business in operatic notes.
One step farther, and we leave the analogy. In the "Swiss Valley," one
of his last works, we are from the first conscious that his harmonies
have run away with his theme. In Ole Bull's "Niagara" we have almost as
much of matter-of-fact Nature as in Turner's "Swiss Valley." The eye
untrained by study of Turner's works finds nothing but a blaze of color
with no intelligible object, just as we have, in opera, music of which
the words are inaudible;--both are there for practised ear and eye, but
in neither case as of primary importance. Turner has even gone farther,
and given us pictures of pure color, as in the illustration of Goethe's
theory of colors,--a _fantasie_ of the palette. And why shall Turner
not orchestrate color as well as Verdi sound? why not give us his
synchromies as well as Beethoven his symphonies? You prefer common
sense,--Harding and Fripp, Stanfield and Creswick? Well, suppose you
like better to hear some familiar voice talking of past times than to
hear "Robert le Diable" ever so well sung, or Hawthorne's prose better
than Browning's verse,--it proves nothing, save that you do not care for
music and poetry so well as some others do.
But after all, Turner was one of the old school of artists. Claude was
the first landscape painter of the line, Turner the last; subjective
poets both,--the one a child, the other a mighty man. But the poets
no longer govern the world as in times past; they give place to the
philosophers. The race is no longer content with its inspirations and
emotions, but must see and understand. The old school of Art was one of
sentiment, the new is one of fact; and out of that English mind from
whose seeming common-place level of untrained, unschooled intellect have
burst so many of the loftiest souls the world has known,--from that mind
more inspired in its want of academic greatness, more self-educated in
its wild liberty, than the best-trained nations of Europe, this new
school has fittingly had its origin.
We speak of it as a School, though yet in its rudiments, because it
has a distinctive character, a real purpose,--and because it is the
embodiment of the new-age spirit of truth-seeking, of the spirit of
science, rather than that of song. Among the pictures contributed to the
English exhibition by the Pre-Raphaelites, there are very few which do
not convey the distinct impression of a determined effort to realize
certain truths. There are few which succeed entirely; but this is so far
from astonishing, that we have only to think that the oldest of these
artists has hardly passed his first decade of recognized artistic
existence, and that their aims are new in Art, to wonder that so much of
fresh and subtile truth is given. There are two respects in which nearly
all the works of the school agree, and which have come to be regarded by
superficial students of Art as its characteristics, namely, that they
are very deficient in drawing and devoid of grace. Both deficiencies
are such as might have been expected from the circumstances. Young men
filled with earnestness and enthusiasm, and with an artistic purpose
full in view, will spend little time in acquiring academic excellences,
or trouble themselves much with methods or styles of drawing. They dash
at once to their purpose, and let technical excellence follow, as it
ought, in the train of the idea of their work. Of course they do not
compare, as draughtsmen and technists, with men who have spent years in
getting a knowledge of the proportions of the human figure, and the best
methods of applying color; but, on the other hand, they are safe from
that most alluring and fatal course of study which makes the subject
only a lay figure to display artistic capacity on. Of all the pictures
of the school, in the collection of which we speak, there is but one of
academic excellence in drawing,--the "King Lear" of Ford Madox Brown.
All the others have errors, and some of them to a ludicrous degree; but
wherever refined drawing is needed to convey the idea of the picture, no
school can furnish drawing more subtile and expressive. The head of
the "Light of the World" is worthy in this respect to be placed beside
Raphael and Da Vinci; and the "Ophelia" of Hughes, though inexcusably
incorrect in the figure, has a refinement of drawing in the face,
and especially in the lines of the open, chanting mouth, which no
draughtsman of the French school can equal. It is where the idea guides
the hand that the Pre-Raphaelites are triumphant; everywhere else they
fail. But this is a fault which will correct itself as they learn the
significance and value of things they do not now understand. They paint
well that which they love, and devotion grows and widens its sphere the
longer it endures, taking in, little by little, all things which bear
relation to the thought or thing it clings to; and the man who draws
because he has something to tell, and draws _that_ well, is certain
of finally drawing all things well. This very deficiency of
Pre-Raphaelitism, then, points to its true excellence, and indicates
that singleness of purpose which is an element in all true Art. The want
of grace, which is made almost a synonyme with Pre-Raphaelitism, has its
origin in the same resolute clinging to truth as the artist comprehends
it, and uncompromising determination to express it as perfectly as he
has the power,--a feeling which never permits him to think whether his
work be graceful, but whether it be just; so that his tremulous and
almost fearful conscientiousness--tremulous with desire to see all,
and fearful lest some line should wander by a hair's breadth from its
fullest expressiveness--makes him lose sight entirely of grace and
repose. No form that has the appearance of being painfully drawn
can ever be a graceful one; and so the Pre-Raphaelite, until he has
something of a master's facility and decision, can never be graceful.
The artist who prefers grace to truth will never be remarkable either
for grace or truth, while the one who clings to truth at all sacrifices
will finally reach the expression of the highest degree of beauty which
his soul is capable of conceiving; for the lines of highest beauty and
supremest truth are coincident. The Ideal meets the Actual finally in
the Real.
If there be one point of feeling in which the Pre-Raphaelites can be
said to be more than in all others antagonistic to the schools of
painting which preceded them, it would be that indicated by this
distinction,--that the new school is one which in all cases places truth
before beauty, while the old esteems beauty above truth. The tendency
of the one is towards a severe and truth-seeking Art, one in all its
characteristics essentially religious in the highest sense of the term,
holding truth dearer than all success in popular estimation, or than all
attractions of external beauty, reverent, self-forgetting, and humble
before Nature; that of the other is towards an Art Epicurean and
atheistic, holding the truth as something to be used or neglected at
its pleasure, and of no more value than falsehood which is equally
beautiful,--making Nature, indeed, something for weak men to lean on and
for superstitious men to be enslaved by. This distinction is radical; it
cuts the world of Art, as the equator does the earth, with an unswerving
line, on one side or the other of which every work of Art falls, and
which permits no neutral ground, no chance of compromise;--he who is not
for the truth is against it. We will not be so illiberal as to say that
Art lies only on one side of this line; to do so were to shut out works
which have given us exceeding delight;--so neither could we exclude
Epicurus and his philosophy from the company of doers of good;--but the
distinction is as inexorable as the line Christ drew between his and
those not his; it lies not in the product, which may be mixed good and
evil, but in the motive, which is indivisible.
Pre-Raphaelitism must take its position in the world as the beginning of
a new Art,--new in motive, new in methods, and new in the forms it puts
on. To like it or to dislike it is a matter of mental constitution.
The only mistake men can make about it is to consider it as a mature
expression of the spirit which animates it. Not one, probably not two
or three generations, perhaps not so many centuries, will see it in its
full growth. It is a childhood of Art, but a childhood of so huge a
portent that its maturity may well call out an expectation of awe.
In all its characteristics it is childlike,--in its intensity, its
humility, its untutored expressiveness, its marvellous instincts of
truth, and in its very profuseness of giving,--filling its caskets with
an unchoosing lavishness of pearl and pebble, rose and may-weed, all
treasures alike to its newly opened eyes, all so beautiful that there
can scarcely be choice among them.
To suppose that a revolution so complete as this could take place
without a bitter opposition would be an hypothesis without any
justification in the world's experience; for, be it in whatever sphere
or form, when a revolution comes, it offends all that is conservative
and reverential of tradition in the minds of men, and arouses an
apparently inexplicable hostility, the bitterness of which is not at all
proportionate to the interest felt by the individual in the subject of
the reform, but to his constitutional antipathy to all reform, to all
agitation. The conservative at heart hates the reformer because he
agitates, not because he disturbs him personally. This is clearly seen
in the hostility with which the new Art has been met in England, where
conservatism has built its strongest batteries in the way of invading
reform. For the moment, the English mind, bending in a surprised
deference to the stormy assault of the enthusiasts of the new school,
partly carried away by its characteristic admiration of the heroism of
their attack and the fiery eloquence of their champion, Ruskin, and
perhaps not quite assured of its final effect, forgets to unmask
its terrible artillery. But to upset the almost immovable English
conservatism, to teach the nation new ways of thought and feeling, in a
generation! Cromwell could not do it; and this wave of reform that
now surges up against those prejudices, more immovable than the white
cliffs of Albion, will break and mingle with the heaving sea again, as
did that of the republicanism of the Commonwealth, whose Protector never
sat in his seat of government more firmly than Ruskin now holds the
protectorate of Art in England. When political reform moved off to
American wildernesses for the life it could not preserve in England, it
but marked the course reform in Art must follow. The apparent ascendency
which it has obtained over the old system will as certainly turn out
to be temporary as there is logic in history; because an Art, like a
political system, to govern a nation, must be in accordance with its
character as a nation,--must, in fact, be the outgrowth of it. The only
unfailing line of kings and protectors is the people; with them is no
interregnum; and when the English people become fitted by intellectual
and moral progress to be protectors of a new and living Art, it will
return to them just as surely as republicanism will one day return from
its exile,--
"And all their lands restored to them again,
That were with it exiled."
The philosophic Art will find a soil free from Art-prejudices and open
to all seeds of truth; it will find quiet and liberty to grow, not
without enemies or struggles, but with no enemies that threaten its
safety, nor struggles greater than will strengthen it. The appreciation
and frank acceptance it has met on its first appearance here, the number
of earnest and intelligent adherents it has already found, are more
than its warmest friends hoped for so soon. But in England, while its
appreciating admirers will remain adherents to its principles, it will
pass out of existence as an independent form of Art, and the elements
of good in it will mingle with the Art of the nation, as a leaven
of nonconformity and radicalism, breeding agitations enough to keep
stagnation away and to secure a steady and irresistible progress. Its
truest devotees will remain in principle what they are, losing gradually
the external characteristics of the school as it is now known,--while
the great mass of its disciples, unthinking, impulsive, will sink back
into the ranks of the old school, carrying with them the strength they
have acquired by the severe training of the system, so that the whole of
English Art will be the better for Pre-Raphaelitism. But with Ruskin's
influence ceases the Commonwealth of Art; for Ruskin governs, not
represents, English feeling,--governs with a tyranny as absolute, an
authority as unquestioned, as did Oliver Cromwell.
Of the men now enlisted in the reform, few are of very great value
individually. Millais will probably be the first important recusant.
He is a man of quick growth, and his day of power is already past; the
reaction will find in him an ally of name, but he has no real greatness.
William Holman Hunt and Dante Rosetti are great imaginative artists, and
will leave their impress on the age. Ford Madox Brown, as a rational,
earnest painter, holds a noble and manly position. But then we have done
with great names. Much seed has sprung up on stony ground; but, having
little soil, when the sun shines, it will die. The slow growth is the
sure one.
* * * * *