THE RENAISSANCE OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY.
Childhood of Rossetti—Religious and Literary Influences—Art Training—
Conflict between Imagination and Technique—Friendship with Millais
and Holman Hunt—The Westminster Competitions—Ford Madox Brown—
Influence of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters”—The Early Italian Masters—
The Renaissance in Mediæval Europe—Relation of Paganism to
Christianity—Revival of Hellenism, and blending of Classic with
Romantic Art—Growth of Technique and Return to Convention—The Rule
of the Raphaelesque.
Into this atmosphere of revolt and aspiration, charged as with electric
forces of long-gathering change, a little band of young painters and
poets came, when the time was ripe, to play their part in the great
_Aufklärung_ of the century. Students they were in more than the
conventional significance of the word; men of widely different
endowments, and of the most diverse mental quality, but sensitive at all
points to the drift of thought beneath the surface of the life around
them. Their task it was to translate into art the message already
proclaimed in poetry, and to make, even of the poetic vehicle, a finer
and more exquisite setting for the new evangel.
The greatest poet of their company, if not in a literal sense the
greatest painter also, was born within a year of Blake’s death,—on the
12th of May, 1828, at 38, Charlotte Street, Portland Place, London: the
successor of Blake in English romance, yet an alien in the land of his
birth. Rossetti suffered, as M. Gabrièl Sarrazin has aptly expressed it,
a double banishment; remote alike from his country and his age.
Essentially Italian by heritage and temperament, he belonged no less to
the fifteenth century than to Tuscany, and bore about with him, though
perhaps unconsciously, the burden of the exile as well as of the
reformer and the pioneer. He was as one born out of due time; or rather,
let us say, reborn; a spirit anew-incarnate from the golden age; brought
back, indeed, from a still earlier re-birth, so that men almost deemed,
as they saw his work and dimly understood its purport, that one of the
prophets was risen from the dead.
Beyond his inheritance from the far-off past, from the dormant but
undying influences of the Italian Renaissance, Rossetti held from his
immediate ancestry no mean estate of talent and of character. His
mother, half Tuscan and half English (on her mother’s side), was sister
to the “Dr. Polidori” known to history as Byron’s travelling companion
and friend. These were the children of Gaetano Polidori, an accomplished
and successful _littérateur_. Gabriele Rossetti, the father of Dante
Gabriel, was wholly Italian, of Neapolitan family. He also was a man of
high literary tastes and achievements; a poet of genuine quality, and a
patriot exiled for his political faith. His popular lays, as well as his
personal activities, fanned the flame of democratic insurrection under
Ferdinand of Naples in 1820, and three years later he found himself
compelled to flee in disguise. He left Italy, never to return; but,
happily, not without honour in his own country, for, a quarter of a
century later, a medal was struck in recognition of his services, and a
statue subsequently erected to his memory in the chief piazza of Vasto,
Naples, which also bears his name. In 1824 Gabriele Rossetti settled in
England. He married in 1826, and was shortly appointed professor of
Italian at King’s College, London; in which adopted city—the great
foster-mother of so much of the world’s best genius—his four children,
Dante Gabriel and his brother and sisters, were brought up.
Trained from the first in the Protestant faith, though inheriting on
both sides the mental bias of Roman tradition, the children entered
early into the age-long conflict between the tender mysticism and
spiritual glamour of catholic piety and the robuster spirit of
intellectual truth. Herein lay the key to that strange mingling of
rationalism and superstition which, both in his poetry and in his
painting, has perplexed many critics of Dante Rossetti’s philosophy.
Hence came his insatiable symbolism, and his acutely realistic detail;
his remoteness of vision, and his keen alertness to present and actual
things. His own perpetual struggle between the real and the ideal, his
ceaseless strivings to reconcile the inward spirit with the outward
sense,—or rather, to set them in their right relations to each other,
the sense as the instrument and vehicle of the soul,—these were but the
epitome, in his own many-sided nature, of the larger strife that ceases
not from age to age; only the battle-ground and the weapons of the fight
are altered.
To the simple Christian creed which they professed, was added in the
Rossettis’ household the religion of an ardent and unwavering
patriotism. From their earliest childhood the little ones were
accustomed to hear around their own fireside high talks of national
liberty and the popular cause. Their home, unpretentious but hospitable
as it always was, became the resort of many a political refugee; a
gathering-place for kindred souls oppressed with the same misfortunes,
or fired with the supreme enthusiasm of a common ideal. Hither came
Mazzini, the greatest patriot of the century, and one of her truest
seers. All that was best in the young democracy of the mid-century, its
eager idealism, its narrow but profound hero-worship, its poetry, its
self-devotion, was here brought before the children’s eyes; its coarser
elements eliminated by the personal distinction of such men as Gabriele
Rossetti loved to gather to his side. The little circle was thus open,
in those crucial years, to influences more potent upon art than was then
apparent, since the humanitarian impulse first manifested in political
and social life had not yet adjusted itself to pictorial expression.
Nor was the literary side of Dante Rossetti’s genius less
sympathetically nurtured in the home atmosphere. His father was an
enthusiastic student and commentator of Dante, after whom he named his
eldest son,—a baptism strangely prophetic of his destiny; of that
fortuity of fate by which, in after years, bereft of love, maligned by
criticism, robbed of health and power, he was made partaker in the
sufferings as well as in the glory of the great Florentine poet. Thus
was fostered in the young Dante of a later day that love of old romance
and noble allegory which remained both with him and with his younger
sister—perhaps the choicest of our women-poets—as an abiding passion and
an inspiration to the highest artistic service.
At the age of fifteen Rossetti passed from King’s College School to
Cary’s Art Academy in Queen Street, Bloomsbury, and thence to the
Antique School of the Royal Academy; there to pursue the artistic
training to which a strong inclination and evident talent had long
called him. Rossetti, however, was a very wayward pupil, and extremely
irregular in his attendance. A fellow-student with him at that time, Mr.
J.A. Vinter, well recalls one morning when the truant was taken to task
for his absence on the previous day. “Why,” said Mr. Cary, “were you not
here yesterday?” Rossetti answered coolly, “I had a fit of idleness.”
But when the master’s back was turned, an interesting explanation of the
avowed idleness was soon forthcoming. Rossetti pulled from his pocket a
bundle of manuscript sonnets, which he proceeded, with impartial
generosity, to paste inside all his friends’ hats! Fortunately for the
subsequent peace of the hyper-sensitive and fastidious author, none of
these early effusions seem to have been preserved. Mr. Vinter’s
impression of Rossetti was—like that of many who knew him in youth—that
beneath a certain brusquerie and unapproachableness of bearing there lay
an unbounded warmth of affection and a ready generosity and kindliness
of heart. But his delight in practical jokes, his high spirits and his
boisterous hilarity in the classroom sometimes put Mr. Cary (the son, by
the way, of the eminent translator of Dante) to considerable
embarrassment. There was one song in particular which Rossetti was never
tired of singing; and he sang it with all the vigour of his strong young
voice, almost to the nauseation of his classmates,—in praise of a
certain “Alice Gray.” One morning Mr. Cary, entering the room, besought
him to abate his tune awhile, for a clergyman had called with his son to
see the school, with a view to enrolling the lad as a pupil. Rossetti
lowered his voice, but only for a moment. When the visitors appeared on
the threshold, his thrilling notes were heard again in passionate
protestation of his willingness to die for “Alice Gray.”
The school was visited on Saturdays by Mr. Redgrave, R.A., who speedily
observed Rossetti’s favourite amusement of drawing grotesque caricatures
of antique figures round the margin of his board, and protested that
“such liberties were hardly consistent with the dignity of the antique.”
Rossetti’s outlining is said to have been very beautiful in effect,
though produced in a highly unconventional manner. Mr. Cary forbade
charcoal outlines altogether, but Rossetti, who obeyed no rules,
invariably made a thick, solid charcoal line which he gradually pared
away on either side with pellets of bread till he had reduced it to the
desired minimum. It is noticeable that one at least of Rossetti’s
friends of this period, and intimately associated with him in the
movement which he subsequently led, has always retained the hardness of
outline which Rossetti afterwards outgrew.
Yet it must be admitted that with all his ardour, his real though very
fitful diligence, and his sincere delight in his chosen profession,
Rossetti never fully conquered that imperfection of technique in
draughtsmanship which has been the stronghold of hostile criticism
throughout the Pre-Raphaelite movement, but which in fact arose from the
inevitable deficiency of a mind too impatient for ideas, too eager for
subject-matter, to be steadfastly concerned with the science of
expression.
That neither Rossetti nor any other of the Pre-Raphaelites _as such_
have attained to technical greatness, still less to technical
perfection, is a charge weightily preferred, and not without reason, but
hardly of so fatal an import as at first appears. It must be remembered
that no new message comes to the world ready-clothed in the full grace
of accurate and harmonious speech. The voice crying in the wilderness is
apt to be harsh and unmusical. The visions of the seer are at first too
vivid, too bewildering in the fresh glory of revelation, to be told (if
he would set them forth on canvas) in any but broken lights and shadowy
images. In every art, the gospel of a new epoch has been proclaimed with
faltering speech and stammering tongue. The torrent of denunciation
outpoured on Wagner’s transgressions of strict form, yet powerless, as
it has proved, to drown his music, was not more sweeping than the
judgment of authority against the metrical solecisms of Walt Whitman’s
poetry; nor has the storm still raging round the modern Scandinavian
drama been less fierce than that which overtook the leaders of the Pre-
Raphaelite van.
Obviously a certain measure of the faculty of expression is necessary if
the meaning is to be intelligible at all. Our judgment of an artist,
though determined primarily by the nature of his message, must
ultimately rest on his ability to deliver it. In Rossetti’s case it must
depend upon the degree in which the greatness of his material can create
a technique of its own, and take the imagination by storm, as Rossetti
does, with those exquisite surprises of design, those marvellous _tours-
de-force_ among his earlier pen and ink drawings, or those southern,
almost tropical colour-triumphs of his maturity, which were perhaps
rather the divine accidents of genius than its habit, either natural or
acquired. They were, in truth, inspirations of utterance, wielding the
imperfect instrument to their own high purposes. The verdict given upon
such achievements by the thoughtful world outside the charmed circle of
the initiate—by that unlearned but not unworthy “outer circle,” as it
were, who, approaching art with intelligence and sympathy, are yet
without the knowledge to assess its technical worth—will always, as we
have already suggested, be decided by the temperament of the spectator—
whether he be as peculiarly sensitive to beauty of idea as his neighbour
is to beauty of expression. And after all, the supreme mission of art is
to the great world of the _un_initiate. By the authority of its priests
and prophets must its form and practice be directed and controlled; but
the final test of its greatness is not satisfied until the exquisite
consolations of beauty, the moral significances of artistic truth, the
proclamation of noble ideals, are “understanded of the people.”
But the new gospel, when Rossetti entered the Academy Schools, had only
reached the initial stage of a “gospel of discontent.” It was still
negative, indefinite, unpromising. Yet even in that early phase, the
old, simple instincts of the missionary spirit are often potent, and
fruitful in the development of ideas. “Andrew ... first findeth his own
brother Simon,” and “Philip findeth Nathaniel,”—not designedly, perhaps,
but rather by the spontaneous attraction of kindred souls; not
necessarily with the deliberate aim of a propagandist, for it would be
pretentious to credit a group of nineteenth-century young Britons in
their teens with a very exalted conception of their artistic mission.
There is every evidence that they were as unaffectedly boyish, and even
school-boyish, as the most orthodox Englishman could wish them. It was
well that they should not yet know the meaning of their own rebellion,
or guess the effect to be wrought upon English art by Rossetti’s meeting
with the first fellow-student who can in any sense be called his
disciple. Probably it was an impulse of purely personal affection, or
that magnetic charm of character which Rossetti exercised over almost
all impressionable natures around him, rather than any deep affinity of
purpose and ideal, that won to his side a younger and in many respects
more brilliant aspirant, John Everett Millais, who had passed through
his two years’ elementary training at Cary’s at a very early age, and in
technical proficiency was already far ahead of his new friend. Born on
the 8th of June, 1829, in Portland Place, Southampton, the first five
years of his life were chiefly spent in Jersey (his father’s ancestral
home), and the succeeding four at Dinan, in Brittany. In 1838, at the
age of nine, he was entered at Cary’s Academy, then under the direction
of Mr. Sass, where his drawing from the antique soon won a silver medal
from the Society of Arts. In 1840, at the age of eleven, he entered the
Royal Academy Schools; the youngest pupil ever admitted within their
walls. Here he won a silver medal in 1843, and four years later a gold
medal for historical painting with “The Benjamites Seizing their
Brides,” shown at the British Institution in 1848. In 1846 his first
exhibited picture, “Pizarro before the Inca of Peru,” appeared at the
Royal Academy, where “Elgiva Seized by Odo” was shown in 1847.
Millais himself, meanwhile, had made acquaintance with an older and
still more earnest student not yet pursuing the Academy curriculum, but
for whom the future had in store a place second only to Rossetti’s in
the movement which united and inspired them in their youth. William
Holman Hunt, indeed, may claim to have been earlier than any of his Pre-
Raphaelite brethren upon the field of reform; for in the hard solitude
of mercantile life, under the stress of poverty and amid the most
uncongenial surroundings, he had already thought out and pursued those
methods of direct and veracious artistic expression which were
afterwards enforced by Pre-Raphaelite rule. Born in London on the 27th
of April, 1828, and destined by his father for commercial life, the lad
secured from chance companions some occasional help in the artistic
studies which he loved. He took a few lessons from a city portrait-
painter, and at last gave up his business career, and threw himself upon
his own artistic resources for a livelihood.
Admission to the schools of the Royal Academy at that time was by a test
as arbitrary and inadequate as the teaching to which it led. Each
student was required to produce a drawing from the antique, in chalk or
charcoal, laboriously stippled in the conventional style; and in this
task the half-trained and inexperienced Hunt very pardonably failed on
two successive occasions. It was not until the year 1846 that he was at
last admitted as a student, and at almost the same time secured a place
on the Academy Exhibition walls, where he was represented by a small
picture entitled “Hark!”—a little child holding a watch to her ear. It
was in the antique galleries at the British Museum, while toiling
forlornly at his trial-drawing among a host of similar candidates, that
he came across the more successful but sympathetic and genial Millais.
The story of Millais’s friendship with the poor and struggling student
somewhat older than himself, and of the generous pecuniary help afforded
from his own private resources to Hunt at a moment when the magic
portals of Art seemed closed for ever against him, has already been told
by Mr. Harry Quilter in his history of those early years.
In the autumn of 1845 Mr. Cary sent up five students, including Rossetti
and J.A. Vinter, for admission to the Academy Schools. His classes were
held in high esteem as a means of introduction to that orthodox fold,
already regarded by many neophytes with impatience and distrust, but
offering at that time the only possible entrance to professional life.
Both the competitors just mentioned were successful, and the admission
of Holman Hunt was independently gained soon afterwards. Mr. Vinter has
a characteristic reminiscence of the opening day of the ensuing term,
when the freshmen were assembled in a class-room, and required to give
their names to the keeper, Mr. Jones. When it came to his turn,
Rossetti, who was rather proud of his mellifluous designation, greatly
amused his companions and impressed the venerable official by slowly
rolling out, in his rich, sonorous tones, “Gabriel—Charles—Dante—
Rossetti!” “Dear me, sir,” stammered Mr. Jones, in confused amazement,
“Dear me, sir, you _have_ a fine name!”
A probation of three months was necessary, however, before the
candidates were finally accepted as students in the Royal Academy
Schools. It is doubtful whether Rossetti ever finished his probationary
drawings: at all events he never entered the Life School, and does not
appear to have passed beyond the elementary stages of the Antique. But
whatever may have been the deficiencies of their early training in art,
a result of ample significance was now realized by the intercourse which
united in close friendship the illustrious trio—Rossetti, Millais, and
Holman Hunt—who were shortly to be recognized as the prime movers in the
Pre-Raphaelite revolt.
There was yet, however, another reformer at work, unknown to them, upon
the same problems as perplexed themselves, stirred with the same
restless discontent with the vain canons of conventional art, and
pursuing, in his own obscure studio, methods which came upon the younger
trio as the revelation that they needed. Ford Madox Brown, with whom
they now became acquainted, was seven years older than Dante Rossetti,
having been born at Calais, of English parents, on the 16th of April,
1821. He studied first under Van Hanselaer at Ghent, and afterwards
spent two years under Baron Wappers at the Antwerp Academy (1837–1839),
three in Paris, (1841–1844), and one in Rome (1845). In his twentieth
year he married his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Bromley, who died in 1846.
His experiences of the foreign schools seem to have kindled in him the
same dissatisfaction with current standards of perfection as was gaining
ground among his contemporaries at home. At all events, when Rossetti
was vaguely casting about for kindred spirits aflame with revolutionary
fire, Madox Brown was the poor and unknown painter of a few decorative
cartoons exhibited during the eighteen-forties in Westminster Hall, for
a competition organized by the government with a view to selecting the
best available fresco-work for the ornamentation of the new House of
Lords. The competition was carried over several years, and served in a
great measure to define and organize the growing revolt against the
tyranny of the Academy, under which, as early as the year 1840, the
younger generation of painters was already beginning to writhe. The
leading Academicians of that time were men whose names, as far as the
outer world is concerned, have scarcely outlived their owners. Etty,
Mulready, Maclise, Leslie, Herbert, Chalon, Cooper, Collins, Eastlake,
Howard, Hart, Jones, Unwins, Patten, Charles Landseer, Redgrave, Shee,—
who knows them now beyond the student and the connoisseur? Webster,
indeed, has earned a more enduring fame, and gained a secure if
unpretentious rank in the portrayal of village life, fairly comparable
to that of Mrs. Gaskell in fiction. But for the rest, even the few
gifted and sincere aspirants outside the Academy, but still in the
thrall of conventional methods, such as Cope, Dyce, Ward, Egg, Elmore,
Goodall, Pickersgill, Hook, Poole, Stone, Martin, Haydon, and David
Scott, were but a heterogeneous group, without clear aims or common
aspirations. The Westminster competition attracted and developed new
talent from independent quarters. It was the first deliberate effort of
English art to shake itself free from academic control. Its effect was
to revive, for the time being, a decorative method noble in itself, but
still more valuable as a training in breadth and dignity of expression,
especially for the young artist to whom the fresco was practically a
foreign language, full of latent possibility and charm. Practice in
fresco-work had a directly good effect on the technique of new and
unknown men at the precise stage of their studies at which it was
afforded them. Madox Brown’s style in particular was strongly and
permanently influenced by such exercise, and the competitions evoked
from him a series of historical and dramatic _genre_ paintings which won
Rossetti’s special admiration. Chief among them were “The Body of Harold
brought before William the Conqueror,” which still ranks with the
artist’s finest productions of its kind, “Justice,” a widow pleading
before a Norman baron, “Adam and Eve after the Fall,” “Wiclif reading
his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt,” “Our Lady of Good
Children,” and “The Infant’s Repast.” One fine cartoon from the hand of
another artist also drew Rossetti’s delighted attention, “Caractacus led
Captive in Triumph through the Streets of Rome,” by G.F. Watts, a
painter worthily representative of the noblest phase of Pre-Raphaelite
work, though never openly associated with the movement. He too had
vainly traversed the desert of academic studentship, as we may gather
from his own naïve record: “Finding there was no teaching, I very soon
ceased to attend.” His picture of “Caractacus,” however, was now
rewarded with a first-class prize of £300. Millais also competed in the
exhibition of 1847; taking for his subject “The Widow bestowing her
Mite.”
In the spring of 1848, Rossetti, deeply impressed by the originality and
power of Madox Brown’s designs, wrote to the artist and begged
permission to enter his studio as a pupil. Mr. Brown did not receive
pupils professionally, but, with a generosity which he showed to many an
eager votary at that period, he welcomed Rossetti to his studio as a
friend, and from that time became one of his kindest and most valued
counsellors.
At the date of Rossetti’s self-introduction to Madox Brown, the latter
was engaged upon a somewhat elaborate picture, “Chaucer reading the
Legend of Custance before the Court of Edward III.”; and Rossetti was
invited to sit to him for the head of the poet. Hunt and Rossetti were
now working together in a studio which they shared in Cleveland Street,
Fitzroy Square; whither soon came Madox Brown to encourage their
tentative efforts, and to aid them both with practical and friendly
instruction.
And now a new influence from the world of literature came upon the
little student-band. It was the inspiration and stimulus of Ruskin’s
“Modern Painters.” For Ruskin also was at war with the old conventions
that lay chill and heavy upon English art; he too was weary of the dead
level of triviality and scholasticism to which painting had sunk, and
saw with prophetic eyes, through the murk of present life and the
shadowy vistas of history, a higher and attainable ideal.
“Modern Painters” struck the keynote of the coming change. A fellow-
student lent the volumes to Holman Hunt, who in his turn shared them
with his friends; and reading together, they found therein, not only a
sympathy for their own revolt, but a definite guidance for their
aspirations. With the authority of the trained draughtsman and
_connoisseur_ as well as with the force and fascination of the literary
artist, Ruskin declared for originality and truth in design, as against
the imitations and artifices of degenerate schools, in a voice that
would brook no compromise. Like Carlyle, his whole being was possest
with that passionate scorn of pretensions and shams, that hatred of
formalism and of every species of cant, which swept like a cleansing
wind over Europe after the French Revolution, and which, if its
immediate results were iconoclastic and disruptive, was so much the
better preparation for the reconstruction to follow.
Ruskin bade men turn, from the Art of the past, to Nature, and seek
fresh inspiration at its primal source. Through Nature alone, he said,
they would reach truth, and finding it, gain also the power to interpret
and reveal. And Nature was a jealous mistress; only to a faithful lover
would she unveil the exquisite mysteries of her beauty; unto his ear
alone would she whisper the high secrets of her soul; she would endure
no translator, no partial and distorted reflection of her face: the man
himself must worship at her inmost shrine, and learn her lesson there
direct and clear.
—A truism, it seems to us, who have seen the swinging of the pendulum
still further in the naturalistic direction, since the reaction in
divers quarters against convention and precedent has carried many to the
opposite extreme. Yet, in the history of the world, the demand for
precedent and conformity, the love of imitation, the morbid hatred of
novelty and the dread of original experiment, which appear in almost
every crisis of man’s development, exhibit one of the most curious
phases of the human mind. Psychologists might argue at length as to the
relation between indolence and cowardice in the strange game of “follow-
my-leader” played by humanity from age to age,—and might attribute both
to a vague and deep sense of the bitter cost of all knowledge, and a
consequent and not wholly vain tenacity towards things apparently
knowable and known.
Ruskin, with a vision large enough to retain all that was eternally
precious in the past, began by recognizing the elements of real vitality
even in the outworn classicism which was the occasion of his readers’
revolt; and led them thence to the higher places of refreshment and
advance. “We must be careful,” said he, “not to lose sight of the real
use of what has been left us by antiquity, nor to take that for a model
of perfection which is, in many cases, only a guide to it. The young
artist, while he should shrink with horror from the iconoclast who would
tear from him every landmark and light which has been bequeathed him by
the ancients, and leave him in a liberated childhood, may be equally
certain of being betrayed by those who would give him the power and the
knowledge of past time, and then fetter his strength from all advance,
and bend his eyes backward on a beaten path; who would thrust canvas
between him and the sky, and tradition between him and God.”
Again, Ruskin insisted continually upon the essential and supreme moral
purpose of art as a “criticism of life”—as a later authority has called
it. He made clear the relation between _thought_ and _language_ in
painting, wherein lies for ever the crux of art; and pointed to examples
of the contrast and the conflict between those two principles whereof
the right adjustment is art’s final aim. “Most pictures,” said Ruskin,
“of the Dutch school, for instance, excepting always those of Rubens,
Vandyke, and Rembrandt, are ostentatious exhibitions of the artist’s
power of speech, the clear and vigorous elocution of useless and
senseless words; while the early efforts of Cimabue and Giotto are the
burning messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of
infants. It must be the part of the judicious critic carefully to
distinguish what is language and what is thought, and to rank and praise
pictures chiefly for the latter, considering the former as a totally
inferior excellence, and one which cannot be compared with, nor weighed
against thought in any way or in any degree whatsoever. The picture
which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly
expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the
less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed.”
Thus the author of “Modern Painters” did for his readers what was more
helpful than all precept,—he showed them the high paths trodden
aforetime by men of like aspirations after a similar revolt. He led them
back to an age which had seen the same struggle between the old art and
the new; an age in which the difficulty of presenting human life and its
environment in faithful colours and in natural images had already been
met, and in some measure overcome. That age was the mother of modern art
in Europe. The fourteenth century, waking from mediævalism, felt the
first quickenings of the Renaissance in Italy.
To that momentous impulse of new life wherein lay, deep-rooted in the
laws of reaction and development, the destinies of modern Europe, the
historian of the Pre-Raphaelite movement must turn if he would read
aright the motive and the message of to-day. For the impulse sought in
the records of the past by the reformers of a later age was of a spirit
kindred with their own, though grappling with its problems under a
somewhat different guise. It was a revolt, not from materialism as we
commonly understand it, namely, the acceptance of matter as the sole and
ultimate reality, and a tacit or open disavowal of the spiritual life;
but rather from that more subtle and insidious form of materialism so
often mistaken for its opposite—the asceticism of mediæval Christianity.
To deny the dignity and sanctity of the physical as the garment of the
spiritual world is surely as blank a materialism as that which makes the
physical sufficient and supreme. To see no spirit in the flesh is to be
no less blind than they who see no spirit _beyond_ the flesh. The innate
cynicism of the monastic idea—its radical _faith_lessness, its utter
distrust of the Spirit’s power to transfigure and ennoble the noble life
of man—is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that the results of that
idea upon the art of the nation were almost identical with the results
wrought upon England by the materialism of the eighteenth century. Art
became a fashion instead of a mission, a cult instead of a worship; it
became the prerogative of a ruling class which conventionalized—as such
must ever do—the spontaneous utterance of the many into the vain
repetitions of the few. That class in modern England was the
_bourgeoisie_: in mediæval Italy it was the priesthood. Herein arose the
narrow religiosity of the early Italian painters, no less than the
ascetic barrenness of the dark ages which preceded them. Art had been
subsidized by a ruling class, however beneficent, for its own purposes,
however sincere and high. The gradual establishment of Christianity as
the state religion of the later Roman period involved the repudiation—or
at least the effort to repudiate—the whole intellectual or æsthetic
heritage of the Græco-Roman world.
There is a curious pathos in the attempt of every vigorous outgrowth of
human endeavour to disown the prior activity which gave it birth. The
ancient fable of the chick and the egg-shell is of perennial meaning and
pertinence. Militant Christianity marched forward wholly unconscious of
its own vast debt to the very paganism upon which it thrust itself in
holy war. The novel fervour of asceticism had extinguished science
before the end of the third century, art in the sixth and seventh, and
the Greek language by the ninth. But the transition of Italy from
paganism to Christianity was not a substitution of wholly new ideals for
old. It was the gradual absorption of all the permanent elements in
pagan culture into a religion of which the germ only was brought from
the Hebrew world, and which owed most of its strength and much of its
weakness to the rich and heterogeneous soil in which it was planted. The
extravagances of mediæval Christianity—its austere intolerance and
contempt of the natural and obvious, its demand, in the first strenuous
tension of novelty and triumph, for the subjective and the
transcendental life—breaking up, when the strain was relaxed, into a
hard formalism of thought and practice—these were but the inevitable
reaction from the grossness of a degenerate paganism whose vital force
was spent. The immense lapse of time occupied by the transition from
paganism to Christianity, as Mr. Bernard Bosanquet ably points out in
dealing with the issues of that change, gave room for as many secondary
waves of action and reaction within itself as did the movement of the
Renaissance which succeeded it. “From the first distinct breach in naïve
or natural paganism to the assumption of a definitely doctrinal and
orthodox form of Christianity, there is an interval which cannot be
reckoned at less than seven hundred years, from the death of Socrates to
the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. So far from being a new
thing, contrasting with the degradation of the pagan world, the
establishment of Christianity was the issue of the advance of that world
during four centuries, and it was not thoroughly completed until, in a
further development of five centuries, it had adopted from paganism the
germs of almost all permanently valuable elements that the latter
contained.... The Dark Ages are not a proof that the great classical
culture had lost its power for human welfare; they prove only how long a
discipline was needed by the mass of humanity before it could appreciate
more than the first stammering misapprehension of its great
inheritance.”[2]
The dawn, then, of the Renaissance in Italy, was the waking of the
mediæval world to the sense of this lost inheritance, yet to be
regained; this hidden dower of beauty and gladness, and of strong and
abundant life. The old message of the Galilean Christ had to be re-
translated, as it has to-day: “I am come that they might have life, and
that they might have it more abundantly,”—not a one-sided life, not a
spiritual life at the cost of the body, any more than a bodily life at
the cost of the soul, but a life robust, many-sided, catholic;
harmonized at all points with what is good and sweet and fair in the
physical world as well as what is high and pure and noble in the life
within. And that message led men back to the great first principles of
conduct and consciousness, till they were confronted afresh with the
want of equipoise between physical instinct and moral law which is the
root-problem of human history. The struggle for _existence_ in the
animal world rises in humanity from a physical to a moral sphere, and
passes into a struggle for _life_.
“History,” says Buckle, “is a record of tendencies, not of events.” The
first tendency of the people thus waking, as we have said, to the sense
of their own birthright and heritage, partook rather of the first of
these two impulses. It was a revolt against the spiritual exclusiveness
of the monastic ideal, and a recoil upon Nature,—especially upon the
apotheosis and worship of Nature already achieved for them in the
Hellenic world. The imperious demands of the physical life, so long
starved and neglected, drove men back upon external things; slowly to
re-discover, through outward and visible realities, the deeper meanings
of which they were in search. The end of the twelfth and the beginning
of the thirteenth century saw a new turn of the current of feeling
towards liberty and expansion of the whole life of man. The painters set
themselves to humanize religion; to bring it into relation with the
vital interests of the so-called secular sphere. And as the fine arts
became emancipated from sacerdotal control, the spirit of free culture
spread into other departments of intellectual activity. In the next
century, the revival of learning followed upon the emancipation of art.
Literature, religion, painting and sculpture, were infused with the same
spirit of experiment and research. Art was brought into touch with
scholarship, and scholarship in its turn graced and dignified by art.
The essence of romance lies in its utter fidelity to immediate and
present life. Its concern is with particular instances, not with
abstractions and generalities. Romance is primarily analytic and
experimental; classicism, synthetic and positive. Romance is inductive,
classicism deductive in its reasoning. Herein romance—deemed for the
most part antagonistic to reason and science, approaches more nearly to
the scientific spirit than any canons of classic art. Its root and base
is in that patient observation of actual things, that sure simplicity
and directness of vision, which is the narrow way to knowledge. Hence
comes the realism of romance,—the realism both of the early Renaissance
and of its later maturity. A dominant characteristic (for instance) of
Michaelangelo—the greatest and most fascinating personality of the whole
Renaissance period—was, as his latest biographer, Mr. John Addington
Symonds, has pointed out, that “he invariably preferred the particular
to the universal, the critical moment of an action to suggestions of the
possibilities of action.” This feature of the highest Renaissance work,
though it seem at first sight to disprove the general theory of romance
as the meditative, contrasted with the classic or dramatic form of art,
is really consonant with it, since one example of one action is more
analytic and reflective in quality than the suggestion of action
generally. Our assertion, then, that the first manifestation of the
break-up of the monastic system was a return to Nature as revealed and
worshipped in the Hellenic ideal, must be qualified by a recognition of
another tendency modifying and chastening the first.
The second tendency was towards the reconciliation of the superb
naturalism of Grecian art with the Christian spirit of self-discipline
and heroic denial. It was an effort after that ultimate balance and
harmony prophesied (to bring a modern instance) in Ibsen’s “Third
Kingdom;” the kingdom in which the realism of the flesh and the idealism
of the spirit shall be blended into one perfect humanity. “It was a
movement,” to quote again from Mr. J.A. Symonds, “towards that further
point outside both Paganism and mediæval Christianity, at which the
classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored
to the conscience educated by the gospel.” The vision of this union was
the inspiration of Pre-Raphaelite art. It quickened the hands of the
painters to great tasks; it stirred the scholars to a new energy of
labour and of hope. The poets, interpreting its meaning for the life of
a future Italy, began to speak one to another across the mediæval gloom,
as waking birds call and answer, while it is yet dark, with a sure
instinct prophetic of the dawn.
Thus the unruffled calm and dignity of Hellenism was troubled, in its
re-birth, with a sense of moral conflict and perplexity unknown to the
ancient world. A peculiar mysticism resulted upon literature from that
revival of the Platonic spirit which was initiated by Pico della
Mirandola and his successors in metaphysical thought. Throughout the
Pre-Raphaelite epoch, from Cimabue (124O) to Perugino, the master of
Raphael (1446), the impulse of naturalism is seen adjusting itself,
through much crudeness of expression, through many blunders, solecisms
of taste, errors of selection, to the great spiritual passion of
Christianity which was still warm at the heart of the thinking world.
There is, especially in early Renaissance work, an effect as of divided
aims, or of methods long habituated to the old ideal and brought
suddenly into the service of the new,—like Heine’s “decayed gods, who,
to maintain themselves after the fall of paganism, took employment under
the new religion.” The physical loveliness of the saints and angels of
Botticelli and Fra Angelico—the last of the purely “religious” painters,
in the common acceptance of the word—is hardly congruous with the
loftiness of their themes, and almost belies the spiritual intensity and
rapture of thought which Botticelli, in later life, drew largely from
the influence of Savonarola, and infused increasingly into his own work.
Giotto, the pride of the Florentine school and the dominant genius of
the fourteenth century, was no less profoundly religious than these; but
in the final roll of art he ranks rather as the first great _Nature_-
painter than as one of a distinctly Christian lineage. Taken, like
David, from the sheepfold, he brought into art a breezy, pastoral air,
and painted before a wide horizon under an open sky. Fra Lippo Lippi
added to that wholesome strength and sanity of sight an even clearer
perception of natural beauty and grace. The glories of the physical
realm, in landscape, in the power of men and in the loveliness of women,
were handled now with a growing boldness which outran the delicate
timidity that had restrained it in the shadow of the Church. And with
the enlargement of intellectual range there came a steady increase of
technical power. The skill of choice, of selectiveness in art, of
composition, draughtsmanship, colouring,—in a word, the science of
_expression_, was brought to bear upon the ready message waiting for the
perfecting of its vehicles. The adaptation of language to thought, which
was the task of the fifteenth century, was achieved by the immediate
predecessors of Raphael in a measure unequalled in the history of the
modern world. And that such an adjustment should resolve itself, as it
did, into a fresh conflict between the forces momentarily reconciled,
proves, not that the success of the effort was spurious, but rather that
the struggle between thought and language in art is but one
manifestation of the eternal striving of the Spirit with the imperfect
medium of the flesh.
But this rare consummation of harmony between the erstwhile conflicting
principles of classicism and romance, though reaching its highest point
in Leonardo and Michaelangelo, achieved in the Venetian school a
technical effect which appealed even more strongly to the æsthetic
passion re-born in Rossetti and his friends, as they looked back across
the ages in their search for example and light. In Giorgione, the
creator of idyllic _genre_ painting in the fourteenth century, and in
Titian, of whom Rossetti himself was in due course the natural
successor, they found all the mystic sensuousness of the new Paganism in
a setting which, to adapt a well-worn phrase, revealed instead of
concealing the soul within. Here, at least, was the apotheosis of
_colour_, which is itself a characteristic quality of all romantic
revivals: wherefore painting has always been specifically the romantic
medium in art, while the classic temper finds in sculpture its most
congenial sphere. Classicism invariably compromises with the tints of
nature; it resolves the ever-varying hues of earth and sky into the
formula of the spectroscope; it tends, in its purest and noblest phases,
towards marble and the statuesque. Here was the perfection of artistic
language, as Ruskin would call it; the delight in strong and full
utterance for its own sake, wherein lurks the perennial danger of
greatness in technique. With all its glow and glory of natural life, the
Venetian school was primarily decorative in character, and therefore
merged the more readily into the gradual substitution of form for
matter, the general deterioration of naturalism into sensuality, which
overtook Italian art after the decadence of Raphael.
Together with the more robust conception of the physical life which
supervened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there came a
change, partial indeed, but progressive, in the ideals of womanhood. The
Madonnas of Botticelli were instinct with a warmth and sensitiveness
unknown before in Christian art. If they were immaculate, their
perfectness was that of a God-possest humanity rather than of a
humanized Godhead. Their faces shine with natural pity and awe and
tenderness and love,—the love of the true _Mater Dolorosa_, sad with
“The burden of the mystery,
... the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.”
They see the shadow of the Cross upon the holy Child, and their
passionate life quivers before the Death to be. The same brooding sense
of mystery, the same large and intense compassion for the “world-
sorrow,” yet mingled with a certain austerity of outlook upon its
strife, is the dominant note of Leonardo’s masterpiece of a later date,
“La Gioconda” (“Our Lady of the Rocks”); often compared with that
triumph of a more modern Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer’s “Melancholia,”
with which it shares in the attainment of perfect harmony between
classic and romantic art.
Yet the return of art in the fourteenth century from the angelic to the
human world did not go far enough to affect the ideals of womanhood
beyond this single aspect—the aspect of maternity. The early Renaissance
painters did indeed humanize, in conception and presentment, the virgins
and the venerable mother-saints of Christendom; but their imagination
never concerned itself with what may be termed the independent humanity
of womanhood. They painted always under the sway of that central and
dominant _motif_ of the Christian mythology,—the idea of woman as the
receptive and passive vehicle of the God-man; and never presented woman
as daughter, sister, lover, or wife, apart from the concurrent idea of
potential motherhood. This limitation—unfortunately for art—instead of
being removed by a further broadening of thought and vision as the
Renaissance proceeded, was emphasized in the fifteenth century by the
influence of Raphael, who cultivated and stereotyped his own ideal of
the “for-ever-motherly” until—so subtle is the influence of fixed types
in pictorial art upon the current standards of truth and beauty—the
maternal function came to be regarded as the sole and sufficient object
of a woman’s existence; and the conventional Madonna-face of Raphael
became a bondage from which Christianity has taken more than three
centuries to set itself free.
For the advent of Raphael into Italian art marked the beginning of the
degradation of the pure and wholesome naturalism achieved in the
Renaissance into a coarse materialism which in its turn degenerated into
a false and shallow conventionality, and had an effect infinitely
mischievous upon Italy, still more so upon France, and through France
upon the England of the Stuart and Hanoverian periods. It might almost
be said that the greatness of Raphael was the weakness of modern art.
The immediate result of a triumph in technique—of a great success in the
wedding of perfect utterance to noble thought—is sometimes to produce,
in the moral atmosphere around it, a sense of finality, a relaxing of
tension, in which the soul is overpowered by its own conquest of the
medium, and loses itself in the facile freedom thus attained. The
disciples of Raphael, counting him to have achieved the highest
perfection, modelled themselves upon his manner, and thence upon his
mannerisms, without question or reserve; just as, in metaphysics and
philosophy, the schoolmen argued from Aristotle without any reference to
the external world, and, bound in the thrall of his genius, followed
implicitly the narrow trend of his reasoning, until, entangled in
theoretical cobwebs of their own spinning, they lost altogether the use
of the inductive method, founded upon observation and experiment, which
is the only true basis of knowledge. Imitation may be the sincerest form
of flattery, but it is sometimes a fatal hindrance to progress. Its
maleficence in the world of mental science is not greater than the
mischief wrought in art by a spirit which does as much harm to the work
of the copyist as to the reputation of the model. As Ruskin says, “All
that is highest in art, all that is creative and imaginative, is formed
and created by every great master for himself, and cannot be repeated or
imitated by others.” Raphael at first-hand was always great, often
sublime. Raphael second-hand,—stereotyped, formalized, degraded by three
centuries of imitations, each more laboured than the last,—became vapid,
artificial, meaningless. The original inspiration was destroyed. Art
lost its hold on Nature; and, severed from that sole source of power,
fell into inevitable decay.
History repeats itself, but with a difference. Man’s struggle, as we
have said, for balance, for self-adjustment to the forces around him,
and to the greater forces within, recurs in every age of the world’s
life, but under conditions ever new. The nineteenth century supplied
such new conditions for the old task. The ground that had long lain
fallow was not wasted in its time of barrenness, but made ready in
unfruitful autumns for fresh seed; prepared by silent and secret forces
for a new harvest. Shaken by social revolution, roused by the pressure
of intellectual problems on every side, Art was confronted once more
with the great realities of life and death, good and evil, and turned
for guidance to the witness of the past: as a soul, once quick to action
but long sunk in apathy, awakes again to the mystery of the ideal, and
gathering itself together for fresh strife, calls urgently upon the old
wisdom and the remembered strength of yore.
In such a spirit did Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his comrades turn from
the dull abstractions of academic tradition, and lift their eyes towards
that golden age whose dawning answered their own cry for light. Not to
the material and redundant splendours of Raphaelesque art did they look
for the inspiration of the hour; not to the pseudoclassicism of the
later Renaissance, but to the pristine freshness and purity of its
youth: just as we now look for the true significance of the romantic
revival, not to the Postlethwaite of fashionable society, or to the weak
sensuality of a drawing-room æstheticism; not to the latter-day
apotheosis of lust which is but a gross travesty of the vigorous
naturalism of Hellenic and early Renaissance art, but to the gracious
innocence and seriousness of Rossetti’s “Virgin,” the noble beauty and
pathos of his dying “Beatrice,” and the austere tenderness of Hunt’s
sore-tempted “Isabella,” confronting Claudio’s painful face with the set
resolve of her impregnable womanhood. So, seeking and following all that
was best in the past, and facing, with vision clarified by that high
discipline, the intellectual, social, and moral strife of the nineteenth
century, the young painters set themselves “to disengage,” as Sainte-
Beuve says, “the elements of beauty,” and to put them forth in some sort
of order and lucidity, even if it were but in a tentative formula, yet
to be subjected to the tests of time.
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Footnote 2:
“Some Thoughts on the Transition from Paganism to Christianity.”