use of the figure of the heathen god to indicate the domain of poetry.
Such a symbolical use had been made of the figures of heathen deities in
the best times of Christian art. But it is in the fact, that being
called to Rome especially to adorn the palace of the so-called head of
the Church, and called as the chief representative of the Christian
artists of his time, Raphael had neither religion nor originality enough
to trace the spirit of poetry and the spirit of philosophy to the
inspiration of the true God, as well as that of theology; but that, on
the contrary, _he elevated the creations of fancy on the one wall, to
the same rank as the objects of faith upon the other_; that in
deliberate, balanced opposition to the Rock of the Mount Zion, he reared
the rock of Parnassus, and the rock of the Acropolis; that, among the
masters of poetry we find him enthroning Petrarch and Pindar, but not
Isaiah nor David, and for lords over the domain of philosophy we find
the masters of the school of Athens, but neither of those greater
masters by the last of whom that school was rebuked,--those who received
their wisdom from heaven itself, in the vision of Gibeon,[37] and the
lightning of Damascus.
[Footnote 37: 1 Kings iii. 5.]
127. The doom of the arts of Europe went forth from that chamber, and it
was brought about in great part by the very excellencies of the man who
had thus marked the commencement of decline. The perfection of execution
and the beauty of feature which were attained in his works, and in those
of his great contemporaries, rendered finish of execution and beauty of
form the chief objects of all artists; and thenceforward execution was
looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity.
And as I told you, these are the two secondary causes of the decline of
art; the first being the loss of moral purpose. Pray note them clearly.
In mediaeval art, thought is the first thing, execution the second; in
modern art execution is the first thing, and thought the second. And
again, in mediaeval art, truth is first, beauty second; in modern art,
beauty is first, truth second. The mediaeval principles led _up_ to
Raphael, and the modern principles lead _down_ from him.
128. Now, first, let me give you a familiar illustration of the
difference with respect to execution. Suppose you have to teach two
children drawing, one thoroughly clever and active-minded, the other
dull and slow; and you put before them Jullien's chalk studies of
heads--_etudes a deux crayons_--and desire them to be copied. The dull
child will slowly do your bidding, blacken his paper and rub it white
again, and patiently and painfully, in the course of three or four
years, attain to the performance of a chalk head, not much worse than
his original, but still of less value than the paper it is drawn upon.
But the clever child will not, or will only by force, consent to this
discipline. He finds other means of expressing himself with his pencil
somehow or another; and presently you find his paper covered with
sketches of his grandfather and grandmother, and uncles, and
cousins--sketches of the room, and the house, and the cat, and the dog,
and the country outside, and everything in the world he can set his eyes
on; and he gets on, and even his child's work has a value in it--a truth
which makes it worth keeping; no one knows how precious, perhaps, that
portrait of his grandfather may be, if any one has but the sense to keep
it till the time when the old man can be seen no more up the lawn, nor
by the wood. That child is working in the Middle-Age spirit--the other
in the modern spirit.
129. But there is something still more striking in the evils which have
resulted from the modern regardlessness of truth. Consider, for
instance, its effect on what is called historical painting. What do you
at present _mean_ by historical painting? Now-a-days it means the
endeavoring, by the power of imagination, to portray some historical
event of past days. But in the Middle Ages, it meant representing the
acts of _their own_ days; and that is the only historical painting worth
a straw. Of all the wastes of time and sense which Modernism has
invented--and they are many--none are so ridiculous as this endeavor to
represent past history. What do you suppose our descendants will care
for our imaginations of the events of former days? Suppose the Greeks,
instead of representing their own warriors as they fought at Marathon,
had left us nothing but their imaginations of Egyptian battles; and
suppose the Italians, in like manner, instead of portraits of Can Grande
and Dante, or of Leo the Tenth and Raphael, had left us nothing but
imaginary portraits of Pericles and Miltiades? What fools we should have
thought them! how bitterly we should have been provoked with their
folly! And that is precisely what our descendants will feel towards us,
so far as our grand historical and classical schools are concerned. What
do we care, they will say, what those nineteenth century people fancied
about Greek and Roman history! If they had left us a few plain and
rational sculptures and pictures of their own battles, and their own
men, in their every-day dress, we should have thanked them. "Well, but,"
you will say, "we _have_ left them portraits of our great men, and
paintings of our great battles." Yes, you have indeed, and that is the
only historical painting that you either have, or can have; but you
don't _call_ that historical painting. You don't thank the men who do
it; you look down upon them and dissuade them from it, and tell them
they don't belong to the grand schools. And yet they are the only true
historical painters, and the only men who will produce any effect on
their own generation, or on any other. Wilkie was a historical painter,
Chantrey a historical sculptor, because they painted, or carved, the
veritable things and men they saw, not men and things as they believed
they might have been, or should have been. But no one tells such men
they are historical painters, and they are discontented with what they
do; and poor Wilkie must needs travel to see the grand school, and
imitate the grand school, and ruin himself. And you have had multitudes
of other painters ruined, from the beginning, by that grand school.
There was Etty, naturally as good a painter as ever lived, but no one
told him what to paint, and he studied the antique, and the grand
schools, and painted dances of nymphs in red and yellow shawls to the
end of his days. Much good may they do you! He is gone to the grave, a
lost mind. There was Flaxman, another naturally great man, with as true
an eye for nature as Raphael,--he stumbles over the blocks of the
antique statues--wanders in the dark valley of their ruins to the end of
his days. He has left you a few outlines of muscular men straddling and
frowning behind round shields. Much good may they do you! Another lost
mind. And of those who are lost namelessly, who have not strength enough
even to make themselves known, the poor pale students who lie buried
forever in the abysses of the great schools, no account can be rendered;
they are numberless.
130. And the wonderful thing is, that of all these men whom you now have
come to call the great masters, there was _not one_ who confessedly did
not paint his own present world, plainly and truly. Homer sang of what
he saw; Phidias carved what he saw; Raphael painted the men of his own
time in their own caps and mantles; and every man who has arisen to
eminence in modern times has done so altogether by his working in their
way, and doing the things he saw. How did Reynolds rise? Not by painting
Greek women, but by painting the glorious little living Ladies this, and
Ladies that, of his own time. How did Hogarth rise? Not by painting
Athenian follies, but London follies. Who are the men who have made an
impression upon you yourselves--upon your own age? I suppose the most
popular painter of the day is Landseer. Do you suppose he studied dogs
and eagles out of the Elgin Marbles? And yet in the very face of these
plain, incontrovertible, all-visible facts, we go on from year to year
with the base system of Academy teaching, in spite of which every one of
these men has risen: I say _in spite_ of the entire method and aim of
our art-teaching. It destroys the greater number of its pupils
altogether; it hinders and paralyzes the greatest. There is not a living
painter whose eminence is not in spite of everything he has been taught
from his youth upwards, and who, whatever his eminence may be, has not
suffered much injury in the course of his victory. For observe: this
love of what is called ideality or beauty in preference to truth,
operates not only in making us choose the past rather than the present
for our subjects, but it makes us falsify the present when we do take it
for our subject. I said just now that portrait-painters were historical
painters;--so they are; but not good ones, because not faithful ones.
The beginning and end of modern portraiture is adulation. The painters
cannot live but by flattery; we should desert them if they spoke
honestly. And therefore we can have no good portraiture; for in the
striving after that which is _not_ in their model, they lose the inner
and deeper nobleness which _is_ in their model. I saw not long ago, for
the first time, the portrait of a man whom I knew well--a young man, but
a religious man--and one who had suffered much from sickness. The whole
dignity of his features and person depended upon the expression of
serene, yet solemn, purpose sustaining a feeble frame; and the painter,
by way of flattering him, strengthened him, and made him athletic in
body, gay in countenance, idle in gesture; and the whole power and being
of the man himself were lost. And this is still more the case with our
public portraits. You have a portrait, for instance, of the Duke of
Wellington at the end of the North Bridge--one of the thousand
equestrian statues of Modernism--studied from the show-riders of the
amphitheater, with their horses on their hind-legs in the saw-dust.[38]
Do you suppose that was the way the Duke sat when your destinies
depended on him? when the foam hung from the lips of his tired horse,
and its wet limbs were dashed with the bloody slime of the battle-field,
and he himself sat anxious in his quietness, grieved in his
fearlessness, as he watched, scythe-stroke by scythe-stroke, the
gathering in of the harvest of death? You would have done something had
you thus left his image in the enduring iron, but nothing now.
[Footnote 38: I intended this last sentence of course to apply to the
thousand statues, not definitely to the one in immediate question,
which, though tainted with the modern affectation, and the nearest
example of it to which I could refer an Edinburgh audience, is the work
of a most promising sculptor; and was indeed so far executed on the
principles asserted in the text, that the Duke gave Mr. Steele a sitting
on horse-back, in order that his mode of riding might be accurately
represented. This, however, does not render the following remarks in the
text nugatory, as it may easily be imagined that the action of the Duke,
exhibiting his riding in his own grounds, would be different from his
action, or inaction, when watching the course of a battle.
I must also make a most definite exception in favor of Marochetti, who
seems to me a thoroughly great sculptor; and whose statue of Coeur de
Lion, though, according to the principle just stated, not to be
considered a _historical_ work, is an _ideal_ work of the highest beauty
and value. Its erection in front of Westminster Hall will tend more to
educate the public eye and mind with respect to art, than anything we
have done in London for centuries.
* * * * *
April 21st, 1854.--I stop the press in order to insert the following
paragraph from to-day's _Times_:--"THE STATUE OF COEUR DE
LION.--_Yesterday morning a number of workmen were engaged in pulling
down the cast which was placed in New Palace Yard of the colossal
equestrian statue of Richard Coeur de Lion. Sir C. Barry was, we
believe, opposed to the cast remaining there any longer, and to the
putting up of the statue itself on the same site, because it did not
harmonize with the building. During the day the horse and figure were
removed, and before night the pedestal was demolished and taken away._"]
131. But the time has at last come for all this to be put an end to; and
nothing can well be more extraordinary than the way in which the men
have risen who are to do it. Pupils in the same schools, receiving
precisely the same instruction which for so long a time has paralyzed
every one of our painters,--these boys agree in disliking to copy the
antique statues set before them. They copy them as they are bid, and
they copy them better than any one else; they carry off prize after
prize, and yet they hate their work. At last they are admitted to study
from the life; they find the life very different from the antique, and
say so. Their teachers tell them the antique is the best, and they
mustn't copy the life. They agree among themselves that they like the
life, and that copy it they will. They do copy it faithfully, and their
masters forthwith declare them to be lost men. Their fellow-students
hiss them whenever they enter the room. They can't help it; they join
hands and tacitly resist both the hissing and the instruction.
Accidentally, a few prints of the works of Giotto, a few casts from
those of Ghiberti, fall into their hands, and they see in these
something they never saw before--something intensely and everlastingly
true. They examine farther into the matter; they discover for themselves
the greater part of what I have laid before you to-night; they form
themselves into a body, and enter upon that crusade which has hitherto
been victorious. And which will be absolutely and triumphantly
victorious. The great mistake which has hitherto prevented the public
mind from fully going with them must soon be corrected. That mistake was
the supposition that, instead of wishing to recur to the _principles_ of
the early ages, these men wished to bring back the _ignorance_ of the
early ages. This notion, grounded first on some hardness in their
earlier works, which resulted--as it must always result--from the
downright and earnest effort to paint nature as in a looking-glass, was
fostered partly by the jealousy of their beaten competitors, and partly
by the pure, perverse, and hopeless ignorance of the whole body of
art-critics, so called, connected with the press. No notion was ever
more baseless or more ridiculous. It was asserted that the
Pre-Raphaelites did not draw well, in the face of the fact, that the
principal member of their body, from the time he entered the schools of
the Academy, had literally encumbered himself with the medals given as
prizes for drawing. It was asserted that they did not draw in
perspective, by men who themselves knew no more of perspective than they
did of astrology; it was asserted that they sinned against the
appearances of nature, by men who had never drawn so much as a leaf or a
blossom from nature in their lives. And, lastly, when all these
calumnies or absurdities would tell no more, and it began to be forced
upon men's unwilling belief that the style of the Pre-Raphaelites _was_
true and was according to nature, the last forgery invented respecting
them is, that they copy photographs. You observe how completely this
last piece of malice defeats all the rest. It admits they are true to
nature, though only that it may deprive them of all merit in being so.
But it may itself be at once refuted by the bold challenge to their
opponents to produce a Pre-Raphaelite picture, or anything like one, by
themselves copying a photograph.
132. Let me at once clear your minds from all these doubts, and at once
contradict all these calumnies.
Pre-Raphaelitism has but one principle, that of absolute, uncompromising
truth in all that it does, obtained by working everything, down to the
most minute detail, from nature, and from nature only.[39] Every
Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the
open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however
studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person. Every
minute accessory is painted in the same manner. And one of the chief
reasons for the violent opposition with which the school has been
attacked by other artists, is the enormous cost of care and labor which
such a system demands from those who adopt it, in contradistinction to
the present slovenly and imperfect style.
[Footnote 39: Or, where imagination is necessarily trusted to, by always
endeavoring to conceive a fact as it really was likely to have happened,
rather than as it most prettily _might_ have happened. The various
members of the school are not all equally severe in carrying out its
principles, some of them trusting their memory or fancy very far; only
all agreeing in the effort to make their memories so accurate as to seem
like portraiture, and their fancy so probable as to seem like memory.]
133. This is the main Pre-Raphaelite principle. But the battle which its
supporters have to fight is a hard one; and for that battle they have
been fitted by a very peculiar character.
You perceive that the principal resistance they have to make is to that
spurious beauty, whose attractiveness had tempted men to forget, or to
despise, the more noble quality of sincerity: and in order at once to
put them beyond the power of temptation from this beauty, they are, as
a body, characterized by a total absence of sensibility to the ordinary
and popular forms of artistic gracefulness; while, to all that still
lower kind of prettiness, which regulates the disposition of our scenes
upon the stage, and which appears in our lower art, as in our annuals,
our commonplace portraits, and statuary, the Pre-Raphaelites are not
only dead, but they regard it with a contempt and aversion approaching
to disgust. This character is absolutely necessary to them in the
present time; but it, of course, occasionally renders their work
comparatively unpleasing. As the school becomes less aggressive, and
more authoritative--which it will do--they will enlist into their ranks
men who will work, mainly, upon their principles, and yet embrace more
of those characters which are generally attractive, and this great
ground of offense will be removed.
134. Again: you observe that as landscape painters, their principles
must, in great part, confine them to mere foreground work; and
singularly enough, that they may not be tempted away from this work,
they have been born with comparatively little enjoyment of those
evanescent effects and distant sublimities which nothing but the memory
can arrest, and nothing but a daring conventionalism portray. But for
this work they are not now needed. Turner, the first and greatest of the
Pre-Raphaelites, has done it already; he, though his capacity embraced
everything, and though he would sometimes, in his foregrounds, paint the
spots upon a dead trout, and the dyes upon a butterfly's wing, yet for
the most part delighted to begin at that very point where the other
branches of Pre-Raphaelitism become powerless.
135. Lastly. The habit of constantly carrying everything up to the
utmost point of completion deadens the Pre-Raphaelites in general to the
merits of men who, with an equal love of truth up to a certain point,
yet express themselves habitually with speed and power, rather than with
finish, and give abstracts of truth rather than total truth. Probably to
the end of time artists will more or less be divided into these classes,
and it will be impossible to make men like Millais understand the
merits of men like Tintoret; but this is the more to be regretted
because the Pre-Raphaelites have enormous powers of imagination, as well
as of realization, and do not yet themselves know of how much they would
be capable, if they sometimes worked on a larger scale, and with a less
laborious finish.
136. With all their faults, their pictures are, since Turner's death,
the best--incomparably the best--on the walls of the Royal Academy; and
such works as Mr. Hunt's "Claudio and Isabella" have never been rivaled,
in some respects never approached, at any other period of art.
This I believe to be a most candid statement of all their faults and all
their deficiencies; not such, you perceive, as are likely to arrest
their progress. The "magna est veritas" was never more sure of
accomplishment than by these men. Their adversaries have no chance with
them. They will gradually unite their influence with whatever is true or
powerful in the reactionary art of other countries; and on their works
such a school will be founded as shall justify the third age of the
world's civilization, and render it as great in creation as it has been
in discovery.
137. And now let me remind you but of one thing more. As you examine
into the career of historical painting, you will be more and more struck
with the fact I have this evening stated to you,--that none was ever
truly great but that which represented the living forms and daily deeds
of the people among whom it arose;--that all precious historical work
records, not the past, but the present. Remember, therefore, that it is
not so much in _buying_ pictures, as in _being_ pictures, that you can
encourage a noble school. The best patronage of art is not that which
seeks for the pleasures of sentiment in a vague ideality, nor for beauty
of form in a marble image; but that which educates your children into
living heroes, and binds down the flights and the fondnesses of the
heart into practical duty and faithful devotion.
ADDENDA
TO
THE FOURTH LECTURE.
138. I could not enter, in a popular lecture, upon one intricate and
difficult question, closely connected with the subject of
Pre-Raphaelitism--namely, the relation of invention to observation; and
composition to imitation. It is still less a question to be discussed in
the compass of a note; and I must defer all careful examination of it to
a future opportunity. Nevertheless, it is impossible to leave altogether
unanswered the first objection which is now most commonly made to the
Pre-Raphaelite work, namely, that the principle of it seems adverse to
all exertion of imaginative power. Indeed, such an objection sounds
strangely on the lips of a public who have been in the habit of
purchasing, for hundreds of pounds, small squares of Dutch canvas,
containing only servile imitations of the coarsest nature. It is strange
that an imitation of a cow's head by Paul Potter, or of an old woman's
by Ostade, or of a scene of tavern debauchery by Teniers, should be
purchased and proclaimed for high art, while the rendering of the most
noble expressions of human feeling in Hunt's "Isabella," or of the
loveliest English landscape, haunted by sorrow, in Millais' "Ophelia,"
should be declared "puerile." But, strange though the utterance of it
be, there is some weight in the objection. It is true that so long as
the Pre-Raphaelites only paint from nature, however carefully selected
and grouped, their pictures can never have the characters of the highest
class of compositions. But, on the other hand, the shallow and
conventional arrangements commonly called "compositions" by the artists
of the present day, are infinitely farther from great art than the most
patient work of the Pre-Raphaelites. That work is, even in its humblest
form, a secure foundation, capable of infinite superstructure; a reality
of true value, as far as it reaches, while the common artistical effects
and groupings are a vain effort at superstructure without
foundation--utter negation and fallacy from beginning to end.