Tendencies and Results.
It has been mentioned that romanticism was not purely a matter of
aesthetics, without relation to the movement of religious and political
thought.[1] But it has also been pointed out that, as compared with what
happened in Germany, English romanticism was almost entirely a literary
or artistic, and hardly at all a practical force, that there was no such
_Zusammenhang_ between poetry and life as was asserted by the German
romantic school to be one of their leading principles. Walter Scott,
_e.g._, liked the Middle Ages because they were picturesque; because
their social structure rested on a military basis, permitted great
individual freedom of action and even lawlessness, and thus gave chances
for bold adventure; and because classes and callings were so sharply
differentiated--each with its own characteristic manners, dialect,
dress--that the surface of society presented a rich variety of colour, in
contrast with the drab uniformity of modern life. Perhaps to Scott the
ideal life was that of a feudal baron, dwelling in a Gothic mansion,
surrounded by retainers and guests, keeping open house, and going
a-hunting; and he tried to realise this ideal--so far as it was possible
under modern conditions--at Abbotsford. He respected rank and pedigree,
and liked to own land. He was a Tory and, in Presbyterian Scotland, he
was an Episcopalian. But his mediaeval enthusiasms were checked by all
kinds of good sense. He had no wish to restore mediaeval institutions in
practice. In spite of the glamour which he threw over feudal life, he
knew very well what that life must have been in reality: its insecurity
from violence and oppression, its barbarous discomfort; the life of
nobles in unplumbed stone castles; the life of burghers in walled towns,
without lighting, drainage, or police; the life of countrymen who took
their goods to market over miry roads impassable half the year for any
wheeled vehicle. As to the English poets whom we have passed in review,
from Coleridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic Church;
and most of them found romantic literary tastes quite consistent with
varying shades of political liberalism and theological heterodoxy.
THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT.--Still even in England, the mediaeval
revival in art and letters was not altogether without influence on
practice and belief in other spheres of thought. Thus the Oxford
Tractarians of 1833 correspond somewhat to the throne-and-altar party in
Germany. At Newcastle in 1845, William Bell Scott visited a
painted-glass manufactory where he found his friend, Francis
Oliphant--afterwards husband of Margaret Oliphant, the novelist--engaged
as a designer. He describes Oliphant as no artist by nature, but a man
of pietistic feelings who had "thrown himself into the Gothic revival
which was, under the Oxford movement, threatening to become a serious
antagonist to our present freedom from clerical domination." Scott adds
that the master of this glass-making establishment was an uncultivated
tradesman, who yet had the business shrewdness to take advantage of "the
clerical and architectural proclivities of the day," and had visited and
studied the French cathedrals. "These workshops were a surprise to me.
Here was the Scotch Presbyterian working-artist, with a short pipe in his
mouth, cursing his fate in having to elaborate continual repetitions of
saints and virgins--Peter with a key as large as a spade, and a yellow
plate behind his head--yet by constant drill in the groove realising the
sentiment of Christian art, and at last able to express the abnegation of
self, the limitless sadness and even tenderness, in every line of drapery
and every twist of the lay figure."
Here is one among many testimonies to the influence of the Oxford
movement on the fine arts. It would be easy to call witnesses to prove
the reverse--the influence of romance upon the Oxford movement.
Newman[2] quotes an article contributed by him to the _British Critic_
for April, 1839, in which he had spoken of Tractarianism "as a reaction
from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the
literature of the last generation, or century. . . . First, I mentioned
the literary influence of Walter Scott, who turned men's minds to the
direction of the Middle Ages. 'The general need,' I said, 'of something
deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may be
considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity
he reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their
hopes, setting before them visions which, when once seen, are not easily
forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which
might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.'" Of Coleridge he
spoke, in the same paper, as having laid a philosophical basis for church
feelings and opinions, and of Southey and Wordsworth as "two living
poets, one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in
that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same
high principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in the
same direction." Newman, like Ruskin, was fond of Scott's verse as well
as of his prose.[3]
Professor Gates has well recognised that element in romantic art which
affiliates with Catholic tendencies. "Mediaevalism . . . was a
distinctive note of the Romantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman was
intensely alive to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of the
Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great
mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroically
striving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs.
His imagination was possessed with the romantic vision of the greatness
of the Mediaeval Church--of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and of
its power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxford
movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church
in harmony with this romantic ideal. . . . As Scott's imagination was
fascinated with the picturesque paraphernalia of feudalism--with its
jousts, and courts of love, and its coats of mail and buff-jerkins--so
Newman's imagination was captivated by the gorgeous ritual and
ceremonial, the art and architecture of mediaeval Christianity. . . .
Newman sought to revive in the Church a mediaeval faith in its own divine
mission and the intense spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he
aimed to restore to religion its mystical character, to exalt the
sacramental system as the divinely appointed means for the salvation of
souls, and to impose once more on men's imaginations the mighty spell of
a hierarchical organisation, the direct representative of God in the
world's affairs. . . . Both he and Scott substantially ruined themselves
through their mediaevalism. Scott's luckless attempt was to place his
private and family life upon a feudal basis and to give it mediaeval
colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic but
more intrinsically hopeless task--that of re-creating the whole English
Church in harmony with mediaeval conceptions." [4]
All this is most true, and yet it is easy to exaggerate the share which
romantic feeling had in the Oxford movement. In his famous apostrophe to
Oxford, Matthew Arnold personifies the university as a "queen of
romance," an "adorable dreamer whose heart has been so romantic,"
"spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers
the last enchantments of the Middle Age," and "ever calling us nearer
to . . . beauty." Newman himself was a poet, as well as one of the
masters of English prose. The movement left an impress upon general
literature in books like Keble's "Christian Year" (1827) and "Lyra
Innocentium" (1847); in Newman's two novels, "Callista" and "Loss and
Gain" (1848), and his "Verses on Various Occasions" (1867); and even
found an echo in popular fiction. Grey in Hughes' "Tom Brown at Oxford"
represents the Puseyite set. Miss Yonge's "Heir of Redcliffe" and
Shorthouse's "John Inglesant" are surcharged with High-Church sentiment.
Newman said that Keble made the Church of England poetical. "The author
of 'The Christian Year' found the Anglican system all but destitute of
this divine element [poetry]; . . . vestments chucked off, lights
quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship
annihilated; . . . the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of
wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in place of the
mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the
tombs (as they were) of what had been and was not." [5] Newman praises
in "The Christian Year" what he calls its "sacramental system"; and to
the unsympathetic reader it seems as though Keble saw all outdoors
through a stained-glass window. The movement had its aesthetic side, and
coincided with the revival of church Gothic and with the effort to make
church music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon the whole,
it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an affair of doctrine and church
polity rather than of ecclesiology; while the later phase of ritualism
into which it has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely a
matter of upholstery, given over to people who concern themselves with
the carving of lecterns and the embroidery of chasubles and altar cloths;
with Lent lilies, antiphonal choirs, and what Carlyle calls the "singular
old rubrics" of the English Church and the "three surplices at
All-Hallowmas."
Newman was, above all things, a theologian; a subtle reasoner whose
relentless logic led him at last to Rome. "From the age of fifteen," he
wrote, "dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I know
no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of
religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery."
Discussions concerning church ceremonies, liturgy, ritual, he put aside
with some impatience. His own tastes were simple to asceticism. Mozley
says that Newman and Hurrell Froude induced several of the Oriel fellows
to discontinue the use of wine in the common room. "When I came up at
Easter, 1825, one of the first standing jokes against the college all
over the university was the Oriel tea-pot." [6] Dean Church testifies to
the plainness of the services at St. Mary's.[7] Aubrey de Vere reports
his urging Newman to make an expedition with him among the Wicklow
Mountains, and the latter's "answering with a smile that life was full of
work more important than the enjoyment of mountains and lakes. . . . The
ecclesiastical imagination and the mountain-worshipping imagination are
two very different things. Wordsworth's famous 'Tintern Abbey' describes
the river Wye, etc. . . . The one thing which it did not see was the
great monastic ruin; . . . and now here is this great theologian, who,
when within a few miles of Glendalough Lake, will not visit it." [8]
There is much gentle satire in "Loss and Gain" at the expense of the
Ritualistic set in the university who were attracted principally by the
external beauty of the Roman Catholic worship. One of these is Bateman,
a solemn bore, who takes great interest in "candlesticks, ciboriums,
faldstools, lecterns, ante-pend turns, piscinas, roodlofts, and sedilia":
wears a long cassock which shows absurdly under the tails of his coat;
and would tolerate no architecture but Gothic in English churches, and no
music but the Gregorian. Bateman is having a chapel restored in pure
fourteenth-century style and dedicated to the Royal Martyr. He is going
to convert the chapel into a chantry, and has bought land about it for a
cemetery, which is to be decorated with mediaeval monuments in sculpture
and painting copied from the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, of
which he has a portfolio full of drawings. "It will be quite sweet," he
says, "to hear the vesper-bell tolling over the sullen moor every
evening." Then there is White, a weak young aesthete who shocks the
company by declaring: "We have no life or poetry in the Church of
England; the Catholic Church alone is beautiful. You would see what I
mean if you went into a foreign cathedral, or even into one of the
Catholic churches in our large towns. The celebrant, deacon and
sub-deacon, acolytes with lights, the incense and the chanting all
combine to one end, one act of worship." White is much exercised by the
question whether a sacristan should wear the short or the long cotta.
But he finally marries and settles down into a fat preferment.
Newman's sensitiveness to the beauty of Catholic religion is acute. "Her
very being is poetry," he writes. But equally acute is his sense of the
danger under which religion lies from the ministration of the arts, lest
they cease to be handmaids, and "give the law to Religion." Hence he
praises, from an ecclesiastical point of view, the service of the arts in
their rudimental state--the rude Gothic sculpture, the simple Gregorian
chant.[9] A similar indifference to the merely aesthetic aspects of
Catholicism is recorded of many of Newman's associates; of Hurrell
Froude, _e.g._, and of Ward. When Pugin came to Oxford in 1840 to
superintend some building at Balliol, he saw folio copies of St.
Buenaventura and Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae" lying on Ward's table, and
exclaimed, "What an extraordinary thing that so glorious a man as Ward
should be living in a room without mullions to the windows!" This being
reported to Ward, he asked, "What are mullions? I never heard of them."
Ward cared nothing about rood-screens and lancet windows; Newman and
Faber preferred the Palladian architecture to the Gothic.[10] Pugin, on
the other hand, who had been actually converted to the Roman Church
through his enthusiasm for pointed architecture; and who, when asked to
dinner, stipulated for Gothic puddings, for which he enclosed designs,
was greatly distressed at the carelessness about such matters which he
found at Oxford. A certain Dr. Cox was going to pray for the conversion
of England, in an old French cope. "What is the use," asked Pugin, "of
praying for the Church of England in that cope?" [11]
Of the three or four hundred Anglican clergymen who went over with Newman
in 1845, or some years later with Manning, on the decision in the Gorham
controversy, few were influenced in any assignable degree by poetic
motives. "As regards my friend's theory about my imaginative sympathies
having led me astray," writes Aubrey de Vere, "I may remark that they had
been repelled, not attracted, by what I thought an excess of ceremonial
in the churches and elsewhere when in Italy. . . . It seemed to me too
sensuous." [12] Indeed, at the outset of the movement it was not the
mediaeval Church, but the primitive Church, the Church of patristic
discipline and doctrine, that appealed to the Tractarians. It was the
Anglican Church of the seventeenth century, the Church of Andrewes and
Herbert and Ken, to which Keble sought to restore the "beauty of
holiness"; and those of the Oxford party who remained within the
establishment continued true to this ideal. "The Christian Year" is the
genuine descendant of George Herbert's "Temple" (1632). What impressed
Newman's imagination in the Roman Catholic Church was not so much the
romantic beauty of its rites and observances as its imposing unity and
authority. He wanted an authoritative standard in matters of belief, a
faith which had been held _semper et ubique et ab omnibus_. The English
Church was an Elizabethan compromise. It was Erastian, a creature of the
state, threatened by the Reform Bill of 1832, threatened by every liberal
wind of opinion. The Thirty-nine Articles meant this to one man and that
to another, and there was no court of final appeal to say what they
meant. Newman was a convert not of his imagination, but of his longing
for consistency and his desire to believe.
There is nothing romantic in either temper or style about Newman's poems,
all of which are devotional in subject, and one of which--"The Pillar of
the Cloud" ("Lead, Kindly Light") (1833)--is a favourite hymn in most
Protestant communions. The most ambitious of these is "The Dream of
Gerontius," a sort of mystery play which Sir Henry Taylor used to compare
with the "Divine Comedy." Indeed, none but Dante has more poignantly
expressed the purgatorial passion, the desire for pain, which makes the
spirits in the flames of purification unwilling to intermit their
torments even for a moment. The "happy, suffering soul" of Gerontius
lies before the throne of the Crucified and sings:
"Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep
Told out for me." [13]
Some dozen years before the "Tracts for the Times" began to appear at
Oxford, a sporadic case of conversion at the sister university offers a
closer analogy with the catholicising process among the German romantics.
Kenelm Henry Digby, who took his degree at Trinity College in 1819, and
devoted himself to the study of mediaeval antiquities and scholastic
philosophy, was actually led into the Catholic fold by his enthusiasm for
the chivalry romances, as Pugin was by his love of Gothic architecture.
His singular book, "The Broad Stone of Honour," was first published in
1822, and repeatedly afterwards in greatly enlarged form. In its final
edition it consists of four books entitled respectively "Godefridus,"
"Tancredus," "Morus" (Sir Thomas More), and "Orlandus," after four
representative paladins of Christian chivalry. The title of the whole
work was suggested by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the "Gibraltar of
the Rhine." Like Fouqué, Digby was inspired by the ideal of knighthood,
but he emphasises not so much the gallantry of the knight-errant as his
religious character as the champion of Holy Church. The book is, loosely
speaking, an English "Genié du Christianisme," less brilliantly
rhetorical than Chateaubriand, but more sincerely devout. It is poetic
and descriptive rather than polemical, though the author constantly
expresses his dislike of modern civilisation, and complains with Burke
that this is an age of sophists, calculators, and economists. He quotes
profusely from German and French reactionaries, like Busching,[14] Fritz
Stolberg, Görres, Friedrich Schlegel, Lamennais, and Joseph de Maistre,
and illustrates his topic at every turn from mediaeval chronicles,
legendaries, romances, and manuals of chivalry; from the lives of
Charlemagne, St. Louis, Godfrey of Bouillon, the Chevalier Bayard, St.
Anselm, King Rene, etc., and above all, from the "Morte Darthur." He
defends the Crusades, the Templars, and the monastic orders against such
historians as Muller, Sismondi, and Hume; is very contemptuous of the
Protestant concessions of Bishop Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and
Romance";[15] and, in short, fights a brave battle against the artillery
of "the moderns" with weapons borrowed from "the armoury of the
invincible knights of old." The book is learned, though unsystematic and
discursive, but its most interesting feature is its curiously personal
note, its pure spirit of honour and Catholic piety. The enthusiasm of
the author extends itself from the institutes of chivalry and the Church
to the social and political constitution of the Middle Ages. He is
anti-democratic as well as anti-Protestant; upholds monarchy, nobility,
the interference of the popes in the affairs of kingdoms, and praises the
times when the doctrines of legislation and government all over Europe
rested on the foundations of the Church.
A few paragraphs from "The Broad Stone of Honour" will illustrate the
author's entrance into the Church through the door of beauty, and his
identification of romantic art with "the art Catholic." "It is much to
be lamented," he writes, "that the acquaintance of the English reader
with the characters and events of the Middle Ages should, for the most
part, be derived from the writings of men who were either infidels, or
who wrote on every subject connected with religion, with the feelings and
opinions of Scotch Presbyterian preachers of the last century." [16] "A
distinguishing characteristic of everything belonging to the early and
Middle Ages of Christianity is the picturesque. Those who now struggle
to cultivate the fine arts are obliged to have recourse to the despised,
and almost forgotten, houses, towns, and dresses of this period. As soon
as men renounced the philosophy of the Church, it was inevitable that
their taste, that the form of objects under their control, should change
with their religion; for architects had no longer to provide for the love
of solitude, of meditation between sombre pillars, of modesty in
apartments with the lancet-casement. They were not to study duration and
solidity in an age when men were taught to regard the present as their
only concern. When nothing but exact knowledge was sought, the undefined
sombre arches were to be removed to make way for lines which would
proclaim their brevity, and for a blaze of light which might correspond
with the mind of those who rejected every proposition that led beyond the
reach of the senses. . . . So completely is it beyond the skill of the
painter or the poet to render bearable the productions of the
moderns, . . . and so fast are the poor neglected works of Christian
antiquity falling to ruin, that it is hard to conceive how the fine arts
can be cultivated after another century has elapsed; for when children
are taught in infant schools to love accounts from their cradle, and to
study political economy before they have heard of the Red Cross Knight or
the Wild Hunter, the manner and taste of such an age will smother the
sparks of nature." [17] The Church summoned all natural beauty to the
ministry of religion. "Flowers bloomed on the altars; men could behold
the blue heaven through those tall, narrow-pointed eastern windows of the
Gothic choir as they sat at vespers. . . . The cloud of incense breathed
a sweet perfume; the voice of youth was tuned to angelic hymns; and the
golden sun of the morning, shining through the coloured pane, cast its
purple or its verdant beam on the embroidered vestments and marble
pavement." [18] Or read the extended rhapsody which closes the first
volume, where, to counteract the attractions of classic lands, the author
passes in long review the sites and monuments of romance in England,
Germany, Spain, Italy, and France. Aubrey de Vere says that nothing had
been so "impressive, suggestive, and spiritually helpful" to him as
Newman's "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties" (1850), "with the exception
of the 'Divina Commedia' and Kenelm Digby's wholly uncontroversial 'Mores
Catholici'" (1831-40).
THE STUDY OF MEDIAEVAL ART.--The correlation of romantic poetry, Catholic
worship, and mediaeval art has been indicated in the chapter upon the
Pre-Raphaelites, as well as in the foregoing section of the present
chapter. But the three departments have other tangential points which
should not pass without some further mention. The revival of Gothic
architecture which began with Horace Walpole[19] went on in an
unintelligent way through the eighteenth century. One of the queerest
monuments of this new taste--a successor on a larger scale to Strawberry
Hill--was Fonthill Abbey, near Salisbury, that prodigious folly to which
Beckford, the eccentric author of "Vathek," devoted a great share of his
almost fabulous wealth. It was begun in 1796, took nearly thirty years
in building, employed at one time four hundred and sixty men, and cost
over 273,000 pounds. Its most conspicuous feature was an octagonal tower
278 feet high, so ill constructed that it shortly tumbled down into a
heap of ruins.[20]
The growing taste for mediaeval architecture was powerfully reinforced by
the popularity of Walter Scott's writings. But Abbotsford is evidence
enough of the superficiality of his own knowledge of the art; and during
the first half of the nineteenth century, Gothic design was applied not
to churches, but to the more ambitious classes of domestic architecture.
The country houses of the nobility and landed gentry were largely built
or rebuilt in what was known as the castellated style.[21] Meanwhile a
truer understanding of the principles of pointed architecture was being
helped by the publication of archaeological works like Britton's
"Cathedral Antiquities" (1814-35), Milner's "Treatise on Ecclesiastical
Architecture" (1811), and Rickman's "Ancient Examples of Gothic
Architecture" (1819). The parts of individual buildings, such as
Westminster Abbey and Lincoln Cathedral, were carefully studied and
illustrated with plans and sections drawn to scale, and measurement was
substituted for guesswork. But the real restorer of ecclesiastical
Gothic in England was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, an enthusiast, nay,
a fanatic, in the cause; whose "Contrasts" (1836) is not only a landmark
in the history of the revival of mediaeval art, but a most instructive
illustration of the manner in which an aesthetic admiration of the Middle
Ages has sometimes involved an acceptance of their religious beliefs and
social principles. Three generations of this family are associated with
the rise of modern Gothic. The elder Pugin (Augustus Charles) was a
French _emigré_ who came to England during the Revolution, and gained
much reputation as an architectural draughtsman, publishing, among other
things, "Specimens of Gothic Architecture," in 1821. The son of A. W. N.
Pugin, Edward Welby (1834-73), also carried on his father's work as a
practical architect and a writer.
Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church just about the time when the
"Tracts for the Times" began to be issued. His "Contrasts: or a Parallel
between the Architecture of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" is
fiercely polemical, and displays all the zeal of a fresh convert. In the
preface to the second edition he says that "when this work was first
brought out [1836], the very name of Christian art was almost unknown";
and he affirms, in a footnote, that in the whole of the national museum,
"there is not even one room, one _shelf_, devoted to the exquisite
productions of the Middle Ages." The book is a jeremiad over the
condition to which the cathedrals and other remains of English
ecclesiastical architecture had been reduced by the successive
spoliations and mutilations in the times of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and
Cromwell, and by the "vile" restorations of later days. It maintains the
thesis that pointed architecture is not only vastly superior
artistically, but that it is the only style appropriate to Christian
churches; "in it alone we find the faith of Christianity embodied and its
practices illustrated." Pugin denounces alike the Renaissance and the
Reformation, "those two monsters, revived Paganism and Protestantism."
There is no chance, he thinks, for a successful revival of Gothic except
in a return to Catholic faith. "The mechanical part of Gothic
architecture is pretty well understood, but it is the principles which
influenced ancient compositions, and the soul which appears in all the
former works, which is so lamentably deficient. . . . 'Tis they alone
that can restore pointed architecture to its former glorious state;
without it all that is done will be a tame and heartless copy." He
points out the want of sympathy between "these vast edifices" and the
Protestant worship, which might as well be carried on in a barn or
conventicle or square meeting-house. Hence, the nave has been blocked up
with pews, the choir or transept partitioned off to serve as a parish
church, roodloft and chancel screen removed, the altar displaced by a
table, and the sedilia scattered about in odd corners. The contrast
between old and new is strikingly presented, by way of object lessons, in
a series of plates, arranged side by side, and devised with a great deal
of satirical humour. There is, _e.g._, a Catholic town in 1440, rich
with its ancient stone bridge, its battlemented wall and city gate, and
the spires and towers of St. Marie's Abbey, the Guild Hall, Queen's
Cross, St. Cuthbert's Church, and the half-timbered, steep-roofed, gabled
houses of the burgesses. Over against it is the picture of the same town
in 1840, hideous with the New Jail, Gas Works, Lunatic Asylum, Wesleyan
Chapel, New Town Hall, Iron Works, Quaker Meeting-house, Socialist Hall
of Science, and other abominations of a prosperous modern industrial
community. Or there is the beautiful old western doorway of St. Mary
Overies, destroyed in 1838. The door stands invitingly open, showing the
noble interior with kneeling worshippers scattered here and there over
the unobstructed pavement. Opposite is the new door, grimly closed, with
a printed notice nailed upon it: "Divine Service on Sundays. Evening
lecture." A separate plate exhibits a single compartment of the old door
curiously carved in oak; and beside it a compartment of the new door in
painted deal and plain as a pike-staff.
But the author is forced to confess that the case is not much better in
Catholic countries, where stained windows have been displaced by white
panes, frescoed ceilings covered with a yellow wash, and the "bastard
pagan style" introduced among the venerable sanctities of old religion.
English travellers return from the Continent disgusted with the tinsel
ornament and theatrical trumperies that they have seen in foreign
churches. "I do not think," he concludes, "the architecture of our
English churches would have fared much better under a Catholic
hierarchy. . . . It is a most melancholy truth that there does not exist
much sympathy of idea between a great portion of the present Catholic
body in England and their glorious ancestors. . . . Indeed, such is the
total absence of solemnity in a great portion of modern Catholic
buildings in England, that I do not hesitate to say that a few crumbling
walls and prostrate arches of a religious edifice raised during the days
of faith will convey a far stronger religious impression to the mind than
the actual service of half the chapels in England."
In short, Pugin's Catholicism, though doubtless sincere, was prompted by
his professional feelings. His reverence was given to the mediaeval
Church, not to her--aesthetically--degenerate daughter; and it extended
to the whole system of life and thought peculiar to the Middle Ages.
"Men must learn," he wrote, "that the period hitherto called dark and
ignorant far excelled our age in wisdom, that art ceased when it is said
to have been revived, that superstition was piety, and bigotry faith."
In many of his views Pugin anticipates Ruskin. He did not like St.
Peter's at Rome, and said: "If those students who journey to Italy to
study art would follow the steps of the great Overbeck,[22] . . . they
would indeed derive inestimable benefit. Italian art of the thirteenth,
fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries is the beau ideal of Christian
purity, and its imitation cannot be too strongly inculcated; but when it
forsook its pure, mystical, and ancient types, to follow those of sensual
Paganism, it sunk to a fearful state of degradation."
As a practising architect Pugin naturally received and executed many
commissions for Catholic churches. But the Catholic Church in England
did much less, even in proportion to its resources, than the Anglican
establishment towards promoting the Gothic revival. Eastlake says that
Pugin's "strength as an artist lay in the design of ornamental detail";
and that he helped importantly in the revival of the mediaeval taste in
stained glass, metal work, furniture, carpets, and paper-hangings.
Several of his works have to do with various departments of ecclesiology;
chancel-screens, roodlofts, church ornaments, symbols and costumes, and
the like. But the only one that need here be mentioned is the once very
influential "True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture"
(1841). This revival of ecclesiastical Gothic fell in with the reform of
Anglican ritual, which was one of the features or sequences of the Oxford
movement, and the two tendencies afforded each other mutual support.
Evidence of a newly awakened interest in mediaeval art is furnished by a
number of works of a more systematic character which appeared about the
middle of the century, dealing not only with architecture, but with the
early schools of sculpture and painting. One of these was "Sketches of
the History of Christian Art" (3 vols., 1847) by Alexander William
Crawford Lindsay, twenty-fifth Earl of Crawford. In the preface to the
reprint of this book in 1885, Lady Crawford speaks of it as a pioneer in
an "early time of unawakened interest." Ruskin refers to it
repeatedly--always with respect--and acknowledges in "Praeterita" that
Lord Lindsay knew a great deal more about Italian art than he himself
did. The book reviews in detail the works of Christian builders,
sculptors and painters, both in Italy and north of the Alps, from the
time of the Roman catacombs and basilicas down to the Renaissance. It
gives likewise a history of Christian mythology, iconography and
symbolism; all that great body of popular beliefs about angels, devils,
saints, martyrs, anchorites, miracles, etc., which Protestant iconoclasm
and the pagan spirit of the _cinque-cento_ had long ago swept into the
dust-bin as sheer idolatry and superstition. Lord Lindsay's treatment of
these matters is reverential, though his own Protestantism is proof
against their charm. His tone is moderate; he has no quarrel with the
Renaissance, and professes respect for classical art, which seems to him,
however, on a lower spiritual plane than the Christian. He remarks that
all mediaeval art was religious; the only concession to the secular being
found in the illuminations of some of the chivalry romances. Gothic
architecture was the expression of Teutonic genius, which is realistic
and stands for the reason, while Italian sacred painting was idealistic
and stands for the imagination. In the most perfect art, as in the
highest type of religion, reason and imagination are in balance. Hence,
the influence of Van Eyck, Memling, and Dürer on Italian painters was
wholesome; and the Reformation, the work of the reasoning Teutonic mind,
is not to be condemned. Reason is to blame only when it goes too far and
extinguishes imagination.[23]
"The sympathies of the North, or of the Teutonic race, are with Death, as
those of the Southern, or classic, are with Life. . . . The exquisitely
beautiful allegorical tale of 'Sintram and His Companions' by La Motte
Fouqué, was founded on the 'Knight and Death' of Albert Dürer, and I
cannot but think that Milton had the 'Melancholy' in his remembrance
while writing 'Il Penseroso.'" [24] The author thinks that, whatever may
be true of Gothic architecture--an art less national than
ecclesiastical--"sculpture and painting, on the one hand, and the spirit
of chivalry on the other, have usually flourished in an inverse ratio one
to the other, and it is not therefore in England, France, or Spain, but
among the free cities of Italy and Germany that we must look for their
rise." [25] I give these conclusions--so opposite to those of Catholic
mediaevalists like Digby and Pugin--because they illustrate the temper of
Lindsay's book. One more quotation I will venture to add for its
agreement with Uvedale Price's definition of the picturesque:[26] "The
picturesque in art answers to the romantic in poetry; both stand opposed
to the classic or formal school--both may be defined as the triumph of
nature over art, luxuriating in the decay, not of her elemental and
ever-lasting beauty, but of the bonds by which she had been enthralled by
man. It is only in ruin that a building of pure architecture, whether
Greek or Gothic, becomes picturesque." [27]
Lord Lindsay's "Sketches" contained no illustrations. Mrs. Jameson's
very popular series on "Sacred and Legendary Art" was profusely
embellished with wood-cuts and etchings. The first number of the series,
"Legends of the Saints and Martyrs," was begun in 1842, but issued only
in 1848. "Legends of the Monastic Orders" followed in 1850; "Legends of
the Madonna" in 1852; and the "History of Our Lord" (completed by Lady
Eastlake) in 1860. Mrs. Jameson had an imperfect knowledge of technique,
and her work was descriptive rather than critical. But it probably did
more to enlist the interest of the general reader in Christian art than
Lord Lindsay's more learned volumes; or possibly even than the brilliant
but puzzling rhetoric of Ruskin.
With Pugin's "Contrasts" began the "Battle of the Styles." This was soon
decided in Pugin's favour, so far as ecclesiastical buildings were
concerned. Fergusson, who is hostile to Gothic, admits that wherever
clerical influence extended, the style came into fashion. The Cambridge
Camden Society was founded in 1839 for the study of church architecture
and ritual, and issued the first number of its magazine, _The
Ecclesiologist_, in 1841. But the first national triumph for secular
Gothic was won when Barry's design for the new houses of Parliament was
selected from among ninety-seven competing plans. The corner-stone was
laid at Westminster in 1840, and much of the detail, as the work went on,
was furnished by Pugin.
It was not long before the Gothic revival found an ally in the same great
writer who had already come forward as the champion of Pre-Raphaelite
painting. The masterly analysis of "The Nature of Gothic" in "The Stones
of Venice" (vol. i., 1851; vols. ii. and iii., 1853), and the eloquence
and beauty of a hundred passages throughout the three volumes, fascinated
a public which cared little about art, but knew good literature when they
saw it. Eastlake testifies that Ruskin had some practical influence on
English building. Young artists went to Venice to study the remains of
Italian Gothic, and the results of their studies were seen in the surface
treatment of many London facades, especially in the cusped window arches,
and in the stripes of coloured bricks which give a zebra-like appearance
to the architecture of the period. But, in general, working architects
were rather contemptuous of Ruskin's fine-spun theories, which they
ridiculed as fantastic, self-contradictory, and super-subtle; rhetoric or
metaphysics, in short, and not helpful art criticism.
Ruskin's adhesion to Gothic was without compromise. It was "not only the
best, but the _only rational_ architecture." "I plead for the
introduction of the Gothic form into our domestic architecture, not
merely because it is lovely, but because it is the only form of faithful,
strong, enduring, and honourable building, in such materials as come
daily to our hands." [28] On the other hand, Roman architecture is
essentially base; the study of classical literature is "pestilent"; and
most modern building is the fruit of "the Renaissance poison tree."
"If . . . any of my readers should determine . . . to set themselves to
the revival of a healthy school of architecture in England, and wish to
know in few words how this may be done, the answer is clear and simple.
First, let us cast out utterly whatever is connected with the Greek,
Roman, or Renaissance architecture, in principle or in form. . . . The
whole mass of the architecture, founded on Greek and Roman models, which
we have been in the habit of building for the last three centuries, is
utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or power of doing
good. It is base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable, and impious.
Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its
old age." [29]
Ruskin loved the religious spirit of the mediaeval builders, Byzantine,
Lombard, or Gothic; and the pure and holy faith of the early sacred
painters like Fra Angelico, Orcagna, and Perugino. He thought that
whatever was greatest even in Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came
from their training in the old religious school, not from the new science
of the Renaissance. "Raphael painted best when he knew least." He
deplored the harm to Catholic and Protestant alike of the bitter
dissensions of the Reformation. But he sorrowfully acknowledged the
corruption of the ancient Church, and had no respect for modern Romanism.
Against the opinion that Gothic architecture was fitted exclusively for
ecclesiastical uses, he strongly protested. On the contrary, he advised
its reintroduction, especially in domestic building. "Most readers . . .
abandon themselves drowsily to the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly
ecclesiastical style. . . . The High Church and Romanist parties . . .
have willingly promulgated the theory that, because all the good
architecture that is now left is expressive of High Church or Romanist
doctrines, all good architecture ever has been and must be so--a piece of
absurdity. . . . Wherever Christian Church architecture has been good
and lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the common
dwelling-house architecture of the period. . . . The churches were not
separated by any change of style from the buildings round them, as they
are now, but were merely more finished and full examples of a universal
style. . . . Because the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for
churches, they are not therefore less fit for dwellings. They are in the
highest sense fit and good for both, nor were they ever brought to
perfection except when they were used for both." [30]
The influence of Walter Scott upon Ruskin is noteworthy. As a child he
read the Bible on Sundays and the Waverley Novels on week-days, and he
could not recall the time when either had been unknown to him. The
freshness of his pleasure in the first sight of the frescoes of the Campo
Santo he describes by saying that it was like having three new Scott
novels.[31] Ruskin called himself a "king's man," a "violent illiberal,"
and a "Tory of the old-fashioned school, the school of Walter Scott."
Like Scott, he was proof against the religious temptations of
mediaevalism. "Although twelfth-century psalters are lovely and right,"
he was not converted to Catholic teachings by his admiration for the art
of the great ages; and writes, with a touch of contempt, of those who are
"piped into a new creed by the squeak of an organ pipe." If Scott was
unclassical, Ruskin was anti-classical. The former would learn no Greek;
and the latter complained that Oxford taught him all the Latin and Greek
that he would learn, but did not teach him that fritillaries grew in
Iffley meadow.[32] Even that fondness for costume which has been made a
reproach against Scott finds justification with Ruskin. "The essence of
modern romance is simply the return of the heart and fancy to the things
in which they naturally take pleasure; and half the influence of the best
romances, of 'Ivanhoe,' or 'Marmion,' or 'The Crusaders,' or 'The Lady of
the Lake,' is completely dependent upon the accessories of armour and
costume." [33] Still Ruskin had the critical good sense to rate such as
they below the genuine Scotch novels, like "Old Mortality" and "The Heart
of Mid-Lothian"; and he is quite stern towards the melodramatic Byronic
ideal of Venice. "The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly
characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save the
remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing
flowers, and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we
would see them as they stood in their own strength. . . . The Venice of
modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of
decay, a stage dream." [34] For it cannot be too often repeated that the
romance is not in the Middle Ages themselves, but in their strangeness to
our imagination. The closer one gets to them, the less romantic they
appear.
MEDIEVAL SOCIAL IDEALS.--It is obvious how a fondness for the Middle
Ages, in a man of Scott's conservative temper, might confirm him in his
attachment to high Tory principles and to an aristocratic-feudal ideal of
society; or how, in an enthusiastic artist like Pugin, and a gentleman of
high-strung chivalric spirit like Sir Kenelm Digby, it might even lead to
an adoption of the whole mediaeval religious system. But it is not so
easy, at first sight, to understand why the same thing should have
conducted Ruskin and William Morris to opinions that were more "advanced"
than those of the most advanced Liberal. Orthodox economists looked upon
the theories put forward in Ruskin's "Unto this Last" (1860), "Munera
Pulveris" (1862-63), and "Fors Clavigera" (1871-84), as the
eccentricities of a distinguished art critic, disporting himself in
unfamiliar fields of thought. And when in 1883 the poet of "The Earthly
Paradise" joined the Democratic Federation, and subsequently the
Socialist League, and was arrested and fined one shilling and costs for
addressing open-air meetings, obstructing public highways, and striking
policemen, amusement was mingled with disapproval. What does this
dreamer of dreams and charming decorative artist in a London police court?
But Socialism, though appearing on the face of it the most modern of
doctrines, is in a sense reactionary, like Catholicism, or
knight-errantry, or Gothic architecture. That is, those who protest
against the individualism of the existing social order are wont to
contrast it unfavourably with the principle of association which is found
everywhere in the Middle Ages. No mediaeval man was free or independent;
all men were members one of another. The feudal system itself was an
elaborate network of interdependent rights and obligations, in which
service was given in return for protection. The vassal did homage to his
lord--became his _homme_ or man--and his lord was bound to take care of
him. In theory, at least, every serf was entitled to a living. In
theory, too, the Church embraced all Christendom. None save Jews were
outside it or could get outside it, except by excommunication; which was
the most terrible of penalties, because it cut a man off from all
spiritual human fellowship. The same principle of co-operation prevailed
in mediaeval industry and commerce, organised into guilds of craftsmen
and trading corporations, which fixed the prices and quality of goods,
the number of apprentices allowed, etc. The manufacturer was not a
capitalist, but simply a master workman. Government was paternal and
interfered continually with the freedom of contract and the rights of the
individual. Here was where Carlyle took issue with modern Liberalism,
which proclaims that the best government is that which governs least.
According to the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, he said, the work of a
government is not that of a father, but of an active parish constable.
The duty of a government is to govern, but this theory makes it its duty
to refrain from governing. Not liberty is good for men, but obedience
and stern discipline under wise rulers, heroes, and heaven-sent kings.
Carlyle took no romantic view of the Middle Ages. He is rather
contemptuous of Scott's mediaeval-picturesque,[35] and his Scotch
Calvinism burns fiercely against the would-be restorers of mediaeval
religious formularies and the mummeries of "the old Pope of Rome"--a
ghastly survival of a dead creed.[36] He said that Newman had the brain
of a good-sized rabbit. But in this matter of collectivism versus
individualism, Carlyle was with the Middle Ages. "For those were rugged,
stalwart ages. . . . Gurth, born thrall of Cedric, it is like, got cuffs
as often as pork-parings; but Gurth did belong to Cedric; no human
creature then went about connected with nobody; left to go his way into
Bastilles or worse, under _Laissez-faire_. . . . That Feudal
Aristocracy, I say, was no imaginary one. . . . It was a Land
Aristocracy; it managed the Governing of this English People, and had the
reaping of the Soil of England in return. . . . Soldiering, Police and
Judging, Church-Extension, nay, real Government and Guidance, all this
was actually _done_ by the Holders of Land in return for their Land. How
much of it is now done by them; done by anybody? Good Heavens!
'_Laissez faire_, Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep,' is everywhere
the passionate half-wise cry of this time." [37]
From 1850 onwards, in which year Ruskin made Carlyle's acquaintance, the
former fell under the dominion of these ideas, and began to preach a
species of Aristocratic Socialism.[38] He denounced competition and
profit-seeking in commerce; the factory system; the capitalistic
organisation of industry. His scheme of a regenerated society, however,
was by no means so democratic as that imagined by Morris in "News from
Nowhere." It was a "new feudalism" with a king at the head of it and a
rural nobility of "the great old families," whose relations to their
tenantry are not very clearly defined.[39] Ruskin took some steps
towards putting into practice his plans for a reorganisation of labour
under improved conditions. "Fors Clavigera" consisted of a series of
letters to workingmen, inviting them to join him in establishing a fund
for rescuing English country life from the tyranny and defilement of
machinery. In pursuance of this project, the St. George's Guild was
formed, about 1870, Ruskin devoting to it 7,000 pounds of his own money.
Trustees were chosen to administer the fund; a building was bought at
Walkley, in the suburbs of Sheffield, for use as a museum; and the money
subscribed was employed in promoting co-operative experiments in
agriculture, manufacturing, and education.
In 1848 the widespread misery among the English working class, both
agricultural labourers and the operatives in cities, broke out in a
startling way in the Chartist movement. Sympathy with some of the aims
of this movement found literary expression in Charles Kingsley's novels,
"Yeast" and "Alton Locke", in his widely circulated tract, "Cheap Clothes
and Nasty"; in his letters in _Politics for the People_ over the
signature "Parson Lot"; in some of his ballads like "The Three Fishers";
and in the writings of his friends, F. D. Maurice and Thomas Hughes. But
the Christian Socialism of these Broad Churchmen was by no means of the
mediaeval type. Kingsley was an exponent of "Muscular Christianity." He
hated the asceticism and sacerdotalism of the Oxford set, and challenged
the Tractarian movement with all his might.[40] Neither was this
Christian Socialism of a radical nature, like Morris'. It limited itself
to an endeavour to alleviate distress by an appeal to the good feeling of
the upper classes; and by setting on foot trade-unions, co-operative
societies, and workingmen's colleges. Kingsley himself, like Ruskin,
believed in a landed gentry; and like both Ruskin and Carlyle, he
defended Governor Eyre of Jamaica against the attacks of the radical
press.[41]
Ruskin and Morris travelled to Socialism by the pathway of art. Carlyle
had early begun his complaints against the mechanical spirit of the age,
and its too great reliance on machinery in all departments of thought and
life.[42] But Ruskin made war on machinery for different reasons. As a
lover of the beautiful, he hated its ugly processes and products. As a
student of art, he mourned over the reduction of the handicraftsman to a
slave of the machine. Factories had poisoned the English sky with their
smoke, and blackened English soil and polluted English rivers with their
refuse. The railroad had spoiled Venice and vulgarised Switzerland. He
would like to tear up all the railroads in Wales and most of those in
England, and pull down the city of New York. He could not live in
America two months--a country without castles. Modern architecture,
modern dress, modern manufactures, modern civilisation, were all utterly
hideous. Worst of all was the effect on the workman, condemned by
competitive commercialism to turn out cheap goods, condemned by division
of labour to spend his life in making the eighteenth part of a pin. Work
without art, said Ruskin, is brutalising. To take pleasure in his work,
said Morris, is the workman's best inducement to labour and his truest
reward. In the Middle Ages every artisan was an artist; the art of the
Middle Ages was popular art. Now that the designer and the
handicraftsman are separate persons, the work of the former is unreal,
and of the latter merely mechanical.
This point of view is eloquently stated in that chapter on "The Nature of
Gothic" in "The Stones of Venice," which made so deep an impression on
Morris when he was in residence at Oxford.[43] "It is verily this
degradation of the operative into a machine which, more than any other
evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into
vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they
cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against
wealth and against nobility is not forced from them either by the
pressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and
have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet
shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill-fed, but that
they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and
therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that
men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure
their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are
condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. . . .
We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised
invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is
not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men--divided
into mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and crumbs of
life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man
is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the
point of a pin, or the head of a nail. . . . And the great cry that
rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast,
is all, in very deed, for this--that we manufacture everything there
except men. . . . And all the evil to which that cry is urging our
myriads can be met only . . . by a right understanding, on the part of
all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and
making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or
beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the
workman." [44]
Morris' contributions to the literature of Socialism include, besides his
romance, "News from Nowhere," two volumes of verse, "Poems by the Way"
(1891)and "The Dream of John Ball"; together with "Socialism: Its Growth
and Outcome" (1893), an historical sketch of the subject written in
collaboration with Mr. E. Belfort Bax. Mackail also describes a
satirical interlude, entitled "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened,"
which was acted thrice at Farringden Road in the autumn of 1887--a
Socialistic farce in the form of a mediaeval miracle play--a conjunction
quite typical of the playwright's political principles and literary
preferences. Morris' ideal society, unlike Ruskin's, included no feudal
elements; there was no room in it for kings, or nobles, or great cities,
or a centralised government. It was primitive Teutonic rather than
mediaeval; resembling the communal type described in "The House of the
Wolfings." There were to be no more classes--no rich or poor. To
ordinary Socialists the reform means a fairer distribution of the joint
product of capital and labour; higher wages for the workingman, shorter
hours, better food and more of it, better clothes, better houses, more
amusements--in short, "beer and skittles" in reasonable amount. The
Socialism of Ruskin and Morris was an outcome of their aesthetic feeling.
They liked to imagine the work people of the future as an intelligent and
artistic body of handicraftsmen, living in pretty Gothic cottages among
gardens of their own, scattered all over England in small rural towns or
villages, and joyfully engaged in making sound and beautiful objects of
use, tools, furniture, woven goods, etc. To the followers of Mr. Hyndman
these motives, if not these aims, must have seemed somewhat unpractical.
And in reading "Fors Clavigera," one sometimes has a difficulty in
understanding just what sort of person Ruskin imagined the British
workman to be.
THE NEO-ROMANTICISTS.--The literature of each new generation is apt to be
partly an imitation of the last, and partly a reaction against it. The
impulse first given by Rossetti was communicated, through Morris and
Swinburne, to a group of younger poets whom Mr. Stedman distinguishes as
"Neo-Romanticists." [45] The most noteworthy among these are probably
Arthur O'Shaughnessy,[46] John Payne,[47] and Théophile Marzials;[48]
though mention (want of space forbids more) should also be made of George
Augustus Simcox, whose "Poems and Romances" (1869) are in the
Pre-Raphaelite tradition. The work of each of these has pronounced
individuality; yet, as a whole, it reminds one continually now of
Rossetti, now of Morris, and again of Swinburne; not infrequently, too,
of Keats or Leigh Hunt, but never of the older romanticism, never of
Scott nor even of Coleridge or Tennyson. The reminder comes sometimes
through a turn of phrase or the trick of the verse; but more insistently
in the choice of subject and the entire attitude of the poet towards art
and life, an attitude that may be vaguely described as "aesthetic." Even
more distinctly than in Swinburne, English romanticism in these latest
representatives is seen to be taking a French direction. They show the
influence not only of Hugo and Gautier, but of those more recent schools
of "decadents" which exhibit French romanticism in its deliquescent
stage; writers like Theodore de Banville and Charles Baudelaire; books
like Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit." Morbid states of passion,
the hectic bloom of fever, heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics;
the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot-house (_serres
chaudes_); the iridescence of standing pools; the fungoidal growths of
decay; such are some of the hackneyed metaphors which render the
impression of this neo-romantic poetry.
Marzials was born at, Brussels, of French parents. His "Gallery of
Pigeons" is inscribed to the modern Provençal poet Aubanel, and
introduced by a French sonnet. O'Shaughnessy "was half a Frenchman in
his love for, and mastery of, the French language";[49] and on his
frequent visits to Paris, made close acquaintance with Victor Hugo and
the younger school of French poets. O'Shaughnessy and Payne were
intimate friends, and dedicated their first books to each other. In
1870-72 they were members of the literary circle that assembled at the
house of Ford Madox Brown, and there they met the Rossettis, Morris,
Swinburne, and William Bell Scott. O'Shaughnessy emerges most distinctly
from the group by reason of his very original and exquisite lyrical
gift--a gift not fully recognised till Mr. Palgrave accorded him, in the
second series of his "Golden Treasury" (1897), a greater number of
selections than any Victorian poet but Tennyson: a larger space than he
gave either to Browning or Rossetti or Matthew Arnold.[50] Comparatively
little of O'Shaughnessy's work belongs to the department of
mediaeval-romantic. His "Lays of France," five in number, are founded
upon the _lais_ of Marie de France, the Norman poetess of the thirteenth
century whose little fable, "Du coq et du werpil," Chaucer expanded into
his "Nonne Prestes Tale." O'Shaughnessy's versions are not so much
paraphrases as independent poems, following Marie's stories merely in
outline.
The verse is the eight-syllabled couplet with variations and alternate
riming, the style follows the graceful, fluent simplicity of the Old
French; and in its softly articulated, bright-coloured prolixity, the
narrative frequently suggests "The Earthly Paradise" or "The Story of
Rimini." The most remarkable of these pieces is "Chaitivel," in which
the body of a bride is carried away by a dead lover, while another dead
lover comes back from his grave in Palestine and fights with the
bridegroom for possession of her soul. The song which the lady sings to
the buried man is true to that strange mediaeval materialism, the
cleaving of "soul's love" to "body's love," the tenderness intense that
pierces the "wormy circumstance" of the tomb, and refuses to let the dead
be dead, which was noted in Keats' "Isabella":
"Hath any loved you well, down there,
Summer or winter through?
Down there, have you found any fair
Laid in the grave with you?
Is death's long kiss a richer kiss
Than mine was wont to be--
Or have you gone to some far bliss
And quite forgotten me?"
Of similar inspiration, but more pictorially and externally Gothic, are
such tales as "The Building of the Dream" and "Sir Floris" in Payne's
volume, "The Masque of Shadows." The former of these, introduced by a
quotation from Jehan du Mestre, is the history of a certain squire of
Poitou, who devotes himself to necromancy and discovers a spell in an old
Greek manuscript, whereby, having shod his horse with gold and ridden
seven days into the west, he comes to the enchanted land of Dame Venus
and dwells with her a season. But the bliss is insupportable by a
mortal, and he returns to his home and dies. The poem has analogies with
"The Earthly Paradise" and the Tannhäuser legend. The ancient city of
Poitou, where the action begins, is elaborately described, with its "lazy
grace of old romance";
"Fair was the place and old
Beyond the memory of man, with roofs
Tall-peak'd and hung with woofs
Of dainty stone-work, jewell'd with the grace
Of casements, in the face
Of the white gables inlaid, in all hues
Of lovely reds and blues.
At every corner of the winding ways
A carven saint did gaze,
With mild sweet eyes, upon the quiet town,
From niche and shrine of brown;
And many an angel, graven for a charm
To save the folk from harm
Of evil sprites, stood sentinel above
High pinnacle and roof."
"Sir Floris" is an allegorical romaunt founded on a passage in "Le
Violier des Histoires Provenciaux." The dedication, to the author of
"Lohengrin," praises Wolfram von Eschenbach, the poet of "Parzival," as
"the sweetest of all bards." Sir Floris, obeying a voice heard in sleep,
followed a white dove to an enchanted garden, where he slew seven
monsters, symbolic of the seven deadly sins; from whose blood sprang up
the lily of chastity, the rose of love, the violet of humility, the
clematis of content, the marigold of largesse, the mystic marguerite, and
the holy vervain "that purgeth earth's desire." Sir Galahad then carries
him in a magic boat to the Orient city of Sarras, where the Grail is
enshrined and guarded by a company of virgin knights, Percival,
Lohengrin, Titurel, and Bors. Sir Floris sees the sacred chalice--a
single emerald--lays his nosegay upon the altar, witnesses the mystery of
the eucharist, and is kissed upon the mouth by Christ. This poet is fond
of introducing old French words "to make his English sweet upon his
tongue"; _accueillade_, _valiantise_, _faineant_, _allegresse_,
_gentilesse_, _forte et dure_, and occasionally a phrase like _dieu vous
doint felicité_. Payne's ballads are less characteristic.[51] Perhaps
the most successful of them is "The Rime of Redemption"--in "The Masque
of Shadows" volume. Sir Loibich's love has died in her sins, and he sits
by the fire in bitter repentance. He hears the voice of her spirit
outside in the moonlight, and together they ride through the night on a
black steed, first to Fairyland, then to Purgatory, and then to the gate
of Heaven. Each of these in turn is offered him, but he rejects them
all--
"With thee in hell, I choose to dwell"--
and thereby works her redemption. The wild night ride has an obvious
resemblance to "Lenore":
"The wind screams past; they ride so fast,
Like troops of souls in pain
The snowdrifts spin, but none may win
To rest upon the twain."
Very different from these, and indeed with no pretensions to the formal
peculiarities of popular minstrelsy, is O'Shaughnessy's weird ballad
"Bisclaveret," [52] suggested by the superstition concerning were-wolves:
"The splendid fearful herds that stray
By midnight"--
"The multitudinous campaign
Of hosts not yet made fast in Hell."
_Bisclaveret_ is the Breton word for _loup garou_; and the poem is headed
with a caption to this effect from the "Lais" of Marie. The wild,
mystical beauty of which the Celtic imagination holds the secret is
visible in this lyrist; but it would perhaps be going too far to
attribute his interest in the work of Marie de France to a native
sympathy with the song spirit of that other great branch of the Celtic
race, the ancient Cymry.
Payne's volume of sonnets, "Intaglios" (a title perhaps prompted by the
chiselled workmanship of Gautier's "Emaux et Camées") bears the clearest
marks of Rossetti's influence--or of the influence of Dante through
Rossetti. The inscription poem is to Dante, and the series named
"Madonna dei Sogni" is particularly full of the imagery and sentiment of
the "Purgatorio" and the "Vita Nuova." Several of the sonnets in the
collection are written for pictures, like Rossetti's. Two are on
Spenserian subjects, "Belphoebe" and "The Garden of Adonis", and one,
"Bride-Night" is suggested by Wagner's "Tristram und Isolde." Payne's
work as a translator is of importance, and includes versions of the
"Decameron," "The Thousand and One Nights," and the poems of François
Villon, all made for the Villon Society.
Jewels and flowers are set thickly enough in the pages of all this
school; but it is in Théophile Marzials' singular, yet very attractive,
verses that the luxurious colour in which romance delights, and the
decorative features of Pre-Raphaelite art run into the most _bizarre_
excesses. He wantons in dainty affectations of speech and eccentricities
of phantasy. Here we find again the orchard closes, the pleached
pleasances, and all those queer picture paradises, peopled with tall
lilied maidens, angels with peacock wings and thin gold hoops above their
heads, and court minstrels thrumming lutes, rebecks, and mandolins--
"I dreamed I was a virginal--
The gilt one of Saint Cecily's."
The book abounds in nocturnes, arabesques, masquerades, bagatelles,
rococo pastorals. The lady in "The Gallery of Pigeons" sits at her
broidery frame and works tapestries for her walls. At night she sleeps
in the northern tower where
"Above all tracery, carven flower,
And grim gurgoil is her bower-window";
and higher up a griffin clings against a cornice,
"And gnashes and grins in the green moonlight,"
and higher still, the banderolle flutters
"At the top of the thinnest pinnacle peak."
In a Pre-Raphaelite heaven the maidens sit in the blessed mother's
chamber and spin garments for the souls in Limbo, or press sweet wine for
the sacrament, or illuminate missals with quaint phantasies. Mr. Stedman
quotes a few lines which he says have the air of parody:
"They chase them each, below, above,--
Half madden'd by their minstrelsy,--
Thro' garths of crimson gladioles;
And, shimmering soft like damoisels,
The angels swarm in glimmering shoals,
And pin them to their aureoles,
And mimick back their ritournels."
This reads, indeed, hardly less like a travesty than the well-known
verses in _Punch_:
"Glad lady mine, that glitterest
In shimmer of summer athwart the lawn;
Canst tell me whether is bitterest,
The glamour of eve, or the glimmer of dawn?"
This stained-glass imagery was so easy to copy that, before long, citoles
and damoisels and aureoles and garths and glamours and all the rest of
the picturesque furniture grew to be a burden. The artistic movement had
invaded dress and upholstery, and Pre-Raphaelitism tapered down into
aestheticism, domestic art, and the wearing of sunflowers. Du Maurier
became its satirist; Bunthorn and Postlethwaite presented it to the
philistine understanding in a grotesque mixture of caricature and
quackery.
THE REACTION.--Literary epochs overlap at the edges, and contrasting
literary modes coexist. There was some romantic poetry written in Pope's
time; and in the very heat and fury of romantic predominance, Landor kept
a cool chamber apart, where incense was burned to the ancient gods.[53]
But it is the master current which gives tinge and direction to lesser
confluents; and romanticism may be said to have had everything its own
way down to the middle of the century. Then reaction set in and the
stream of romantic tendency ceased to spread itself over the whole
literary territory, but flowed on in the narrower and deeper channels of
Pre-Raphaelitism and its allied movements. This reaction expressed
itself in different ways, of which it will be sufficient here to mention
three: realistic fiction, classical criticism, and the Queen Anne revival.
The leading literary form of the past fifty years has been the novel of
real life. The failure of "Les Burgraves" in 1843 not more surely
signalised the end of French romanticism, than the appearance of "Vanity
Fair" in 1848 announced that in England, too, the reign of romance was
over. Classicism had given way before romanticism, and now romanticism
in turn was yielding to realism. Realism sets itself against that desire
of escape from actual conditions into an ideal world, which is a note of
the romantic spirit in general; and consequently it refuses to find the
past any more interesting than the present, and has no use for the Middle
Ages. The temperature, too, had cooled; not quite down to the Augustan
grade, yet to a point considerably below the fever heat registered by the
emotional thermometer of the late Georgian era. Byron's contemporaries
were shocked by his wickedness and dazzled by his genius. They
remonstrated admiringly with him; young ladies wept over his poetry and
prayed for the poet's conversion. But young university men of
Thackeray's time discovered that Byron was a _poseur_; Thackeray himself
describes him as "a big, sulky dandy." "The Sorrows of Werther," which
made people cry in the eighteenth century, made Thackeray laugh; and he
summed it up in a doggerel ballad:
"Charlotte was a married woman
And a moral man was Werther,
And for nothing in creation
Would do anything to hurt her."
* * * * *
"Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted woman,
Went on cutting bread and butter."
Mr. Howells in Venice sneers at Byron's theatrical habit of riding
horseback on the Lido in "conspicuous solitude," as recorded in "Julian
and Maddalo." He notices the local traditions about Byron--a window from
which one of his mistresses was said to have thrown herself into the
canal, etc.--and confesses that these matters interest him very little.
As to the Walter Scott kind of romance, we know what Mr. Howells thinks
of it; and have read "Rebecca and Rowena," Thackeray's travesty of
"Ivanhoe." Thackeray took no print from the romantic generation; he
passed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift.
His masters were the English humourists of the eighteenth century. He
planned a literary history of that century, a design which was carried
out on other lines by his son-in-law, Leslie Stephen. If he wrote
historical novels, their period was that of the Georges, and not of
Richard the Lion Heart. It will not do, of course, to lay too much
stress on Thackeray, whose profession was satire and whose temper purely
anti-romantic. But if we turn to the leaders of the modern schools of
fiction, we shall find that some of them, like George Eliot and Anthony
Trollope, are even more closely realistic than Thackeray--who, says Mr.
Howells, is a caricaturist, not a true realist--and of others such as
Dickens and Meredith, we shall find that, in whatever way they deviate
from realism as strictly understood, it is not in the direction of
romance.
In Matthew Arnold's critical essays we meet with a restatement of
classical principles and an application of them to the literature of the
last generation. There was something premature, he thinks, about the
burst of creative activity in the first quarter of the nineteenth
century. Byron was empty of matter, Shelley incoherent, Wordsworth
wanting in completeness and variety. He finds much to commend in the
influence of a literary tribunal like the French Academy, which embodies
that ideal of authority so dear to the classical heart. Such an
institution acts as a salutary check on the lawlessness, eccentricity,
self-will, and fantasticality which are the besetting intellectual sins
of Englishmen. It sets the standard and gives the law. "Work done after
men have reached this platform is _classical_; and that is the only work
which, in the long run, can stand." For want of some such organ of
educated opinion, to take care of the qualities of order, balance,
measure, propriety, correctness, English men of genius like Ruskin and
Carlyle, in their national impatience of prescription and routine, run on
into all manner of violence, freak, and extravagance.
Again, in the preface of the 1853 edition of his poems, Arnold asserts
the superiority of the Greek theory of poetry to the modern. "They
regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them the action
predominated over the expression of it; with us the expression
predominates over the action. . . . We have poems which seem to exist
merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of
producing any total impression."
"Faust" itself, judged as a whole, is defective. Failing a sure guide,
in the confusion of the present times, the wisest course for the young
writer is to fix his attention upon the best models. But Shakspere is
not so safe a model as the ancients. He has not their purity of method,
and his gift of expression sometimes leads him astray. "Mr. Hallam, than
whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had
the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how
extremely and faultily difficult Shakspere's language often is." Half a
century earlier it would have needed courage to question Hallam's remark;
but the citation shows how thoroughly Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb had
shifted the centre of orthodoxy in matters of Shaksperian criticism.
_Now_ the presumption was against any one who ventured a doubt of
Shakspere's impeccability. The romantic victory was complete. "But, I
say," pursues the essayist, "that in the sincere endeavour to learn and
practise . . . what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself
to find the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the
ancients." All this has a familiar look to one at all read in
eighteenth-century criticism; but in 1853 it sounds very much like heresy.
As an instance of the inferiority of romantic to classical method in
narrative poetry, Arnold refers to Keats' "Isabella." [54] "This one
short poem contains, perhaps, a greater number of happy single
expressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies of
Sophocles. But the action, the story? The action in itself is an
excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely
constructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is
absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of
Keats, turn to the same story in the 'Decameron'; he will then feel how
pregnant and interesting the same action has become in the hands of a
great artist who, above all things, delineates his object; who
subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express."
A sentence or two from Arnold's essay on Heinrich Heine, and we may leave
this part of our subject. "Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too
much importance to the romantic school of Germany--Tieck, Novalis, Jean
Paul Richter. . . . The mystic and romantic school of Germany lost
itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to
ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder
sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Görres, or
Brentano, or Arnim; Heine, the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet
also much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not
conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel,
along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself, the
power of modern ideas."
And, finally, the oscillation of the pendulum has brought us back again
for a moment to the age of gayety, and to that very Queen Anne spirit
against which the serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt.
There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of what was admirable
in the verse of Pope and the prose of Swift, but we discover a quaint
attractiveness in the artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, and
speech. Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, Reynolds'
portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the sedan chair, the spinet, the
hoop-skirt, the _talon rouge_--all these have receded so far into the
perspective as to acquire picturesqueness. To Scott's generation they
seemed eminently modern and prosaic, while buff jerkins and coats of mail
were poetically remote. But so the whirligig of time brings in its
revenges, and the old-fashioned, as distinguished from the antique,
begins to have a romanticness of its own. It is now some quarter century
since people took to building Queen Anne cottages, and gentlemen at
costume parties to treading minuets in small clothes and perukes, with
ladies in high-cushioned hair and farthingales. Girl babies in large
numbers were baptised Dorothy and Belinda. Book illustrators like Kate
Greenaway, Edwin Abbey, and Hugh Thomson carried the mode into art. The
date of the Queen Anne revival in literature and the beginnings of the
_bric-à-brac_ school of verse are marked with sufficient precision by the
publication of Austin Dobson's "Vignettes in Rhyme" (1873), "Proverbs in
Porcelain" (1877), and the other delightful volumes of the same kind that
have followed. Mr. Dobson has also published, in prose, lives of Steele,
Fielding, Hogarth, and Goldsmith; "Eighteenth-Century Vignettes," and the
like. But his particular ancestor among the Queen Anne wits was Matthew
Prior, of whose metrical tales, epigrams, and _vers de société_ he has
made a little book of selections, and whose gallantry, lightness, and
tone of persiflage, just dashed with sentiment, he has reproduced with
admirable spirit in his own original work.
It was upon the question of Pope that romantics and classics first joined
issue in the time of Warton, and that the critical battle was fought in
the time of Bowles and Byron; the question of his real place in
literature, and of his title to the name of poet. Mr. Dobson has a word
to say for Pope, and with this our enquiries may fittingly end:
"Suppose you say your Worst of POPE, declare
His Jewels Paste, his Nature a Parterre,
His Art but Artifice--I ask once more
Where have you seen such artifice before?
Where have you seen a Parterre better grac'd,
Or gems that glitter like his Gems of Paste?
Where can you show, among your Names of Note,
So much to copy and so much to quote?
And where, in Fine, in all our English Verse,
A Style more trenchant and a Sense more terse?"
"So I, that love the old Augustan Days
Of formal courtesies and formal Phrase;
That like along the finish'd Line to feel
The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel;
That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear;
That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe,
Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by trope,
I fling my Cap for Polish--and for POPE!" [55]