The Fine Arts are seized at present with a strange movement; they are
all going backwards. One would fancy they were retreating, or that they
had lost something on the road, and were turning back to pick it up. We
scarcely imagine it was worth while going out of their way to embrace
the Middle Ages; it shows but little taste on their part. They might as
well dress in the costume of that period, and wear Gothic night-caps,
and mediæval high-lows, and talk, and write, and flirt in the language
of that period, as to attempt to reconcile its hard angular painting
(all their pictures look to us like coloured problems—as if Euclid had
been their drawing-master) to the spirit of our own times. Imagine
portraits of the heroes of the present age in the stiff kitchen-poker
style which Messrs. Pugin, Dyce, and such like retrograders, would wish
to revive! How would the immortal Simpson look? How would the popular
Jim Crow appear to us, when carried two hundred years back? Why! we
should not know them again.
[Illustration]
Perhaps this going backwards is for the purpose of enabling the artists
to jump farther onwards, as the French proverb says, "_Reculer pour
mieux sauter_;" or is it to make the Fine Arts so much younger, by
knocking some three hundred years off their age? We always thought that
art was of no particular period, but for all time. Antiquated ladies may
gain by the above process of youth-making, and we can imagine in our own
mind's ear (if the mind has an eye it must have an ear) a very old man
saying, "Ah! I wish I could go back to the Middle Age!" but really the
Fine Arts should be above such weakness. This love of going backward may
account, perhaps, for so few artists getting forward in their
profession. Let them turn their backs upon the past, and the future may
smile brightly again upon them. The English school of painting will not
stand long, if it is built with old materials; some four hundred years
old.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]