‘The English Renaissance of Art’ was delivered as a lecture for the first
time in the Chickering Hall, New York, on January 9, 1882. A portion of
it was reported in the _New York Tribune_ on the following day and in
other American papers subsequently. Since then this portion has been
reprinted, more or less accurately, from time to time, in unauthorised
editions.
There are in existence no less than four copies of the lecture, the
earliest of which is entirely in the author’s handwriting. The others
are type-written and contain many corrections and additions made by the
author in manuscript. These have all been collated and the text here
given contains, as nearly as possible, the lecture in the original form
as delivered by the author during his tour in the United States.
AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme æsthetic faculty of
Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the
most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special
manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the honour to deliver
before you, I will not try to give you any abstract definition of
beauty—any such universal formula for it as was sought for by the
philosophy of the eighteenth century—still less to communicate to you
that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a
particular picture or poem affects us with a unique and special joy; but
rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great
English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as
far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is
possible.
I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new
birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the
fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of
life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form,
its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new
intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic
movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty.
It has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought, and
again as a mere revival of mediæval feeling. Rather I would say that to
these forms of the human spirit it has added whatever of artistic value
the intricacy and complexity and experience of modern life can give:
taking from the one its clearness of vision and its sustained calm, from
the other its variety of expression and the mystery of its vision. For
what, as Goethe said, is the study of the ancients but a return to the
real world (for that is what they did); and what, said Mazzini, is
mediævalism but individuality?
It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of
purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the
intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit,
that springs the art of the nineteenth century in England, as from the
marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy sprang the beautiful boy Euphorion.
Such expressions as ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ are, it is true, often apt
to become the mere catchwords of schools. We must always remember that
art has only one sentence to utter: there is for her only one high law,
the law of form or harmony—yet between the classical and romantic spirit
we may say that there lies this difference at least, that the one deals
with the type and the other with the exception. In the work produced
under the modern romantic spirit it is no longer the permanent, the
essential truths of life that are treated of; it is the momentary
situation of the one, the momentary aspect of the other that art seeks to
render. In sculpture, which is the type of one spirit, the subject
predominates over the situation; in painting, which is the type of the
other, the situation predominates over the subject.
There are two spirits, then: the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of
romance may be taken as forming the essential elements of our conscious
intellectual tradition, of our permanent standard of taste. As regards
their origin, in art as in politics there is but one origin for all
revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a nobler form of life, for a
freer method and opportunity of expression. Yet, I think that in
estimating the sensuous and intellectual spirit which presides over our
English Renaissance, any attempt to isolate it in any way from in the
progress and movement and social life of the age that has produced it
would be to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its true
meaning. And in disengaging from the pursuits and passions of this
crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do with
art and the love of art, we must take into account many great events of
history which seem to be the most opposed to any such artistic feeling.
Alien then from any wild, political passion, or from the harsh voice of a
rude people in revolt, as our English Renaissance must seem, in its
passionate cult of pure beauty, its flawless devotion to form, its
exclusive and sensitive nature, it is to the French Revolution that we
must look for the most primary factor of its production, the first
condition of its birth: that great Revolution of which we are all the
children though the voices of some of us be often loud against it; that
Revolution to which at a time when even such spirits as Coleridge and
Wordsworth lost heart in England, noble messages of love blown across
seas came from your young Republic.
It is true that our modern sense of the continuity of history has shown
us that neither in politics nor in nature are there revolutions ever but
evolutions only, and that the prelude to that wild storm which swept over
France in 1789 and made every king in Europe tremble for his throne, was
first sounded in literature years before the Bastille fell and the Palace
was taken. The way for those red scenes by Seine and Loire was paved by
that critical spirit of Germany and England which accustomed men to bring
all things to the test of reason or utility or both, while the discontent
of the people in the streets of Paris was the echo that followed the life
of Emile and of Werther. For Rousseau, by silent lake and mountain, had
called humanity back to the golden age that still lies before us and
preached a return to nature, in passionate eloquence whose music still
lingers about our keen northern air. And Goethe and Scott had brought
romance back again from the prison she had lain in for so many
centuries—and what is romance but humanity?
Yet in the womb of the Revolution itself, and in the storm and terror of
that wild time, tendencies were hidden away that the artistic Renaissance
bent to her own service when the time came—a scientific tendency first,
which has borne in our own day a brood of somewhat noisy Titans, yet in
the sphere of poetry has not been unproductive of good. I do not mean
merely in its adding to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its
strength, or that more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was
thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned
expression in the face of science, and that when science would put on a
form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the
transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and
deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and
Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the
artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of
limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the
characteristics of the real artist.
The great and golden rule of art as well as of life, wrote William Blake,
is that the more distinct, sharp and defined the boundary line, the more
perfect is the work of art; and the less keen and sharp the greater is
the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling. ‘Great
inventors in all ages knew this—Michael Angelo and Albert Durer are known
by this and by this alone’; and another time he wrote, with all the
simple directness of nineteenth-century prose, ‘to generalise is to be an
idiot.’
And this love of definite conception, this clearness of vision, this
artistic sense of limit, is the characteristic of all great work and
poetry; of the vision of Homer as of the vision of Dante, of Keats and
William Morris as of Chaucer and Theocritus. It lies at the base of all
noble, realistic and romantic work as opposed to the colourless and empty
abstractions of our own eighteenth-century poets and of the classical
dramatists of France, or of the vague spiritualities of the German
sentimental school: opposed, too, to that spirit of transcendentalism
which also was root and flower itself of the great Revolution, underlying
the impassioned contemplation of Wordsworth and giving wings and fire to
the eagle-like flight of Shelley, and which in the sphere of philosophy,
though displaced by the materialism and positiveness of our day,
bequeathed two great schools of thought, the school of Newman to Oxford,
the school of Emerson to America. Yet is this spirit of
transcendentalism alien to the spirit of art. For the artist can accept
no sphere of life in exchange for life itself. For him there is no
escape from the bondage of the earth: there is not even the desire of
escape.
He is indeed the only true realist: symbolism, which is the essence of
the transcendental spirit, is alien to him. The metaphysical mind of
Asia will create for itself the monstrous, many-breasted idol of Ephesus,
but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual
life which conforms most clearly to the perfect facts of physical life.
‘The storm of revolution,’ as Andre Chenier said, ‘blows out the torch of
poetry.’ It is not for some little time that the real influence of such
a wild cataclysm of things is felt: at first the desire for equality
seems to have produced personalities of more giant and Titan stature than
the world had ever known before. Men heard the lyre of Byron and the
legions of Napoleon; it was a period of measureless passions and of
measureless despair; ambition, discontent, were the chords of life and
art; the age was an age of revolt: a phase through which the human spirit
must pass, but one in which it cannot rest. For the aim of culture is
not rebellion but peace, the valley perilous where ignorant armies clash
by night being no dwelling-place meet for her to whom the gods have
assigned the fresh uplands and sunny heights and clear, untroubled air.
And soon that desire for perfection, which lay at the base of the
Revolution, found in a young English poet its most complete and flawless
realisation.
Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer:
Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian
painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in
Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of
England.
Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and
clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of
beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats
was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite
school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak.
Blake had indeed, before him, claimed for art a lofty, spiritual mission,
and had striven to raise design to the ideal level of poetry and music,
but the remoteness of his vision both in painting and poetry and the
incompleteness of his technical powers had been adverse to any real
influence. It is in Keats that the artistic spirit of this century first
found its absolute incarnation.
And these pre-Raphaelites, what were they? If you ask nine-tenths of the
British public what is the meaning of the word æsthetics, they will tell
you it is the French for affectation or the German for a dado; and if you
inquire about the pre-Raphaelites you will hear something about an
eccentric lot of young men to whom a sort of divine crookedness and holy
awkwardness in drawing were the chief objects of art. To know nothing
about their great men is one of the necessary elements of English
education.
As regards the pre-Raphaelites the story is simple enough. In the year
1847 a number of young men in London, poets and painters, passionate
admirers of Keats all of them, formed the habit of meeting together for
discussions on art, the result of such discussions being that the English
Philistine public was roused suddenly from its ordinary apathy by hearing
that there was in its midst a body of young men who had determined to
revolutionise English painting and poetry. They called themselves the
pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
In England, then as now, it was enough for a man to try and produce any
serious beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen; and besides
this, the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—among whom the names of Dante
Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais will be familiar to you—had on their
side three things that the English public never forgives: youth, power
and enthusiasm.
Satire, always as sterile as it in shameful and as impotent as it is
insolent, paid them that usual homage which mediocrity pays to
genius—doing, here as always, infinite harm to the public, blinding them
to what is beautiful, teaching them that irreverence which is the source
of all vileness and narrowness of life, but harming the artist not at
all, rather confirming him in the perfect rightness of his work and
ambition. For to disagree with three-fourths of the British public on
all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest
consolations in all moments of spiritual doubt.
As regards the ideas these young men brought to the regeneration of
English art, we may see at the base of their artistic creations a desire
for a deeper spiritual value to be given to art as well as a more
decorative value.
Pre-Raphaelites they called themselves; not that they imitated the early
Italian masters at all, but that in their work, as opposed to the facile
abstractions of Raphael, they found a stronger realism of imagination, a
more careful realism of technique, a vision at once more fervent and more
vivid, an individuality more intimate and more intense.
For it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the æsthetic
demands of its age: there must be also about it, if it is to affect us
with any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct individuality, an
individuality remote from that of ordinary men, and coming near to us
only by virtue of a certain newness and wonder in the work, and through
channels whose very strangeness makes us more ready to give them welcome.
_La personnalité_, said one of the greatest of modern French critics,
_voilà ce qui nous sauvera_.
But above all things was it a return to Nature—that formula which seems
to suit so many and such diverse movements: they would draw and paint
nothing but what they saw, they would try and imagine things as they
really happened. Later there came to the old house by Blackfriars
Bridge, where this young brotherhood used to meet and work, two young men
from Oxford, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris—the latter
substituting for the simpler realism of the early days a more exquisite
spirit of choice, a more faultless devotion to beauty, a more intense
seeking for perfection: a master of all exquisite design and of all
spiritual vision. It is of the school of Florence rather than of that of
Venice that he is kinsman, feeling that the close imitation of Nature is
a disturbing element in imaginative art. The visible aspect of modern
life disturbs him not; rather is it for him to render eternal all that is
beautiful in Greek, Italian, and Celtic legend. To Morris we owe poetry
whose perfect precision and clearness of word and vision has not been
excelled in the literature of our country, and by the revival of the
decorative arts he has given to our individualised romantic movement the
social idea and the social factor also.
But the revolution accomplished by this clique of young men, with
Ruskin’s faultless and fervent eloquence to help them, was not one of
ideas merely but of execution, not one of conceptions but of creations.
For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have
been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but
of new technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of
marble quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little
low-lying hills of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity
for that intensified vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple
humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard
porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain. The
splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of the new
oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has been due to
the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased
consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim. The
critic may try and trace the deferred resolutions of Beethoven {124} to
some sense of the incompleteness of the modern intellectual spirit, but
the artist would have answered, as one of them did afterwards, ‘Let them
pick out the fifths and leave us at peace.’
And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like
the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on
elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you
will find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to
perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age
and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages.
And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction
against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous
poetry and painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti
and Burne-Jones by a far greater splendour of colour, a far more
intricate wonder of design than English imaginative art has shown before.
In Rossetti’s poetry and the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a
perfect precision and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless,
a seeking for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining
consciousness of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value
which is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the
romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic note
was struck by Théophile Gautier’s advice to the young poet to read his
dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a poet’s reading.
While, then, the material of workmanship is being thus elaborated and
discovered to have in itself incommunicable and eternal qualities of its
own, qualities entirely satisfying to the poetic sense and not needing
for their æsthetic effect any lofty intellectual vision, any deep
criticism of life or even any passionate human emotion at all, the spirit
and the method of the poet’s working—what people call his
inspiration—have not escaped the controlling influence of the artistic
spirit. Not that the imagination has lost its wings, but we have
accustomed ourselves to count their innumerable pulsations, to estimate
their limitless strength, to govern their ungovernable freedom.
To the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production, and
the places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness in any
artistic work, had a peculiar fascination. We find it in the mysticism
of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle. We find it later in the
Italian Renaissance agitating the minds of such men as Leonardo da Vinci.
Schiller tried to adjust the balance between form and feeling, and Goethe
to estimate the position of self-consciousness in art. Wordsworth’s
definition of poetry as ‘emotion remembered in tranquillity’ may be taken
as an analysis of one of the stages through which all imaginative work
has to pass; and in Keats’s longing to be ‘able to compose without this
fever’ (I quote from one of his letters), his desire to substitute for
poetic ardour ‘a more thoughtful and quiet power,’ we may discern the
most important moment in the evolution of that artistic life. The
question made an early and strange appearance in your literature too; and
I need not remind you how deeply the young poets of the French romantic
movement were excited and stirred by Edgar Allan Poe’s analysis of the
workings of his own imagination in the creating of that supreme
imaginative work which we know by the name of _The Raven_.
In the last century, when the intellectual and didactic element had
intruded to such an extent into the kingdom which belongs to poetry, it
was against the claims of the understanding that an artist like Goethe
had to protest. ‘The more incomprehensible to the understanding a poem
is the better for it,’ he said once, asserting the complete supremacy of
the imagination in poetry as of reason in prose. But in this century it
is rather against the claims of the emotional faculties, the claims of
mere sentiment and feeling, that the artist must react. The simple
utterance of joy is not poetry any more than a mere personal cry of pain,
and the real experiences of the artist are always those which do not find
their direct expression but are gathered up and absorbed into some
artistic form which seems, from such real experiences, to be the farthest
removed and the most alien.
‘The heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains poetry,’
says Charles Baudelaire. This too was the lesson that Théophile Gautier,
most subtle of all modern critics, most fascinating of all modern poets,
was never tired of teaching—‘Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a
sunset.’ The absolute distinction of the artist is not his capacity to
feel nature so much as his power of rendering it. The entire
subordination of all intellectual and emotional faculties to the vital
and informing poetic principle is the surest sign of the strength of our
Renaissance.
We have seen the artistic spirit working, first in the delightful and
technical sphere of language, the sphere of expression as opposed to
subject, then controlling the imagination of the poet in dealing with his
subject. And now I would point out to you its operation in the choice of
subject. The recognition of a separate realm for the artist, a
consciousness of the absolute difference between the world of art and the
world of real fact, between classic grace and absolute reality, forms not
merely the essential element of any æsthetic charm but is the
characteristic of all great imaginative work and of all great eras of
artistic creation—of the age of Phidias as of the age of Michael Angelo,
of the age of Sophocles as of the age of Goethe.
Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the
day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which
we desire. For to most of us the real life is the life we do not lead,
and thus, remaining more true to the essence of its own perfection, more
jealous of its own unattainable beauty, is less likely to forget form in
feeling or to accept the passion of creation as any substitute for the
beauty of the created thing.
The artist is indeed the child of his own age, but the present will not
be to him a whit more real than the past; for, like the philosopher of
the Platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of all time and of all
existence. For him no form is obsolete, no subject out of date; rather,
whatever of life and passion the world has known, in desert of Judæa or
in Arcadian valley, by the rivers of Troy or the rivers of Damascus, in
the crowded and hideous streets of a modern city or by the pleasant ways
of Camelot—all lies before him like an open scroll, all is still instinct
with beautiful life. He will take of it what is salutary for his own
spirit, no more; choosing some facts and rejecting others with the calm
artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of beauty.
There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all things, but
all things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the secure and sacred
house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or
disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing that is debatable, nothing
about which men argue. He can steep himself, if he wishes, in the
discussion of all the social problems of his day, poor-laws and local
taxation, free trade and bimetallic currency, and the like; but when he
writes on these subjects it will be, as Milton nobly expressed it, with
his left hand, in prose and not in verse, in a pamphlet and not in a
lyric. This exquisite spirit of artistic choice was not in Byron:
Wordsworth had it not. In the work of both these men there is much that
we have to reject, much that does not give us that sense of calm and
perfect repose which should be the effect of all fine, imaginative work.
But in Keats it seemed to have been incarnate, and in his lovely _Ode on
a Grecian Urn_ it found its most secure and faultless expression; in the
pageant of the _Earthly Paradise_ and the knights and ladies of
Burne-Jones it is the one dominant note.
It is to no avail that the Muse of Poetry be called, even by such a
clarion note as Whitman’s, to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to
placard REMOVED and TO LET on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus.
Calliope’s call is not yet closed, nor are the epics of Asia ended; the
Sphinx is not yet silent, nor the fountain of Castaly dry. For art is
very life itself and knows nothing of death; she is absolute truth and
takes no care of fact; she sees (as I remember Mr. Swinburne insisting on
at dinner) that Achilles is even now more actual and real than
Wellington, not merely more noble and interesting as a type and figure
but more positive and real.
Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations
are no principle at all. For to the poet all times and places are one;
the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is
inept, no past or present preferable. The steam whistle will not
affright him nor the flutes of Arcadia weary him: for him there is but
one time, the artistic moment; but one law, the law of form; but one
land, the land of Beauty—a land removed indeed from the real world and
yet more sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet with that calm which
dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, the calm which comes not from
the rejection but from the absorption of passion, the calm which despair
and sorrow cannot disturb but intensify only. And so it comes that he
who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best,
because he has stripped life of what is accidental and transitory,
stripped it of that ‘mist of familiarity which makes life obscure to us.’
Those strange, wild-eyed sibyls fixed eternally in the whirlwind of
ecstasy, those mighty-limbed and Titan prophets, labouring with the
secret of the earth and the burden of mystery, that guard and glorify the
chapel of Pope Sixtus at Rome—do they not tell us more of the real spirit
of the Italian Renaissance, of the dream of Savonarola and of the sin of
Borgia, than all the brawling boors and cooking women of Dutch art can
teach us of the real spirit of the history of Holland?
And so in our own day, also, the two most vital tendencies of the
nineteenth century—the democratic and pantheistic tendency and the
tendency to value life for the sake of art—found their most complete and
perfect utterance in the poetry of Shelley and Keats who, to the blind
eyes of their own time, seemed to be as wanderers in the wilderness,
preachers of vague or unreal things. And I remember once, in talking to
Mr. Burne-Jones about modern science, his saying to me, ‘the more
materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint: their wings
are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul.’
But these are the intellectual speculations that underlie art. Where in
the arts themselves are we to find that breadth of human sympathy which
is the condition of all noble work; where in the arts are we to look for
what Mazzini would call the social ideas as opposed to the merely
personal ideas? By virtue of what claim do I demand for the artist the
love and loyalty of the men and women of the world? I think I can answer
that.
Whatever spiritual message an artist brings to his aid is a matter for
his own soul. He may bring judgment like Michael Angelo or peace like
Angelico; he may come with mourning like the great Athenian or with mirth
like the singer of Sicily; nor is it for us to do aught but accept his
teaching, knowing that we cannot smite the bitter lips of Leopardi into
laughter or burden with our discontent Goethe’s serene calm. But for
warrant of its truth such message must have the flame of eloquence in the
lips that speak it, splendour and glory in the vision that is its
witness, being justified by one thing only—the flawless beauty and
perfect form of its expression: this indeed being the social idea, being
the meaning of joy in art.
Not laughter where none should laugh, nor the calling of peace where
there is no peace; not in painting the subject ever, but the pictorial
charm only, the wonder of its colour, the satisfying beauty of its
design.
You have most of you seen, probably, that great masterpiece of Rubens
which hangs in the gallery of Brussels, that swift and wonderful pageant
of horse and rider arrested in its most exquisite and fiery moment when
the winds are caught in crimson banner and the air lit by the gleam of
armour and the flash of plume. Well, that is joy in art, though that
golden hillside be trodden by the wounded feet of Christ and it is for
the death of the Son of Man that that gorgeous cavalcade is passing.
But this restless modern intellectual spirit of ours is not receptive
enough of the sensuous element of art; and so the real influence of the
arts is hidden from many of us: only a few, escaping from the tyranny of
the soul, have learned the secret of those high hours when thought is
not.
And this indeed is the reason of the influence which Eastern art is
having on us in Europe, and of the fascination of all Japanese work.
While the Western world has been laying on art the intolerable burden of
its own intellectual doubts and the spiritual tragedy of its own sorrows,
the East has always kept true to art’s primary and pictorial conditions.
In judging of a beautiful statue the æsthetic faculty is absolutely and
completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are
dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are
powerless to help us. In its primary aspect a painting has no more
spiritual message or meaning than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass
or a blue tile from the wall of Damascus: it is a beautifully coloured
surface, nothing more. The channels by which all noble imaginative work
in painting should touch, and do touch the soul, are not those of the
truths of life, nor metaphysical truths. But that pictorial charm which
does not depend on any literary reminiscence for its effect on the one
hand, nor is yet a mere result of communicable technical skill on the
other, comes of a certain inventive and creative handling of colour.
Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of Giorgione or
Titian, it is entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the
subject, a kind of form and choice in workmanship which is itself
entirely satisfying, and is (as the Greeks would say) an end in itself.
And so in poetry too, the real poetical quality, the joy of poetry, comes
never from the subject but from an inventive handling of rhythmical
language, from what Keats called the ‘sensuous life of verse.’ The
element of song in the singing accompanied by the profound joy of motion,
is so sweet that, while the incomplete lives of ordinary men bring no
healing power with them, the thorn-crown of the poet will blossom into
roses for our pleasure; for our delight his despair will gild its own
thorns, and his pain, like Adonis, be beautiful in its agony; and when
the poet’s heart breaks it will break in music.
And health in art—what is that? It has nothing to do with a sane
criticism of life. There is more health in Baudelaire than there is in
[Kingsley]. Health is the artist’s recognition of the limitations of the
form in which he works. It is the honour and the homage which he gives
to the material he uses—whether it be language with its glories, or
marble or pigment with their glories—knowing that the true brotherhood of
the arts consists not in their borrowing one another’s method, but in
their producing, each of them by its own individual means, each of them
by keeping its objective limits, the same unique artistic delight. The
delight is like that given to us by music—for music is the art in which
form and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be separated
from the method of its expression, the art which most completely realises
the artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are
constantly aspiring.
And criticism—what place is that to have in our culture? Well, I think
that the first duty of an art critic is to hold his tongue at all times,
and upon all subjects: _C’est un grand avantage de n’avoir rien fait_,
_mais il ne faut pas en abuser_.
It is only through the mystery of creation that one can gain any
knowledge of the quality of created things. You have listened to
_Patience_ for a hundred nights and you have heard me for one only. It
will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing something about
the subject of it, but you must not judge of æstheticism by the satire of
Mr. Gilbert. As little should you judge of the strength and splendour of
sun or sea by the dust that dances in the beam, or the bubble that breaks
on the wave, as take your critic for any sane test of art. For the
artists, like the Greek gods, are revealed only to one another, as
Emerson says somewhere; their real value and place time only can show.
In this respect also omnipotence is with the ages. The true critic
addresses not the artist ever but the public only. His work lies with
them. Art can never have any other claim but her own perfection: it is
for the critic to create for art the social aim, too, by teaching the
people the spirit in which they are to approach all artistic work, the
love they are to give it, the lesson they are to draw from it.
All these appeals to art to set herself more in harmony with modern
progress and civilisation, and to make herself the mouthpiece for the
voice of humanity, these appeals to art ‘to have a mission,’ are appeals
which should be made to the public. The art which has fulfilled the
conditions of beauty has fulfilled all conditions: it is for the critic
to teach the people how to find in the calm of such art the highest
expression of their own most stormy passions. ‘I have no reverence,’
said Keats, ‘for the public, nor for anything in existence but the
Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty.’
Such then is the principle which I believe to be guiding and underlying
our English Renaissance, a Renaissance many-sided and wonderful,
productive of strong ambitions and lofty personalities, yet for all its
splendid achievements in poetry and in the decorative arts and in
painting, for all the increased comeliness and grace of dress, and the
furniture of houses and the like, not complete. For there can be no
great sculpture without a beautiful national life, and the commercial
spirit of England has killed that; no great drama without a noble
national life, and the commercial spirit of England has killed that too.
It is not that the flawless serenity of marble cannot bear the burden of
the modern intellectual spirit, or become instinct with the fire of
romantic passion—the tomb of Duke Lorenzo and the chapel of the Medici
show us that—but it is that, as Théophile Gautier used to say, the
visible world is dead, _le monde visible a disparu_.
Nor is it again that the novel has killed the play, as some critics would
persuade us—the romantic movement of France shows us that. The work of
Balzac and of Hugo grew up side by side together; nay, more, were
complementary to each other, though neither of them saw it. While all
other forms of poetry may flourish in an ignoble age, the splendid
individualism of the lyrist, fed by its own passion, and lit by its own
power, may pass as a pillar of fire as well across the desert as across
places that are pleasant. It is none the less glorious though no man
follow it—nay, by the greater sublimity of its loneliness it may be
quickened into loftier utterance and intensified into clearer song. From
the mean squalor of the sordid life that limits him, the dreamer or the
idyllist may soar on poesy’s viewless wings, may traverse with fawn-skin
and spear the moonlit heights of Cithæron though Faun and Bassarid dance
there no more. Like Keats he may wander through the old-world forests of
Latmos, or stand like Morris on the galley’s deck with the Viking when
king and galley have long since passed away. But the drama is the
meeting-place of art and life; it deals, as Mazzini said, not merely with
man, but with social man, with man in his relation to God and to
Humanity. It is the product of a period of great national united energy;
it is impossible without a noble public, and belongs to such ages as the
age of Elizabeth in London and of Pericles at Athens; it is part of such
lofty moral and spiritual ardour as came to Greek after the defeat of the
Persian fleet, and to Englishman after the wreck of the Armada of Spain.
Shelley felt how incomplete our movement was in this respect, and has
shown in one great tragedy by what terror and pity he would have purified
our age; but in spite of _The Cenci_ the drama is one of the artistic
forms through which the genius of the England of this century seeks in
vain to find outlet and expression. He has had no worthy imitators.
It is rather, perhaps, to you that we should turn to complete and perfect
this great movement of ours, for there is something Hellenic in your air
and world, something that has a quicker breath of the joy and power of
Elizabeth’s England about it than our ancient civilisation can give us.
For you, at least, are young; ‘no hungry generations tread you down,’ and
the past does not weary you with the intolerable burden of its memories
nor mock you with the ruins of a beauty, the secret of whose creation you
have lost. That very absence of tradition, which Mr. Ruskin thought
would rob your rivers of their laughter and your flowers of their light,
may be rather the source of your freedom and your strength.
To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the
movements of animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees
in the woods and grass by the roadside, has been defined by one of your
poets as a flawless triumph of art. It is a triumph which you above all
nations may be destined to achieve. For the voices that have their
dwelling in sea and mountain are not the chosen music of Liberty only;
other messages are there in the wonder of wind-swept height and the
majesty of silent deep—messages that, if you will but listen to them, may
yield you the splendour of some new imagination, the marvel of some new
beauty.
‘I foresee,’ said Goethe, ‘the dawn of a new literature which all people
may claim as their own, for all have contributed to its foundation.’ If,
then, this is so, and if the materials for a civilisation as great as
that of Europe lie all around you, what profit, you will ask me, will all
this study of our poets and painters be to you? I might answer that the
intellect can be engaged without direct didactic object on an artistic
and historical problem; that the demand of the intellect is merely to
feel itself alive; that nothing which has ever interested men or women
can cease to be a fit subject for culture.
I might remind you of what all Europe owes to the sorrow of a single
Florentine in exile at Verona, or to the love of Petrarch by that little
well in Southern France; nay, more, how even in this dull, materialistic
age the simple expression of an old man’s simple life, passed away from
the clamour of great cities amid the lakes and misty hills of Cumberland,
has opened out for England treasures of new joy compared with which the
treasures of her luxury are as barren as the sea which she has made her
highway, and as bitter as the fire which she would make her slave.
But I think it will bring you something besides this, something that is
the knowledge of real strength in art: not that you should imitate the
works of these men; but their artistic spirit, their artistic attitude, I
think you should absorb that.
For in nations, as in individuals, if the passion for creation be not
accompanied by the critical, the æsthetic faculty also, it will be sure
to waste its strength aimlessly, failing perhaps in the artistic spirit
of choice, or in the mistaking of feeling for form, or in the following
of false ideals.
For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural
affinity with certain sensuous forms of art—and to discern the qualities
of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its powers of
expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before us. It is not an
increased moral sense, an increased moral supervision that your
literature needs. Indeed, one should never talk of a moral or an immoral
poem—poems are either well written or badly written, that is all. And,
indeed, any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good
or evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision,
often a note of discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for
all good work aims at a purely artistic effect. ‘We must be careful,’
said Goethe, ‘not to be always looking for culture merely in what is
obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as soon
as we are aware of it.’
But, as in your cities so in your literature, it is a permanent canon and
standard of taste, an increased sensibility to beauty (if I may say so)
that is lacking. All noble work is not national merely, but universal.
The political independence of a nation must not be confused with any
intellectual isolation. The spiritual freedom, indeed, your own generous
lives and liberal air will give you. From us you will learn the
classical restraint of form.
For all great art is delicate art, roughness having very little to do
with strength, and harshness very little to do with power. ‘The artist,’
as Mr. Swinburne says, ‘must be perfectly articulate.’
This limitation is for the artist perfect freedom: it is at once the
origin and the sign of his strength. So that all the supreme masters of
style—Dante, Sophocles, Shakespeare—are the supreme masters of spiritual
and intellectual vision also.
Love art for its own sake, and then all things that you need will be
added to you.
This devotion to beauty and to the creation of beautiful things is the
test of all great civilised nations. Philosophy may teach us to bear
with equanimity the misfortunes of our neighbours, and science resolve
the moral sense into a secretion of sugar, but art is what makes the life
of each citizen a sacrament and not a speculation, art is what makes the
life of the whole race immortal.
For beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall
away like sand, and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of
autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession
for all eternity.
Wars and the clash of armies and the meeting of men in battle by trampled
field or leaguered city, and the rising of nations there must always be.
But I think that art, by creating a common intellectual atmosphere
between all countries, might—if it could not overshadow the world with
the silver wings of peace—at least make men such brothers that they would
not go out to slay one another for the whim or folly of some king or
minister, as they do in Europe. Fraternity would come no more with the
hands of Cain, nor Liberty betray freedom with the kiss of Anarchy; for
national hatreds are always strongest where culture is lowest.
‘How could I?’ said Goethe, when reproached for not writing like Korner
against the French. ‘How could I, to whom barbarism and culture alone
are of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of
the earth, a nation to which I owe a great part of my own cultivation?’
Mighty empires, too, there must always be as long as personal ambition
and the spirit of the age are one, but art at least is the only empire
which a nation’s enemies cannot take from her by conquest, but which is
taken by submission only. The sovereignty of Greece and Rome is not yet
passed away, though the gods of the one be dead and the eagles of the
other tired.
And we in our Renaissance are seeking to create a sovereignty that will
still be England’s when her yellow leopards have grown weary of wars and
the rose of her shield is crimsoned no more with the blood of battle; and
you, too, absorbing into the generous heart of a great people this
pervading artistic spirit, will create for yourselves such riches as you
have never yet created, though your land be a network of railways and
your cities the harbours for the galleys of the world.
I know, indeed, that the divine natural prescience of beauty which is the
inalienable inheritance of Greek and Italian is not our inheritance. For
such an informing and presiding spirit of art to shield us from all harsh
and alien influences, we of the Northern races must turn rather to that
strained self-consciousness of our age which, as it is the key-note of
all our romantic art, must be the source of all or nearly all our
culture. I mean that intellectual curiosity of the nineteenth century
which is always looking for the secret of the life that still lingers
round old and bygone forms of culture. It takes from each what is
serviceable for the modern spirit—from Athens its wonder without its
worship, from Venice its splendour without its sin. The same spirit is
always analysing its own strength and its own weakness, counting what it
owes to East and to West, to the olive-trees of Colonus and to the
palm-trees of Lebanon, to Gethsemane and to the garden of Proserpine.
And yet the truths of art cannot be taught: they are revealed only,
revealed to natures which have made themselves receptive of all beautiful
impressions by the study and worship of all beautiful things. And hence
the enormous importance given to the decorative arts in our English
Renaissance; hence all that marvel of design that comes from the hand of
Edward Burne-Jones, all that weaving of tapestry and staining of glass,
that beautiful working in clay and metal and wood which we owe to William
Morris, the greatest handicraftsman we have had in England since the
fourteenth century.
So, in years to come there will be nothing in any man’s house which has
not given delight to its maker and does not give delight to its user.
The children, like the children of Plato’s perfect city, will grow up ‘in
a simple atmosphere of all fair things’—I quote from the passage in the
_Republic_—‘a simple atmosphere of all fair things, where beauty, which
is the spirit of art, will come on eye and ear like a fresh breath of
wind that brings health from a clear upland, and insensibly and gradually
draw the child’s soul into harmony with all knowledge and all wisdom, so
that he will love what is beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and
ugly (for they always go together) long before he knows the reason why;
and then when reason comes will kiss her on the cheek as a friend.’
That is what Plato thought decorative art could do for a nation, feeling
that the secret not of philosophy merely but of all gracious existence
might be externally hidden from any one whose youth had been passed in
uncomely and vulgar surroundings, and that the beauty of form and colour
even, as he says, in the meanest vessels of the house, will find its way
into the inmost places of the soul and lead the boy naturally to look for
that divine harmony of spiritual life of which art was to him the
material symbol and warrant.
Prelude indeed to all knowledge and all wisdom will this love of
beautiful things be for us; yet there are times when wisdom becomes a
burden and knowledge is one with sorrow: for as every body has its shadow
so every soul has its scepticism. In such dread moments of discord and
despair where should we, of this torn and troubled age, turn our steps if
not to that secure house of beauty where there is always a little
forgetfulness, always a great joy; to that _città divina_, as the old
Italian heresy called it, the divine city where one can stand, though
only for a brief moment, apart from the division and terror of the world
and the choice of the world too?
This is that _consolation des arts_ which is the key-note of Gautier’s
poetry, the secret of modern life foreshadowed—as indeed what in our
century is not?—by Goethe. You remember what he said to the German
people: ‘Only have the courage,’ he said, ‘to give yourselves up to your
impressions, allow yourselves to be delighted, moved, elevated, nay
instructed, inspired for something great.’ The courage to give
yourselves up to your impressions: yes, that is the secret of the
artistic life—for while art has been defined as an escape from the
tyranny of the senses, it is an escape rather from the tyranny of the
soul. But only to those who worship her above all things does she ever
reveal her true treasure: else will she be as powerless to aid you as the
mutilated Venus of the Louvre was before the romantic but sceptical
nature of Heine.
And indeed I think it would be impossible to overrate the gain that might
follow if we had about us only what gave pleasure to the maker of it and
gives pleasure to its user, that being the simplest of all rules about
decoration. One thing, at least, I think it would do for us: there is no
surer test of a great country than how near it stands to its own poets;
but between the singers of our day and the workers to whom they would
sing there seems to be an ever-widening and dividing chasm, a chasm which
slander and mockery cannot traverse, but which is spanned by the luminous
wings of love.
And of such love I think that the abiding presence in our houses of noble
imaginative work would be the surest seed and preparation. I do not mean
merely as regards that direct literary expression of art by which, from
the little red-and-black cruse of oil or wine, a Greek boy could learn of
the lionlike splendour of Achilles, of the strength of Hector and the
beauty of Paris and the wonder of Helen, long before he stood and
listened in crowded market-place or in theatre of marble; or by which an
Italian child of the fifteenth century could know of the chastity of
Lucrece and the death of Camilla from carven doorway and from painted
chest. For the good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is
what we become through it. Its real influence will be in giving the mind
that enthusiasm which is the secret of Hellenism, accustoming it to
demand from art all that art can do in rearranging the facts of common
life for us—whether it be by giving the most spiritual interpretation of
one’s own moments of highest passion or the most sensuous expression of
those thoughts that are the farthest removed from sense; in accustoming
it to love the things of the imagination for their own sake, and to
desire beauty and grace in all things. For he who does not love art in
all things does not love it at all, and he who does not need art in all
things does not need it at all.
I will not dwell here on what I am sure has delighted you all in our
great Gothic cathedrals. I mean how the artist of that time,
handicraftsman himself in stone or glass, found the best motives for his
art, always ready for his hand and always beautiful, in the daily work of
the artificers he saw around him—as in those lovely windows of
Chartres—where the dyer dips in the vat and the potter sits at the wheel,
and the weaver stands at the loom: real manufacturers these, workers with
the hand, and entirely delightful to look at, not like the smug and vapid
shopman of our time, who knows nothing of the web or vase he sells,
except that he is charging you double its value and thinking you a fool
for buying it. Nor can I but just note, in passing, the immense
influence the decorative work of Greece and Italy had on its artists, the
one teaching the sculptor that restraining influence of design which is
the glory of the Parthenon, the other keeping painting always true to its
primary, pictorial condition of noble colour which is the secret of the
school of Venice; for I wish rather, in this lecture at least, to dwell
on the effect that decorative art has on human life—on its social not its
purely artistic effect.
There are two kinds of men in the world, two great creeds, two different
forms of natures: men to whom the end of life is action, and men to whom
the end of life is thought. As regards the latter, who seek for
experience itself and not for the fruits of experience, who must burn
always with one of the passions of this fiery-coloured world, who find
life interesting not for its secret but for its situations, for its
pulsations and not for its purpose; the passion for beauty engendered by
the decorative arts will be to them more satisfying than any political or
religious enthusiasm, any enthusiasm for humanity, any ecstasy or sorrow
for love. For art comes to one professing primarily to give nothing but
the highest quality to one’s moments, and for those moments’ sake. So
far for those to whom the end of life is thought. As regards the others,
who hold that life is inseparable from labour, to them should this
movement be specially dear: for, if our days are barren without industry,
industry without art is barbarism.
Hewers of wood and drawers of water there must be always indeed among us.
Our modern machinery has not much lightened the labour of man after all:
but at least let the pitcher that stands by the well be beautiful and
surely the labour of the day will be lightened: let the wood be made
receptive of some lovely form, some gracious design, and there will come
no longer discontent but joy to the toiler. For what is decoration but
the worker’s expression of joy in his work? And not joy merely—that is a
great thing yet not enough—but that opportunity of expressing his own
individuality which, as it is the essence of all life, is the source of
all art. ‘I have tried,’ I remember William Morris saying to me once, ‘I
have tried to make each of my workers an artist, and when I say an artist
I mean a man.’ For the worker then, handicraftsman of whatever kind he
is, art is no longer to be a purple robe woven by a slave and thrown over
the whitened body of a leprous king to hide and to adorn the sin of his
luxury, but rather the beautiful and noble expression of a life that has
in it something beautiful and noble.
And so you must seek out your workman and give him, as far as possible,
the right surroundings, for remember that the real test and virtue of a
workman is not his earnestness nor his industry even, but his power of
design merely; and that ‘design is not the offspring of idle fancy: it is
the studied result of accumulative observation and delightful habit.’
All the teaching in the world is of no avail if you do not surround your
workman with happy influences and with beautiful things. It is
impossible for him to have right ideas about colour unless he sees the
lovely colours of Nature unspoiled; impossible for him to supply
beautiful incident and action unless he sees beautiful incident and
action in the world about him.
For to cultivate sympathy you must be among living things and thinking
about them, and to cultivate admiration you must be among beautiful
things and looking at them. ‘The steel of Toledo and the silk of Genoa
did but give strength to oppression and lustre to pride,’ as Mr. Ruskin
says; let it be for you to create an art that is made by the hands of the
people for the joy of the people, to please the hearts of the people,
too; an art that will be your expression of your delight in life. There
is nothing ‘in common life too mean, in common things too trivial to be
ennobled by your touch’; nothing in life that art cannot sanctify.
You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the
æsthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be
the food of some æsthetic young men. Well, let me tell you that the
reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert
may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all. It is because
these two lovely flowers are in England the two most perfect models of
design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art—the gaudy leonine
beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the
artist the most entire and perfect joy. And so with you: let there be no
flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around your
pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not lend its form
to design, no curving spray of wild rose or brier that does not live for
ever in carven arch or window or marble, no bird in your air that is not
giving the iridescent wonder of its colour, the exquisite curves of its
wings in flight, to make more precious the preciousness of simple
adornment.
We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life.
Well, the secret of life is in art.