Chapter X: Preface (3)

227. The first picture I named, Rossetti's "Annunciation," was, I believe, among the earliest that drew some public attention to the so-called "Pre-Raphaelite" school. The one opposite to it,--Millais' "Blind Girl," is among those chiefly characteristic of that school in its determined manner. And the third, though small and unimportant, is no less characteristic, in its essential qualities, of the mind of the greatest master whom that school has yet produced.

I believe most readers will start at the application of the term "master," to any English painter. For the hope of the nineteenth century is more and more distinctly every day, to teach all men how to live without mastership either in art or morals (primarily, of course, substituting for the words of Christ, "Ye say well, for so I am,"--the probable emendation, "Ye say ill, for so I am not"); and to limit the idea of magistracy altogether, no less than the functions of the magistrate, to the suppression of disturbance in the manufacturing districts.

Nor would I myself use the word "Master" in any but the most qualified sense, of any "modern painter"; scarcely even of Turner, and not at all, except for convenience and as a matter of courtesy, of any workman of the Pre-Raphaelite school, as yet. In such courtesy, only, let the masterless reader permit it me.

228. I must endeavor first to give, as well as I can by description, some general notion of the subjects and treatment of the three pictures.

Rossetti's "Annunciation" differs from every previous conception of the scene known to me, in representing the angel as waking the Virgin from sleep to give her his message. The Messenger himself also differs from angels as they are commonly represented, in not depending, for recognition of his supernatural character, on the insertion of bird's wings at his shoulders. If we are to know him for an angel at all, it must be by his face, which is that simply of youthful, but grave, manhood. He is neither transparent in body, luminous in presence, nor auriferous in apparel;--wears a plain, long, white robe,--casts a natural and undiminished shadow,--and, although there are flames beneath his feet, which upbear him, so that he does not touch the earth, these are unseen by the Virgin.

She herself is an English, not a Jewish girl, of about sixteen or seventeen, of such pale and thoughtful beauty as Rossetti could best imagine for her; concerning which effort, and its degree of success, we will inquire farther presently.

She has risen half up, not _started_ up, in being awakened; and is not looking at the angel, but only thinking, it seems, with eyes cast down, as if supposing herself in a strange dream. The morning light fills the room, and shows at the foot of her little pallet-bed, her embroidery work, left off the evening before,--an upright lily.

Upright, and very accurately upright, as also the edges of the piece of cloth in its frame,--as also the gliding form of the angel,--as also, in severe foreshortening, that of the Virgin herself. It has been studied, so far as it has been studied at all, from a very thin model; and the disturbed coverlid is thrown into confused angular folds, which admit no suggestion whatever of ordinary girlish grace. So that, to any spectator little inclined towards the praise of barren "uprightnesse," and accustomed on the contrary to expect radiance in archangels, and grace in Madonnas, the first effect of the design must be extremely displeasing, and the first is perhaps, with most art-amateurs of modern days, likely to be the last.

229. The background of the second picture (Millais' "Blind Girl"), is an open English common, skirted by the tidy houses of a well-to-do village in the cockney rural districts. I have no doubt the scene is a real one within some twenty miles from London, and painted mostly on the spot. The houses are entirely uninteresting, but decent, trim, as human dwellings should be, and on the whole inoffensive--not "cottages," mind you, in any sense, but respectable brick-walled and slated constructions, old-fashioned in the sense of "old" at, suppose, Bromley or Sevenoaks, and with a pretty little church belonging to them, its window traceries freshly whitewashed by order of the careful warden.

The common is a fairly spacious bit of ragged pasture, with a couple of donkeys feeding on it, and a cow or two, and at the side of the public road passing over it, the blind girl has sat down to rest awhile. She is a simple beggar, not a poetical or vicious one;--being peripatetic with musical instrument, she will, I suppose, come under the general term of tramp; a girl of eighteen or twenty, extremely plain-featured, but healthy, and just now resting, as any one of us would rest, not because she is much tired, but because the sun has but this moment come out after a shower, and the smell of the grass is pleasant.

The shower has been heavy, and is so still in the distance, where an intensely bright double rainbow is relieved against the departing thunder-cloud. The freshly wet grass is all radiant through and through with the new sunshine; full noon at its purest, the very donkeys bathed in the rain-dew, and prismatic with it under their rough breasts as they graze; the weeds at the girl's side as bright as a Byzantine enamel, and inlaid with blue veronica; her upturned face all aglow with the light that seeks its way through her wet eyelashes (wet only with the rain). Very quiet she is,--so quiet that a radiant butterfly has settled on her shoulder, and basks there in the warm sun. Against her knee, on which her poor instrument of musical beggary rests (harmonium), leans another child, half her age--her guide;--indifferent, this one, either to sun or rain, only a little tired of waiting. No more than a half profile of her face is seen; and that is quite expressionless, and not the least pretty.

230. Both of these pictures are oil-paintings. The third, Mr. Burne Jones's "Bridal," is a small water-color drawing, scarcely more than a sketch; but full and deep in such color as it admits. Any careful readers of my recent lectures at Oxford know that I entirely ignore the difference of material between oil and water as diluents of color, when I am examining any grave art question: nor shall I hereafter, throughout this paper, take notice of it. Nor do I think it needful to ask the pardon of any of the three artists for confining the reader's attention at present to comparatively minor and elementary examples of their works. If I can succeed in explaining the principles involved in them, their application by the reader will be easily extended to the enjoyment of better examples.

This drawing of Mr. Jones's, however, is far less representative of his scale of power than either of the two pieces already described, which have both cost their artists much care and time; while this little water-color has been perhaps done in the course of a summer afternoon. It is only about seven inches by nine: the figures of the average size of Angelico's on any altar predella; and the heads, of those on an average Corinthian or Syracusan coin. The bride and bridegroom sit on a slightly raised throne at the side of the picture, the bride nearest us; her head seen in profile, a little bowed. Before them, the three bridesmaids and their groomsmen dance in circle, holding each other's hands, bare-footed, and dressed in long dark blue robes. Their figures are scarcely detached from the dark background, which is a willful mingling of shadow and light, as the artist chose to put them, representing, as far as I remember, nothing in particular. The deep tone of the picture leaves several of the faces in obscurity, and none are drawn with much care, not even the bride's; but with enough to show that her features are at least as beautiful as those of an ordinary Greek goddess, while the depth of the distant background throws out her pale head in an almost lunar, yet unexaggerated, light; and the white and blue flowers of her narrow coronal, though _merely_ white and blue, shine, one knows not how, like gems. Her bridegroom stoops forward a little to look at her, so that we see his front face, and can see also that he loves her.

231. Such being the respective effort and design of the three pictures, although I put by, for the moment, any question of their mechanical skill or manner, it must yet, I believe, be felt by the reader that, as works of young men, they contained, and even nailed to the Academy gates, a kind of Lutheran challenge to the then accepted teachers in all European schools of Art: perhaps a little too shrill and petulant in the tone of it, but yet curiously resolute and steady in its triple Fraternity, as of William of Burglen with his Melchthal and Stauffacher, in the Grutli meadow, not wholly to be scorned by even the knightliest powers of the Past.

We have indeed, since these pictures were first exhibited, become accustomed to many forms both of pleasing and revolting innovation: but consider, in those early times, how the pious persons who had always been accustomed to see their Madonnas dressed in scrupulously folded and exquisitely falling robes of blue, with edges embroidered in gold,--to find them also, sitting under arcades of exquisitest architecture by Bernini,--and reverently to observe them receive the angel's message with their hands folded on their breasts in the most graceful positions, and the missals they had been previously studying laid open on their knees, (see my own outline from Angelico of the "Ancilla Domini," the first plate of the fifth volume of _Modern Painters_);--consider, I repeat, the shock to the feelings of all these delicately minded persons, on being asked to conceive a Virgin waking from her sleep on a pallet bed, in a plain room, startled by sudden words and ghostly presence which she does not comprehend, and casting in her mind what manner of Salutation this should be.

232. Again, consider, with respect to the second picture, how the learned possessors of works of established reputation by the ancient masters, classically catalogued as "landscapes with figures"; and who held it for eternal, artistic law that such pictures should either consist of a rock, with a Spanish chestnut growing out of the side of it, and three banditti in helmets and big feathers on the top, or else of a Corinthian temple, built beside an arm of the sea, with the Queen of Sheba beneath, preparing for embarkation to visit Solomon,--the whole properly toned down with amber varnish;--imagine the first consternation, and final wrath, of these _cognoscenti_, at being asked to contemplate, deliberately, and to the last rent of her ragged gown, and for principal object in a finished picture, a vagrant who ought at once to have been sent to the workhouse; and some really green grass and blue flowers, as they actually may any day be seen on an English common-side.

And finally, let us imagine, if imagination fail us not, the far more wide and weighty indignation of the public, accustomed always to see its paintings of marriages elaborated in Christian propriety and splendor; with a bishop officiating, assisted by a dean and an archdeacon; the modesty of the bride expressed by a veil of the most expensive Valenciennes, and the robes of the bridesmaids designed by the perfectest of Parisian artists, and looped up with stuffed robins or other such tender rarities;--think with what sense of hitherto unheard-of impropriety, the British public must have received a picture of a marriage, in which the bride was only crowned with flowers,--at which the bridesmaids danced barefoot,--and in which nothing was known, or even conjecturable, respecting the bridegroom, but his love!

233. Such being the manifestly opponent and agonistic temper of these three pictures (and admitting, which I will crave the reader to do for the nonce, their real worth and power to be considerable), it surely becomes a matter of no little interest to see what spirit it is that they have in common, which, recognized as revolutionary in the minds of the young artists themselves, caused them, with more or less of firmness, to constitute themselves into a society, partly monastic, partly predicatory, called "Pre-Raphaelite": and also recognized as such, with indignation, by the public, caused the youthfully didactic society to be regarded with various degrees of contempt, passing into anger (as of offended personal dignity), and embittered farther, among certain classes of persons, even into a kind of instinctive abhorrence.

234. I believe the reader will discover, on reflection, that there is really only one quite common and sympathetic impulse shown in these three works, otherwise so distinct in aim and execution. And this fraternal link he will, if careful in reflection, discover to be an effort to represent, so far as in these youths lay either the choice or the power, things as they are, or were, or may be, instead of, according to the practice of their instructors and the wishes of their public, things as they are _not_, never were, and never can be: this effort being founded deeply on a conviction that it is at first better, and finally more pleasing, for human minds to contemplate things as they are, than as they are not.

Thus, Mr. Rossetti, in this and subsequent works of the kind, thought it better for himself and his public to make some effort towards a real notion of what actually did happen in the carpenter's cottage at Nazareth, giving rise to the subsequent traditions delivered in the Gospels, than merely to produce a variety in the pattern of Virgin, pattern of Virgin's gown, and pattern of Virgin's house, which had been set by the jewelers of the fifteenth century.

Similarly, Mr. Millais, in this and other works of the kind, thought it desirable rather to paint such grass and foliage as he saw in Kent, Surrey, and other solidly accessible English counties, than to imitate even the most Elysian fields enameled by Claude, or the gloomiest branches of Hades forest rent by Salvator: and yet more, to manifest his own strong personal feeling that the humanity, no less than the herbage, near us and around, was that which it was the painter's duty first to portray; and that, if Wordsworth were indeed right in feeling that the meanest flower that blows can give,--much more, for any kindly heart it should be true that the meanest tramp that walks can give--"thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

235. And if at first--or even always to careless sight--the third of these pictures seem opposite to the two others in the very point of choice, between what is and what is not; insomuch that while _they_ with all their strength avouch realities, _this_ with simplest confession dwells upon a dream,--yet in this very separation from them it sums their power and seals their brotherhood; reaching beyond them to the more perfect truth of things, not only that once were,--not only that now are,--but which are the same yesterday, to-day, and forever;--the love by whose ordaining the world itself, and all that dwell therein, live, and move, and have their being; by which the Morning stars rejoice in their courses--in which the virgins of deathless Israel rejoice in the dance--and in whose constancy the Giver of light to stars, and love to men, Himself is glad in the creatures of His hand,--day by new day proclaiming to His Church of all the ages, "As the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy Lord rejoice over thee."

Such, the reader will find, if he cares to learn it, is indeed the purport and effort of these three designs--so far as, by youthful hands and in a time of trouble and rebuke, such effort could be brought to good end. Of their visible weaknesses, with the best justice I may,--of their veritable merits with the best insight I may, and of the farther history of the school which these masters founded, I hope to be permitted to speak more under the branches that do not "remember their green felicity"; adding a corollary or two respecting the other pieces of art above named[43] as having taken part in the tenor of my country hours of idleness.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] _Nineteenth Century_, NOV.-DEC. 1878.--ED.

[43] May I in the meantime recommend any reader interested in these matters to obtain for himself such photographic representation as may be easily acquirable of the tomb of Ilaria? It is in the north transept of the Cathedral of Lucca; and is certainly the most beautiful work existing by the master who wrought it,--Jacopo della Quercia.

THE THREE COLORS OF PRE-RAPHAELITISM.

II.

236. The feeling which, in the foregoing notes on the pictures that entertained my vacation, I endeavored to illustrate as dominant over early Pre-Raphaelite work, is very far from being new in the world. Demonstrations in support of fact against fancy have been periodical motives of earthquake and heartquake, under the two rigidly incumbent burdens of drifted tradition, which, throughout the history of humanity, during phases of languid thought, cover the vaults of searching fire that must at last try every man's work, what it is.

But the movement under present question derived unusual force, and in some directions a morbid and mischievous force, from the vulgarly called[44] "scientific" modes of investigation which had destroyed in the minds of the public it appealed to, all possibility, or even conception, of reverence for anything, past, present, or future, invisible to the eyes of a mob, and inexpressible by popular vociferation. It was indeed, and had long been, too true, as the wisest of us felt, that the mystery of the domain between things that are universally visible, and are only occasionally so to some persons,--no less than the myths or words in which those who had entered that kingdom related what they had seen, had become, the one uninviting, and the other useless, to men dealing with the immediate business of our day; so that the historian of the last of European kings might most reasonably mourn that "the Berlin Galleries, which are made up, like other galleries, of goat-footed Pan, Europa's Bull, Romulus's She-wolf, and the Correggiosity of Correggio, contain, for instance, no portrait of Friedrich the Great; no likeness at all, or next to none at all, of the noble series of human realities, or of any part of them, who have sprung not from the idle brains of dreaming dilettanti, but from the Head of God Almighty, to make this poor authentic earth a little memorable for us, and to do a little work that may be eternal there."

* * *

237. But we must surely, in fairness to modernism, remember that although no portraits of great Frederick, of a trustworthy character, may be found at Berlin, portraits of the English squire, be he great or small, may usually be seen at his country house. And Edinburgh, as I lately saw,--if she boasts of no Venetian perfectness of art in the portraiture of her Bruce or James, her Douglas or Knox, at Holyrood, has at least a charming portrait of a Scottish beauty in the Attic Institution, whose majesty, together with that of the more extensive glass roofs of the railway station, and the tall chimney of the gasworks, inflates the Caledonian mind, contemplative around the spot where the last of its minstrels appears to be awaiting eternal extinction under his special extinguisher;--and pronouncing of all its works and ways that they are very good.

And are there not also sufficiently resembling portraits of all the mouthpieces of constituents in British Parliament--as their vocal powers advance them into that worshipful society--presented to the people, with due felicitation on the new pipe it has got to its organ, in the _Illustrated_ or other graphic _News_? Surely, therefore, it cannot be portraiture of merely human greatness of mind that we are anyway short of; but another manner of greatness altogether? And may we not regret that as great Frederick is dead, so also great Pan is dead, and only the goat-footed Pan, or rather the goat's feet of him without the Pan, left for portraiture?

* * *

238. I chanced to walk, to-day, 9th of November, through the gallery of the Liverpool Museum, in which the good zeal and sense of Mr. Gatty have already, in beautiful order, arranged the Egyptian antiquities, but have not yet prevailed far enough to group, in like manner, the scattered Byzantine and Italian ivories above. Out of which collection, every way valuable, two primarily important pieces, it seems to me, may be recommended for accurate juxtaposition, bringing then for us into briefest compass an extensive story of the Arts of Mankind.

The first is an image of St. John the Baptist, carved in the eleventh century; being then conceived by the image-maker as decently covered by his raiment of camel's hair; bearing a gentle aspect, because the herald of a gentle Lord; and pointing to his quite legibly written message concerning the Lamb which is that gentle Lord's heraldic symbol.

The other carving is also of St. John the Baptist, Italian work of the sixteenth century. He is represented thereby as bearing no aspect, for he is without his head;--wearing no camel's hair, for he is without his raiment;--and indicative of no message, for he has none to bring.

239. Now if these two carvings are ever put in due relative position, they will constitute a precise and permanent art-lecture to the museum-visitants of Liverpool-burg; exhibiting to them instantly, and in sum, the conditions of the change in the aims of art which, beginning in the thirteenth century under Niccolo Pisano, consummated itself three hundred years afterwards in Raphael and his scholars. Niccolo, first among Italians, thought mainly in carving the Crucifixion, not how heavy Christ's head was when He bowed it;--but how heavy His body was when people came to take it down. And the apotheosis of flesh, or, in modern scientific terms, the molecular development of flesh, went steadily on, until at last, as we see in the instance before us, it became really of small consequence to the artists of the Renaissance Incarnadine, whether a man had his head on or not, so only that his legs were handsome: and the decapitation, whether of St. John or St. Cecilia; the massacre of any quantity of Innocents; the flaying, whether of Marsyas or St. Bartholomew, and the deaths, it might be of Laocoon by his vipers, it might be of Adonis by his pig, or it might be of Christ by His people, became, one and all, simply subjects for analysis of muscular mortification; and the vast body of artists accurately, therefore, little more than a chirurgically useless sect of medical students.

Of course there were many reactionary tendencies among the men who had been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the Caesars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the spirituality of the converse of Moses and Elias with Christ concerning His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem, by placing them, above the Mount of Transfiguration, in the attitudes of two humming-birds on the top of a honeysuckle.

240. But the best of these ornamental arrangements were insufficient to sustain the vivacity, while they conclusively undermined the sincerity, of the Christian faith, and "the real consequences of the acceptance of this kind (Roman Bath and Sarcophagus kind)" of religious idealism were instant and manifold.[45]

* * *

So far as it was received and trusted in by thoughtful persons, it only served to chill all the conceptions of sacred history which they might otherwise have obtained. Whatever they could have fancied for themselves about the wild, strange, infinitely stern, infinitely tender, infinitely varied veracities of the life of Christ, was blotted out by the vapid fineries of Raphael: the rough Galilean pilot, the orderly custom receiver, and all the questioning wonder and fire of uneducated apostleship, were obscured under an antique mask of philosophical faces and long robes. The feeble, subtle, suffering, ceaseless energy and humiliation of St. Paul were confused with an idea of a meditative Hercules leaning on a sweeping sword; and the mighty presences of Moses and Elias were softened by introductions of delicate grace, adopted from dancing nymphs and rising Auroras.

Now no vigorously minded religious person could possibly receive pleasure or help from such art as this; and the necessary result was the instant rejection of it by the healthy religion of the world. Raphael ministered, with applause, to the impious luxury of the Vatican, but was trampled underfoot at once by every believing and advancing Christian of his own and subsequent times; and thenceforward pure Christianity and "high art" took separate roads, and fared on, as best they might, independently of each other.

But although Calvin, and Knox, and Luther, and their flocks, with all the hardest-headed and truest-hearted faithful left in Christendom, thus spurned away the spurious art, and all art with it (not without harm to themselves, such as a man must needs sustain in cutting off a decayed limb), certain conditions of weaker Christianity suffered the false system to retain influence over them; and to this day the clear and tasteless poison of the art of Raphael infects with sleep of infidelity the hearts of millions of Christians. It is the first cause of all that pre-eminent _dullness_ which characterizes what Protestants call sacred art; a dullness not merely baneful in making religion distasteful to the young, but in sickening, as we have seen, all vital belief of religion in the old. A dim sense of impossibility attaches itself always to the graceful emptiness of the representation; we feel instinctively that the painted Christ and painted apostle are not beings that ever did or could exist; and this fatal sense of fair fabulousness, and well-composed impossibility, steals gradually from the picture into the history, until we find ourselves reading St. Mark or St. Luke with the same admiring, but uninterested, incredulity, with which we contemplate Raphael.

241. Without claiming,--nay, so far as my knowledge can reach, utterly disclaiming--any personal influence over, or any originality of suggestion to, the men who founded our presently realistic schools, I may yet be permitted to point out the sympathy which I had as an outstanding spectator with their effort; and the more or less active fellowship with it, which, unrecognized, I had held from the beginning. The passage I have just quoted (with many others enforcing similar truths) is in the third volume of _Modern Painters_; but if the reader can refer to the close of the preface to the second edition[46] of the first, he will find this very principle of realism asserted for the groundwork of all I had to teach in that volume. The lesson so far pleased the public of that day, that ever since, they have refused to listen to any corollaries or conclusions from it, assuring me, year by year, continually, that the older I grew, the less I knew, and the worse I wrote. Nevertheless, that first volume of _Modern Painters_ did by no means contain all that even then I knew; and in the third, nominally treating of "Many Things," will be found the full expression of what I knew best; namely, that all "things," many or few, which we ought to paint, must be first distinguished boldly from the nothings which we ought not; and that a faithful realist, before he could question whether his art was representing anything truly, had first to ask whether it meant seriously to represent anything at all!

242. And such definition has in these days become more needful than ever before, in this solid, or spectral--which-ever the reader pleases to consider it--world of ours. For some of us, who have no perception but of solidity, are agreed to consider all that is not solid, or weighably liquid, nothing. And others of us, who have also perception of the spectral, are sometimes too much inclined to call what is no more than solid, or weighably liquid, nothing. But the general reader may be at least assured that it is not at all possible for the student to enter into useful discussion concerning the qualities of art which takes on itself to represent things as they are, unless he include in its subjects the spectral, no less than the substantial, reality; and understand what difference must be between the powers of veritable representation, for the men whose models are of ponderable flesh, as for instance, the "Sculptor's model," lately under debate in Liverpool,--and the men whose models pause perhaps only for an instant--painted on the immeasurable air,--forms which they themselves can but discern darkly, and remember uncertainly, saying: "A vision passed before me, but I could not discern the form thereof."

243. And the most curious, yet the most common, deficiency in the modern contemplative mind, is its inability to comprehend that these phenomena of true imagination are yet no less real, and often more vivid than phenomena of matter. We continually hear artists blamed or praised for having painted this or that (either of material or spectral kind), without the slightest implied inquiry whether they _saw_ this, or that. Whereas the quite primal difference between the first and second order of artists, is that the first is indeed painting what he has seen; and the second only what he would like to see! But as the one that can paint what he would like, has therefore the power, if he chooses, of painting more or less what also his public likes, he has a chance of being received with sympathetic applause, on all hands, while the first, it may be, meets only reproach for not having painted something more agreeable. Thus Mr. Millais, going out at Tunbridge or Sevenoaks, sees a blind vagrant led by an ugly child; and paints that highly objectionable group, as they appeared to him. But your pliably minded painter gives you a beautiful young lady guiding a sightless Belisarius (see the gift by one of our most tasteful modistes to our National Gallery), and the gratified public never troubles itself to ask whether these ethereal mendicants were ever indeed apparent in this world, or any other. Much more, if, in deeper vistas of his imagination, some presently graphic Zechariah paint--(let us say) four carpenters, the public will most likely declare that he ought to have painted persons in a higher class of life, without ever inquiring whether the Lord had shown him four carpenters or not. And the worst of the business is that the public impatience, in such sort, is not wholly unreasonable. For truly, a painter who has eyes can, for the most part, see what he "likes" with them; and is, by divine law, answerable for his liking. And, even at this late hour of the day, it is still conceivable that such of them as would _verily_ prefer to see, suppose, instead of a tramp with a harmonium, Orpheus with his lute, or Arion on his dolphin, pleased Proteus rising beside him from the sea,--might, standing on the "pleasant lea" of Margate or Brighton, have sight of those personages.

Orpheus with his lute,--Jubal with his harp and horn,--Harmonia, bride of the warrior seed-sower,--Musica herself, lady of all timely thought and sweetly ordered things,--Cantatrice and Incantatrice to all but the museless adder; these the Amphion of Fesole saw, as he shaped the marble of his tower; these, Memmi of Siena, fair-figured on the shadows of his vault;--but for us, here is the only manifestation granted to our best practical painter--a vagrant with harmonium--and yonder blackbirds and iridescent jackasses, to be harmonized thereby.

244. Our best _painter_ (among the living) I say;--no question has ever been of that. Since Van Eyck and Duerer there has nothing been seen so well done in laying of clear oil-color within definite line. And what he might have painted for us, if _we_ had only known what we would have of him! Heaven only knows. But we none of us knew,--nor he neither; and on the whole the perfectest of his works, and the representative picture of that generation--was no Annunciate Maria bowing herself; but only a Newsless Mariana stretching herself: which is indeed the best symbol of the mud-moated Nineteenth century; in _its_ Grange, Stable--Sty, or whatever name of dwelling may best befit the things it calls Houses and Cities: imprisoned therein by the unassailablest of walls, and blackest of ditches--by the pride of Babel, and the filthiness of Aholah and Aholibamah; and their worse younger sister;--craving for any manner of News from any world--and getting none trustworthy even of its own.

245. I said that in this second paper I would try to give some brief history of the rise, and the issue, of that Pre-Raphaelite school: but, as I look over two of the essays[47] that were printed with mine in that last number of the _Nineteenth Century_--the first--in laud of the Science which accepts for practical spirits, inside of men, only Avarice and Indolence; and the other,--in laud of the Science which "rejects the Worker" outside of Men, I am less and less confident in offering to the readers of the _Nineteenth Century_ any History relating to such despised things as unavaricious industry,--or incorporeal vision. I will be as brief as I can.

246. The central branch of the school, represented by the central picture above described:--"The Blind Girl"--was essentially and vitally an uneducated one. It was headed, in literary power, by Wordsworth; but the first pure example of its mind and manner of Art, as opposed to the erudite and _artificial_ schools, will be found, so far as I know, in Moliere's song: _j'aime mieux ma mie_.

Its mental power consisted in discerning what was lovely in present nature, and in pure moral emotion concerning it.

Its physical power, in an intense veracity of direct realization to the eye.

So far as Mr. Millais saw what was beautiful in vagrants, or commons, or crows, or donkeys, or the straw under children's feet in the Ark (Noah's or anybody else's does not matter),--in the Huguenot and his mistress, or the ivy behind them,--in the face of Ophelia, or in the flowers floating over it as it sank;--much more, so far as he saw what instantly comprehensible nobleness of passion might be in the binding of a handkerchief,--in the utterance of two words, "Trust me" or the like: he prevailed, and rightly prevailed, over all prejudice and opposition; to that extent he will in what he has done, or may yet do, take, as a standard-bearer, an honorable place among the reformers of our day.

So far as he could not see what was beautiful, but what was essentially and forever common (in that God had not cleansed it), and so far as he did not see truly what he thought he saw; (as for instance, in this picture, under immediate consideration, when he paints the spark of light in a crow's eye a hundred yards off, as if he were only painting a miniature of a crow close by,)--he failed of his purpose and hope; but how far I have neither the power nor the disposition to consider.

247. The school represented by Mr. Rossetti's picture and adopted for his own by Mr. Holman Hunt, professed, necessarily, to be a learned one; and to represent things which had happened long ago, in a manner credible to any moderns who were interested in them. The value to us of such a school necessarily depends on the things it chooses to represent, out of the infinite history of mankind. For instance, David, of the first Republican Academe, was a true master of this school; and, painting the Horatii receiving their swords, foretold the triumph of that Republican Power. Gerome, of the latest Republican Academe, paints the dying Polichinelle, and the _morituri_ gladiators: foretelling, in like manner, the shame and virtual ruin of modern Republicanism. What our own painters have done for us in this kind has been too unworthy of their real powers, for Mr. Rossetti threw more than half his strength into literature, and, in that precise measure, left himself unequal to his appointed task in painting; while Mr. Hunt, not knowing the necessity of masters any more than the rest of our painters, and attaching too great importance to the externals of the life of Christ, separated himself for long years from all discipline by the recognized laws of his art; and fell into errors which wofully shortened his hand and discredited his cause--into which again I hold it no part of my duty to enter. But such works as either of these painters have done, without antagonism or ostentation, and in their own true instincts; as all Rossetti's drawing from the life of Christ, more especially that of the Madonna gathering the bitter herbs for the Passover when He was twelve years old; and that of the Magdalen leaving her companions to come to Him; these, together with all the mythic scenes which he painted from the _Vita Nuova_ and _Paradiso_ of Dante, are of quite imperishable power and value: as also many of the poems to which he gave up part of his painter's strength. Of Holman Hunt's "Light of the World," and "Awakening Conscience," I have publicly spoken and written, now for many years, as standard in their kind: the study of sunset on the Egean, lately placed by me in the schools of Oxford, is not less authoritative in landscape, so far as its aim extends.

248. But the School represented by the third painting, "The Bridal," is that into which the greatest masters of _all_ ages are gathered, and in which they are walled round as in Elysian fields, unapproachable but by the reverent and loving souls, in some sort already among the Dead.

They interpret to those of us who can read them, so far as they already see and know, the things that are forever. "Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail--tongues, they shall cease--knowledge, it shall vanish."

And the one message they bear to us is the commandment of the Eternal Charity. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with _all_ thine heart, and thy neighbor as thyself." As thyself--no more, even the dearest of neighbors.

"Therefore let every man see that he love his wife even as himself."

No more--else she has become an idol, not a fellow-servant; a creature between us and our Master.

And they teach us that what higher creatures exist between Him and us, we are also bound to know, and to love in their place and state, as they ascend and descend on the stairs of their watch and ward.

The principal masters of this faithful religious school in painting, known to me, are Giotto, Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Luini, and Carpaccio; but for a central illustration of their mind, I take that piece of work by the sculptor of Quercia,[48] of which some shadow of representation, true to an available degree, is within reach of my reader.

249. This sculpture is central in every respect; being the last Florentine work in which the proper form of the Etruscan tomb is preserved, and the first in which all right Christian sentiment respecting death is embodied. It is perfectly severe in classical tradition, and perfectly frank in concession to the passions of existing life. It submits to all the laws of the past, and expresses all the hopes of the future.

Now every work of the great Christian schools expresses primarily, conquest over death; conquest not grievous, but absolute and serene; rising with the greatest of them, into rapture.

But this, as a _central_ work, has all the peace of the Christian Eternity, but only in part its gladness. Young children wreathe round the tomb a garland of abundant flowers, but she herself, Ilaria, yet sleeps; the time is not yet come for her to be awakened out of sleep.

Her image is a simple portrait of her--how much less beautiful than she was in life, we cannot know--but as beautiful as marble can be.

And through and in the marble we may see that the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth: yet as visibly a sleep that shall know no ending until the last day break, and the last shadow flee away; until then, she "shall not return." Her hands are laid on her breast--not praying--she has no need to pray now. She wears her dress of every day, clasped at her throat, girdled at her waist, the hem of it drooping over her feet. No disturbance of its folds by pain of sickness, no binding, no shrouding of her sweet form, in death more than in life. As a soft, low wave of summer sea, her breast rises; no more: the rippled gathering of its close mantle droops to the belt, then sweeps to her feet, straight as drifting snow. And at her feet her dog lies watching her; the mystery of his mortal life joined, by love, to her immortal one.

Few know, and fewer love, the tomb and its place,--not shrine, for it stands bare by the cathedral wall: only, by chance, a cross is cut deep into one of the foundation stones behind her head. But no goddess statue of the Greek cities, no nun's image among the cloisters of Apennine, no fancied light of angel in the homes of heaven, has more divine rank among the thoughts of men.

250. In so much as the reader can see of it, and learn, either by print or cast, or beside it; (and he would do well to stay longer in that transept than in the Tribune at Florence,) he may receive from it, unerring canon of what is evermore Lovely and Right in the dealing of the Art of Man with his fate, and his passions. Evermore _lovely_, and _right_. These two virtues of visible things go always hand in hand: but the workman is bound to assure himself of his Rightness first; then the loveliness will come.

And primarily, from this sculpture, you are to learn what a "Master" is. Here was one man at least, who knew his business, once upon a time! Unaccusably;--none of your fool's heads or clown's hearts can find a fault here! "Dog-fancier,[49] cobbler, tailor, or churl, look here"--says Master Jacopo--"look! I know what a brute is, better than you, I know what a silken tassel is--what a leathern belt is--Also, what a woman is; and also--what a Law of God is, if you care to know." This it is, to be a Master.

Then secondly--you are to note that with all the certain rightness of its material fact, this sculpture still is the Sculpture of a Dream. Ilaria is dressed as she was in life. But she never lay so on her pillow! nor so, in her grave. Those straight folds, straightly laid as a snowdrift, are impossible; known by the Master to be so--chiseled with a hand as steady as an iron beam, and as true as a ray of light--in defiance of your law of Gravity to the Earth. _That_ law prevailed on her shroud, and prevails on her dust: but not on herself, nor on the Vision of her.

Then thirdly, and lastly. You are to learn that the doing of a piece of Art such as this is _possible_ to the hand of Man just in the measure of his obedience to the laws which are indeed over his heart, and not over his dust: primarily, as I have said, to that great one, "Thou shalt _Love_ the Lord thy God." Which command is straight and clear; and all men may obey it if they will,--so only that they be early taught to know Him.

And that is precisely the piece of exact Science which is not taught at present in our Board Schools--so that although my friend, with whom I was staying, was not himself, in the modern sense, ill-educated; neither did he conceive me to be so,--he yet thought it good for himself and me to have that Inscription, "Lord, teach us to Pray," illuminated on the house wall--if perchance either he or I could yet learn what John (when he still had his head) taught _his_ Disciples.

251. But alas, for us only at last, among the people of all ages and in all climes, the lesson has become too difficult; and the Father of all, in every age, in every clime adored, is Rejected of science, as an Outside Worker, in Cockneydom of the nineteenth century.

Rejected of Science: well; but not yet, not yet--by the men who can do, as well as know. And though I have neither strength nor time, nor at present the mind to go into any review of the work done by the Third and chief School of our younger painters, headed by Burne Jones;[50] and though I know its faults, palpable enough, like those of Turner, to the poorest sight; and though I am discouraged in all its discouragements, I still hold in fullness to the hope of it in which I wrote the close of the third lecture I ever gave in Oxford--of which I will ask the reader here in conclusion to weigh the words, set down in the days of my best strength, so far as I know; and with the uttermost care given to that inaugural Oxford work, to "speak only that which I did know."

252. "Think of it, and you will find that so far from art being immoral, little else _except_ art is moral;--that life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality: and for the words 'good,' and 'wicked,' used of men, you may almost substitute the words 'Makers' or 'Destroyers.'

"Far the greater part of the seeming prosperity of the world is, so far as our present knowledge extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of good, but having assigned to it a certain inevitable sequence of destruction and of sorrow.

"Its stress is only the stress of wandering storm; its beauty the hectic of plague: and what is called the history of mankind is too often the record of the whirlwind, and the map of the spreading of the leprosy. But underneath all that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the midst of it, the work of every man, 'qui non accepit in vanitatem animam suam,' endures and prospers; a small remnant or green bud of it prevailing at last over evil. And though faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin, the true workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden ground; by the help of their joined hands the order of all things is surely sustained and vitally expanded, and although with strange vacillation, in the eyes of the watcher, the morning cometh, and also the night, there is no hour of human existence that does not draw on towards the perfect day.

"And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all men understood that the beauty of Holiness must be in labor as well as in rest. Nay! more, if it may be, in labor; in our strength, rather than in our weakness; and in the choice of what we shall work for through the six days, and may know to be good at their evening time, than in the choice of what we pray for on the seventh, of reward or repose. With the multitude that keep holiday, we may perhaps sometimes vainly have gone up to the house of the Lord, and vainly there asked for what we fancied would be mercy; but for the few who labor as their Lord would have them, the mercy needs no seeking, and their wide home no hallowing. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow them, all the days of their life, and they shall dwell in the house of the Lord--For Ever."[51]

FOOTNOTES:

[44] "Vulgarly"; the use of the word "scientia," as if it differed from "knowledge," being a modern barbarism; enhanced usually by the assumption that the knowledge of the difference between acids and alkalies is a more respectable one than that of the difference between vice and virtue.

[45] _Modern Painters_, volume iii. I proceed in my old words, of which I cannot better the substance, though--with all deference to the taste of those who call that book my best--I could, the expression.

[46] The _third_ edition was published in 1846, while the Pre-Raphaelite School was still in swaddling clothes.

[47] These essays were, "Recent Attacks on Political Economy," by Robert Lowe, and "Virchow and Evolution," by Prof. Tyndall,--ED.

[48] James of Quercia: see the rank assigned to this master in _Ariadne Florentina_. The best photographs of the monument are, I believe, those published by the Arundel Society; of whom I would very earnestly request that if ever they quote _Modern Painters_, they would not interpolate its text with unmarked parentheses of modern information such as "emblem of conjugal fidelity." I must not be made to answer for either the rhythm or the contents of sentences thus manipulated.

[49] I foolishly, in _Modern Painters_, used the generic word "hound" to make my sentence prettier. He is a flat-nosed bulldog.

[50] It would be utterly vain to attempt any general account of the works of this painter, unless I were able also to give abstract of the subtlest mythologies of Greek worship and Christian romance. Besides, many of his best designs are pale pencil drawings like Florentine engravings, of which the delicacy is literally invisible, and the manner irksome, to a public trained among the black scrabblings of modern wood-cutter's and etcher's prints. I will only say that the single series of these pencil-drawings, from the story of Psyche, which I have been able to place in the schools of Oxford, together with the two colored beginnings from the stories of Jason and Alcestis, are, in my estimate, quite the most precious gift, not excepting even the Loire series of Turners, in the ratified acceptance of which my University has honored with some fixed memorial the aims of her first Art-Teacher.

[51] _Lectures on Art_, Sec.Sec. 95-6.--ED.

* * * * *

ART.

III.

ARCHITECTURE.

THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.

(_Pamphlet, 1854._)

THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN OUR SCHOOLS.

(_R.I.B.A. Transactions, 1865._)

* * * * *

THE OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.[52]

253. I read the account in the _Times_ newspaper of the opening of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham as I ascended the hill between Vevay and Chatel St. Denis, and the thoughts which it called up haunted me all day long as my road wound among the grassy slopes of the Simmenthal. There was a strange contrast between the image of that mighty palace, raised so high above the hills on which it is built as to make them seem little else than a basement for its glittering stateliness, and those lowland huts, half hidden beneath their coverts of forest, and scattered like gray stones along the masses of far-away mountain. Here man contending with the power of Nature for his existence; there commanding them for his recreation; here a feeble folk nested among the rocks with the wild goat and the coney, and retaining the same quiet thoughts from generation to generation; there a great multitude triumphing in the splendor of immeasurable habitation, and haughty with hope of endless progress and irresistible power.

254. It is indeed impossible to limit, in imagination, the beneficent results which may follow from the undertaking thus happily begun.[53] For the first time in the history of the world, a national museum is formed in which a whole nation is interested; formed on a scale which permits the exhibition of monuments of art in unbroken symmetry, and of the productions of nature in unthwarted growth,--formed under the auspices of science which can hardly err, and of wealth which can hardly be exhausted; and placed in the close neighborhood of a metropolis overflowing with a population weary of labor, yet thirsting for knowledge, where contemplation may be consistent with rest, and instruction with enjoyment. It is impossible, I repeat, to estimate the influence of such an institution on the minds of the working-classes. How many hours once wasted may now be profitably dedicated to pursuits in which interest was first awakened by some accidental display in the Norwood palace; how many constitutions, almost broken, may be restored by the healthy temptation into the country air; how many intellects, once dormant, may be roused into activity within the crystal walls, and how these noble results may go on multiplying and increasing and bearing fruit seventy times seven-fold, as the nation pursues its career,--are questions as full of hope as incapable of calculation. But with all these grounds for hope there are others for despondency, giving rise to a group of melancholy thoughts, of which I can neither repress the importunity nor forbear the expression.