On the Old Road Volume I Part 13

II.

236. The feeling which, in the foregoing notes on the pictures that entertained my vacation, I endeavored to ill.u.s.trate 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 inc.u.mbent 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d 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 Inst.i.tution, whose majesty, together with that of the more extensive gla.s.s 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 p.r.o.nouncing of all its works and ways that they are very good.

And are there not also sufficiently resembling portraits of all the mouthpieces of const.i.tuents in British Parliament--as their vocal powers advance them into that wors.h.i.+pful society--presented to the people, with due felicitation on the new pipe it has got to its organ, in the _Ill.u.s.trated_ 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 compa.s.s 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 const.i.tute 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 ma.s.sacre of any quant.i.ty of Innocents; the flaying, whether of Marsyas or St.

Bartholomew, and the deaths, it might be of Laoc.o.o.n 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 att.i.tudes 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 apostles.h.i.+p, 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 fellows.h.i.+p with it, which, unrecognized, I had held from the beginning.

The pa.s.sage 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 a.s.serted 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, a.s.suring 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s 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 jacka.s.ses, to be harmonized thereby.

244. Our best _painter_ (among the living) I say;--no question has ever been of that. Since Van Eyck and Durer 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 una.s.sailablest 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 n.o.bleness of pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d 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 Pa.s.sover 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 G.o.d 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 princ.i.p.al 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 cla.s.sical tradition, and perfectly frank in concession to the pa.s.sions 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 G.o.ddess 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 pa.s.sions. Evermore _lovely_, and _right_. These two virtues of visible things go always hand in hand: but the workman is bound to a.s.sure 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 ta.s.sel is--what a leathern belt is--Also, what a woman is; and also--what a Law of G.o.d 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.