On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2)

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 named43 as having taken part in the tenor of my country hours of idleness.

THE THREE COLORS OF PRE-RAPHAELITISMII

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 called44 "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 Cæsars, 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 edition46 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 Fésole 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 Dürer 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 essays47 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.