best may. Look at Jones! look at Morris! what do they do but catch a spark from the ages which had a life? The sentiment of that picture is not unreal; it is refracted, if you will. The poetry of it is a poetry of situation, which none but a delicate culture can taste. There is a world of passion in that situation, if you can but feel it." "A situation," I said; "but what a situation !" "Oh, pardon me; I do not mean by a situation a mere transcript of a fact; it is the transcript of a sentiment. Look at the Greeks! No incident too slight, too fleeting, to be the casket of an imperishable thought." were in the habit of running up and down once a week or so); "I will take you to all the studios. I know all these fellows and you should read the Academy and the Portfolio; the Academy is the best thing there is. I write in it myself sometimes. Good night." Im A week after this conversation I found myself in Oxford with my new acquaintance Mr. W. The young gentleman had insisted on my accompanying him to Oxford and thence to London; and I retain so pleasant a recollection of his hospitality that I am unwilling to criticise himself or his tastes, or even to call in question the furniture of his rooms, to which I had looked forward as a probable soluHere he turned away from me to some tion of the problems which his conversaladies who were of the company, ladies tion continually suggested. I must conwho have lately come into our neigh-fess that what I saw amazed me. bourhood, and whose unconventional be-agine an old set of panelled rooms dating, haviour, dress, and conversation furnish I dare say, from 1700. I remembered much matter for les disettes of a country them as occupied by a friend of my own town. As far as I can hazard a guess, their aim is to reconcile the thirteenth with the eighteenth century; and our sweet Phyllises and Phidyles, always ready to learn, are dropping the quaint skirts and ribbons which made them as pretty as Dresden china in the Clarissa period of a few years ago, and are becoming mediæval Florentines, sweeping through the aisle on Sunday mornings like Laura or Beatrice at a fancy ball. about thirty years ago: they were then painted or grained a cheerful light-oak colour. Mr. W. had had the panels painted tea-green. His sofas and chairs were covered with yellow chintz. Persian rugs lay in all directions about the room the floor covered with China matting. The curtains were of a kind of snuffcoloured green. The furniture, spindlelegged mahogany tables, odd round looking-glasses like those one sees in bedI could find no place for myself in this rooms, and carved book-cases with glass conversation; the names were unfamiliar. fronts such as I remember in my grandI had been visiting picture-galleries with mother's house some forty years past. The my eyes shut, it seems Blake, Stot-fireplace was full of Gothic or semi-Gothic hard, Watts, Morris, Rossetti, Corot, blue-and-white tiles, with an old-fashDaubigny, Jones and Jones, and again Jones. I knew the names of these painters to be sure, but had looked upon most of them as artists who had more sentiment or quaintness than knowledge and power. Then the terms they usedtonality, mood-landscape, exquisite passion, splendour of experience, pulsations of consciousness and adjectives: intimate, precious, sharp, swift, resonant, sweet. "Well," I thought, "I am an old fogy, but not too old to learn; and I will find out whatever I can of these lean kine who are to eat up our John Bull and all he has believed in hitherto, and see whether the leanness is theirs or mine; and meantime I will boldly ask this young précieux how I can obtain access to the studios in which these painters work, and to the literature in which their principles are set down." "Are you coming up to town any time in the next ten days?" he said (as if I ioned brass fender. In the upper lights grass-land with three rabbits and the top | dazzled as if I had been couched for a of a shed; and as its pendant half an cataract. I have hardly yet dared to reacre of town rubbish with the back of a move the bandages. My eclectic friend red-brick house, and half-a-dozen cats on taught me to see what my rheumy eyes the tiles. Then a dark red lady with her had hitherto passed over unnoted. He hair, also red, twisted east, and her gown led me to avious places of the Pierides, twisted west, almond eyes, her face like and bade me look into unsullied fountains the ace of spades and her mouth like the in which I had seen before nothing but ace of hearts a sort of grisaille drawing quaintness and conceit. Thus was my without distance or perspective, in which visual ray cleansed. In humility I rethe patterns of the clothes were more ceived the sacred books and newspapers conspicuous than the features. Land- of his sect, and though not yet enlightscapes one in oil, painted, I should say, ened, I hope I may call myself a catechuwith thumb and fingers- a sullen pool men. and a gnarled oak green, that made one's teeth creak to look at it; another, a cold rushy moor, blown by the wind, with a stunted thorn and a bit of grey distance, lovely in sentiment, but dreary and unhappy more than the world really is. Then a misty-moisty row of poplars near a tank the sky represented by blots of white paint, the trees by blots of grey and in the midst of this collection of oddities, lo! a facsimile of one of Leonardo's drawings, an Albert Dürer engraving, and a bit of early Florentine painting. I felt like a geologist amongst a heap of unsorted specimens, searching in vain for a central thought to bind all these contraries together. Let me first describe how this school appeared to me as it was gradually revealed to me through books and pictures and conversation; then I may perhaps go on to find some guiding principle by which to judge of it. Eclecticism is a threadbare word; for everything nowadays is eclectic, from Mr. Disraeli's Cabinet downwards. It is even vulgar to be eclectic; but you cannot escape altogether the habit of the age in which you live; and so these purists are, in spite of themselves, more eclectic than their neighbours; and pick out from all styles and periods what is in accordance with their mood. And this is very various. I find them admiring and imitating early Italian art, modern French, eighteenth century of the date of Queen Anne, and down to the threshold of the nineteenth, old English of the period of Chaucer, Greek idyllic, Roman decadence. What I was tired with my journey, and asked leave to rest an hour in my host's luxurious armchair while he went out on some business. I fell into a sort of waking doze, in which the objects around me seemed gradually to harmonize into is their common characteristic? Hear it something like a tune in a minor key. I felt the charm of grace and refinement. This rococo collection had after all some unity. I seemed to find the key to it in the half-toned grey-green atmosphere which pervaded all. No bright colour was admitted, except here and there a sunlight patch on a Persian carpet. All the life represented had something of incompleteness or decay. There was no midday heat or splendour or strength. The yellow allegories in the windows were worn and wasted; the green of the walls was that of a hortus siccus; the men and women in the drawings were all sick and sorry. The sadness of tone in all this Castle of Indolence so oppressed me that I got up and leant out of the window, and gazed out upon bright chestnut trees in full leaf, rich buttercups in Christchurch meadow, boys in coloured flannels talking and laughing on their way to the boats, and all the sights and sounds of healthy happy midsummer life. I came back from London dazed and in their own catch-words- what they relish is refinement, delicacy, subtlety of thought, colour, and form, and a certain yearning of passion. They admire and imitate the dawn or decline of the great schools; not the full sunshinethey have no eyes for Titian, but they rave about Botticelli. They make much more of Stothard than of Reynolds; of Blake than of Byron. And this is not merely the modern fashion of doing justice to neglected genius. It is that the sentiment of these artists attracts them by its refinement, and perhaps by its want of strength and colour. There is a fine flower of refinement which only springs up here and there out of a rich soil in Greece, Italy, or France, very rarely in Rome, England, or Germany. It has not robustness enough to be the groundwork of a great school. To take illustrations for different arts, I would instance Chopin for music; Flaxman for sculpture; for poetry, the Italians whom Mr. Rossetti imitates, as artists who had daughters three That sing about the golden tree, But I am rhapsodizing: and I am called back to a difficulty by two great names, perhaps the greatest; Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo, both great idealists, and great masters of sentiment; and that generally a sentiment of melancholy. Nothing in Mr. Pater's "Sirensongs" is more tuneful than his description of Leonardo's "Belle Joconde." He understands Leonardo as far as he can in their different ways this quality; a distinction of sentiment the characteristic of which is refinement and an undefined but rich and ripe and full of flesh, such longing. For a special instance I cannot as Giorgione saw; such as still rain intake a better than Botticelli, who is so fluence from behind dark altars or in completely their favourite painter that I Florentine galleries, the work of Titian may be pardoned for saying a word about and Tintoret and Raphael. him. There is a half-expressed longing and fineness of sentiment in Botticelli's painting which is unlike anything else except the poetry of which Dante's Vita Nuova is the highest example. Giotto, Fra Angelico, almost any one else you please, are straightforward and matter-offact in comparison with him. Perhaps one may say that there is a similar difference between Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, or between Titian and Bellini. be understood at this distance of time, This refined sentiment, not unknown to and from the fragments of his work Perugino and his pupils, but expressed which exist. But Leonardo is a giant by them in a more happy, sunshiny tem- among giants. His little finger is thicker per, is the quality which our modern than Botticelli's loins; what may be afschool most admires. Mr. Pater, in his fectation in the one is idealism in the book on the Renaissance, says it is other. I would rather restore to art rebellion against dogma and the worship Leonardo's statue of Pope Julius than all of the body that inspires the keen-souled the lost works of the great masters. That Cinquecentists. No! I say; go to Ti- Leonardo in his long and busy life protian and Veronese if you wish to see the duced so little is a reproach to the acregorgeous happy pagan life and the glory painters of Venice, though such great of the worship of the body. In Botti- names are among them. There is no celli we have not the splendid health of affectation in Leonardo as there is perthe Roman and Venetian painters; but a haps in Luini. Leonardo is gloomy, melpale skin, soft blue lines in the throat, ancholy, and tenderly sentimental, but long slender limbs, languid eyes, pouting he is too great to be affected, though inlipsa sad allegory of life, a melancholy tense study sometimes makes his work Virgin; not Raphael's happy Mother; artificial. So, too, Michael Angelo-a not Bellini's holy Annunziata; not Ti-smaller artist working in his spirit might tian's triumphant Assunta. The two become affected; but the sense of power sides of Botticelli's character are typified in him transcends all affectation, as it by two of his pictures, "Mars and does in Shakespeare. Let our moderns Venus," at Berlin; and the "Assump-get the power of Leonardo and Michael tion of the Virgin,” which I saw at Bur- Angelo, or even of Botticelli, and we will lington House last year. The one shows not quarrel with their mannerisms. his tender longing after the Greek life; Meanwhile, let them learn to be simple. the other, his tender Piagnone piety. "Simple," I hear some one say, "why And in both there is something morbid. simplicity is the one thing we love." Not It is not the art which springs from hap-so- this is not a genuine simplicity; it piness and health; it loves decay and is the simplicity of fastidiousness. Simthe sense of the nearness of death. In plicity is the heritage of health, not the Botticelli's pictures this is so constantly acquisition of a taste which dislikes vulpresent that it becomes an affectation. garity. You cannot become simple by "Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile". pruning and paring, by turning away and so Mr. Rossetti (of whom I speak in from this and that, by calling the midday all reverence as an idealist and as a sunshine a glare, and finding fault with painter) paints throats which are all but grass and flowers for being too bright in goitres, and impossible rosebud lips; colour. Be healthy first of all, whether and Mr. Burne Jones lengthens out the your powers are small or great. Study limbs of his doleful virgins, and wraps nature in her healthy forms, not in her them round with clinging garments of decay. You cannot build a school on russet hue. Oh, gardens of the Hesper- the foundations of tender regret and ides! not such as these were the choice sentiment. A living school grows LIVING AGE. VOL. IX. 419 His because it lives, and does not choose and, blue gown hanging up, a girl driving a settle beforehand how its heart shall beat, calf, a horseman astray on a moor. or count its pulses by the watch. Refinement and sensibility are graces, not virtues, and they may be cultivated till they become sickly. They are essential to the poetic or shaping spirit, but they are not its only essentials; and one of the most important of all is health. Let me take (without offence, I hope) three modern instances. First, Mr. Morris's decorative work, which interprets and is interpreted by his poetry for of his painting I cannot speak, not having had enough opportunity of seeing it (why won't these artists exhibit? what harm would it do them or their paintings to be looked at by vulgar people? and vulgar people might learn something from them, as I hope they learn from the pictures in the National Gallery). Mr. Morris, then, like the others of his school, picks like a chiffonnier here and there whatever is tender and sentimental. He began with medieval asceticism-now he has gone on to a strange Greek Gothic Eastern gorgeousness, of which the first rule is that it should not be commonplace. But excellent as are the details, it is all repetition or echo; only there is something of his own in the treatment, and so far he is in harmony with the old Renaissance. These old masters accepted the classical detail, and to some extent the classical rules. But with what a strong grasp did they lay hold on them, and make them their own! To return to our lackadaisical artists. The same refining sensibility is shown in their treatment of nature. They do not work in the spirit of Turner or Gainsborough, or even Constable, whom the French have taught them to admire. I do not know where you will find more perfect refinement than in the works of Mr. F. Walker and Mr. Mason, whose loss to art all its lovers must deplore. But are their subjects quite worthy of them? Mr. Walker paints a team of oxen on a Somersetshire hillside, a child and a lamb under an apple-tree, a border of delicately painted flowers, as light and suggestive and perfect as Schumann's "Kinderscenen," or Blake's "Songs of Innocence." Mr. Mason's Arcadia, where is it? not this side of Parthenope. With what.exquisite care and labour he worked may be learnt from his repeated studies of the same subject under different skies and in different moods. But the subjects are disappointing-a drying-yard with a He was highest flight of fancy is the lovely dance of girls by the seaside, or the return of the mowers under the moon. the Theocritus of English painting; but with such power and such fineness he might have risen above the idyl. What I complain of is that, with higher pretensions than those of other painters, this school stops short of completeness for very fineness and fastidiousness: they have not faith enough to risk a failure by trying what may be too hard for them. But I cannot leave these artists without paying the tribute of admiration for their distinctive excellencies. They see, it is true, only the grave and pensive side of nature; but that aspect which they represent is perfectly represented and in genuine sympathy with its beanty. I suppose the same is true of Corot and the other grey French painters whom they all admire as suggesting a dreamy wistfulness, and not obtruding any pedantic or scientific knowledge; but I cannot forgive these men for banishing the sun from the sky and making nature mourn in sober colours. Nature has her bright and gaudy side as well as her mists and moonshine, and art has as much to do with thankfulness as with regret - nay, much more. But now I seem to hear them calling to their fellows (and the voice is the voice of Mr. Burne Jones and the lyre is twanged by the skilled fingers and tuned by the delicate ear of Mr. Swinburne), "Give us fruits, but let them be bruised and overripe. Bind garlands for us, but of faded roses. Sing us songs, but with the lesser third we will have no light but sunset, no hope but of the grave, no love but of that which is gone as we grasp it, no faith but in a frail and brittle beauty." It seems we are in the midst of a renaissance. Who shall read us the signs of the times? Why did we not know of this great new birth? why do we still feel half inclined to jest about it? Its professors are in earnest, or mean to be; they speak in esoteric language with all the certainty of a school, and carry out principles unflinchingly. Full of sadness at the smokiness and grime, material and spiritual, of their age, they love to remember the past ages, and simple souls! they turn away their eyes lest they behold vulgarity, and let the restful influence of the past flow upon them. To see nothing but with cleansed eyes; to this is how they mean to conduct their renaissance. choose out what is best and imitate it; | failure by attempting a higher flight. Sir G. G. Scott's idea of taking a fresh departure from Gothic of the thirteenth century is a good and true one, if only it could have come naturally and not by thinking; and if, like Imlac, he and his followers have not flown far, they share with that philosopher the credit of having at least tried to move. What they (like Imlac) want is the power to move their learned wings, and power is not born of learning; though learning is not to be despised, and is of course an essential of renaissance. Mr. Pater's book on the Renaissance may, I suppose, be taken as an exposition of the principles of the school of art to which he belongs. He speaks, at any rate, as with authority, and his book is didactic as well as historical. But to my mind his view of the Italian Renaissance, though full of insight, and seizing very truly several aspects of that period, mistakes its central principle. Mr. Pater would have us believe that the artists of the fifteenth century were melancholy I sympathize indeed with the weariness sentimentalists and dreamers of sad which comes with the thought of this dreams, as sick of the middle ages as a renaissance or Gothic revival, as it used converted Gothicist, and with no sure to be called. The first revival began hope of anything; only determined to with the Romantic school, Fouqué and rebel against dominant stupidity and Scott and the Eglinton tournament and vulgarity. I believe them, on the con- sham castles, and the Gothic of Blore tray, to have been young and hopeful and Wilkins; then came Pugin and Rusreformers, glorying in their youth, and kin, who had the root of the matter in joyfully accepting the guidance of the them: but the one "could only be exnewly-found models of beauty. The pressed in cathedrals ;" and the other is languid or pedantic archæologist of to- still our teacher, but who shall read him day cannot conceive the joy which was aright? Full of the letter of Ruskin, felt in Rome as one by one the forgotten but with too little of his spirit, came the works of great writers came out from pre-Raphaelites and other makers of ugly their monkish graveclothes, and the things (the Uglicists, may we call them ?), heaped-up soil yielded its treasures, and setting up the symbols of their faith in Lysippus and Praxiteles became a reality patterns of striped brick and stone, partifrom a name. There never was a time coloured pictures, and crooked furniture when buoyant hope had more the ascen- fit neither to look at nor to use. Now dant. The spirit of the age had in it we have, on the one hand, our sentimenmore of Lorenzo the Magnificent than of tal school and a revival of eighteenthLeonardo da Vinci; more of Rabelais century friezes and cornices, mixed with than of Erasmus. It is better symbol-sham mediævalism and sham paganism; ized by the joyful certainty of Raphael and, on the other, Ritualism - that than by Michael Angelo's doubting mel-strange unintelligible jumble of modern ancholy. There is a true and a false renaissance; just as every language has a true and a false growth, a natural and a learned period. Each seeks for the spirit of the antique; but the one lives, and the other studies. The one thankfully makes use of former models and methods as a means of new and original creation; the other lays up its talent in a napkin, and sadly despairs, and aims at nothing but imitation. One dares whilst the other doubts. What a splendid growth is Cinquecento architecture; and how unlike Cinquecento architecture is that of the school whose highest aim is to copy accurately a chimney-piece, or adapt a house from one of the date of Queen Anne. By all means copy Queen Anne houses if you can do no better, but don't imagine that it is high art to do so; still less accuse of vulgarity those who risk coxcombry and ancient religion misunderstood and travestied. This is what our renaissance has brought us, instead of the glories (blasphemed by Mr. Ruskin) of the fifteenth century. For Hatfield and Hardwicke we have the Houses of Parliament and the Albert Memorial. I think we need not be proud of our nineteenth-century renaissance until it becomes more what do they call it? naif. I believe it is a German word. Our sentimental school abjure this bastard renaissance, but they are of it notwithstanding, for they have for ideas of their own an echo of past ideas. Learning, as I said, is an essential of a renaissance; but as the note of a true renaissance is faith and of a false renaissance criticism or, shall I say, hope of the one, and regret of the other? there is more life in honest effort which looks forward at the risk of vulgarity, |