Kitobni o'qish: «Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432»

THE MEDIÆVAL MANIA

History is said to be a series of reactions. Society, like a pendulum, first drives one way, and then swings back in the opposite direction. At present, we may be said to be returning at full speed towards a taste for everything old, neglected, and for ages despised. Science and refinement have had their day, and now rude nature and the elemental are to be in the ascendant. In our boyhood, we learned the Roman alphabet; but youngsters now had need to add a knowledge of black-letter, which is rapidly getting back into fashion. Perfection is only to be found in the darkness and ignorance of the middle ages.

It is proper, no doubt, to get rid of what is tame and spiritless in art; and it must be owned that nearly everything that was done in architecture and decoration during the Georgian era was detestable. But it is one thing to reform, and another to revolutionise. Let us by all means go to nature for instruction; but nature under the exercise of cultivated feeling—selecting what tends to ennoble and refine, not that which degrades and sends us back to forms and ideas totally out of place in the nineteenth century, and which, for that very reason, can have nothing but a temporary reign, to be followed in the succeeding age by a violent reaction.

On a former occasion, we drew attention to this tendency towards mediævalism as regards ornamental design, and took the Great Exhibition to witness the fact. We have also pointed to that strange phenomenon, the rise anew of monastic institutions among us, long after their object is accomplished, giving a spectre-like expression to an obsolete idea; we have exposed, likewise, the inclination of the working-classes to trust to the protection, and, on every emergency, claim as a matter of right the aid of the wealthy, thus wilfully and deliberately returning to the condition of serfdom: we have now to trace the mediæval mania in a department where, notwithstanding all this ominous conjunction of symptoms, its appearance is truly surprising—in the department of high art in painting.

Our readers need not fear that we are about to inflict on them a scientific dissertation. All we wish to do, is to explain to them a word, with the meaning of which many of them are very imperfectly acquainted, and by the mere explanation, to enable them to determine upon its claims to designate—not merely a school, but the school of art, destined, if founded in truth and nature, to overturn every other. This word—Pre-Raphaelitism—is taken from the name of one of the Italian masters, and it is necessary, in order to understand the question, to ascertain what were the circumstances and the genius that have thus set him up as a landmark in the history of art.

After the fall of the Western Empire, the fine arts were lost, and their productions literally buried in the wreck. The minds of the composite nations that arose in Europe had no guide. Men were left to their own instincts, only faintly aided by the ruins and traditions of degenerate Rome; and each series of countries had its own style of art, framed or adopted by the genius of the people. During the middle ages, the style most general in Northern Europe was the Gothic; and by that term the whole system of art during the period is popularly known in England. The state of painting, under the Gothic régime, may be seen in the stained windows of the cathedrals; in which strong outlines and bright colours are laid down without any reference to chiaro-scuro, or the scientific arrangement of light and shadow. This seems a natural stage in art-development, and at the same moment it was seen in equal perfection in China and Europe. In the former region, the people are now beginning to advance a step beyond, through their imitation of English pictures; although, but a few years ago, they burst into fits of laughter on seeing the shadow of the nose in a portrait. In Europe, a gigantic and almost sudden stride was made, towards the close of the fifteenth century, under an influence from which the Chinese were debarred, and the nature of which we shall presently explain.

Let us first, however, just notice, that the charms of gaudy inartistic colouring frequently exercise a powerful sway even over minds familiar with better things; although that sway is always indicative of the decay of intellectual or moral freshness. Thus, it is remarked by an old Greek author (Dionysius of Halicarnassus), that the perfection to which painting had been brought by Apelles, had degenerated under Augustus; the painters being so much fascinated by the new art of colouring, that they neglected design, and preferred the brilliant or gaudy to the solid, and counterfeit to natural beauty. What this 'perfection' of Apelles was, we cannot now tell; but the probability is, that it existed only in design, and that the union of this with artistic colouring was reserved for the modern masters.

Before these masters appeared, and before the influence we are about to refer to was felt in Europe, some efforts were made by unassisted genius to rise beyond the conventionalities of the time; in the latter half of the thirteenth century, Cimabue already surpassed his modern Greek preceptors; and his disciple Giotto was considered so natural and original, that his style could not be referred to any existing school, but was called the maniera di Giotto. 'Instead of the harsh outline,' says Vasari, 'circumscribing the whole figure, the glaring eyes, the pointed hands and feet, and all the defects arising from a total want of shadow, the figures of Giotto exhibit a better attitude; the heads have an air of life and freedom, the drapery is more natural, and there are even some attempts at fore-shortening the limbs.' All this, however, although a decided improvement on mediæval art, was rude and imperfect—it was only the first faint dawn of a better light. 'As yet,' to use the words of Roscoe, 'the characters rarely excelled the daily prototypes of common life; and their forms, although at times sufficiently accurate, were often vulgar and heavy.... To everything great and elevated, the art was yet a stranger: even the celebrated picture of Pollajuolo exhibits only a group of half-naked and vulgar wretches, discharging their arrows at a miserable fellow-creature, who, by changing places with one of his murderers, might with equal propriety become a murderer himself.'

But the time at length came when that stimulus was to be communicated to taste which sent a thrill throughout the general heart of Europe. The pictures of the old Greeks were lost for ever, dead and gone; but their statues were only buried—buried alive—and now, at the command of wealth and genius, they were dug out of their tomb of ages, and came forth, unharmed, in their enchanted life and immortal beauty. Yes, unharmed; for in the head, the torso, the limb, the hand, the finger, the same principle of life existed as in the entire figure; and, owing to the sublime law of proportion, which bound all together, the minutest fragment indicated a perfect whole. The palace of Lorenzo de Medici was the assembling-place, and the ideal beauty of the Greeks found a new shrine in the groves of Florence. These became a true academia, where genius studied and taught, and where the presiding spirit of the place was Michael Angelo Buonarotti,[A] the sculptor—painter—architect—poet, whose universal mind appeared to fit him, not so much to shine in any one department—although shine he did in all—as to give an impetus to the whole Revival. But Michael Angelo, as a painter, excelled chiefly in design; while one who was his contemporary, and being a few years later in the field, has been supposed by some to be his imitator, was the painter par excellence of the new era—the first great painter of the moderns. This was Raphael. He was the pupil of Perugino; and while such, contented himself with imitating, with the utmost fidelity, the works of that artist; till at length emancipating himself from tutelage, he went for inspiration to the cartoons of Michael Angelo, to the sculptures of the Medici gardens, and to nature herself. Vasari makes Michael Angelo the magnus Apollo of Raphael; but Quatremère de Quincy assigns to the latter artist a holier worship. In a letter from him, which he quotes, respecting his famous picture of the Galatea, Raphael says, that in order to paint a beautiful woman, he must see many, but that, after all, he must work upon a certain ideal image present in his mind. 'We thus see,' says the French critic, 'that he really sought after the beautiful which Nature presents to art, but which the imagination of the artist alone can seize, and genius alone realise.'

Raphael was the first of the moderns to idealise beauty, or, in other words, to represent nature in the form she is striving, in her infinite progression, to attain, but which as yet she only indicates here and there in those hints and parts that prophetic genius combines and moulds into a whole. He softened the harsh outlines, mellowed the glaring colours, and harmonised the awkward proportions of mediæval art. With him, a new epoch commenced, adorned by many illustrious names, from Julio Romano, the poet of painters, to Titian, who clipped his pencil in the rainbow. The Lombard school of Titian was the third of the three first great schools of the Revival, in which taste, emancipated from the darkness of the middle ages, sought inspiration in nature and the Greek sculptures. What would be thought if a school were to arise three hundred years later, not merely discarding the experience and teachings of the great masters, but claiming by its very name to return into the gulf from which these had been emancipated? This school of decline has, in fact, made its appearance among the other symptoms of the mediæval mania, and we now gravely hang up in our exhibitions the productions of the Pre-Raphaelites! The name at first provoked so much ridicule in England, that their friends were at pains to inform the world, that it was assumed merely for the purpose of intimating their entire separation from the schools of Raphael and his successors, and their exclusive devotion to nature. The artists of Germany, however, with whom the mania commenced, were less scrupulous.¹ They imitated, purposely, the rudeness of the early painters, and even favourably distinguished the juvenile works of Raphael when he was as yet the mere copyist of Perugino. It is thus only the reformed schools the Pre-Raphaelists avoid; for Mr Ruskin's notion, that there were no schools at all before Raphael, is quite too wild for answer.² The name, however, is of little consequence. The nature returned to is obviously, to any one who has eyes in his head, the nature of the middle ages; and if our readers will look again at the quotations we have made above—which were not taken at random—they will find, in the words of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Vasari, and William Roscoe, a pretty accurate description of the genius and manner of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Nor could the fact be otherwise. We have noticed the identity of taste between the Chinese and the unawakened Europeans, as pointing to a natural stage in art-development; and if we allot to the new school a position one degree higher than that of Cimabue and Giotto, it is all that can be claimed by artists, who have even attempted to dismiss from their minds a later and nobler experience. Their rule is—to have no rule; to copy nature, just as she happens to be before them; to select nothing, reject nothing, subordinate nothing, and thus to have no composition and no chiaro-scuro. They recognise no inequality, no relationship of objects: a pin in a lady's dress, and the nose on the lady's face, are treated with the same even-handed justice. The harmony of colours is a mere dream: let them only be as bright as a stained-glass window, and all is well.

At this moment, there are two specimens of Pre-Raphaelitism to be seen at the Exhibition of the Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. They are both distinguished, like the philosopher in Andersen's Drop of Ditchwater, by having no name; but a quotation is appended to each of the numbers in the catalogue, and is to be supposed to indicate, the subject. No. 9, in the Great Room, has this quatrain from Tennyson—

 
'She only said: "My life is dreary—
He cometh not!" she said;
She said: "I'm aweary, aweary—
I would that I were dead."'
 

In illustration of this awkwardly-constructed stanza, a female, uncomely and ungraceful, is represented as standing in the attitude of a yawn, not indicated by the gaping mouth, but by the contorted person, and arms twisted behind the back. She is close to a stained-glass window, whose gaudy colours are challenged by her own bright blue dress, the object of the artist throughout appearing to be violent opposition, not harmony. The picture, with its violent dislocations, both of bones and impressions, conveys the idea of anything but repose, although a mouse on the floor bids us notice, that notwithstanding appearances, the ungainly lady stretches herself in silence. There cannot well be anything more inelegant and untrue than this piece; yet there is clever painting here and there; and some of the accessories, if taken without reference to the design, in which they are blots, are models of their kind. The thought belongs to the middle ages; the mechanical touch to the post-Raphaelite era.

The other picture, No. 93, in the same room, is larger and more ambitious. It represents a carpenter's workshop, with a mechanic at each end of the long bench; one of these, a half-starved, hideous wretch, with hardly a trace of the human anatomy in his composition; and the other, a respectable and rather sagacious-looking person, with immeasurable legs. Behind the bench is a frightful old woman, of the lowest class; and before it another, younger, but repulsively ugly and vulgar, examining, in conjunction with the respectable workman—and with her brow knotted in an awful congeries of wrinkles up to her fiery hair—the hand of a little boy. This little boy, though plebeian and red-haired, is not unpleasing: he has apparently cut his hand while playing with some of the edge-tools lying about the shop; while his brother, a better-figured as well as better-behaved boy, with a hairy apron round him, is making himself useful in carrying a basin of some dark-coloured stuff—probably carpenter's glue. But let us see what the legend attached to the number says: 'And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.'—Zechariah, xiii. 6. What does this mean? It means, innocent reader, that the piece we have described in its principal features is the Holy Family of the Pre-Raphaelites! This is their mode of going to nature, selecting nothing but the mean and repulsive, and rejecting nothing but poetical and religious feeling and common decency.

But if the theory of the Pre-Raphaelites is just as regards painting, it must be just as regards the other departments of taste. Suppose it applied to musical composition. Let us throw overboard everything that degrades music to a science, and 'go to nature,' as Mr Ruskin counsels, 'rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.' What would be the result? The result would be the torture of everybody in the country who had the misfortune to possess a cultivated ear. And yet the music of that time would not be absolutely disagreeable in itself: it would merely involve the deprivation of what had become a necessary to the taste; for nature would still inspire simple sounds, connected more or less with the feelings. Nature, in fact, proceeds in music upon laws that are merely elaborated and carried out by science; while in painting, she offers an endless variety of objects and effects, to be selected, grouped, and made into a picture by the artist. We all feel this when gazing on natural scenery. We are actuated by an unconscious eclecticism, and make the composition for ourselves. To some natural scenes, no skill could impart interest of any kind; others attain to a certain character of the picturesque; while others, again, combine in themselves all the elements of a good picture. But even with these last, mere imitation will not do. Nature, as Hazlitt observes, 'has a larger canvas than man'—a canvas immensely larger; and the artist, since he cannot copy, must select. The same reasoning applies to figure and group-painting, and its accessories. Nature rarely forms a perfect group, because it is not her purpose to embody a single expression. As for small accessorial objects, such as a pin or a leaf, being painted with the same care and accuracy as principal objects, this is a defect in drawing, that argues a singular want of reflection. In nature, we see distinctly the figure and its more prominent parts, but we see the minute accessorial parts so indistinctly, that sometimes we can scarcely tell what they are. The precise detailing of these objects, therefore, may have the truth of fact, but it is destitute of the truth of nature.

What would be the effect of the new system, if applied to romantic fiction? But the question is unnecessary; for the new system ignores romance, which is the truth of nature not of fact. A pre-Raphaelite story, taken from real life, might be romantic in its incidents and striking in its catastrophe; but it would want coherence in the design, and therefore produce no sustained emotion; and its characters being drawn, without selection, from vulgar prototypes, would excite more disgust than interest. The drama?—but there the new theory of art becomes too ridiculous: a tragedy on such a plan would be received with alternate yawns of ennui and shouts of laughter. All these are pertinent questions; for fine art, in literature, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, forms a homogeneous circle under one law of taste.

It may be supposed that we are ascribing too much importance to the department of the mediæval mania under examination; but, for our part, we 'scorn nothing' that presents a bar, however slight, to the progress of civilisation and refinement. Pre-Raphaelitism is only one form of a degradation of taste which appears to keep pace with the utilities of the time, and we shall never be slow in lending our aid to cleanse the temple of its desecrators.

L.R.