ARTISTS WITH THEORIES, CONVICTIONS,

M

AND PRINCIPLES

R. HOLMAN HUNT'S extraordinary autobiography gives the first official, and from one point of view, trustworthy✶ account of the Pre-Raphaelite movement that of 1847-48. The book is intended to give such an account; for its title is "Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." There is no attempt made here to criticise that book in any way; but its strongly personal character will be clear to every person who reads this or any other series of thoughts drawn from its pages. The preface and the text of the volumes read as if the writer had addressed only a little group of persons who would understand him at a word, and would believe him without the necessity of proof or even demonstration; and who take his point of view in everything.

I

SOME words of the preface are worth quoting, because they immediately introduce the subject of this paper, and tell us in the briefest and most positive way what is to be noted in the first place in any record of Pre-Raphaelite theories and Pre-Raphaelite aims. There has been, in that preface, allusion to the great and long-continued labor required to make a thorough painter, and Burne-Jones has been quoted as having said that "at least three hundred years" are needed to attain maturity in art. Then follow these sentences:

"The Greeks, the Romans, and the Italians eked out their short span of personal observation and experience by handing on their acquired wisdom to their pupils, and so extended individual life, and thus more surely reached the goal of their ambition. I hope to convince my readers that every student of art in the past was loyal to his own nationality, and that in these days men of British blood, whether of insular birth or of the homes beyond the seas, should not subject themselves to the influence of masters alien to the sentiments and principles of the great English poets and thinkers.

*I do not ignore Mr. Harry Quilter's sketch in "Pref. erences, nor Mr. Bate's rather careful study in "The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters," nor the several papers of Mr. W. M. Rossetti.

"It was matter for caution even in the days when the sober high purposes of Continental masters insured the cultivation of correctness and respect for questions of common sense; but now that these qualities are ridiculed and put aside, there is greater reason for regarding foreign training as most pernicious and altogether to be shunned by students of the race to which Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and the great fathers of our own art belonged."

We have, then, to begin with, this point established: the ambition of at least this one Pre-Raphaelite (and he speaks for his associates as well) was to shut up England and English art within its own bounds; and he was still of that mind when he was putting this book into final shape. He believed in being as English as possible; and as in 1847 he disbelieved in the then contemporary art of the Continent, so when he wrote his preface (very recently, for his book is dated 1905) he was of the same mind, confirming and restating his views of sixty years before, and applying them to the art of the Continent as we have known it from 1870 to 1905. Now, when we think of what was in 1847 the contemporary art of the Continent, and that he was looking at it from the island kingdom without unusually strong perspective glasses of foresight and insight, we can see that he was partly in the right. Let us suppose that we are in England in 1847—"the Continent" must have seemed asleep; or that we are in 1848, and all is revolution, violence, political and social unrest; or that we are in 1849, the French Revolution of the previous year having resulted in a tentative republic, and the feeble revolts in other states all crushed. We have to look at, in our English cities, now and then a picture by Horace Vernet, or one by Rosa Bonheur, or perhaps by Paul Delaroche. Pictures by Ingres, by Couture, by Delacroix are hardly known. Ary Scheffer, indeed, exhibits in London; but his pictures would hardly take captive the imagination, or bid Englishmen follow him. There is no daily practice of photography ready to furnish monochromatic reproductions of paintings, no annual volumes of Le Salon, full of photogravures; there are only rare and very brief runs to Paris for the poor young

artists who have grown up despising the Continental art. Let us try to imagine how it would be, even to-day, if we were to take as the successor of Horace Vernet either Édouard Detaille or Alphonse de Neuville; if we should take as the successor of Paul Delaroche, perhaps, J. P. Laurens; if we take, to stand for Scheffer, the famous Bouguereau. Those suggestions are not unfair, for though the military painters named are certainly far superior to Horace Vernet in artistic importance, they are not the more adequately the representatives of a contemporary art. As for Laurens-if he is not the equal of Delaroche in moral purpose, he is his superior in knowledge and in the variety of subjects drawn from the archives of the past. Whom to name as the equivalent of Rosa Bonheur it is not easy and not important to decide. The point is that the Continental painters shown to the English would be of the technically efficient but hardly spirit-stirring class, and that those uninspired painters would not commend themselves to young Englishmen of the purist school, of the nationalist school, of the exclusive spirit which would set severe limitations to art. Or, suppose that one of Gérôme's pictures of 1848 came to London in the following year; what would young Englishmen of very earnest purpose think of "Innocence," or of "Jeunes Grecs excitant des Coqs à combattre"? What a hateful picture, in subject and in technic, would it have been to them!

There was, indeed, the tremendous power and tragedy of Géricault, who had died twenty years before-but then Géricault dealt with painful subjects, which to this day the English critic holds up to the horror of the English reader. Couture's "Les Romains de la décadence" is passed upon by Hunt, who saw it in Paris in 1849-50, as the work of a man "without the breath of life in his nostrils."

We have also Hunt's recollections of Ingres and Delacroix, as counting little with him, though his companion, Rossetti, was pleased with Delacroix. And behind these men very new men in 1847-who was there? There was Baron Gros; there was David, with the dull classicality shown in his more grandiose pictures, and a horror equal to that of Géricault's choice in his more personal conceptions-the death of Marat, for instance.

Let us not once suppose that this English shrinking from Continental subjects of

thought and Continental pictures is at all peculiar to half a century ago. It is not so very long since the Spectator quoted from a Paris journal, which had sent its correspondent to the annual exhibition of the Royal Academy; the correspondent had looked with amazement at the placid English pictures with their absence of historical verity when disagreeable, and their absence of modern allusion when either cynical or sad. And his comment was to the effect, that the English pictures represented only La Reine-Le Lor Maire— Le Sunday-school—Monsieur, Madame et Bébé. The Spectator quoted those words and then made its own remark upon them, that "somehow or other they seemed to us like praise." Well, to say that that comment sounded like praise was to accept—was it not? the suggestion that these and others like them were the proper subjects for modern art. Tranquil English royalty living at Windsor and walking on "the slopes," perfunctory English officials embodied in the highly decorative and traditional lord mayor, innocent English people, described by the French phrase then newly launched by Gustav Droz; those were the fitting subjects of art, rather than what Hunt found in Paris and described in these terms (vol. i, p. 186): "Nothing to make intelligible the axiom that 'art is love.' The startling antithesis proclaimed that art is hatred, war, murder, lust, pride, and egoism." That very "axiom," "Art is love" seems to involve denial of the possible assertion that art is life; but it is closely related to the primal assumption that art is local patriotism.

II

THERE was another influence which told as strongly for the Pre-Raphaelite line of thought as did that shrinking of the untravelled middle-class Englishman from foreign ways and foreign views. It was the worship of fifteenth-century Italy as seen in its art and as inferred from its art. Fifteenth-century Italy was to these enthusiastic students of early, even of archaic methods of painting, a kind of half-made paradise. Ruskin had printed, or was about to print (it is indiffer. ent) those phrases of his about the mediæval life of Pisa, in which the ladies and the knights are glorified, are treated as living an ideal human life, are held up with reproachful comparisons to the inhabitants of the ugly nineteenth-century cities. And there are

words to this effect, that the pleasures of the Middle Ages were stained with blood, indeed, but that "ours" were gray with dust: a spirited comparison, not without a truth concealed in it. But this idealized Middle Age had led up to the fifteenth century, and the painters Lippi, Botticelli, Filippino, Paolo Uccello, Cosmo Rosselli, and Benozzi Gozzoli gave to the young English students such a foretaste of religious joys, angelic purity, and heavenly peace that the whole epoch in which those men had painted seemed half divine, and the men of the epoch prophets and apostles of a nobler society than the one they knew. In a way, then, the nineteenthcentury Englishman of puritan habit of mind accepted the Florentine religious painter of the fifteenth century as his master in artistic thought, and in all such religious belief and religious aspiration as could be expressed in

As a third influence in the building up of Pre-Raphaelitism we find the love of the Middle Ages; their architecture, their picturesque forms of decorative art, and the possible expression of their thought in modern painting and drawing. How far this strongly marked tendency came of the study of Gothic architecture, as a primary cause, and how far that architectural movement itself, the “Gothic revival" of those very years, was but a part of the same new-born desire to study the thirteenth century and the years which followed it, it would take too much space to consider. A sincere love of the English cathedrals and parish churches, and of the ruined abbeys of the north with their picturesque decay; the rejection of dull eighteenth-century street architecture, as seen in the stuccoed houses of London; a longing for vigorous colors and strongly outlined patterns; the growing idea that the unequalled logic and rationality of Gothic architecture were in some way virtuous-even religious; all these processes of thought taken to

gether were needed to make up the strong mediævalism shown by the earlier compositions of Hunt, Rossetti, Millais, Collinson, Lawless, Hughes, Jones-pictures mentioned in another connection-by Rossetti's very early poems, "The Blessed Damozel" and "The Staff and Scrip," and by such poetry of William Morris as was published afterward, in 1858, in the volume called "The Defence of Guenevere."

IV

CLOSELY Connected at once with mediævalism and with the worship of the Italian painters of the fifteenth century there is to be noted a constant reference to ecclesiology. Thus the incidents of the Bible and some scenes of legendary church history appealed to the minds of Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais, in their youth, with a living intensity, only to be expressed by giving to their designs the concentrated force which they could put into new versions of the familiar ecclesiastical treatment. "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," the Annunciation picture known as "Ecce Ancilla Domini," the powerful drawing of Mary Magdalen at the house of Simon, are pictures in which are reflected the sentiment as well as the emblems and attributes of the Roman Catholic Church, as seen in the Italian pictures on the one hand, and as seen in the English Church windows on the other hand. One would not deny to Rossetti his white lily springing from a vase in "The Girlhood of Mary" or embroidered on the silk which the handmaid of the Lord has hung over the screen at the bed's foot; that flower is emblematic of the mother of Christ, and the love of significant allusion, always prominent among English artists from Hogarth's time down, must be allowed its way in this and other such incidents. So in the celebrated "Christ in the House of His Parents," by Millais, and "The Shadow of the Cross," by Hunt, the canvas is crowded with allusion to the Scripture narrative, and also to the emblems accepted by the early Church. The ecclesiological look may not exist in the picture, it may not remind you of a mediæval window, it may be, as the two pictures last above named are, a real-seeming narrative painting, and yet the church feeling is seen throughout. If you look into the details, the objects which are put into the picture, and are placed and grouped as they are placed and grouped, you see that all is done

with most deliberate purpose, to produce an emblematical design. The chief of these pictures is, I think, "The Light of the World," and in this is seen intense religious fervor, mediæval feeling, or the desire to have and to express such feeling, and the evident reference of the artistic conception to Italian work of the fifteenth century.

V

THERE was, moreover, the desire for realistic drawing of the figure, for natural pose, natural gesture--natural action, in short, in all figure subjects. This desire was modified by the early Italian influence already mentioned, and also by the influence of mediævalism, as explained above; but it remains evident in all Pre-Raphaelite work. Now it is curious to think that this desire for realistic verity in drawing would have been gratified by those French painters of the day whom the Pre-Raphaelites despised without knowing them. There is a difference between the realism of the Paris-taught Frenchman, with all his examples classical in their character, with all his traditions bound up with Raphael and the followers of Raphael, and the Pre-Raphaelite idea of it founded upon the more perfect of the Gothic sculptures in cathedral porches, together with some hints taken from paintings in manuscripts. And yet it would seem clear that the same artist who turned from Géricault, offended by the violence and misery seen in "Le Radeau de la Méduse" in the Louvre, would have found in that master and in Couture, and even in Delaroche-even in the contemned Vernet-as much reality of gesture and truth of pose as pictorial art will allow. This search for natural-seeming attitudes and for the appearance of movement in a picture has a larger significance than at first appears. The scores of Pre-Raphaelite pictures given in photographic plates in P. H. Bate's book and Harry Quilter's book named in the footnote above, in W. M. Rossetti's "Ruskin and Rossetti" papers brought together in 1899, in McColl's "Nineteenth Century Art," and in Mr. Hunt's two volumes. all agree in pointing to a love and longing for intensity, for strenuous emphasis, even if it should lead to violence. In the Tennyson of 1859 (the most accessible collection of PreRaphaelite work, because, though the originai is rare, there is a good reissue) Millais' illus

And in

trations to "The Miller's Daughter," the designs for "The Talking Oak," and, still better, his "Mariana" are even more clumsily managed than is necessary for truth. In the effort to avoid affectation grace of line has been rejected. What is good in the striving for verity is, then, the carefully imagined action. "Imagined" is the word, for the situation has been pictured in the artist's imagination before it was drawn on the block. this matter of verity got by imaginative treatment, Millais' designs in this book are to be compared to those, also in this book, by J. C. Horsley, and by those of Maclise, who was certainly, of all famous and admired painters, the most feeble in his way of telling a story, presenting an incident, displaying a scene. Now, Millais' directness of insight and readiness of expression, his frank way of telling what he has to tell, were not by themselves technically Pre-Raphaelite, as is shown by his retaining them while he left the peculiarities of the clique behind him. In the hands of Holman Hunt realism of movement, of action, is a different thing. To him comes that strong desire to mingle realism with mediævalism which we have many occasions to notice as we look through the designs of the Pre-Raphaelites. Thus in the Tennyson the two illustrations to "Oriana" are worked out with great care, the very strange scale coat of armor, winged helmet, and short bow as of a horseman, and the action of the lover, and in the first the action of the lady, are taken from life as accurately and even as imaginatively as anything in the work of Millais; while yet the whole picture is, in each case, steeped in an atmosphere of quaintness, of remoteness, of an undated epoch, and of manners made up of the traditions of different races of men. Let all these works be compared with the Maclise illustration to the "Morte D'Arthur," with its feeble drawing and still more feeble conception: and the contrast will be made out very much as if the publishers had wished to favor the Pre-Raphaelites at the expense of their fellow-draughtsmen of the older school.

VI

THE question of fidelity to nature remains, and must be left for another occasion. There are many kinds of "truth in art,” and it is interesting to test one kind by the others. RUSSELL STURGIS.