Constable prophesies the Decay of English Art—The new Impulse from Italy—The English Renaissance of 1850—Rossetti and the Specialistic Temperament—Classicism of the Eighteenth Century—Influence of the French Revolution—Revival of Romance—Distinction between Mediæval and Modern Romance—Pessimism in Pre-Raphaelite Painting—Nature as a Background—Moral Significance of the Change.

A study of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England at the zenith of the nineteenth century opens up perhaps a wider field for controversy in the ethics of art than is afforded by any other phase of modern painting. Between the ridicule which, for the most part, greeted Rossetti’s first picture, “The Girlhood of Mary Virgin,” in 1849, and the enthusiastic homage which exalted him, thirty years later, to the dominance not merely of a school, but almost of a religion, lies a ground of infinite question and dispute, still awaiting the historian who shall adjust the issues of the strife to the main thought-current of the period.

“In thirty years,” said Constable in 1821, “English art will have ceased to exist.”

The words were significant of that first stirring of weariness and discontent which precedes either a collapse or a revolution. It was impossible that the conventions of the eighteenth century, persisting in pictorial art long after they had been cast off by literature, should suffice for an age which had wholly outgrown the conceptions of life on which they were founded. Landscape and portraiture, however enriched by the last gleams of a flickering classicism in the genius of a Turner, a Lawrence, or a Constable, were still in the “bondage of corruption” to traditional schools. Turner, indeed, is too great to be bracketed with his contemporaries, or with the pioneers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. He stands as much alone as Titian. But the thrall of the conventional, of the accepted canons of what should be perceived and conceived, and how things ought to look in pictures, lay yet upon English art. One other painter, a solitary and uncouth herald of the new day, holds a unique position in that transition period. Blake alone, working his fantastic will like a sanctified Rabelais run riot in all supernal things, discerned weird glimpses of the coming light; such glimpses as Chatterton, in the world of poetry, caught brokenly before the neo-romantic dawn.

Posterity may decide that the catastrophe thus prophesied by Constable was only averted by the grafting of an Italian genius upon English stock, and that to the country of the Great Renaissance England owes—at least in the field of painting—her own Renaissance of the nineteenth century. Spontaneous as was the impulse of revolt in kindred minds, and worthily as it issued in the hands of others, the supreme achievement of the Pre-Raphaelite movement abides with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Without him there might have been—and indeed was already begun—a breaking up of the old pictorial conventions; an experiment both significant and fruitful in contemporary art. Failing this ready soil, the genius brought over by Rossetti from a Latin race could hardly have been naturalized as it was in early life by interchange of thought and method with fellow-schismatics from the English schools. But whether that vital change of spirit which found its fullest expression in the Pre-Raphaelite movement would have produced anything like its present results independently of Rossetti, is a question still entangled in that injudicial partisanship of opinion from which no contemporary judgment can quite shake itself free. A final estimate of Rossetti’s debt to his comrades, and of the original and intrinsic merit both of their own work and of his, is beyond the reach of the present century. Meanwhile, a verdict of no inconsiderable weight is available in the words of Ruskin: “I believe Rosetti’s name should be placed first on the list of men who have raised and changed the spirit of modern art; raised in absolute attainment, changed in the direction of temper.”

It is easily argued that all criticism, all appreciation even, resolves itself ultimately into a question of temperament. To some minds, and these not the least discriminate, the very limitations and extravagances of Pre-Raphaelitism appeal with a peculiar force. There are whole aspects of life which Romance, if it touch, can never transfigure. The passionate, brooding loveliness of Rossetti’s women, the remote and subtle pathos of Holman Hunt, the dreamy and yet vivid tenderness of Millais’s earlier style,—these are not qualities of universal charm: they are the outcome of special moods and conditions which find neither voice nor answer save in the channels they themselves create. It is only given to a rarely catholic genius—a Shakespeare, a Handel, or a Raphael—to move, as it were, the broad currents of common feeling, and to command the general sympathies of the educated world. Artists of more distinctive and personal quality—a Shelley in poetry, a Chopin in music, or a Rossetti in painting—will rather gain each an elect circle of interpreters through whom to sway less immediately the thought of their generation; the more so since in the realm of the fine arts is felt most potently the growing tendency to specialize both thought and utterance in the tension of modern life. “Our age,” it has been aptly said, “has seen a specialization of emotions as well as of studies and industries. Let us not then expect all things from any man. Let us welcome the best representative of every mood of the mind.”^[1]

The private life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, though leaving to those who loved him an inexhaustible harvest of tender and pathetic memories, was outwardly uneventful enough, save for the one romance and tragedy of his early manhood by which he is vaguely known to the outer world. But behind the veil of recordable history, few artists have suffered greater mental vicissitudes in a lifetime of half a century, or have lived at such high spiritual pressure and imaginative strain. London-born and London-bred though he was, the force of his Italian parentage and temperament isolated him—save for a very few congenial spirits—in an alien world; and though his work in painting and poetry was largely Saxonized by training and environment, the man himself was oppressed with the burden of an imagination steeped in the very soul of mediæval Florentine romance. His whole nature was overstrung and at the mercy of physical and social “weather.” Memory, daily experience, his own conceptions and creations in design and poetry, small incidents of life woven by his own feverish brain into actual calamity, possessed him with a power simply incomprehensible to the average mind. Like Sir Bedevere, striding from ridge to ridge in Lyonness,—

At the last, his death, it has been affirmed by Mr. Theodore Watts, was due but indirectly to physical disease; primarily to the prolonged and terrible fervour of writing “The King’s Tragedy.” Out of such conditions of artistic expression came a depth and intensity of feeling incompatible with wide versatility or range of vision. Such a temperament must either specialize or achieve nothing.

But it is the business of the historian to look behind temperament towards the deep and primal impulses of a nation and a century. To him the sum of temperaments becomes the spirit of an age; or rather, the nation itself, in the grasp of the age, is conceived as a living, thinking, struggling personality; complex, problematic, self-contradictory, but strong to inspire the same loyalties, the same aspirations, as the old world found in Rome, or mediæval Europe in the great mother-cities which were at once her burden and her pride. To study a temperament like Rossetti’s in its relation to the intellectual life of the age, and to ask how such a temperament was in its turn brought to bear upon some of the problems of that life, is to be confronted with much more than a personality or a career; is to deal with a wide and crucial phase in the history of a people.

For the Pre-Raphaelite movement was much more than a revolution in the ideals and methods of painting. It was a single wave in a great reactionary tide—the ever rising protest and rebellion of our century against artificial authority, against tradition and convention in every department of life. It broke out, socially, with the French Revolution; it found voice in the poetic impulse which followed it in Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats; it spread from ethics to politics, it touched all morality and all knowledge, and it affected the whole literature of Europe from philosophy to fiction and from the drama to the lyric poem. Schumann and Chopin breathed it into music; Darwin, re-forming the world of science, laid in the doctrine of evolution the foundations of the new cosmogony. It remained for painting, the youngest of the arts, to enter last into the van of progress and take its stand against the classic and orthodox scholasticism now discredited and void.

Not that the classicism of eighteenth century art was without a beauty and a meaning of its own. It was at least the relic of a noble ideal, the outworn garment of a spirit once vigorous and sincere. The true classic temper—the mental ordering of the visible world into types and models according to academic rule—is the natural outgrowth of man’s effort to select and classify those objects around him which it gives him pleasure to contemplate. The “choosing-spirit” of an age—its preference for certain aspects of life and indifference to other aspects—embodies itself in set forms and modes of artistic expression which are accepted by that age as sufficient and final, and stereotyped by common usage into conventions from which, in the progress of a growing people, all vitality gradually ebbs away. Just as in science or philosophy the theories and methods of authoritative men are established as “classic” till fresh facts and fresh problems come to light, so in literature, in music, and in painting, certain types and modes are adopted by general consent as the fit vehicles for the thought to be expressed, and these persist, by force of authority and usage, into a new age bringing new ideas into play and seeing the subject-matter of all art—namely life itself—in a new light. Thus the accepted canons of art, which were at first the natural reflection of the highest culture of the period, become at last the barren dogmas of an outgrown habit of mind. The thought of the people has outrun the language of the schools. The strife of the new thought with the old language is begun.

Such a strife it was that came upon the western world under the outward turmoil of the French Revolution. Europe was in the mood for great reactions. The vast and sordid materialism of the eighteenth century, with its prodigious hypocrisies and its flippant sensuality,—its sentimentality even, which, as Heine reminds us, is always a product of materialism—was rudely broken up. The disruption of the settled order of worldly things awoke men’s dormant questions as to the divine order of things, the moral government of the universe. Or rather, the rejection of external authority was but the evidence of the rejection of authority within—the rejection of traditional standards of right and wrong, beauty and happiness, wisdom and truth; and the demand for new standards for the criticism of life, for new ethics, new ideals, new gods.

Now the pure and lofty classicism of the seventeenth century, as exemplified supremely in the poetry of Milton, was saved from materialism by the robust piety of a Puritan world. It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the accession of imperial and commercial power brought with it a certain coarsening of the moral fibre of the nation, that the “grand” style became petrified, as it always tends to do, into the grandiose. A people nurtured in the somewhat tawdry luxury of the Hanoverian period was not likely to take very serious views of life, but was well content with superficial philosophies. In the blaze of outward prosperity the inward vision grew dim. Art became the slave of tradition instead of the handmaid of a living will.

Then the great wave of rebellion, surging through the life of Europe, swept into the deep backwaters of imaginative and creative thought. Men born into the storm and stress of revolution, and confronted with the great problems of practical life, were driven back to question ultimate things; were thrown once more upon the spiritual world. And as the outward struggle spent itself, its full significance weighed more upon the peoples. The deep charm of the contemplative, the reflective, the critical, fell once more upon the European mind.

So the “classic” temper—the love of order and authority (degraded at last into mere acceptance of tradition and rule)—gave place to the “romantic” temper,—the temper of enquiry and experiment, the sense of the mystery and the reality of life, the openness of the mind towards spiritual things. And with this new consciousness of the invisible world and all its significance upon the life of man, comes the utter discarding of self-consciousness; the repudiation of “pose.” Life has become too real for attitudinizing.

The first result of this change of spirit upon the art of a nation appears in the choice of subject for artistic treatment. The painter begins to portray not merely things and persons but incidents and conditions; to picture men and women as they are in actual life; in short, to state the problems fairly; to see facts and examine circumstances, in order to reach the solutions and the meanings, vaguely guessed and earnestly desired by the soul awakened to the perception of the supernatural and the divine. This was the initial task of the neo-romantic revival; in this lay the primary significance of the new school of painting which appeared soon after the year 1845 on English exhibition walls.

And to do this it became necessary to set out, as it were, the terms on which life is lived; to deal not merely with the beauty which man loves and the joy which he desires, but also with the stern conditions of their attainment. The struggle between the present evil and the recognized good, the conflict of the soul with earthly bonds, Love baffled in dire cross-currents of fate and duty, or wasted and despoiled in sin, Faith shaken by the storms of circumstance, Hope bowed down before the closing doors of death; and, on the other hand, the glory of consummated joys (though never without the under-thought of their transiency), or the strength of human fidelity and endurance—these are the themes of the second renaissance.

It is hardly surprising that the considerable class of critics (more numerous in the eighteen-forties than to-day) to whom all seriousness is melancholy and all mystery painful, should have dismissed much of the Pre-Raphaelite work under the inaccurate label of “pessimism.” To bring the mood of awe, of sadness, of perplexity, into art at all, and more especially to present serious themes with the directness of familiar life, and without the stage-craft glamour of the heroic and the exceptional, is, in the judgment of such persons, to be indisputably a pessimist. Yet from this standpoint we should have to exclude no small part of the greatest art the world has ever seen. If we accept Heine’s dictum that no man is truly a man until he suffers, we shall call no nation great in art until it is great in tragedy. There comes with every awakening of an age (whether in ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, or mediæval Italy) to problems new to the world at large, or which the preceding age had lost sight of, a straining of the vision towards ultimate meanings and purposes. And the cry for light is answered often by a lurid dawn.

But the temper of Pre-Raphaelitism differs both from that of Greek tragedy (in being essentially romantic and ascetic), and from the mediæval mysticism of which it is to some extent a revival. However sincerely Rossetti and his comrades may have found their inspiration in the early and purest period of the Italian Renaissance (as we shall have to consider in examining the name “Pre-Raphaelite”), it was impossible, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to return absolutely to the mediæval habit of mind. All that was best in the romance of the middle ages, the passionate idealism, the abiding sense of the reality of the unseen, the self-abandonment of devotion to the transcendental and the super-sensuous life, the exquisite childlikeness of spirit which comes of the highest maturity—all these indeed were regained, but with a difference. For the enigma of the universe, regarded by the mediæval world as a mystery of faith, has come upon our own age rather as a mystery of doubt. The silence of the natural world towards man’s eagerest questionings of the Power behind it, was to those pious souls only the holy reticence of an all-wise and all-sufficient God. They accepted with a brave resignation what the modern world endures with a no less courageous but far less trustful mind.

Therefore the much-debated mysticism of the Pre-Raphaelite School carries with it a deeper sombreness than that of a purely mediæval type, and makes the relations between man and external Nature more problematic and obscure. The sense of the impassive irony of Nature behind the little drama of man’s life on earth comes again and again into the dim vistas of landscape behind Rossetti’s loveliest women, and into the mingling of scenic grandeur with an atmosphere of desolation in some of the backgrounds of Holman Hunt. Even Millais, the least subjective of the Brotherhood, achieves, in “The Vale of Rest,” something of that subtle contrast, half discord and half harmony, between the glory and absolute peace of sunset and the dumb unquestionable night of death foreshadowed in the open grave. The classic method of rendering natural background to human tragedy is rather to adjust the mood of Nature to the subject in hand; to depict natural forces either as warring (as in Turner) in the blind anger and fury of the elements against man, or assuming an aspect in harmony with his own pain. But the romantic method finds more tragedy in the ironic beauty and indifference of Nature in the face of human vicissitude, and comes nearer to tears than the affectation of dramatic sympathy; just as, in great crises of suffering and doubt, no anger wounds us so deeply as a smile.

Of this special phase of nature-feeling, a later artist, of strong affinity of spirit with certain undercurrents of Pre-Raphaelite thought—Frederick Walker—is perhaps a greater exponent. But the old-world Nature-worship, independent of human interest and moral significance, is as dead in art as it is in science. Unconsciously perhaps, but surely, art in all its forms has cast off the yoke of the old cosmogony which the implacable Time-Spirit has overthrown. The criticism of life has passed from the self-satisfied, the confident, the epicurean, to the reflective, the questioning, and the experimental stage.

Where, then, is the secret of the changed attitude of English culture towards the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood? What was it that was actually accomplished by this little band of young reformers with their visions of a world of beauty and meaning undreamed of in Royal Academy philosophy? The controversy that raged for years round the work of the leaders—least of all round that of Millais, more round that of Holman Hunt, and most bitterly round the work of Rossetti—was it primarily over a technical question, a matter of pigments and perspective, of anatomy and composition? If so, the house was divided against itself and should have fallen, for Millais soon forsook (if indeed he ever adopted) the path of his early comrades, and a total divergence in method and manner finally separated Rossetti from Holman Hunt. Or was it concerned with underlying principles and purposes with which English culture had not for three hundred years been troubled? Was it essentially an ethical revolt; the first impulse towards that fusion of ethics with æsthetics which will be the task of the twentieth century; the inmost stirring, at the nation’s heart, of a new life which the intellect still fails to lay hold of, and the laggard will, for the most part, yet resists?