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CHRISTIAN ART
AND SYMBOLISM,
WITH SOME HINTS ON
THE STUDY OF LANDSCAPE.
t;  BY THE
REV. R' ST JOHN TYRWHITT,
FORMERLY STUDENT AND RHETORIC READER OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.
LONDON:
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE.
i872.


[ALL RIGHTS RESERVRD.]




p\J
Th3C
TF:Dc9.




ADVERTISEMENT.


THESE papers were delivered as Lectures during
the Winter and Spring of 187I-2, at Winchester,
Bradford, and Halifax. They have been freed, in
great measure, from local allusions, and I have
reason to hope that they may have enough of general
interest to make them acceptable to a tolerably wide
circle of readers in their present form.
The autotype of the Delphic Sibyl suffers by
reduction, but is sufficient for its purpose. It should
be held well off from the eye, like all other small
works, till the reader has found his own best
focus.
It will be seen that the quotation from Professor
Max Muller at p. 204, relating to the spread of the
Reformation among the German peasantry and lower
clergy, is connected with the beginning, not with the
end, of Lecture VI.
R. ST. J. T.
Ketilby, Oxford, i6th April, I872.
294866




I
i
I
I
I
II
I
II
i




CONTENTS.


LECTURE


I


PREFACE,         BY    PROFESSOR           JOHN       RUSKIN...................................
I.     INTRODUCTORY.........................................................................................
II.     GREEK        AND     CHRISTIAN          ART............................................................
III.      ITALIAN       ART-HISTORY......................................................................
IV. FLORENTINE SUCCESSION OF PAINTERS AND HISTORY
OF    SYMBOLISM            AND     THE      GROTESQUE..............................
V.      RAFAEL        AND      M  ICHAEL        ANGELO..................................................
VI.      DiURER       AND      HOLBEIN...........................................................................
VII.       LANDSCAPE           SKETCHING...................................................................
VIII.        POETRY        OF    LANDSCAPE...............................................................
XI.      ART,      CRAFT,        AND      SCHOOLS.........................................................
MEMORIAL           CHART....................................................... To face page


'AGE
ix
I
34
70


Io6
139
172
205
237
262
292




'Viii


CONTENTS.


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE DELPHIC         SYBIL OF MICHAEL ANGELO............... To face Title
THESEUS OF PHIDIAS.................................................................... To face page  41
I.   THE VINE.        EARLIEST CHRISTIAN ART...............................  66
2.   THE VINE.         TRANSITIONAL............................................  67
3.   THE VINE.         BYZANTINE................................................................................  67
BYZANTINE CAPITAL, RAVENNA............................................. Tofaepage         78
NOAH-CALLIXTINE CATACOMB................................................. 128
T HE    LOM  BARD      N OAH.............................................................................................  128




PREFACE.


BY PROFESSOR JOHN RUSKIN.
THE writer of this book has long been my friend,
and in the early days of friendship was my disciple.
But, of late, I have been his; for he has devoted
himself earnestly to the study of forms of Christian
Art which I have had little opportunity of examining, and has been animated in that study by a
brightness of enthusiasm which has been long impossible to me.
Knowing this, and that he was able perfectly to
fill what must otherwise have been a rudely bridged
chasm in my teaching at Oxford, I begged him to
give these lectures; and to arrange them for press.
And this he has done to please me; and now that
it is done, I am - in one sense - anything but
pleased: for I like his writing better than my own,
and am more jealous of it than I thought it was




x


PREFA CE.


in me to be of any good work-how much less
of my friend's! I console myself by reflecting, or
at least by repeating to myself, and endeavouring
to think, that he could not have found all this
out if I had not shown him the way. But most
deeply and seriously I am thankful for such help,
in a work far too great for my present strength;help all the more precious, because my friend can
bring to the investigation of early Christian Art,
and its influences, the integrity and calmness of the
faith in which it was wrought. Happier than I, in
having been a personal comforter and helper of
men, fulfilling his life in daily and unquestionable
duty; while I have been, perhaps wrongly-always
hesitatingly,-persuading myself that it was my duty
to do the things that pleased me.
Also, it has been necessary to much of my
analytical work that I should regard the Art of
every nation as much as possible from their own
national point of view; and I have striven so earnestly
to realize belief which I supposed to be false, and
sentiment which was foreign to my temper, that, at
last I scarcely know how far I think with other
people's minds, and see with any one's eyes but my
own. Even the effort to recover my temporarily
waived conviction occasionally fails; and what was




PREFA CE.


xi


once securest to me becomes theoretical, like the
rest. But my old scholar has 4been protected by his
definitely directed life, from the temptations of this
speculative equity; and I believe his writings to contain the truest expression yet given in England of the
feelings with which a Christian gentleman of sense
and learning should regard the art produced, in
ancient days, by the dawn of the faiths which still
guide his conduct, and secure his peace.
On all the general principles of Art, Mr. Tyrwhitt
and I are absolutely at one; but he has often the
better of me by his acute personal knowledge of
men and their ways. When we differ in our thoughts
of things, it is because we know them on contrary
sides; and often, his side is that most naturally seen,
and which it is most desirable to see. There is one
important matter, for instance, on which we are thus
apparently at issue, and yet are not so in reality.
These lectures show, throughout, the most beautiful
and just reverence for Michael Angelo, and are of
especial value in their account of him: while the
last lecture on Sculpture, which I gave at Oxford,
is entirely devoted to examining the modes in which
his genius itself failed, and perverted that of other
men. But Michael Angelo is great enough to make
praise and blame alike necessary, and alike inade



Xii


PREFA CE.


quate, in any true record of him. My friend sees him
as a traveller sees froma distance some noble mountain
range, obscure in golden clouds and purple shade;
and I see him as a sullen miner would the same
mountains, wandering among their precipices through
chill of storm and snow, and discerning that their
strength was perilous, and their substance sterile.
Both of us see truly-both partially; the complete
truth is in the witness of both.
The notices of Holbein, and of the English whom
he painted, (see especially the sketch of Sir Thomas
Wyatt in the sixth lecture>, are to my mind of singular
value; and the tenor of the book throughout, as far
as I can judge, for, as I said, much of it treats of
subjects with which I am unfamiliar, so sound, and
the feeling in it so warm and true, and true in the
warmth of it, that it refreshes me like sight of the
things themselves it speaks of. New and vivid sight
of them it will give to many readers; and to all who
will regard my commendation I commend it; asking
those who have hitherto credited my teaching to read
these lectures as they would my own; and trusting
that others, who have doubted me, will see reason to
put faith in my friend.


Pisa, 30th April, I872.




CHRISTIAN ART
AND
SYMBOLISM.
LECTURE I.
INTR OD UCTOR Y.
THOUGH doing is preferable to talking in all practical sciences, and though more knowledge of art
would, probably, be gained by copying an oak
branch, or a mossy stone, or a cast of the Torso,
under proper inspection, than by reading these
papers-still a certain amount of speech is necessary
to art now and then; because people require to
have their attention faithfully drawn to it. No doubt
reading will not make even a competent critic
without careful observation of nature, at the least;
and some manual skill is felt to be necessary to him,
I




2    CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


by all the painters on whom he is to express an
opinion; partly because it enables him to understand
the difficulties they contend with; and partly because
it sharpens his powers of observation, and teaches him
to appreciate their execution. And appearing here
in the character of critic, I should like to introduce what the French call a pihce justificative,
about that generally- objectionable race of men.
Mr. Phcebus says that critics are the men who have
failed in art or literature. Balzac said it at first of
St. Beuve-and, of course, it annoyed St. Beuve
very much, which was all it was intended to do.
But none of all the epigrams in Lothair was more
delightfully pungent than this saying or quotation,
which annoyed a class of men whom all the world is
glad to see annoyed, and produced an effect, in the
daily and weekly press, like that of firing a
blunderbuss into a rookery. But it is quite true.
Nobody can be either poet, painter, or critic, till
he has made a great many failures, in the first place.
Then in art a good second-rate man, well skilled in
technicalities, and generally well educated, will be
a better critic, on the whole, than a great genius who
has enough to do to think his own thoughts without,
minding his contemporaries, and who frequently
refuses to talk about his work at all. But what is




INTR ODUCTOR Y.


3


failure? Does any man ever succeed in doing all
he wants to do as well as it can be done? and does
he also succeed in getting all the world to acknowledge his success? Because anything short of that is
failure; and in intellectual works of high aim, you
never can tell how long a time may be required
for success. Then if intellectual success means what
I think it does mean, namely, communicating your
ideas to other men so as to make them understand
you, and think with you; then many men have a
great deal of real success, who are failures in point of
6clat or profit. The fact is, want of success is a varying, uncertain matter, and may be usefully divided
into failures to do anything good, and failures to get
anything good. Let us be thankful, at all events,
that the many of us who fail in the latter way are
not necessarily of those who fail in the former.  But
in both poetry and painting, almost every man may
be said to reach his point of failure. He may use
his capacity to the utmost, but at last he can do no
more, he finds something absolutely beyond him. A
man may write a small volume of good verse with
some passion, some new thought and scholarly
English in it; but such a person fails as a poet if he
can't go on with it, and keep it up, and express the
thoughts of his life in rhythmic and musical. form,




4     CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.
I daresay many well-taught ladies are capable, like the
mighty men of old in the Apocrypha, of inventing
musical tunes, or composing a pretty air now and
then. But that is very different from the sustained
production of Schumann, whose suffering life was
endurable only because it expressed its whole sad
course in harmonies. Quantity must tell: there are
hogsheads of claret, and there are sample bottles.
Consider the amount of writing which Carlyle
and Browning went through-both of them being
men who put their hearts into everything, never
spared labour, never gave except of their best
-consider the vast productions of those two minds,
before either obtained what is called success. Why
they are not successful men now in one sense; for
neither of them has got or been made anything, except
in university distinctions, and such like barren honour;
but I do not suppose their admirers will think they
need much more.
Again, it is of the nature of failure not to improve as one goes on, not to gather strength with
years and labour. I suppose, in fact, every man who
combines common sense with high aspiration, must
have the full sensation of failure when he looks at
his own deeds, and the sum of his ways, and compares them with his ideal; or even with what they




INTROD UCTOR Y.


5


might actually have been. I am sure every good
Christian must feel thus: assuredly, it is better in the
end for a man to own himself an unprofitable servant.
But, in painting, I should be inclined to say a man
has failed, and died away in the race, when he
begins to repeat himself, and multiply his works for
money; not pressing on to do better things, or even
to do things better. Many men, highly successful
as far as money goes, I should call failures, because
they are untrue to their genius. Life is a long race,
and the stayers have the best of it after all: those
who run the longest, who continue to have and to
follow fresh inspirations, doing their best for the
best's sake.  It is this pressing on to the prize
unseen: it is this steady pursuit of the ideal: it is
this sense of the craftsman's honour: it is this
desire to do work, if possible, better than ever it was
done before, or if not, better than one ever yet did
it oneself, which brings the pursuit of Art into
such close relation with the Spiritual or Religious
life. No doubt that Art is the working of an
excellent spirit in man: it needs faith in that
which is unseen: it is the pursuit of a good which
never will be reached in this world; and so far it
is a phase of spiritual life. I cannot avoid noticing
its close analogy with that universal, spiritual race




6    CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


or progress which is open to the weak, as well as the
mighty, and which bids all alike, so run that they
may obtain.
In a few words, it is quite true that it is easier
to talk than to do, and that many people talk and
criticise who cannot draw, or who have tried and
failed; or who have not made progress enough to give
them proper judgment or authority. You cannot
stop them in a free country; and the real cure for
bad criticism is to encourage competent and honest
criticism. I never had the honour of being connected with any newspaper; but I presume that if
the public did not demand sharp spiteful articles,
journalists would not write them; and that the best
way of discouraging facetious ignorance, is not to
read it. But a poet may view a painter as a brother
poet or creator, and analyse or criticise the thoughts
he expresses, to excellent purpose. Rogers's tribute
to Michael Angelo, and Browning's analysis of
Fillippo Lippi are of the highest artistic value, though
neither of them can be called practical painters. Their
criticisms express intelligent sympathy with another's
thoughts, and they make no comment on his technical methods.
The fact is, all criticism is a free fight; but when
it gets serious, and "the bills step forth, and the




INTROD UCTOR Y.


7


bows go back," the Anonymi and Pseudonymi disperse. When men who are not ashamed of their
names meet in earnest, right is generally done,
after some smiting.  But there is no doubt that
if you are to criticise the technique of pictures, you
ought, at least, to have tried to draw: because
nothing else can give you an idea, either of the
difficulty of the subject, or of its interest, or of
the immense difference between works of fine hand,
perception, and purpose, and slovenly, coarse, or
false work. For quick work is often most delicate;
and one of the most laborious and consummate
workmen who ever lived, Holman Hunt, is also
most rapid in his execution.
And, indeed, you cannot really observe, without
drawing-I mean that an ordinary person commonly
occupied cannot. Wordsworth did so, with preRafaelite accuracy, when he wrote of the beauty of
the daisy's star-shaped shadow "thrown on the rude
surface of the naked stone."  Scott was. a noble
colourist; and in the humbler walks of life I know
farm-servants, keepers, and gillies who make excellent use of those habits of watching the outer face
of nature, which their life enforces on them; they are
naturalists, if not artists, in feeling. But no one
can for a moment doubt the use of drawing to a




8    CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


naturalist, because it not only enables him to record
his observations, but helps him to observe minutely
and correctly. All the Arts and Sciences depend
more from year to year on illustration. When you
have seen a picture of a thing, your idea about it is
better than it would have been from mere description-that is truism. All who are used to drawing
will agree that you see very much more in a thing
when you begin to draw it, than you saw before you
began. And anybody who has never attempted to
draw a natural object will find, whenever he does so,
that the humblest bit of nature has more in it than
he thought.  I suppose that a hen's egg is a very
simple and humble natural object: it is one of the
first things generally given pupils to copy in light
and shade. Before you begin to draw it you just
see it is an egg, and hope it is a fresh one. When
you begin, you notice first its whiteness, the oval line
which limits that whiteness, and beauty in that oval;
then the rounding or structural shade of that oval
whiteness; then the cast shadow, and darker objects
behind, which produce the effect of whiteness, and
the gradations which produce the effect of rounding
on your eye. The attempt at imitating all these
qualities makes you see them more and more
clearly. That is a lesson of observation by means




INTRODUCTORY.


9


of drawing, and it cannot be had without drawing.
A great deal is said about the hand obeying the
eye; but the fact is, that a good hand is like
a good servant, and educates the eye in its post
of command.    There is nothing like touch; all
skilled work depends upon it; it is the result
of harmonious action between the hand, which
feels and presses, and the eye which watches and
reports simultaneously to the spirit.  That is why
copies are inferior to originals; because in the
latter you have the master's hand and eye working together in the action of self-expression. "In
Italy," says Nathaniel Hawthorne (Transformation,
p. 95), "it is not quite satisfactory to think that a
sculptor has very little to do with the power of
actually chiselling the marble. There is a class of
men who do it for him with exquisite mechanical
skill. In no other art, surely, does genius find such
effective instruments, and so happily relieve itself
of the drudgery of actual performance. The admi.
ration which our artists get for buttons, button-holes,
shoe-ties, and neckcloths, at our present epoch of
taste, makes a large share of their renown. It would
be abated if we were generally aware that the sculptor can claim no credit for these pretty things.
They are not his work, but that of some nameless




Io   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


machine in human shape."   This passage is, I
believe, literally true, and its quiet irony shows what
a good art-critic the author would have madeand indeed actually was-without technical knowledge. Of course, the hand of the master is everything. Who would ever think of polishing the rough
chiselling from the face of Michael Angelo's Day or
Twilight?
Artistic touch is really the expression of one of
the most wonderful works of God; of the union, or
united action, of thought and living matter on other
matter.  That great statue called the Thought of
Michael Angelo -the misnamed Duke Lorenzothat thought streamed through his fingers wonderfully, and ate away the marble till the block became a spiritual thing to all intents and purposes.
I could not fancy its being done through another
man's fingers, nor could it be.
But now I think it is time to give some reason
for the hope that is in us, that Art is a really and
practically good thing for us. I say in, and for us,
for I think, as lawyers say, that the court is with me.
So it is in a sermon; and yet how difficult it is,
how truly a gift given one, hardly to be commanded
of one's own will, to say any good thing which
one's neighbour will render into deed? And how




INTRODUCTORY.


II


impossible it is to put subtlety into anybody's eye,
or to give the craftsman's touch to the nerves of
the hand, by merely talking or writing I But as to
the good of Art-as to the reason why many of us
should take to drawing, and all of us encourage all
men to do so.    Our reasons for it are our hopes
from it, or, which is the same thing, the wants
which press us to it.  And, in the first place, we
want, and through art we hope for, more knowledge
for our selves, keener perception, more invention,
more freshness, more geist, as philosophers say,
a higher and better spirit, as Christians say;
greater vigour of existence-we want that got
into our measure of days here'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant;
More life, and fuller-that we want.
By we, I mean every one of us. Some of us are
weary of work; some of us are bored with want of
work.  I do not want to exalt one class at the
expense of the other-working too hard is sometimes
a fault, and at best it is a misfortune. But being
bored really consists in wanting suitable employment for one's energies-sometimes in having deprived oneself of it, or got on wrong employment.
Art is a practical subject of thought for all of us




12   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


who have leisure for culture, or who are engaged in
the culture of others' minds or their own employment. And I want all, or a good many here, to
reflect how Art in its various branches may be a right
employment for them, and for those whom they guide
or influence.  To which end let us have a few
divisions and distinctions for clearness' sake. I do
not know that they are good, but they help to
express my meaning.
What I understand by Art, after twenty or thirty
years at it, is that it originates as an energy or
activity of the spirit of man, set in him  by the
Father of ail spirits as a means of delight in the
days of his vanity; and that it consists in search
for and production of beauty.   Then, as perfect
beauty, or the idea of beauty, is here unattainable, the pursuit of it is of the nature of aspiration; incessant, delightful, insatiable, unresting.
The work of a perfect artist would be "like a perpetual fountain to a perpetual thirst."* I shall give
cautions enough against overwork and want of
method, I hope, when we come to practical remarks.
In art as in other things, surtout, point de zgle. What
I mean here is that what we call Fine Art never
ceases to aspire. Poets, painters, musicians, and good
* Rvmola.




INTRODUCTOR Y.


13


craftsmen will follow their craft, like Tennyson's
crew, for ever:They know the merry world is round,
And they may sail for evermore.
Then I should say, that Art divides itself into Ideal
Art, pursuit of pure beauty, and applied Art, which
uses beauty for educational or even commercial purposes. The word ideal is generally objected to. I
have not refreshed my memory about all the metaphysics I once swallowed in connection with that
word. Let this suffice for us now. Ideal Art is the
pursuit of your idea, by your will and intellect, or
spirit; therefore it is a spiritual pursuit, in the wider
sense. It is spiritual or religious, in the more limited
sense, when you are pursuing an idea of the highest
class; that is to say, one which refers to Divine or
spiritual natures above your own. In such thought
and the works which result from it, the spiritual and
the ideal are the same thing. But the pursuit of such
an ideal must be made with absolute sincerity and
singleness of purpose. It may be said that sacred
Art is applied   Art; because it is applied to
teaching, though of the highest subject.   In that
case let us say that applied    Art may be also
spiritual.  You may say that Angelico's skill is
applied to sacred work; but he applies it with abso



14  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


lute sincerity, to set forth that which he believed.
His art is a pursuit of the ideal, in that he pursued
the chief good, the source of all ideas or forms of
beauty and of truth. All sacred Art, insofar as it is
truly sacred, is the expression of this, that a man has
an idea of seeing and a desire to see the face of God,
whatever those words mean; that he longs for the
Beatific Vision, and expresses his longing. In so
doing he is taught to gather from the visions or sights
of this earth, and to project again from himself,
images of spiritual beauty, which he thinks may be
symbolic of the object of his longing. That kind of
work is not for many, and those who are marked for
it will be led to it. I say nothing of it here except
that it is wholly ideal because it is spiritual, seeking
the greatest idea, or spiritual fact, which can exist.
The ideal and the spiritual, or the beautiful and the
spiritual, meet at last, as two parallel lines of railroad
seem to meet; below the horizon, and in perspective
very far away.
But Art may be applied to education and right
spiritual development, and that is the application we
have to do with here. So used, it becomes ideal
according as a man is enabled to throw his own spirit
or personality into it according to his powers and
perceptions; according to the excellence of the spirit




INTRODUCTOR Y.


I5


that is given him.  Ideal means spiritual, if it
means anything. 'We have had it explained to us,
quite truly, that Art is not essentially moral or
didactic - the rules, the study, and the practice of
Art are not. A very good man may be a very bad
painter, and blue and yellow still make green in the
most profoundly immoral hands; nor can the rules of
perspective, or the nature of truths or colours be
modified, by the character of those who use them.
But the men who obey the rules and pursue the
study are moral agents, and the work they produce
is moral or immoral accordingly.  For all honest
work is morally good, and you may take the word
of Hooker and Butler for it:-" The ways of welldoing are in number as many as the paths of human
action." Shakspeare, we are told, is not didactic.
He did not think of making somebody in Othello
observe like a chorus, throughout, or at the end of
the play, that it is wrong to tell lies about a lady, or
to smother her with a pillow. Scott is not didactic;
he did not improve Torquil of the Oak into a homily,
or conclude the Heart of Mid Lothian with any earnest
exhortations about filial or sisterly affection. But in
this Scott and Shakspeare-bepraising age let some of
us do more than praise; let us read Othello again,
or go into the character of Jeanie Deans. Art, we




16   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


said, was the expression of man's delight, or wondering comprehension of God's work. Let the tenderness and truth which delighted the soul of the
Edinburgh lawyer have their result on your spirit. Is
the effect of Jeanie Deans moral or immoral, or
neither?  It was written that Shakspaere should
delight in the wonders of the heart of man. Read
Othello; let some of that tempest of passion blow
loud through the chambers of your brain; the love
that is as strong as death; the jealousy cruel as the
grave —will that degrade your soul, or purify it, or
neither? You may feel with Desdemona if you like,
or with Iago if you like; but not being an idiot you
cannot help doing one or the other; and if you do
one, Shakspeare is morally good for you, and if you
do the other, it is the contrary.  Call his work
undidactic if you will; but never say it does not deal
with spirit. We won't have any more about Art
moral or Art immoral.   The sun is not strictly
moral, for he is made to shine on the just and unjust
alike; the world is far from moral; but we hope that
it may be the way to heaven.
But, after all, our subject is applied Art. We
have to consider that it may be applied to common
people, things, and uses, and may be made to pay
commercially.  There is no doubt it is made to pay.




INTRODUCTORY.                17
How, in this practical England, plain men go straight
to their work of money-getting, and pictorially advertise hotels, and cattle food, and patent safes, and
grand pianos; and how Art is employed in clothing
our railway stations with cheerful and practical
hideousness-while we, who want more culture and
spiritual life, are puzzled and dubious about using
Art for spiritual or intellectual purposes. There is
not a primary school in England which is painted
with the history of England; there is no public school
ornamented with anything more instructive than
carvings of their own names by the youthful pocketknives of British worthies. It used to be so at Westminster, and I daresay it is so still, and elsewhere
also. And then you are told how interesting it is to
have these Graffite of men afterwards renowned; like
Sinaitic inscriptions of wanderers through the howling
wilderness of school.  How useful it must be for idle
little boys to know that their great ancestors were as
idle as they were. How absurd, how profane, how
heterodox, how very slow, how generally improper,
would it be to have a fresco of Marathon, or Hastings,
or Cressy, or Trafalgar, instead of the incised autograph of the distinguished little Jawkins, who afterwards became a cabinet minister.  And all the while
we are illustrating all our books of history and
2




I8   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


antiquities, not very well, it is true, but usefully. I
say not well in general, because, if you take up good
educational books, like Smith's Dictionaries, you will
find the illustrations, on the whole, inferior to the
letter-press, on which highly competent men have
been employed. Whereas if you take up, for instance,
Dr. Rolleston's last work, you will see that the illustrations are of first-rate accuracy; which is all that he
requires of them. But, in fact, all phrontisteria, or
places where thought or meditation is done, should be
illustrated to assist thought.  Decoration with ideas
is as cheap as decoration without, and the painted
symbol often conveys ideas with greater power and
vividness than the printed symbol.  Letters can tell
you that sunsets are pensive and battles tumultuous;
but the painter can give you a vision of your own, a
share in the press of combat or the calm of evening;
letters describe an event, a picture makes you
remember it.
Now, there is a "sourd" objection to the use
of Art in the English mind, and it is based on its
misuse. We have all heard of and seen demoralizing
Art, and high technical skill and sense of beauty are
often alike abused by it, as in Correggio's Antiope,
which may be taken as the type of the great sin of a
great painter. But it is not, after all, necessary now to




INTRODUCTORY.


I9


inquire about whether Art be a good thing or not, or
to show that the abuse of a good thing does not necessarily make it a bad thing. I have no gift for
denunciation, and am quite unequal to expressing my
opinion about sensual abuse of pictorial power. Let
us extend Dante's advice about such things.  He
said, " Look, and pass on." I say pass on, and don't
look. Ignore Sir Pandarus and all his works. Our
question is not of the abuses, but of the humbler uses,
of Art; and I cannot help feeling that these are, for
the time, its chief uses. What will it do-not so much
for those who have every other means of education, as
for those who have no other?  Is there any good in
it for those many who say-who will show us any
good?  Most of us are aware of a certain monotony,
plainness, dulness, ugliness, in our middle-class life.
What is to be said of the poor and struggling life of
England? A great deal is always being said of it;
and much of that is so utterly painful, so distressing
and overwhelming, that many able persons seem to
despond altogether about the usefulness, or rather the
possibility, of artistic pleasure and enjoyment of
beauty for the majority of our population. Yet I
hold that the true patron of Art, and the true source
of Art, is an educated people; it is not a wellprincipled despot here, or a kind rich man of culture




20   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


there, who can promote Art, as it is called, in a
national way. It can only be done by the gradual
education of numbers into appreciation and desire
of beauty as a comfort to their weary lives. It
may be in vain, but personally I hope to work
for this.
This is what Lord Derby says, following the line
of thought opened twenty years ago by the present
Slade Professor at Oxford. What was visionary then
is statesmanlike now, but it was as true then as it is
now. Hear Lord Derby-he begins with the usual
facts and calculations about the superiority of French
Art instruction and manufactories, based on the Exhibition of I867. He says that our neglect of Art in
every department of industry makes us mere hewers
of wood and drawers of water for other nations; and
he shows that local exertion in this matter is better
than State aid, in which I quite agree. State aid
is really held out to us through the Science and
Art Department. Then he goes on-" We live in a
very busy, not in a very beautiful part of England.*
If the country continues to prosper, these districts
will be still busier and still less pleasant to see. More
than half our population now live in great towns, and
they are the ugliest, as well as the biggest, in Europe.
* Spoken at Liverpool.




INTRODUCTORY.


21


Can it be a good thing for generations to grow up,
one after another, seeing nothing, except on some
rare holiday, but what is squalid, dirty, and mean?
It seems to me a cruelty to give a man, by artistic
training, a keen sense and appreciation of natural
beauty, and then to set him down to live in the centre
of Liverpool; and still more of such places as the great
towns on the coalfield. Is it a law of nature that
things must always continue so?  I do not see it.
The smoke which shuts out the sky, the chemicals
which destroy vegetation, the unlovely sights which
in any one of these towns meet you at every
turn, are all preventible evils, and at no great cost.
If I were to look at 'it in an artistic point of view
only, I should not be very sanguine of your being
able to develop a real and popular love for Art in
places where all natural beauty is driven away and
destroyed."
There is a tone of despair in this: and I do not
suppose that we, who wish to possess and impart to
others below us, that delight in God's works which is
the essence of Art, shall live to see it very widely
extended. But the feeling and care for Art, which
induces people to read essays of this unpromising
title, is really a call to Art as well as to read; to help
the instruction of others, as well as learn oneself; to




22   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


use and press on every means and every measure by
which instruction may be more widely spread. I
have never had clerical duty in a great manufacturing
town; perhaps, I could not have done it. I have
often thought so, in passing northward by rail to
Highland or Yorkshire moors, rejoicing in prospects
of an autumn holiday and the "glory of shootingjackets." And, to do myself justice, it spoils many
days of my holiday to see the smoke of the torment
of cotton and iron, hanging over league after league,
and county after county; going up always like incense
to the god of false political economy, over-production
and haste to be rich. But I have fourteen years'
close experience of the habits of English people,
small tradesmen, workmen, their wives and children
-in a large parish in Oxford. And I should say,
considering the hard realities of their life, you need
never be the least afraid of giving them too keen
appreciation of natural beauty. Teach them first
that it really exists for them. First catch your pupils,
by using pictures in your primary schools, and
making the rudiments of drawing a part of your
primary education, accessible if not compulsory.
When you have trained a few good lads, you will
have taught them to look for beauty-you will have
taught the cats the way to the cream. If you took a




INTROD UCTOR Y.


man out of Sheffield, and educated him for years as an
artist at Florence, he probably wouldn't like Sheffield
when he had to go back. But we want to teach
some rudiments at home in Sheffield. What we are
desirous of, I hope, is that there should be good
schools of design, and models of beautiful work, and
flowers and still life, even means of study from
nature, in all the great grim towns on the coal-field.
Mechanical drawing and conventional design can be
taught to any mechanic's son who is a good steady
lad; and they are a means of advancement. They
are not Art, but they bring him within range of Art;
he begins to see form and colour; if he has feeling
and spirit he will want to make experiments in them;
he will begin to compare his Art-school work with
nature. And when you have done that for any, you
have given him the key of a new world of his own;
an open door is before him and none can shut it.
Drawing is like sport, the pursuit is the object; the
change, exercise, interest, does the good. I speak
here as a parson, as a practical psychologist and
dealer in culture.  You cannot have a city of
draughtsmen; you cannot have a population of
aesthetic tinkers, as I was once reminded, I remember.
But a man who can mend a kettle properly, or take
off a shaving in good form, is probably capable of




24   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


drawing if he is capable of admiring; and you must
begin to teach him and his by giving him something
to admire. Open galleries and collections; public
gardens and window gardens; parks, playgrounds,
excursion trains-all these things help the pupils of
your Art-school, and bring you in more of them.
No doubt there is a drawing instinct, and some
have more of it, others less. Those who have not
got it are open to other means of culture besides Art;
and we must accept the means that are given us.
Here we have a national system of examination in
Science and Art, stimulating instruction; do let us
work it as well as we can. The Science Department,
as a means of culture, will attract the majority; yet
drawing is a part of Science. Practically, a certain
number of pupils in our schools will tell themselves off
to the more artistic pursuit of drawing, and make it
an amusement or even a profession. Let all the pupilteachers, and best pupils of our primary schools,
be rewarded with free tickets for Science or Art
school-teaching.  I have a large parish primary
school; not a bad one, thanks to a good schoolmaster. And I have a pretty large draft of good
boys in the Oxford Art School: some of them do
pretty well, and that is, and always must be,
encouragement enough to continue the system. For




INTRODUCTORY.


25


parents and friends take interest in their children's
drawings, to an extent you cannot over-estimate. In
short the Art-school is a means of culture; and I will
believe in a mechanic's being over-cultivated, and
distressed by being taught to draw-when I see
such a man, and not before.   I have known a
workman of great artistic power take to drinking;
but I know several others who do nothing of the
kind, and he would have done so all the same if he
had continued a plain bricklayer, without learning
to carve!
Now, to have Art popularized, and made a means
of culture for the people, it is practically necessary
that it should be made to pay; and that too by the
patronage of the people. That is to say, Art wants a
patron always; and popular Art wants the patronage
of the more numerous classes. This is why we ought
to respect commercial or paying Art; because it is
popular Art, because it brings uncultivated people
within Art-range. If you get beautiful things into
the common market, you get them into common life,
and then people begin to make progress from them,
You want to get men into the Art-world, because
they will find comfort and culture there; and you
must have accessible means for them. Their life is
ugly and you want it to be not so ugly. This is what




26   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


our many Art-schools and kindred societies wish to
do-to get cheaply at the right sort of cup and platter,
and the right sort of wall-paper and window-curtain;
and the right coloured carpet, and the truest woodcuts, and lithographs, and photographs of the worthiest
subject; finally, the picture, mosaic and statue of the
highest aim. We want to get the best work into the
best place, or fullest circulation.  Right patronage
blesses him that gives as well as him who receives. I
think, if I could get up a popular feeling for simple
landscape, or still life, or well-shaped crockery, all
down a back street, so that workmen and costermongers should spend pence on small things really fit
to be seen: that would be the patronage of Art that I
desire to see. I want buyers from back slums; and
next after that, I should like to see an intelligent
search for originality and sincerity in work, on the
part of richer people, who can buy pictures. Of this,
perhaps, hereafter; but it may encourage us all to
consider (in spite of the feeling, and the misgivings,
which do Lord Derby so great honour), how vigorous
patronage is given to Art in the great manufacturing
cities. They often buy the wrong picture; the practice of their Art-schools is capable of improvement.
I know the evils of our Art-school system of competition; they have been lately pointed out in Fors




INTROD UCTOR Y.


27


Clavigera: our Science and Art teaching may not be
the best conceivable; but anyhow it is there. It is
accessible, it gives England a means of culture sorely
needed, and may extend a happy influence into a low.
stratum. Do not let us be afraid of asthetic tinkers,
if only we can get them. I fear some minds may
have a lurking objection to aesthetic clergy: and I
may just say for myself that I consider my own pursuit of Art is justifiable, since it is not inconsistent
with much work as priest, preacher, almoner and
visitor; and I do sincerely look on it as a means of
popular culture and education. The differences of
social life, I well hope, are felt very keenly at the
higher end of it, by those who have all the advantages. Can it be that there is a means of imparting
some of our best and highest enjoyment to people
below us, who are, after all, people exceedingly like
ourselves? Have we a chance of doing any spiritual
good to our own people? of opening the eyes of the
unseeing to delights which God meant for them? If
we can help to do this, our life will not have been
in vain.
Let me recapitulate a little here. It is satisfactory
to persuade oneself that a connection exists between
Art and English life, and if I can make others
think so too, I shall be infinitely delighted. This




28   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


paper began by depreciating mere talk about Art, in
favour of practice. Nevertheless it was said, in effect,
that criticism, or talk about Art, must go on;
we can't be all silent painters, and the greatest
painters require intelligent criticism to interpret them
and explain the value of their work; and criticism
may be highly intelligent without technical knowledge. However, on the other hand, it seemed your
criticism or enjoyment of all Art work will be so
infinitely improved by your learning to draw that
you had much better do so. Then, I went on to say,
Art is a spiritual thing; man's use of the gift of
the Spirit cf God, in order to express his delight in
God's work, is Art. The mere copy or imitation of
nature is not enough, it must have the stamp of the
human mind which produced it, and it must bear the
trace of intelligence or of delight. Some seeds are
sown by traversing the bodies of birds, and so Fine
Art cannot grow, unless its germs, the forms of natural
beauty, pass through the mind or invention of a man.
Fine Art is not imitation, but intelligent, imaginative
or delighted record.
Then Art was considered as an energy or pursuit,
and first, Ideal: the pursuit of absolute beauty. Of
this spiritual beauty is the highest form; so that the
Ideal and the Spiritual coincide at last in regions




INTRODUCTOR Y.


29


which man may seek but not reach in this world.
Secondly, we said Art might be applied to uses,
especially to those of instruction and education. This
opened the question, whether it might not be our
duty to encourage the learning and the practice of
Art by all means in our power. We saw that a
national system of education is in use among us;
it seemed that though it be imperfect, it will in all
probability amend itself; and above all it is there.
Further, Art is really at last represented at our
Universities. I cannot see why it should not be
encouraged also by University prizes, and that may
come later. Then we glanced at the need of national
education; of teaching men, first, that they are
not beasts (which necessarily involves religious or
spiritual information about themselves); secondly,
of supplying them with such fact-knowledge, manual
dexterity, capacity of sound thought, right emotion,
and mental culture in general, as Christian men
ought to have.  It was said Art is a means to
this end; that its pursuit gives peace, independence,
the power of contemplation and observation, and
delight therein; in fact it makes a man free of a
world of his own. We saw the blessing this might
be to so many of our race; and asserted the possibility
of their possessing or enjoying some forms of beauty,




30   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


even in their ugliest dwellings. It was acknowledged
that great efforts are making to that end, and something was said of public collections and various means
of bringing the sight of beauty within the reach of all
people. And I meant to convey my impression that
the present work of the Department of Science and
Art is and will be of great value to us; as it will
open' a kind of career for energetic lads, workmen's sons who live within poverty mark.  I said
that boys of capacity in primary schools ought to
have gratuitous teaching in the Science and Art
schools, and said that we manage it in Oxford. It
is of great consequence to unite denominational
primary education with the State system as closely
as possible; and that is done by giving the best boys.
and pupil-teachers in primary schools a chance in these
State examinations. And we need not and must not
be afraid of over-educating or developing too much
artistic power and tenderness in our great manufacturing towns. A mechanic of genius is like a prince
who has a genius; his skin is thinner than other
men's in his position; he must have the advantages
of refinement and pay their price. But if you can
make a mechanic something of an artist in a hideous
town, he will be the better for it: and see if he does
not make the town less hideous. Great efforts are




INTRODUCTOR Y.


3r


made in Manchester and elsewhere; and therefore,
from time to time, great mistakes. But the great merchants do buy pictures of their own choice, and the
clerks and workmen do work at the schools with their
own hands. They are producing quantities of minor
works of conventional or applied art-copies, patterns,
and designs. In so doing they are well and happily
employed, they are learning to feel the want of
natural beauty in Manchester, no doubt; but they
are also learning to rejoice in it whenever they get
out of Manchester, and to record their delight in
it, and bring it home. And then, in multiplying
good designs, with which the schools supply them,
they are bringing beauty within the reach of the
people who want it most. Of course minor and auxiliary arts advance with drawing and painting. Etching, engraving, architectural carving, photography;
these are all branches of the same thing. But there
should be always open access to works of higher aim;
or at least there is a higher class of popular art which
should always be within everybody's reach in large
towns. Small public galleries or collections should be
formed, attached perhaps to the art-schools, but open
to the public-to the ragged public-boys and girls
and all. They should consist mainly of landscapes,
perhaps by Stanfield, Harding, by Brett, Inchbold, or




32   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Richardson and Birkett Foster, Alfred Hunt or
Powell, Jackson or Duncan,-one specimen of each
of these masters might be bought and kept in permanent exhibition in all the big towns in England,
and if that were done it would be a blessing to many
a carpenter, and tailor, and navigator. Don't think
these fellows cannot admire because you won't let
them see anything but what is ugly. A great
northern city is sure to be crowded often with people
who have seen better days and green fields-you are
not likely to go wrong in setting any kind of landscape within their reach. Blake lived his life without
any sight of the higher beauties of nature; and
Turner spent a fourth of his in searching for landscape subjects within reach of Old Maiden Lane.
Wordsworth created the taste by which his work
could be enjoyed. Surely it is a high enough occupation for any of us to create or aid the faculties by
which the works of God can be enjoyed.
There are a few lines of verse I have written
down here, to the purpose that we ought to do something for posterity, in a country where our forefathers
have done so much for us. Mr. Browning has been
looking on Nature in glory.  He, by his Art, expresses his delight in God's work, and so he thinks
of England and history, and the making of her




INTRODUCTOR Y'


33


history. He is off the coast of Spain at evening, and
thus he says:Nobly, nobly, Cape St. Vincent to the Eastward died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest North-East distance dawned Gibraltar, grand and grey:
" Here and here did England help me-how can I help England? " Say
Whoso turns, as I at evening turn to God, to praise and pray,
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa,


3




34   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


LECTURE II.
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.
I AM only going to refer to a short period of Greek
history to-day-from Marathon in 490 to the beginning
of the Peloponnesian War in 432-I, or its end in 405.
I hope it is not too much if I ask you to remember
that that is the period of the great glory of Athens
and the life of Phidias, in whom Greek sculpture
centres. I have constructed a scheme or chart to
assist your memory of these lectures; and we shall
get through its first part to-day. Ageladas, Phidias,
Myron-these men were handsome flesh-and-blood fellows in white or yellowish tunics, with white or purplestriped cloaks like plaids; and so were all their friends.
Some of them wore golden grasshoppers in their hair.
They were men, and not names only: and once upon
a time they might all have been seen chipping away
in a moderately-sized, oblong-square, bright, lowish
building on the top of a hill. Call that hill the




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


35


Acropolis, the fortress or high place of Athens; call
the building the Parthenon-it is the dwelling of a
certain Maiden Wisdom, named of men Athene. It
has a pediment, a low gable in front supported on
columns; in that pediment, with others, were the
statues now in the Elgin room at the British Museum,
which those photographs reproduce in part. Within
is the dread Wisdom in ivory and gold, golden aegis
and Gorgon over her dark thundery purple robes:
"nor wants there in her hand what seems both spear
and shield." Round the friezes are the combats of
Amazons and heroes, and the triumph of olive-crowned
knights of Athens, and their horses would delight
Yorkshire as well as they did Attica. All is white
and gold and faint tinting, perhaps, on the marble,
and clear warm shadow over white and gold. The
sky is deep azure to-day, as it was yesterday, as it
will be to-morrow, except in the rose of dawn and the
flames of sunset. You look over a glittering town,
and a plain of grey olive, and corn, and cypress, and
ivy, and poplar, and willow, and reed, the delight of
Greeks, in the line of the fast-rising long walls,
down to the busy port and the triremes, and the blue
profound sea and its islands. Think now that Pericles
and Aspasia were in the many-coloured crowd which
filled the Parthenon this morning; that iEschylus




36  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


came up with his brother Ameinias, the maimed
captain of Salamis; that Sophocles was there,. and
Anaxagoras, perhaps, conspicuous for his absence; and
that a sad young man named Aristophanes was to
be seen, and, perhaps, a beautiful youth called
Alcibiades, and a very ugly friend of his by the
name of Socrates-all these and their race have one
thought-to clothe the city of their delight with her
garment of victory.  For they are the men of
Marathon, and the hard sea-fights of the Artemisium
and Salamis; and of Plataea and Mycale, and last, of
the Eurymedon. They have saved Greece again and
again, in spite of herself: they have won such fame
as never yet was won, since the Golden Fleece was
brought home from Colchis. They are a free state
governed by its best man, Pericles, son of Xanthippus;
they have got the right man in the right place, and
till he dies he will rule them rightly. But they do
not love him, or any master; anarchy is coming on
them; they show their teeth at him as they dare, and
tear his friends away from him one by one; and Phidias
will die in prison for his reward, the year before
the ruinous war begins. Jerusalem was not the
only city that slew her prophets-or Hebrews then,
or Puritans afterwards, the only murderers of poet
sages.




GREEK AND CHRISFIAN ART.


37


In any retrospect of Art, however sketchy, it is
necessary to go back to its earlier and greatest
documents-that is to say, to the earlier Greek
models, with Phidias as their leading representative.
And the subject of the relations of Greek and
Christian Art involves some discussion of the relations of Greek and Christian life. It must do so if
Art has anything to do with the spirit or life of
man. And as there is no compressing a matter of
this kind within the limits of one brief lecture, this
paper will be only a sort of dash or raid into the
subject, bringing a little knowledge out of it, with
rapid retreat from the overpowering forces of what
I do not know.
Now, to an artist, merely as a man who delights
in seeing and recording natural beauty, the great
difference between Greek and modern Anglo-Christian life would be that Art and Nature met in
Greek life, and do not meet in ours. The Greek
saw enough of beauty to know how much it is
worth.  Our life, artistically speaking, is a continual struggle against ugliness.  An Athenian's
life is described, not untruly, as a continual, rejoicing, unreflective embrace of beauty. Uglinesses he
had, and absurdities, and his eye was quick to note
them. Aristophanes' sketch of the fat man in the




38  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


torch-races, blown and incapable, may perhaps be
remembered by some of us; with many others (as
the Poet, the Sycophant, and the messenger Gods in
the comedy of the Birds). But every citizen of Athens
lived continually out-of-doors-" for ever delicately
marching through transparent liquid air"-in the
finest atmosphere on earth.  He saw Hymettus and
Pentelicus, and AEgina and Salamis in distance;
though it is true he considered AEgina " an eye-sore."
He saw Athene and Theseus, the forms of his gods
and heroes, all round him; and he saw daily the living
frames of strength and beauty from which the great
statues were conceived. The Greek was his own
model and type; he idealized man because he really
knew the beauty of man. He thought the beginning
and end of Art was to set forth or represent his gods
and himself, which was well; and he thought his gods
must be just like himself, which was not so well. He
surrounded himself and his heroes with beauty, subject
and auxiliary to his own beauty, exactly as the Goth
carved flowers round the niches which held the statues
of his saints.  He studied animals, the horse in particular, as his companions (I cannot attach much
importance to Myron's celebrated cow); considering
himself the fairest of all animals. Accordingly, he
seized on animal character with success when he tried.




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


39


Greece, as Mr. Maurice said long ago, and as every one
says now, represents to us the power of the Man, of
the human soul unconscious of the Divine teaching
which is yet with him, not taught to look beyond himself, and contented with the glorious things within his
reach; and poetry and plastic art were the most
glorious of these things. His Art, then, was the
natural expression of an excusable self-admiration or
self-respect.  Respect means looking to or looking
at: the Greek honestly thought himself fit to be
looked at, and he was so; and he rightly thought
himself and his wife, at their best, the most beautiful
objects in nature; and he looked at, and represented
himself and her accordingly; and in as far as he
represented anything else, he did it in its relations to
himself and wife. Let this expression pass; it does not
suit my purpose now to go into the half-Oriental relations of the sexes in Athens in the age of Phidias; let
the words mean only that female beauty was rightly
appreciated by Athenians, whom we must take as our
representative Greeks. Goths and Northmen have
felt it more strongly, partly from the honour paid to
the Mother of our Lord, mainly because the effort
of Christian art to look for spirituality in the:fate,
and strive after expression, has directed attention to
soft and expressive features as much as to broad




40   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


chests and tough sinews. I am not going into the
second or Praxitelean school of Greek art; or into its
rapid decadence. In Art we love not decadence; but
its first sign in Greek art, and all other, is either
sensuality, or the substitution of works of conscious
knowledge and methodical skill for works of inspiration.: By talking of Greek works of inspiration, I
mean to express my thought that the excellent spirit
of the artificer was inspired, or breathed into Phidias
(in particular) by the Father of Spirits; and on this
subject the first few verses of Exodus xxxi. should
be carefully read, and compared with the expressions
of St. Paul, I Cor. xii. 4-6, and of St. James, i. 17.
I think that while the spiritual gift is continued to
the workman, while it is still given him to "see
within his head " new truth or beauty, or to see old
truth or beauty in a way of his own, so long art is
progressive, and cannot decay. In other words, which
express virtually the same thing, "When art is
practised for delight, it advances: when for display,
it wanes."
But now, it is all very well to say this, but can the
difference between inspiration, spirituality, &c., and
mere skill and learning, be proved, or seen in producible works, and can we manage to see it?    I
think it is possible. Let us try. Three photographs




I




I




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.                   41
from the original work are universally accessible. The
earliest one is by Phidias, and is called Theseus.* The
next may be of the Augustan age, but is perhaps as
late as that of Titus; it is by Agesander of Rhodes.
The third is from the Sistine, a photograph, not of a
statue, but of the fresco of a statue, by Michael
Angelo, and near it is his Delphic Sibyl.      A fourth
is the tomb of Giuliano de Medici mistaken for his
brother Lorenzo, and named the Duke Lorenzo.
The passage describing him in Rogers's Italy is well
known to most of us.t      Now, I say that there are
three degrees of inspiration, or ideality, or spirituality,
in these works, and that they correspond to the
spiritual gift and spiritual-mindedness of their three
authors.   Here is the thought or spirit of Michael
Angelo, servant of Christ the Lord. Here is the ideal
or spirit of Phidias, seeker after God, according to his
lights. Here is the skill of Agesander, seeking his
own glory according to his own powers, and probably
* The following large photographs were hung up:
PHIDIAS.         AGESANDER.       MICHAEL ANGELO.
Theseus.                Laocoon.        Delphic SibyL
Ceres and Proserpine.                    Male figure from
(Ceres and Proserpine were introduced    Sistine.
because one is a correlative in position to  Tomb of Duke
Theseus, and both show grandeur of         Lorenzo, with
draped form.)                              Day and Night.
t See note at end.




42  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


to a passage in Virgil. There is spirit in the other
works in different degrees; in this of his there is none.
The seeking, longing faces in Michael Angelo, unsatisfied and conscious of corruption, are of course
a great point of contrast between him and Phidias.
But one of these fresco-pictures (not actual statues) is
very like the Theseus fore-shortened; and it and the
Theseus approach each other in ideality or spirituality.
They are something more than highly ingenious and
skilful problems in muscle, and I do not think the
Laocoon is much more. That is chosen as a work of
consummate skill and successful working out of the
idea of a coarser and less spiritual mind; or of Virgil's
description at second-hand.  Let Michael Angelo
wait. And in speaking of these other great works, we
must not forget that Greeks really had souls and
spirits, and a Father of their spirits. They were not a
divine sort of Lazzaroni, nor yet a set of beautiful
supernatural beings who never wore any clothes, or
looked at all foolish, or did anything disgraceful.
They were in great part as we are, spirits dwelling in
houses of fair clay, fallen and glorious, brilliant and
ruined, having vague hope in death as in life, yet
infinitely less able to realize it or give reason for it
than we are. Yet they had undoubtedly the great
capacity, or tendency, or right which distinguishes




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.      4


43


man from brute; they had the power of prayer, of
seeking right and hope from the Invisible.  It is the
crucial difference; and the Laureate sketches it with
force and precision, as is his custom.
For what are men better than sheep and goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, owning God, they lift not hands of prayer?
This is the difference between the life that is in
a beast and the soul that is in a man-that the latter
is capable of infinitely greater hope and aspiration
beyond himself, for help, for good, for Infinite Good,
for some Person to give him all of them. And this
work was done in vague general service of his Gods
by Phidias; he did it, not exactly because he meant
to pray to Theseus, but because Theseus was a fit
person to stand or sit in honour before Athene; and
Athene was a manifestation or personified attribute
of Zeus the one God; whom, like other thoughtful and
good Greeks, he really believed on, behind all the
Pantheon. I believe with Professor Zeller, in a Greek
monotheism behind their polytheism. I shall appeal
directly to St. Paul on that point; it does seem likely,
that the better sort of Greeks, those who lived the
best lives and most desired the right, worshipped
Athene or Apollo as attributes of the one God of
right, in the time of Pericles and Phidias. This was




44   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


the spirituality of Greek art, if it had any. Being
linked with idolatry, or worship of the image which is
nothing, it could not last long, and men fell away from
it: the second school of Attic sculpture went after
Aphrodite Pandemos; and Praxiteles compounded
Laises and Thaises into the form of a goddess of their
profession. That is what many young gentlemen call
Hellenism now. But in better days, these earlier
images were worshipped as symbols manifesting
features of the Unknown God: and the times of such
ignorance, said St. Paul, God winked at.
Before we go to the Apostle's testimony at Lystra
and Athens (and how changed and degraded an
Athens) let us just run over the points of these two
statues. Theseus is Phidias's simple ideal of Greek
manhood in glory. He looks like the great broadshouldered genial individual of the period: he is
all strength and repose, profoundly quiet and unaffected; and has almost forgot his strength awhile,
having rest, and enough to do to feel his power, without pain of fatigue.  He is not what you call
thoughtful; he values himself highly, but unconsciously. He never profoundly analysed himself,
or anything else, in his life. His deeds and his
sorrows have been great already, but they have
passed, and he is still mighty among the mighty.




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


45


He is leayaXo4vXoc, high-hearted:,s-yaXA~vXoc, conscious of strength, valour and beauty, rejoicing in
himself without vanity. I should say his laugh was a
very great laugh-not frequent. He is trained from
childhood to ride and to row; in harping and rhythmic
speech, in song and dance and high free bearing. He
can generally know a humbug when he sees him, and
ask a pithy question; he is taught to fell his enemy
with his fist; and sword and spear he has dealt with
all his days.  He loves gardening and farming;
the ancient olives, the vine-rows and the violet.
bed by the well come into all his poetry. He is
much attached to nightingales, also he is partial to
owls. For his gods, some of them are his relatives,
as far as he knows: they do him much good,
sometimes some wrong; then he tells them about
it in good Greek.  He has an idea that beyond
them and their Homeric ways, which are now-andthen ungodly, there is a rightful fate or higher
Zeus, in whom is all good for him. But he has an
inveterate habit of making intermediate gods in his
own image; and he has no notion of purity or faith
with women; and those two things will be the ruin of
his children, if not of him.
Now I say this statue idealizes this. sort of
man, the Athenian from Marathon to Arginusae,




46  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


or thereabout.  The strength and repose of the
statue are so subtly expressed, because Phidias was
not thinking principally of muscle. The way to see
strength and repose in the statue I think, is to mark
the restful elbow and shoulder, the bend of the spine,
and the gently exerted thigh. That is the repose.
Then look at the depth of the ribs and the play of the
shoulder-blade and all along them. That is strength.
Who could stand before the blow of that arm? And
all is so easy, that the work possesses what is called
unity or self-consistency. It is one conception done
at once without apparent change or experiment.
Now the Laocoon has as much anatomical knowledge;
probably more, in the central figure: the boys, and
especially the snakes, are generally admitted to be a
failure. You see its subject and object in a moment:
not so with Theseus. The motives of the two works
are different-one was done for indirect worship and
the honour of his gods and heroes, by a very great
man: the other was done directly for the honour of his
own skill, ky a most skilful man. And he does show
his skill all over the statue, every muscle and sinew is
rightly accentuated, contracting as the agony runs
through the nerves like fire and ice; an aesthetic
inquisitor could not have recorded the convulsions of
torture more accurately: and the statue is of great




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.            47
value to the student accordingly It is masterly and
academic: the other is great, and has a spirit in it.
The one is a laboured imitation of Pain, with coarse
appeal to the passion of horror in the beholder: it is
done for sensation, and anticipates Gustave Dor6.
The other does not regard the beholder; it is an
expression of Phidias's delight in gods and heroes, and
the man whom it anticipates certainly is not yet come.
It answers to our first definition of true art; man's
expressed delight in God's work. It is through
Phidias only, as far as I can see, that Greek glyptics
have any real or inner likeness to the work of Michael
Angelo, whom we here take as our representative of
Gothic- Christian sculpture.  The autotypes, from
the Sistine should be well looked at on this matter:
Michael Angelo cannot have seen the Theseus; but
I think any one will see the analogy and indeed
resemblance, between it and this figure.
My own reading on this part of my subject has
been far too fragmentary, but the names of a few
cheap and very accessible books may be mentioned
here, which bear on Greek art and mythology, and
their connexion. Take Preller's Greek Mythology, and
Seeman's Gods and Heroes.  Read with these the
first volume, or first two or three 'chapters of Max
Miller's Chips from  a German Workshop. Read




48   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


also the chapters on Greek Landscape, in vol. iii. of
Modern Painters; and there is an article, or translation of an essay by Professor Zeller, of Gottingen, on
Monotheism among the Greeks, in vol. iv., p. 361,
of the Contemporary Review, which, I believe, I
have Professor Muller's authority for recommending, as I do most strongly.  Lessing's Laocoon is
a most interesting set of studies. It hardly seems
necessary in talking of the Laocoon, to go into the
question whether he ought to roar, or how much he
ought to roar. Very loud, I should say, if at all.
Homer, Virgil, and Sophocles quite agree about it,
and make Mars and Hercules vocal in the extreme;
also Charles Dickens. "Did I groan loud, Wackford," said Mr. Squeers, "or did I groan soft?"
"Loud!" answered Wackford. Tragedy, the argument or theme of ancient tragedy, is, doubtless, the
representation of man overpowered by circumstance.
But whether there is not a better way of representing
him thus in sculpture, than carving him with his
mouth wide open, I think is a question which might
be discussed.  In the particular instance, I think
Laocoon's roar is a sort of lion-like protest against
the unjust gods, who will have an end of sacred Troy
and strong-speared Priam's people.  The Greeks
were sensitive children of nature, and were nowise




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.            49
ashamed to sing out when they were hurt. If I were
to make a conjecture why Gothic honour lays such
stress on silent endurance of pain, I should say that
it is for two reasons; first, from that vast estimation
of the power and value of patience, which the Gothic
world derived from Christianity; from the thought
that it becomes man or woman to bear witness, to
the end, that their Master forsakes them not entirely.
Secondly, the hard and defiant mourir-muet principle is inherited from the Scandinavian races, stern
to inflict, and stubborn to endure, who smiled or
laughed in death, like Regner Lodbrog among the
snakes. As a Gothic or Norsk virtue, endurance is
the privilege of the strong; as a Christian virtue,
it is within the reach of the weak, and of all.
Now observe, once more, the distinction between
Greek Art and Gothic-Christian is that of bodily
expression and spiritual expression.  The Greek
dwells contentedly on the bodily beauty; the Christian has been taught conviction of his own spiritual
nature, and he always tries to represent or indicate it.
The Greek work is more perfect, yet most of us
would prefer the imperfection of the Goth-the more
particularly as we cannot bridge over 2,000 years, or
go back to the nature, circumstances, and surroundings
which gave the Greek his powers. The visible body
4




50   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


of man in its ideal perfection can be represented:
the viewless spirit in its mystery is unable to express
itself, and knows not that which it shall be. Phidias
gives you one, Michael Angelo strives before you with
the other. Consequently in all Christian sculpture the
face is the most interesting part, dwelt on passionately
by the workman. But I think this distinction is
hardly enough insisted on between Phidias, and later
Greek workmen, that his work was in a sense sacred,
and that he probably thought he was doing service
to his Gods while he carved their marble forms. And
this involves the question, how far and in what sense
Phidias believed in his Gods. Natural religion, or
rather theogony begins with personifying the powers
of nature. You have the analysis or description of the
process in Muller.  Greek religion goes on to personify the powers or virtues of man as attributes of
God. The Aryan herdsman sees God in clouds
and hears Him in the wind; the Greek will see
Him in marble like himself.  The former thinks
that everything he sees done is done by somebody,
therefore, the sunrising and sunset, the rain, and
fruitful seasons, the blessings and the terrors of
Nature, are done by somebody. Gradually he expresses that Personal Doer, Creator, Lord, and
Father, by spoken name and visible symbol. That




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


in few words is the progress of natural theism, with
or without the help of primal tradition of revelation.
So far, says St. Paul, God taught heathen to feel after
Him. He left not Himself without witness, in that
He did good and gave rain from heaven, and fruitful
seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladnessthat is St. Paul's appeal in the Spirit of God to those
who would have adored Him as Mercurius. God that
made the world, he tells fallen Athens, made of one
blood all nations of men, that they should seek the
Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find
Him (though He be not far from every one of us).
In all the agony of apostolic protest against the idol
and the graven image, his whole soul penetrated with
the Hebrew Revelation, that the Lord our God is One
God-the apostle still goes back with his hearers to
the natural monotheism of their fathers, to bring
them at length to God in Christ. But who of all men
brought in the idol, and set up the human form
for worship? The Greek above all others. You will
see, the Apostle recognizes natural religion as the
voice of God in man, even while his spirit is stirred
within him at seeing the whole city given to idolatry.
And what brought it to such idolatry? It was the
great Greek spirit of personification-the Greek's way
of seeing all things in himself, joined to his unpre



52   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


cedented sense of beauty; this made him the
mightiest idolator, or maker of gods in his own image,
that ever lived since God made man in His image.
It seems to be this strange inversion which makes the
sin of idolatry; that the clay should know for itself
all about the potter, and contentedly make of itself to
itself a sufficient representative of Him. The root of
idolatry in races which do not possess revelation
seems to be man's specially Greek tendency, to set
himself up as an anthropomorphic sign of Deity
(statue or signmn, as the Romans called it) rather
than accept the signs already given, the rain and
harvest, and sunset and sunrise, and the instinct of
prayer, and the love that is between man and woman,
or man and man.     It had been done before in
symbolic nature-worship, as in Egypt.  Caesarism,
or the worship of the despot, had shown itself in
the days of Nebuchadnezzar if not of Nimrod.
But never had man before produced images of his
own beauty, which seemed so like the glory of the
(unseen Powers. God had made man in His own
image, now man made himself an image of God.
Now, of this idolatry of Athens, against which St.
Paul protested~PH  iasw, in one sense and age,
the centre and soul, because he represents whatever
good there was in it in his time. It was error and




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


53


ignorance.  "Yet," said St. Paul, "times of this
ignorance, (your ignorance and your fathers', O
Athenians!) God winked at; but now commandeth
all men everywhere to repent, because he hath appointed a day, in which He will judge by that man
whom He hath ordained."
But what did Phidias believe? What did other
leading minds of his day believe?  Consider how
near he lived to the half, or whole beliefs of the
mythologic age.  Herodotus told.all Greece at
Olympia, in the most unquestioning language, how
the hostile shadow had passed through the thick of
strife at Marathon, felling Athenians dead and striking them blind, all covered with his streaming beard;
some great ghost of days gone by, taking delight
of battle. as of old. He told all Greece how Phoebus
Apollo was sufficient for his own, and defended
his own at Delphi: he told them of the triumph of
Demeter and her son rolling in its cloud across
the Thriasian plain, and "brooding over the masts
of Salamis," and the wrath of the landless ones,
Greek Gueux de Mer, who should have revelled
from Athens to Eleusis on that day; he told them
of the woman's form in mid-air above the fleet at
the onset, shrieking scorn on the cowards who were
yet backing water, when Ameinias of Athens was




54   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


on board the first Persian trireme. Ameinias was
the younger brother of AEschylus, and AEschylus
in all probability fought at both Marathon and
Salamis: and Herodotus appeals to the testimony of
men of his own time about all these wonders. To us
it is a grand garland of fancies, and we believe that
the men thought they saw what they said they saw.
But what did Pericles and Anaxagoras, and Phidias,
think about it all? What did Pericles think of
Horer?    Unfortunately he was so far unlike the
present Prime Minister that he did not publish his
views on the subject. How very interesting the comparison would be if he had.  Great resemblances
exist between the two statesmen; and not the least
curious one is that persecution or annoyance has
continually assailed them both on account of their
religious views. One can quite fancy the sort of
reports and questions with which Pericles may have
been assailed in the Pnyx. Doubtless, with Anaxagoras at his side, Pericles would take a dubious view
L of Homer; but, as has been said, and as Professor
'Zeller ably makes out, the thoughtful Greek who
really desired to find a God of Right and Justice, had
an appeal in his own thoughts beyond the Homeric
Zeus, to the gradually-personified Fate, the true
Father of all gods and men. No thoughtful man




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


54


could think that the Homeric Zeus meant anybody in
Pericles' day. But Pericles and the leading minds of
Athens did not go one whit nearer atheism, because
they saw there must be some mistake about the
Homeric Zeus: they simply went back to a higher
unknown Zeus, who was really just and all-ruling, and
lord of himself as well as of other things. And the
higher they placed him, in infinity of goodness and
infinity of power, the more monotheism prevailed over
polytheism in their minds. If Zeus be an unknown
Zeus of all Right and Good, thought the better Greek,
then there is One Person to ask for Right and Good.
He lives somewhere, under some conditions. Why
should not we, if we do the right, go to Him and be
as He is? Why should not those who are with Him
and please Him, come back to us, i. e. within reach of
our senses?
Why not, indeed? So probably thought Pericles
and Anaxagoras, and Herodotus and iEschylus, and
Phidias and the men of Marathon. I do not speak
of professional traders in doubt or denial, sophists in
the bad sense; we can all form a tolerable notion of
what they-are like, as the breed is by no means
extinct. But these men believed in Spirit, and in their
own spirit, and in a Father of Spirits. For myths or
adumbrations of Him, they took them silently: prayer




56   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


and sacrifice seemed good to them, and established
ritual would do for them.  They thought of the
myths of heroes as Alva may have thought of Roman
Catholic legend; or Cortes of the appearance of
Santiago; or Cato of the Dioscuri at Regillus.
Then as to the great athletic statues, we may take
Myron's Discoboli as good specimens of what they
were like. Nobody can respect the late Professor of
Poetry in Oxford more than I do; but it is extraordinary to me that, with all his Hellenism,
Mr. Arnold says so little of Greek art. No man knows
more of the ideas of the contemporaries of Phidias;
no man says less of Phidias himself; while the great
Documents, the original hand-writing of Phidias, are
within one hundred and fifty yards of every one who
enters the Library of the British Museum. How far
would he not go to see the undoubted MSS., autograph
and holograph, of AEdipus Tyrannus or Colonaeus,
in Sophocles' hand? Yet we have no evidence of his
ever having looked at the work of Phidias' hand, which
Sophocles looked at and enjoyed every day of his life.
London is very unlike Athens; but those who want
to see or study Greek Art need not think of going out
of London. It is said that while Greek athletics made
Greece the delight and honour of the world, ours only
disgust and offend all nations except ourselves. But




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


57


why did Greek gymnastics or athletics delight all manJ kind? Because of the art, the sculpture which immortalized the beauty of the athlete: because the
statues commemorate the great games, or services of
reverent delight to the personified powers of nature;
because in Greece athletics and art went together,
and went the right way too; as service to God,
according to men's light. To go on about Greece
and Hellenism, without appreciating the extent to
which every Greek was trained by the eye, is to leave
out of account a great part of Greek education; which,
as I say, differed from ours in this, that we analyze
beauty without seeing it, and they saw it without
analysis. For beauty of form, I do not think the
Greeks had finer specimens of it than the higher
Gothic races. A great Roman revival of sculpture
came from Graecised study of Gothic forms. The
Germanicus looks like an instance of this, though it
must, I suppose, be assigned to the younger Cleomenes
(about B.C. 200). I certainly prefer it to the Apollo,
or even the Antinous, personally speaking: it seems
to me both ideal and academic. And, to speak
one word for ourselves, I doubt whether eight mightier
men, or better models, were ever produced at
Olympia, than the four English and four American
lads who rowed the Harvard race.    The broad




58   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


assertion, that the Gothic form is not equal to the
Greek in beauty, is founded on conventional standards of beauty, based on measurements from Greek
statues.  In an excellent work, Dr. Fau's Anatomy, this astounding addition is made to it: that
the forms of children, male or female, possess no
beauty at all. Beauty must be used here in some
stricter sense, in which we are not using it.  But
here is one more photograph, easy to obtain, and
not of a Greek statue. Did you ever see anything
more like Apollo? The square broad brow, the hair,
the pride of the bow-shaped lips, the eyes severely
bright, the round chin, and long hard neck. Many
will know who it is. It is Tom King who beat
Heenan. Tom King, now a preacher, declaring such
faith as is in him to all men, believing himself to be
called to that work.
Professor Arnold in one of his works makes an: allusion, well worthy of our attention, to the opposition between Christian asceticism  and Hellenic
happiness. The consciousness of sin, and the Lord's
death for sin, he says, in the words of George
Herbert, "banished joy" from  the soul.  There
is no doubt that asceticism has had great influence on Christian art, or that it is logically traceable
to the doctrine of sin and corruption. But actual




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


59


and practical asceticism among Greek Christians
began because of actual corruption in the Hellenic
world. It is a question whether the Greek world of
the second century had much joy in the life it lived
or the vices it practised.  But if it had, undoubtedly
Christianity did banish a great deal of such joy. Were
Greeks much happier, really, for not knowing that
they were rather corrupt? If so, the faith interfered
with that sort of happiness.
And no doubt, asceticism has borne hard on art.
I do not care to distinguish the severity of the early
Church from that of Puritanism or Protestantism.
Both began alike, with the search of purity of spirit
in an evil time, and necessary separation from the
world, and consequent persecution-and both, after
being the rule of many noble and innocent lives,
became a burden no man could bear. But as to
Christianity setting itself against art, the Christians
made all the use they could, of the art-work of heathen
and Christian hands alike, in the Catacombs. Every
symbol and myth and decoration which was not absolutely contrary to and directed against the faith,
Christians cheerfully accepted. The popular contrast
between Greek beauty and Christian barbarism is
pleasingly brought out in a plaintive passage in
Thackeray somewhere-The Newcomes, I think



60   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


where he follows Gibbon, who followed Libanius, who
followed the philosophic wailings of his day; and
idealizes the brutal Christian mob breaking into the
temples, and smashing the fair, calm faces of the
marble gods, and so on. Mr. Thackeray did not
mean it; but Gibbon and Libanius meant to imply
that it was the Christian faith which had made the
mob brutal.  St. Paul had taken away their natural
taste for beauty. I wonder how much they really
had to take away about his time.  Demetrius of
Ephesus did not say much about beauty, as a practical man, afraid of loss in his business. There is
some difference between the Greece of Pericles and
that of Ptolemy. Were the crowds of Rome, Corinth,
or Alexandria so very aesthetic, or pure, or tranquil,
before St. Paul; or did he and his corrupt their
artistic feeling?  Had these same rough iconoclasts
any particular reason to love the fair calm faces of
the pagan gods? What had those gods or their
friends done for the brutal Christian crowd?  The
believers in the fair calm gods had had Christians
continually broiled alive in their honour; the fair
calm faces had been lustrated with the smoke of
torment, and never looked one whit less calm.  And
the philosophers, who did not the least believe in the
fair calm gods, had looked on at ease while the faces




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


6i


of Christian women were smashed by tigers or wild
bulls. I am at a loss to see why maimed martyrs, like
St. Paphnutius, for instance, should have been expected to address themselves to the artistic sympathies
of Constantine in the names of Scopas and Praxiteles.
You all know that most striking passage in the Dean
of Westminster's account of the Council of Nice.
When the council met, a strange grim figure halted
up to meet the Emperor, having one thigh withered
to the hip with cutting and branding, and one eye
thrust out, and being otherwise horribly disfigured.
It was Paphnutius of the Upper Thebaid; and it
was noticed how the great Lord of the world took
the old man in his arms, and set his lips tenderly
to the eyeless socket, which had last looked on
the light of fire and steel, to be endured to extremity in the fore-front of the battle of the Lord.
When Constantine kissed Paphnutius, no doubt he
kissed an unhellenic and inartistic-looking person.
But it could hardly be expected that that person
would care much for the Apollo Belvedere. And I
don't care for him either-for his long legs, or his
chignon, or the attempt at facial expression, which
may be scornful, or may be only stuck-up. Now, this
same Paphnutius, martyr in both will and deed, he
bore the strongest testimony in the Council of Nice,




62   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


if3o pfiKcpa at the top of his voice (grotesquely and
unhellenically, of course) against the very central
injunction of asceticism-that is to say, against
clerical and lay celibacy in general.  He vehemently
refused to impose on others, as a yoke, the burden
he willingly bore himself.  It is quite clear that
ascetics of this character were not men who would
reject fresco or mosaic as means of Christian teaching;
nor did any convent of ascetics ever do so that I
know of.  Christianity would have done art no good
by encouraging it to multiply Laocoons and Aphrodites, had that been possible. But Christian people,
as we see from Bottari, De Rossi, and all works on
the Catacombs, did undoubtedly encourage and make
use of the expiring energies of Graeco-Roman art.
Next time I shall be able to show you tracings illustrative of the transition of the earliest classical work
of the Catacombs into the earliest style of purely
Christian art-that is to say, the Byzantinism  of
Ravenna. Up to the sack by Alaric, Rome is the
seat of Graeco-Christian art, which degenerates and
barbarizes with all other art, until, with Alaric's,taking of Rome, "at one stride comes the dark;"
and the art of the Catacombs ceases.   Save its
changed relics in Ravenna and Byzantium, Greek
art dies in the Catacombs, till the Lombard




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART. -


63


revival. We cannot have more than a very short
summary, of facts mostly controverted, about these
Christian sepulchres; but we shall often have to refer
to them. As in other things, I believe I know something of the matter; but that is nothing to the
quantity I do not know.
1   First, as to the authenticity of these paintings; that
I is to say, as to whether they are of the same date as
the walls they are painted on. I take the paintings
first. You will see in Bottari's work, that some of the
sepulchral Christian bas-reliefs are, happily, dated:
the earliest he gives is that of Junius Bassus, A.D. 358,
and very beautiful it is.  The Commendatore de
Rossi is, of course, inclined to. plead for the highest
degree of antiquity for everything, and Mr. Northcote's book follows him. Mr. J. H. Parker is at the
opposite pole of opinion, and he is inclined to refer
a large majority of these works, in the cemetery of
S. Callixtus and elsewhere, to that great beginning of
Christian decoration, which originated in the time,
and by the enthusiasm, of St. Paulinus* of Nola.
And he is enabled by the unmistakeable resemblance
of frescoes in the Catacombs to dated mosaics, to
conclude that many works described as of the second


* Born 353, died 43I. Pupil of St. Ambrose.




64 CHRISTIAN'ART AND SYMBOLISM.


and third centuries are really of the fifth and sixth,
and I must agree with him. Nevertheless, he makes
exception in favour of various paintings of the Fish
and the Good Shepherd; and I think probably of the
Vine and other symbols taken from Holy Scripture.
It is well to take the absolutely unbiassed testimony
of Dr. Theodore M6mmsen.' He begins by explaining that as Jewish Catacombs of the highest antiquity
exist to this day; and as burial was a Pagan custom
as well as burning, the Catacombs are not exclusively
Christian. He throws doubt on, or he is not satisfied
with, the derivation of the word from Kara and cumbo
or rlp3oc, or the Spanish catar to see, etc. But he
specifies two sets of paintings as examples; one in
the Callixtine Catacomb, the other, on which he lays
special stress, in the sepulchre called of Flavia
Domitilla, granddaughter of Vespasian; - who is
known to have been exiled for the faith, after the
martyrdom of her husband. These he describes, and
they would be of the greatest antiquity. And in
these the dying Graeco-Roman Art survives-as in
Pompeii and the cities of Magna Graecia. This is
quite unlike Ravenna. Anybody can see the freedom
and beauty of the vine-branches here, with the boy* Contemporary Review, May, 1871.
t Near the Church of SS. Nereus and Achilles.




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


vintagers. Well, this is (No. I, page 66) nearest in
treatment and design to the well-known later mosaic in
the church of St. Constantine, at Rome, dated 320, by
Mr. Parker. Professor M6mmsen is sure that this painting in Flavia Domitilla's tomb is of the date of the
building.* There are similar paintings in the Callixtine
Catacomb:-the figures of the Good Shepherd, the
Fish bearing Bread, the history of Jonah, etc. Of the
date of the tomb itself, he is not so certain. It cannot
be later than Hadrian, he says; and he leaves it an
open question as to its being really the foundation of a
granddaughter of Vespasian-by no means denying it,
but thinking the case for it incomplete. One instance
is as good as any number for our purpose, and these
may be taken as specimens of the earliest Christian symbolic paintings, and the last relics of Greek
technical skill, used with Greek sense of beauty. Soon
we come to the monk's work, and the Ostrogoth's;
neither of them to be despised; but both alike
beginning without a shadow of teaching in form.
Earnestness of faith, desire to communicate fact and
doctrine, and oriental glory of colour, now enter the
ring; and their great documents are the mosaics of
Ravenna.
* Before A.D. 98, if authentic.
5




No. 1. The Vine:
Earliest Christian Work.
Callixtine Catacomb.
Bottari ii. T. 74.




No. 2. The Vine. 'Transitional. From Cemetery on
Latin Way. Bottari ii. tav. 93.


No. 3. Byzantine. Sixth Century~ Tomb of Galla Placidia,




68   CHRISTIANI ART AND SYMBOLISM.


I began this by bringing several works of central
and typical character before you: the personification
of noble manhood by Phidias; the height of academic
skill in the Laocoon; and two or three works of
Michael Angelo, which express transcendent spiritual
power.* Then, speaking of the technical practice of
Art, I said, in effect, that Christianity inherited faint
traditions of Greek Art through Rome, and in later
days recovered and learnt much from great ancient
models; but that the generic distinction between
Greek and Christian Art survives, in the contented
and perfect bodily beauty of the one, and the facial
power, and effort for spiritual expression, in the other.
Nevertheless, it seemed that the works of Phidias
had in them the expression of such religious feeling
as was possible for him; and we were led to consider
how far he and his contemporaries could see through,
and beyond, their idolatry. And it seems that
St. Paul appeals to a monotheism, which he knew to
exist even behind the grosser Athenian idolatry of
his own day, and which earlier Greeks must have held
also. Then we spoke of Christian asceticism, ot severe
treatment of the body to which the Greek gave such
abundant honour; and I protested against the idea
that the Christians had any particular objection to
* Note in Appendix on Sculpture of the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo.




GREEK AND CHRISTIAN ART.


69


Art and beauty in the martyr ages; only pointing out
that they were hardly to be expected to care for
sculpture which was fully identified with the system
which was always flogging and burning them. We
then began to consider, how willingly they made
use of the relics of Greek beauty in the decorations of the Catacombs. In these earliest works
Greek and Christian Art meet, the one in its senility,
the other in helpless infancy. In the great Renaissance of the fifteenth century, Greek Art came back
to the Teutonic world, as an adjunct to Greek
literature, with great results. But before that, there
had been repeated Renaissances of Art, north and
south of the Alps: not Greek, but Lombard, French,
Florentine, Saxon and Norman-English. One or two
of these we shall consider in these lectures.




70   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


LECTURE III.
ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.
I SAID we had followed Graeco-Roman art to its
grave, last lecture; for it was buried in the Catacombs, with many things: with bones of martyrs and
confessors; with strange scattered relics of Gentile
life; with the remains of an ancient world and system
dead and buried out of sight; with the histories and
memories of 350 miles of human sepulchres. Here
it rested for awhile, and hence the old lessons of
Christian symbolism rose again, and have been used
ever since for the picture-preaching of the Faith.
Let me run over a few facts about the Catacombs to
you. There are about sixty-five on all sides of Rome:
their aggregate length, as I said, may be estimated
at 350 miles. They are worked in the soft tufa
rock,-volcanic mud, cooled and hardened; and in
that only —avoiding marshy or low ground, and
also the harder puzzolana or building-stone.  It is




ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.


7r


not true, says Professor M6mmsen, that they originated in the numberless sand and puzzolana pits
round Rome. Their arrangements are quite inconsistent with this: the narrow passages, three-quarters
or half a metre in breadth, and intersecting at
right angles, cannot be quarried-out space for getting
stone, and there are no wide passages or roads
for leading it when got. "These vaults have been
devised for one object only, to get as much wall
as possible in a given space, of such depth as to
admit of tombs on each side. In some instances the
real sand, or stone pits, have been found within the
Catacombs, very differently arranged, with broad
passages and conveniences for carrying the sand to
the surface; but these pits are evidently more
ancient, and either shut off altogether by the builders
of the catacomb, or utilised for their purpose by
intermediate walls.  The enormous space occupied by the burial vaults of Christian Rome, in
their extent not surpassed even by the system of
cloacae or sewers of Republican Rome, is certainly
the work of that community which St. Paul addressed
in his Epistle to the Romans-a living witness of its
immense development."
There is no doubt then that the Catacombs may
be said to be mainly and originally Christian, though




72   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


not exclusively so. The earlier Jewish Catacombs,
marked by the seven-branch candlestick on the walls,
are of course an exception. But the use of burial as
against burning distinguishes, in a general way,
Christian treatment of the dead from heathen. The
Christians always buried, the heathen generally
burned. Burial was a heathen custom also; and
after a body had been burnt one bone at least of it
was to be buried, by Roman pontifical law. Still
burning was the heathen custom, and with the middle
classes the light " compact " * ashes were kept in jars
and ranged on shelves in pigeon-holes made in the
sides of pits, called Columbaria or pigeon-cotes. Now,
in the very earliest Christian times everybody who
had a piece of ground seems to have been buried in
it. There a mausoleum, or chapel, or cella memorize
was built, if he had been a rich or well-known manheathen or Christian, and there his family and friends
assembled from time to time for memorial feasts.
Thus, Professor Mommsen thinks, arose the first
Christian churches and chapels before Constantine's
time. And there can be no doubt that agape, or
love-feasts, whether completed or not completed by
the Eucharistic celebration, took place here also.
They form a difficult subject which is not for us now.
* tvirov aroSov, XEschylus, Agamemnon, 443, Dind.




ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.


73


The point is, that Christians soon came to desire to
be buried together as Christians; to be, in death,
assemblages of the church, as they had been living
congregations on earth, and therefore they excluded
heathens from burial with them.
For a visit to, say the Calixtine Catacomb, you
go out on the Appian Way; by the road on which
Horace left Rome for Brundusium, and St. Paul
approached Rome from Puteoli; you turn off into
somebody's vineyard, not very far from the round
tower of Caecilia Metella; a bundle of thin tapers
are produced and lighted, and you go down'a flight
of narrow steep steps, two, three, or four flights;
for there are as many as four stories in these
houses of death. Where the first range of tombs
may begin will depend on the thickness of sand
and soil above the tufa rock. Then you are in a
narrow gallery between rows of stone niches, graves
mostly despoiled, all in soft drab-coloured rock,
plastered and painted here and there.  They are
wonderfully like berths in a cabin, only the sleep
obtained in them  is so much more sound.  The
single graves are called loculi; the larger ones,
where the rock is hollowed into an apse, or half
cupola, above a sarcophagus, are arcosolia. Cubicula
are square chambers surrounded with tombs, and




74   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


were no doubt places of worship; the Eucharist being
generally celebrated on the grave of a martyr. Here
then on these walls the skill of Christian painters,
sometimes of Gentiles, was employed to decorate
them with the symbols of the faith.
But our subject for to-day is early Italian art
history.
There may appear at first sight to be two strong
objections to the attempt to trace any connexion or
succession in schools of painting and sculpture, from
the earliest Graeco-Christian work in the Roman
Catacombs to these days of English landscape
painting. First, it is impossible to do it within the
compass of an essay; secondly, it may seem impossible to do it at all. But we spoke of Art, in the
first instance, as an expression of man's delight in
God's work, which he calls nature; and naturalism
and reality are a sufficient connexion between
schools of living Art in all ages. So many men have
come and seen, and rejoiced, and recorded their
delight in nature. Their Art has often been symbolic as well as literal or historical; representing
things not actually existing. But symbolism is
capable of naturalist treatment.  Assyrian bulls,
or Egyptian sphinxes, or Gothic griffins, are good
Art based on nature, if their authors had enough of




ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.


75,


the spiritual gift of imagination to fuse into one
object the natural characteristics of two or three
animals. The Assyrian symbol has the strength
of the bull, the wings of the eagle, and the human
face of command, truly rendered as seen: the Lombard griffins have their compound nature of lion and
eagle faithfully characterized: the workman saw
within his head, by memory from nature and his
own power of conception, that which he meant to
carve, before he touched hammer or chisel.
This naturalism, or intense perception of, and
delight in representing, the visible work of God,
is the common feature of early-Christian, Gothic,
or modern Art. It may be said to dawn in the
Catacombs, and a few carvings at Ravenna, and
rise above the horizon in the ancient churches of
Pavia, or Lucca, or Verona, or St. Ambrogio at
Milan. Perhaps the best example we can have is the
front of St. Zenone at Verona, with its bronze gates
anticipating  Ghiberti, and repeating the ancient
scriptural symbolisms of the Catacombs,* along with
historical subjects. With these there are huntings,
and fightings, and grotesques; the Gothic fancy is
in its full strength here: but in these gates and on
this front, the early naturalism of Gothic work is.
* See p. I28: "The Lombard Noah."




76   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


connected with the last Graeco-Roman efforts at
representation of nature. Greek or Graco-Roman
Art dies in the Catacombs; Dr. Theodore Mommsen
says that they were closed, as cemeteries, after the
taking of Rome by Alaric, in 410; though they may
have been afterwards adorned, painted, and repainted
as places of pilgrimage. But the early sepulchral
Art clings to nature, and symbolism direct from
nature, aiming at the character of natural objects.
Its vines are from nature; its sheep are made as like
sheep as the painter or mosaicist can manage; its
doves are just like real doves, and its palm-trees like
palms. Even the later Byzantinism retained reference
to nature, and truth in conventional work.* Moreover,
it seems clear from passages from De Rossi, that the
Christian artists of the later empire were like the
Gothic Christians in this other great respect; that
they desired to bring all things into church; to
represent all their ways and thoughts in their sacred
places. Of course peaceful and weak men did this
in a different way from warlike and strong men.
The Veronese churches show us how the Lombard
Goths did their work. Let us take De Rossi's
account, and see how secular things, and crafts, and
pursuits are represented by Graeco-Roman Christians
* Stones of Venice, vol. iii. plate iv. The Byzantine Olive.




ITALIAN ART-HISTOR Y.


77


in the Catacombs, as in Gothic churches. "It is a
fact I have constantly observed," he says, "in the
subterranean cemeteries, that Christians of the
earliest times made use of sarcophagi, without
any special Christian symbols upon them, and probably the work of heathen hands, containing images
of the stars and seasons, and scenes of pastoral life
and agriculture, some even of the chase, and some of a
fomic character.  The Christians gave their own
sense to scenes of husbandry and shepherd life,
personifications of the seasons, dolphins, and seamonsters. Anything which was free from idolatrous
imagery, or did not actually represent Pagan deities,
they freely made use of." And he goes on with,curious illustrations of the Christian desire to find
foreshadowings of the history of their own faith in
ancient legend. We all know how Orpheus, in particular, is used in the Callixtine and other catacombs
as a symbol of our Lord. So also with representa.
tions of Hercules, Deucalion, and others.  The
Christian symbolist, or parabolic artist, had no more
hesitation in using a heathen myth to impress a
fact of Christian history, than he had in using Pagan
paint or Pagan brushes to record it on the cemetery
wall.
The subject of Christian symbolism  requires a




78  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


paper to itself, which will contain some notes of how
spiritual teaching-all centering in the ideas, or
i thought, or faith-call it which you will-of the Incarnation and of the Cross-has gone on from the first
days till now; how it has been parabolic or symbolic;
and how its symbolism has been represented in fresco,
in bas-relief, in mosaic; by illuminations in books for
those who could afford them, by church paintings and
windows, and by acted pictures or mysteries, for those
who could not. For the present I have to go on
with the history of carved or pictured beauty, and
observe where the Goths or Teuton races inherited
faint traditions of it.
Theodoric the Ostrogoth, Dietrich of Bern or
Verona, the historical vanquisher of Odovakar or
Odoacer, the mythical champion of the great Rabenschlacht or Battle of Ravenna, belongs to Gibbon's
Decline and Fall; and also to the Nibeiungenlied.
He is one of those mighty and rough-hewn personages of history who loom in grandeur half-made-out,
like the head and shoulders of Michael Angelo's
statue of Day. So is Frederick Barbarossa; so in
part are Charlemagne and Cceur-de-Lion, so are the
fainter shades of Arthur and Odin; so, to all the
Mahommedah world, is Solomon, son of David.
Well, this Dietrich, or Theodoric, hero of primitive




Byzantine Capital, Ravenna




i
ii
A
I




ITALIAN ART-HISTOR Y.


8I


romance, perfectly real and practical maker of modern
history and builder of Ravennese temples, had his
cipher carved on one of these capitals, which now
stand in great beauty where he set them, in the
market-place of Ravenna.  That he was sent to
Constantinople at eight years of age as a hostage in
463, (ten years after the voice had come by night
to the anxious Emperor, crying that the bow of
Attila was broken);-that he was there trained
worthily for war and administration; that he was,
on the whole, faithful to the Emperors Leo and
Zeno, though he had at last to march on Constantinople; that Zeno diverted his forces to Italy;
that he conquered Odovakar in 490; that for
thirty-three years he strove to do judgment and
justice, to an extent to which Italy and the world
were totally unaccustomed; that though a halfconvert or Arian only, he encouraged the orthodox
faith; that he long honoured and cared for Boethius
and Symmachus, and at last slew them in the jealousy
of his old age, and died heart-broken with remorse,
and partly of terror in recognizing the Roman
profile of Boethius, at dinner, in a large cod's head
and shoulders-that is common knowledge, at least
as true as history in general. He lies at Ravenna,
under a huge monolith, in a round tower of other
6




82   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


days which time has hardly touched, but which is
slowly sinking into the wet soil. The earth is quietly
absorbing one of the mightiest of her children.
But he, and his daughter Amalosuntha, seem to
have delighted in Byzantine Art; and all the most
interesting work in Ravenna is done by Greeks or
Graeco-Romans; under a new conventual phase, at
the bidding and under the patronage of the Goth. In
Cairo and Jerusalem too, you may see the Byzantine
work done, and done with the greatest clearness,
grace, and sense of beauty, by Greeks for Caliphs.
Here in Ravenna it is done for Ostrogoths. Greek
hands and teaching may be traced far north; in
Rhenish carvings, as the Station-Crosses of Mayence,
and Planig.* To follow them into Saxon and Irish
illumination, is not for us now.t  But Byzantinism
is a very different thing from the Graeco-Roman art
of the Catacombs; as also from the Romanesque
work of the Lombard churches, which has more in
common with the naturalisms and fancies of the
earliest Christians. And let us just say what we
understand by some of these words, and how we distinguish their meaning.
* See the 7ahrbucher des Vereins von Alterhumsfieunden in
Rheinlande, p. 175. (Bonn. I868.)
t See Professor Westwood's works.




ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.


83


Roman Art I have called Graeco-Roman, because
all its ornament and beauty of decoration is derived
from Greece. It is properly called Roman, because
all its constructive beauty or grandeur belongs to
Rome. Rome gave us the round arch, and all
round-arched building is Roman; call it Romanesque
in Italy, where the influence and name of old Rome
still weighed with the builder or artist; call it Byzantine, where -the influence of the earlier Rome came
to the builder through Byzantium, or Constantinople,
or new Rome. Constantinople is called Rome to
this day by Greeks, Turks, and Russians: little
reck they of the White Pope, the White Priest of
Italy, and his Eternal City. Well, call the Roman
round arch Norman when its soffits and edges are
done in zigzags; call it Moorish when the round arch
becomes the waggon arch, and the cove of the Arab
tent is added to it; call it Cinque-cento when it
becomes mongrel, and you can't call it anything else.
Round arches, at all events, are Roman, because
they suited the Roman cloacae, and vaultings, and
brick architecture. The Lombard, or Saracen, or the
latter first, or both of them together, pointed the
arch like a lance-point, or the Norman noticed the
intersections of his round arches; and he foliated it
for symbolism of the Holy Trinity, and sometimes




84   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


because he loved green leaves. But the Byzantine
ornament is our subject now; it is chiefly in mosaic
that I shall speak of it, because the Ravennese
mosaics are its chief expression and best example,
with those of St. John Lateran and St. Constantia at
Rome. Now, we all associate Byzantine work with
stiffness, and most of us know something of its want
of grace in drawing the figure. The splendour of
Byzantine colour is generally appreciated; and an
idea may be formed from Dietrich's capital, or from
the  specimens given in the Stones of Venice,
how  very great beauty of drawing, of line, and
light and shade, the Byzantine retained in decoration;
using, most commonly, vegetable forms, or those of
birds. Splendour of colour, I say, remains; with
much conventional grace of form. Why does all
/ beauty of human representation depart? You have
I it, or the attempt at it, in the earliest work of the
Catacombs; in the vintagers, in Orantes, and other
figures. Yet, you soon see that a change is passing
over it: the type of outer distress and inward despondency.  The ascetic, or conventual change is
passing over. the Christian life; and, as it advances,
so surely does all the drawing on the sepulchres
become stiffer, and more depressed, and gloomy. Art
has fled for refuge to the cloister; and the monks'




ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.             85
brains are reeling with controversy; storm  after
storm of Arianism breaks on their heads; the Goths
will not see distinctions they must die for; kings and
queens are against them; their hearts are failing
them with terror for the desolation of Italy; for the
sword of the Lombard is shaken against her. The
dwellers in Italian convents and churches, through
the age between Attila and Alboin, had to look on
such evil without relief or hope of change, such
distress and apparent failure of the faith as probably
can only be equalled, mutatis mutandis, in the great
centres of modern civilization. Besides, conventual
severities and ascetic treatment of the human body
deprived it of sacredness or beauty in the eyes of
recluses. They gradually shrink from representing
our Lord. His face grows more severe, because
they look for Him as Judge and Avenger only-the
mirror of their world is too dark for them to see
His face in. The following extract from Mr. Lecky
speaks of the tenth century, though the change he
describes as complete, of course began earlier; and
indeed, it is observable in Catacomb paintings of late
date.  Of Christian Art, he says: "The places
decorated were the Catacombs: the chapels were all
surrounded by the dead; the altar upon which the
sacred mysteries were celebrated was the tomb of a




86  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


martyr. It would seem but natural that the great
and terrible scenes of Christian vengeance should be
depicted. Yet nothing of this'kind appears in the
Catacombs: with two doubtful exceptions, there are
no representations of martyrdom. Daniel unharmed
amid the lions; the unaccomplished sacrifice of
Isaac; the Three Children unscathed amid the flames;
and St. Peter led to prison, are the only images
that reveal the horrible persecution that was raging.
There was no disposition to perpetuate forms of
suffering: no ebullition of bitterness or complaint;
no thirsting for vengeance. Neither the Crucifixion,
nor any of the scenes of the Passion, were ever represented: nor was the Day of Judgment, nor were
the sufferings of the lost. The wreaths of flowers.
in which Paganism delighted, and even some of the
more joyous images of the Pagan mythology, were
still retained, and were mingled with all the most
beautiful emblems of Christian hope, and with representations of the miracles of mercy."  "After the
tenth century, he says, the Good Shepherd, which
adorns every chapel in the Catacombs, is no more
seen; the miracles of mercy are replaced by the
details of the Passion, and the terrors of the Last
Judgment. About the twelfth century this change
becomes almost universal. From this period, writes




ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.


87


one of the most learned of modern archaeologists,
Christ appears more and more melancholy, and truly
terrible. It is, indeed, the Rex tremendae majestatis
of a Dies Irae."
This is true in its main points. There is one
Crucifix in the Catacombs, evidently of the time of
Charlemagne. Some account of the Christian use of
the Cross and the Crucifix will be found in the next
Paper. It appears to me from observations made in
Eastern Greek convents, at Mount Sinai in particular (on comparing them with early MSS.), that
the severe or melancholy representation of Our Lord
begins very early, and has a good deal to do with
the unskilfulness of the workman. There is a transition face, as we may call it, at Ravenna in the
Church of S. Apollinare Nuova, with the great eyes
and heavy eyebrows which afterwards become mere
caricature in the MSS. and elsewhere. This would
date from Justinian; and the harsh work in his convent of the Transfiguration, at Mount Sinai, corresponds to it. Then in the Duomo at Torcello, the
mother city of Venice, there is perhaps the earliest
mosaic of the Last Judgment in existence. Neither
the building nor its original ornaments can be of
much later date than the first settlement on the
Lagune islets-perhaps of those who fled from




88   CHaRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Attila in 452, or certainly from Alboin in 568.*
The red stream of its lake of fire, and the worms
writhing in the eyeless skulls, will be remembered
by all who have seen it.  There is no doubt of
the despairing severity of much Byzantine Art; but
it is the effect of Eastern asceticism; and it is
sharpened by the sense of corruption in Christian
life itself, and by external distress. It changes in
some of the Gothic schools, and almost vanishes, and
again and again recurs, like a spectre which is always
near, but visible only at noon and midnight. And
this severity must hang over Christian thoughtover all religious or spiritual thought, unto the end
-a shadow of warning, a shadow of death, even of
the second death.  Not only does the world pass
away with all its shows and all its beauty, but there
shall be judgment. There remaineth a fearful looking
for, which no faith, or definite form of religion ever
denies or avoids; a human sense of justice and judgment, inevitable and irresistible.  Priests really did
not fabricate that penal doctrine, which every priest
on earth, not being a madman, would certainly give
his life to be able to deny in God's name.
Once more let me try to begin about Ravenna.
The interest of the place centres for us in its ancient
* See p. 95.




ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.


89


mosaics, not later than the time of Justinian: we
will not stop to moralize on it as the residence of
Dante or of Byron. The city was once a seaport:
it is a stranded Venice, situated at the southern point
of the great horseshoe or Delta formed by the Po
and its tributaries from Alp and Apennine. Venice
is at the other extremity, and perhaps, centuries
hence, will suffer the fate of Ravenna, and be divorced
from the Adriatic, to which she used annually to be
wedded. What was once the port wherein rode the
Adriatic Fleet of Rome, from Augustus to Alaric,
is now the pretty Maremma-looking village of
St. Apollinaris in Classe, and the sea is only visible
from its campanile.  I must speak very generally
of its mosaics.  They are found in the Chapel of
Galla Placidia, the Church of St. Vitale, St. John
the Evangelist, and St. Apollinare Nuova, called
Nella Citta, and the two Baptisteries. I shall read
the following account of some of the art of these
churches: their symbolism is reserved for the next
Paper. This is directly from notes on the spot,
extended and verified while my memory was fresh:" In comparing the primitive art of Rome with that
of Ravenna, one is struck by the obvious difference
between Art derived through Rome from ancient
Greece, and the purely Christian work of the Adriatic




90   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLIS.M.


city, wrought by Byzantine hands, and with Eastern
/splendour of colour.  Beauty of form is scarcely
/aimed at, or is merely decorative; but the principle of
symbolic art-preaching is in full force. Until these
great mosaics are copied in the same material, it is
to be feared that a good idea cannot be obtained
of them   without a journey to Ravenna.   They
are distinguishable from those in St. Mark's at
Venice by the subordination of the gold backgrounds
to the most wonderful gradations of dark azure
and green in the figures and decorations, which
range in colour from the hues of deep sea and purple
night to those of malachite and emerald. The high
lights in all of them are put in boldly and precisely
with golden tesserae, and white figures are introduced
as freely as in the atrium of St. Mark's.  Crimsons
and scarlets are more rarely used, and made precious
in the work, as Mr. Ruskin says. The processions of
male and female saints in St. Apollinare Nuova are
a delightful illustration of this; and so many distressing photographs of them are in circulation,
necessarily conveying ideas of utter gloom, blackness,
and barrenness to the public, that we will vainly try
to describe the glorious hues which deck those forgotten walls with the after-glow of the sunken Past.
"The purple and white marble columns of the




ITALIAN ART-HIISTOR Y.


91


central aisle of the basilica support on each side a
processional frieze in mosaic of male and female
saints, ended on the male side with the Lord in
Glory, a head and face of extreme beauty, though with
something of the sadness of later and fallen Art; on
the female side, by an Adoration of the Magi, exactly
like some in the Roman Catacombs. All the figures
are white-robed, and tread on emerald-green turf,
separated from each other by upright palms bearing
scarlet dates.* They are shod also with scarlet, and
bear small crowns in their hands lined with the same
colour. The background is of gold, not bearing a
large proportion to the size of the figures; but above
them are white single figures with ample golden
spaces; and a third course of singular representations
of New Testament subjects runs round just below the
roof, with backgrounds of alternate gold and black;
black, or the darkest purple, also prevailing, relieved
with gold, in the roof.t  The splendid and jewelled
effect of the whole is beyond praise, and its brilliant
lightness makes it especially suitable to the dark
* The palm is used in Rome as in Ravenna: but the Eastern
workmen seem always to insist on the fruit, which is generally omitted
in Rome.
t Giotto may have derived his taste for blue backgrounds, &c.,
from Ravenna. Nothing can be more interesting than to compare his
lovely frescoes in the northern chapel of St. Giovanni with the mosaics
of the nave.




92   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


aisle of a great city. We cannot but hope that it
may find favour with the restorers of our metropolitan
cathedral, where processions of figures must certainly
be a part of the decorations, and reflected light will
necessarily be a great object.
I "As has been said, the symbolisms of the Ravenna
hurch walls are similar in subject with those of the
Catacombs, consisting both of emblematic objects,
as lambs or palms, and of historic or symbolic pictures
of events. Birds are imitated with delightful realism
in St. Vitale; but the Gothic energy is strongly
repressed, as yet, by Byzantine rule and its languor;
and non-symbolic or secular carvings are rarer than
in the Catacombs-far more so than in the Veronese
churches. The transition thither from Ravenna is the
passage from Ostrogothic or semi-Byzantine Art to
the untamable vigour of the Lombard fancy.  It is
true, that knights on horseback, running stags, ducks,
a grotesque head and legs, and a mermaid, bear
witness to some Teutonic sculptor in St. Giovanni
Evangelista at Ravenna; and the vestry of the same
church contains what appears to be a first attempt.
at historical mosaic (of Theodoric's siege of Constanti.
nople, and other profane and sacred subjects)-which
I take to be the most powerfully comic Art-pro.
duction in all the wide world."




ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.


93


Observe only, in the first place, that there is no
image of Pain, Poena, Penalty of Sin, or Punishment
-these words are all the same. That the artists
believed in such punishment there can be no shadow
of doubt; but the Church did not allow them to
employ their imaginations on ghastly images of it.
She did not use Art to proclaim terrors she was not
allowed to deny; and as did the Catholic Church
up to the end of the seventh century-so does
the Anglican Church to this day. Even the Cross,
at Ravenna, is always very richly and brightly
ornamented, and is used as a symbol of the Person
of our Lord, rather than of His sufferings. Observe,
we here pass from the Art of ancient Rome-derived
from Greece, and last observed in the Catacombsto the Art of Byzantium, which preserved the relies of
Greek beauty in a strange and gilded repose; or,
"like a museum of fossils,"-to use the expression of
a man much beloved, early dead and deeply regretted
-the late Lord Lothian. Every one who has read
his letters on Italian History and Art will feel a
strange regret and wonder, that such powers and
early performance, rather than promise, were so soon
withdrawn from the world.
To turn from Byzantine colour and design to.
history, we go back to a time long before the Raven



94   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


nese mosaics were finished. Close to the year 450, the
lovely chapel of Placidia began to be built for the
world-wearied Augusta. "She had lived long enough
to see the billows of calamity over her sire and
children borne-stroke after stroke, sea after sea,"
-and here she found rest. Her embalmed corpse
might still be seen till a century ago, when a lot
of idle choristers were allowed to set it on fire, by
the reverent care of the custodians. At this time,
near the beginning of the fifth-century work of
Ravenna, the hoofs of Attila are treading down
Europe, and he is driven back from Chalons to
destroy Aquileia. He is Etzel in the Nibelungenlied.
That date, 45 I, marks the first flight to the Lagunes,
from Aquileia and other towns. Altinum was not
finally destroyed till 641, by the Lombards. Then
the episcopal seat was removed to the island of
Torcello, and the inhabitants of the mainland city,
giving up all hope of returning to their former homes,
built their Duomo there. The Marchese Selvatico
believes that that original church of the seventh
century, partially, not entirely, restored in Ioo8, is
now standing, "variously strengthened, refitted, and
modified, but, on the whole, preserving its original
aspect" -on the lonely islet to the north-east of
Venice.  Its architecture is Romanesque - round




I'ALIAN ART-HISTORY.


95


arches, but without cupolas over'them, which are Byzantine: its mosaics are, or resemble Byzantine work,
except that they are, as might be expected, ruder
than those of Ravenna.   At the east end is the
Lord in Glory; He fills the apse of all Byzantine
churches; at the west is the Last Judgment, already
referred to. It is, as far as I can discover, after some
inquiry, the earliest existing attempt at representing
that inconceivable event. It is the earliest on record,
unless we except the celebrated painting of Methodius, the Apostle of Thrace and the Danube, made
for Bogoris, king of Bulgaria, about 850. Here the
Penal Lake of Fire is represented as a red stream,
or river of the wrath of God, flowing from under the
Throne. There are no details of torment, and none
of that fantastic play with terror which characterize
Gothic work in after-days.   But Torcello is the
mother city of Venice. And as the Lombards of the
seventh century drove the dwellers in Altinum to
make their nests in the sea, in halcyon fashion, at
Torcello and Rio Alto (Rialto, the earliest centre
of Venice);-so they settled at Verona themselves.
And, first of all barbarians (for the Ostrogoths seem
to have employed Byzantines, and done but little
themselves)-they set to work at bas-relief at once;
and as hard as they could.    In Art, as in all




96   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


things, this great and still unconquered race, noblest
of Southern Teutonry, worked hard and spared not;
neither their brains and imagination, nor their
hammer and chisel, nor their axe and sword, ever
rested till the days of Pepin and Charlemagne.
Mr. Kingsley has chosen Longobards or Lombards
(Longbeards) as his ideal figures of Goths or Teutons,
in Hypatia. I remember, he was supposed to have got
into disgrace by that work.     He gives a partly
unfavourable view of the great Cyril of Alexandria;
but the absolute perfection of that prelate's character is not part of our creed; and I really think
the excellence of the book, in its pictures of Alexandria, its philosophies, and its great Christian work
and institutions, make it fit reading for all. In short,
it is the only readable picture we can get of the time
and place; as Scott's Count Robert of Paris contains
the only description in our language of the court of
the Byzantine Empire. I used to have a list of historical novels for my Oxford pupils, to be taken
along with their text-books, like Harvey sauce with
cold mutton, and I should be glad to furnish anybody with it.* But for the Lombard carvers. These
* For Middle-Age Period-Count Rohert of Paris; Scott's Betrothed,
and Talisman, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Anne of Geierstein; Bulwer's
Harold, Last of the Barons; Kingsley's Ilypatia; G. Eliot's Romola.




ITALIAN, ART-HISTOR Y.


97


unknown workers are a school, or a set of men of the
greatest importance in Art-history, and in all history.
For they laid the foundation of all that drawing of
form, all that sense of power to record, and teaching
by representative record, which inspired Nicolo
Pisano, and Giunto Pisano, and Cimabue, and Giotto,
when Painting awoke soon after Sculpture.     The
order of the Arts is always the same. Architecture
comes first in time, because you must have a roof
to live under first; then Sculpture, because it is
human nature to cut one's beams and stones about
-at all events, it was Lombard nature; then Painting, when one has learnt enough of form from Sculpture to want to put on a little colour. The sleeping
arts are like the sleeping Eumenides; they call each
other up —yeLp* 'Iyeie ical cV r2-vS  ey dy 8e. "Up,
wake thou her, as I wake thee." So, undoubtedly,
goes the history of sculpture and painting at Pavia,
Verona, and Pisa; at Florence, and then at last in
Venice.*
The early authority for the history of the Lombards is one of themselves. I believe I have done a
thing not frequently done: I have read nearly all
* San Michele at Pavia is not of later date than the seventh century,
about the date of the oldest part of Torcello; S. Zenone near four
centuries later.
7




98   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


through Paul Warnefridus the Deacon, and live to tell
the tale.  Professor Kingsley has read the story of
Ayo and Ibor, and the origin of the name Longbeard, in Book I.; and he tells it again beautifully in
Wulfs Saga, in Hypatia. But it is possible he may not
have extended his studies very far into a rather unpromising chronicle in rather curious Latin. I cannot
find room now to say more about the Deacon, except
that he seems to have been a knight or gentleman of
the blood of Alboin, with whom his great-grandfather crossed the Alps; that he shared in the ruin of
the Lombard rule in northern Italy by Pepin; that he
retained, unbroken, his fealty to Didier or Desiderius,
the last Lombard king; that he was carried away
into Gaul as a prisoner, escaped to Italy again,
became a Benedictine monk at Monte Casino, and
there wrote his chronicle, with many copies of Latin
verses, ingenious and pious.  Altogether he must
have been a true, intelligent and valiant sort of man;
and one may partly see in his works the extraordinary
comfort and blessing the convent afforded in those
dreadful times, to any one who was in the position of
anvil rather than of hammer. One or the other a
man must be, at many periods of the world's history.
The Lombard exile had no longer home or nation;
but the brotherhood of Benedict was both to him: and




ITALIAN ART-HISTOR Y.


99


his thankful duty to the founder of his order is commemorated in such hexameters and pentameters as
never perhaps were conceived before or since by any
of the sons of men.
Well, he says, his ancestors came from the isle of
Gothland in the Baltic, called Scandia. They come
within range of geography and chronology somewhere
on the Danube in Noricum, not far from Vienna; and
in the time of Odoacer (i.e., about 476). He was slain
by Theodoric about twenty years after. In April, 568,
they accept the invitation of Narses (see Gibbon),
and Alboin leads them across the Noric Alps, somewhere about Friuli or Forum Julii (not the other
Forum Julii, Frejus on the other side of Italy).
They are already good smiths and craftsmen in
metal-one curious and grim relic of the handiwork
of that day the Deacon says he has seen King Rachis
show to a party of friends-the goblet or "scala "
made from the gold-mounted skull of Cunimund,
slain by Alboin, as Gibbon narrates. Great progress
in Art and craft were made in Alboin's time, says the
Deacon, and his name and glory.were long dear to
his people. His occasional acts of mercy and magnanimity are dwelt on, as Gibbon speaks only of his
ferocity, &c. Pavia' and Verona are the Lombard
capitals: they seem to have been converted from,,




IGO  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Arianism about the time of Gregory the Great; the
baptism of Agilulf and Theodolinda was commemorated in a strange mosaic, of which a plate is
given in Ciampini's Vetera Monumenta.* It looks just
as if they were being boiled.  The early story of
Theodolinda's wooing by her first husband, and her
second choice of Agilulf, is as fresh and charming
as any knightly tale I ever read. Now the thing to
observe is that, at Verona, these hammer-men got
among the marbles of the Alps, and saw examples of
marble-carving. At it theywent straightway. Smith
turns sculptor; their skill in craft distinguishes them
from former invaders of Italy: and it seems to me to
mark their Scandinavian origin. They can learn and
imitate and invent; they can make as well as break;
above all they have the imaginative, creative, or poetic
gift; and all the wildness of the northern fancy is
theirs. The great Artist-race of the world have just
won their land-the first things that interest them in it
are the churches, and the story of the Christian
faith in them.  And these Verona photographs
show the sort of work they did. Observe the door
and base of the wheel window,-it is the type of
a Romanesque church. And now try to forget the
ugly colours and blank darkness of the photograph,
* Tab. iii. Part I. p._20.




ITALIAN ART-HISTORY.


I'o01


and think of all this as a dazzling mass of rose
and white marble, like the Doge's Palace at Venice;
strong like a fortress; coloured like a palace;
a gallery of Art and a school of symbolism; a
record of Christian history. For here historic and
symbolic Art begin together in the service of God;
and all the chief facts and events of the Faith were
narrated in the bas-reliefs of this church, and on the
castings of its bronze doors-probably the most
ancient of all Christian works of the kind. The men
who did these were the precursors, or in some sense
the ancestors, of the great Florentine succession from
Giotto to Michael Angelo. Their work is far different
in spirit from Byzantine carving. With less sense of
beauty, and less accurate perfection in masonry, it
has far more life, novelty, variety of fancy, and
energy of representation. There is an eastern quietude,:
and obedience to rules which alter not, in the
Byzantine work; it is graceful and fixed, restrained
by beautiful but unrelaxing conventionality: it is
the work of an exhausted race of Christians.  But
the Lombard building and carving   is the work
of fighting and conquering Christians; it bears
the stamp of the hunter and the soldier.     In
the work of S. Zenone, scriptural histories are
mingled with knights in combat, and the weird




102  CHRISTIAN. ART AAND SYMBOLISM.


"Chase of Theodoric"-now utterly effaced by mere
idle mischief. As with Clovis on the Rhine, so here
with Astulf or Agilulf, the faith has prevailed with the
conquering race and will share its power. " He that
hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one."
It is so here; the garment of Roman civilization is
sold, and the Gothic war-sword is bought indeed.
And now we pass to Pisa. Nicolo Pisano's career
centres about 1250. I pass by Sicilian Art, mainly
because I do not know enough about it; but for
other good reasons also. In the first place, no great
school of drawing and painting is derived from it, it
is a kind of cul de sac, and leads nowhere; though,
as Lord Lothian observes, the same collision occurs
in Sicily, between ancient Byzantine Art of the
highest: character, and the vigour of Northmen
and Saracens, which occurred in Verona and Venice,
between Byzantine work and Saracen or Lombard.
The spirit of the North and the spirit of the East
strive equally in both Venice and Sicily. Frederick II.
ornamented Sicily with many buildings, decorated
with statues, mosaics and frescoes by'unknown artists
anterior to Antelami, or Giunto of Pisa, or Guido of
Siena; but they had no successors. And books of good
information on the historical period of painting after
Cimabue are so common, that I shall only give the




ITALIAN ART-HISTOR Y.


lo3


barest skeleton of Art history;-a skeleton "far too
naked to be shamed "-of mere names in order, with
leading characteristics. The two best standard works
of modern authority are Wornum's Epochs of Painting
and Crowe and Cavalcaselle's History of Italian
Painting.
The names of Buschetto (end of eleventh century)
and Nicolo Pisano, whose career centres in 1250, should
be remembered: * the one as the architect of the
Cathedral of Pisa and its Baptistery and leaning
Campanile; the other as the great sculptor who
brought form and drawing within reach in Tuscany,
retaining all the Lombard expression and energy,
but drawing science, and correctness from study of
ancient models. Giunto of Pisa and Guido of Siena
are named the earliest painters of Italy.  Torrita,
or the monk Jacobus designed the mosaics of the
Baptistery of Florence. Then, about I270, Cimabue
broke away finally from the old semi-Byzantine
school of gold backgrounds and traditional treatment, and so caused the death of poor Margheritone,
its last Italian professor. But he did a still greater
service to Art in recognizing the powers of Giotto,
* Vasari says Nicolo studied under some Greek sculptors who
were working in the Duomo of Pisa (Della Valle says he learnt from
native Pisans). A great sarcophagus, with the Calydonian boar-hunt,
and nude and draped figures, is mentioned.




o14  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISIM.


and training him to his great work; he not only
reigned but chose his successor.
If, as is asserted, the Middle Ages centre in
Dante, they centre also in Giotto, his friend and companion, scarcely his inferior in power. It is now, I
am happy to say, quite easy to get photographs from
the works of Giotto and the early schools. He is the
first of the universal artists, who were perhaps goldsmiths, architects, engineers, engravers, sculptors, and
painters in all vehicles; who could design cathedrals
and paint frescoes on their own walls, like Leonardo,
or Durer, or Michael Angelo. Cimabue was nobly
born and attained notice and influence early. His
advance in all before him is marked. But the best
thing he did was to discover, and value, and educate
to surpass himself, the shepherd's boy, whom he found
one day drawing a ram's head on a tile in the hill
pastures that look down on Valdarno. Giotto's chief
works are at Padua and Assisi-some remain at
Rome; and at Ravenna one of the most beautiful
contrasts in the world is in St. Giovanni Evangelista;
where one of the chapels is ornamented like the
Arena at Padua, with Giotto's blue backgrounds
and lovely faces (I never was so struck as this
year by their great beauty); - and the solemn
mosaics of the roof are all in Tyrian purple and sea




ITALIAN ART-HISTOR Y.


Io5


green. His greatest architectural monument is the
Campanile at Florence; the Arena Chapel at Padua
gives an idea of the universality of his powers. He
was very ugly or irregular of feature, and seems to
have enjoyed the circumstance greatly. He never
left off making jokes, great and small. A century
of Giotteschi, or disciples of his, succeeded him before
any one again reached the mark he had made.
Orgagna is the next to do so. As a colourist, to this
day no man has excelled or can excel the qualities
of the blonde faces one sees at Padua and Ravenna.
His blues, warm whites, golden tints on hair and
ornament, with many subtle uses of Indian red and
other pigments, and various greens, all are matters
of professional study to this day. There is a beautiful
sketch by Lord Lindsay of the peaceful times in
Padua, in the spring and summer of I303, when
Giotto, with wife and children, and Dante who knew in
him one friend at least, rested "in breathless quiet
after all their ills," hearing no more of the factions
of Bianchi or Neri,-as the Arena frescoes went on
extending all Summer through, over the walls of the
little chapel in the fields, once the shambles of Roman
holidays-to this day a Keblah and sacred place of
pilgrimage for all who have followed, or who desire to
follow, the steps of the first great Italian master.




o6   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


LECTURE IV.
FLORENTINE SUCCESSION OF PAINTERS
AND HISTORY OF SYMBOLISM AND
THE GROTESQUE.
IT is said to the disparagement of modern railways,
that now-a-days there is no travelling at all, one
only arrives, and is delivered like luggage.  Contrariwise I hear it asserted, that in the old times
one travelled a good deal, but frequently did not
arrive, but was shot into the road like rubbish. I
am not going into the rights of these counter-statements, but only want, by way of introduction, to
indulge in a brief recollection of one of the arrivals of
my life-the first sight of Pisa on an Italian evening.
The day had been long, hot and exciting; there had
been a row with an offensive Vetturino.  I had
transferred myself to the side of an old conductor
on an old diligence, drawn by old horses, at five
miles an hour, along a straight road, with a green




FLORENTINE SUCCESSION OF PAINTERS. 107


canal by it, and a clumsily built, but gondola-looking
boat, which made me think of Venice. It was dreamy
and nice; but at last there came a turn in the road,
and I saw the Baptistery and Duomo, and above
them the leaning Campanile, all flaming, like rubies
and red-hot gold against deep azure; with a vivid
suddenness of impression, a purity and force of
colour, and a rush of associations and history all at
once, which I shall remember to the end of my days.
It was not till afterwards that I recognized the grand
situation of Pisa, between the mountains and the
sea, or its slight analogy to Ravenna; I felt, as
every one does feel at such times.  I was in body
then where I had been in spirit a hundred times,
in presence of the second group of buildings in the
world; if (which I doubt) St. Mark's is to be the
first.  We must pass this by.   Remember, that
the cathedral and other buildings were begun by
Buschetto, at the end of the eleventh century;
adorned by Nicolo Pisano up to the middle, or
latter end of the thirteenth; that the Campo Santo,
or burying-ground has on its walls the frescoes of
Giotto, Orgagna, and Benozzo Gozzoli, especially the
Triumph of Death, by Orgagna; and that within it
rest the bones of Crusaders in the soil they won;
the sacred soil of Jerusalem, which their fathers




Io8  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


brought year by year in their galleys, therein to rest.
Nicolo Pisano's career, I said, centres in I250,
and we pass from him to Cimabue and Giotto.
There are so many and so good accounts of the
progress of the earlier Florentine school; and the
biographies of its members are, on the whole, so
uneventful, that very brief sketches of them will
suffice, up to the death of Ghirlandajo, and the beginning of his great pupil's career. These papers,
originally delivered as lectures, cannot attempt
anything like connected history, though they are
an attempt to bring Art into closer contact with
History.  I have relied chiefly on the History of
Florentine Art, by Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle-a mine of information, and rich in original
documents, and new   facts.  There can be no
doubt that the Florentine school is the modern
school of Drawing, as the Venetian is the world's
school of Colour.  And for any purposes of study
below those of a matured and professional painter,
the works and history of the student-masters, from
Giotto to the early mind of Rafael, are excellent
sources of knowledge, and the best education for
awakened feeling. These men's works are their history: how they were worried by patrons and halfstarved in monasteries-fed on stale leavings, like




FLORENTINE SUCCESSION OF PAINTERS. 0og


the Ghirlandajos, or entirely on cheese, like Paul
Uccello; how Masaccio got into debt for common
necessaries, and never paid, or was paid; and how
monks and abbots habitually whitewashed frescoes
over with the energy of churchwardens; all this
is a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, which
we cannot linger over: it is gossip, though it is
sometimes sad, and often amusing. Let me name
a succession of men, who seem to me, on the whole,
the best to choose as typical or representative men,
up to the youth of Rafael and Michael Angelo,
and then we will go to our symbolism. Giotto *
is the universal master, poet and craftsman, far in
advance of all men of his time, i.e. from  1276 to
I336.
Orgagna,- or the three Arcagnuoli, or the Sienese
Lorenzetti: whoever it was, and whatever number of
men it was, who painted the frescoes in the Campo
Santo at Pisa, represent Byzantine and Eastern
asceticism and severity of religious thought. His, or
their power of drawing, vigour of conception, and
grasp of mind equal Giotto's; without his sense of
pure beauty. The Loggia at Florence is Andrea
Orgagna's design, and has no equal in the world.


* National Gallery, 276, 568 Wornum's Catalogue of x867.
t National Gallery, 559, 570-578.




IIo  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Date of Andrea's birth unknown-he was dead in
1376. Like Verrocchio, Leonardo, Ghirlandajo, and
Direr, he began as a goldsmith.
Fra Angelico,: Brother John of Fiesole, represents
religious peace, devotion, hope, and happiness, without
severity. He is the central Purist of the world, and
the ideal and the spiritual meet in his works, simply
because all his ideas were about blessed spirits1387 to I455. His favourite pupil was Benozzo
Gozzoli. His frescoes are still on the walls of the
Convent of St. Mark, at Florence: almost as bright
and fresh as when Savonarola studied them day
by day, and Rafael, and Baccio della Porta, Fra
Bartolomeo with him.   He had no influence on
naturalist Art, into which Benozzo Gozzoli quietly
glided, but he is a representative man and painter
in all senses of the word.
Masaccio is the evident precursor of Michael
Angelo, though Ghirlandajo may be placed between
them, having been for a time his actual master.
Bodily action, like that of Greek statues, begins in
earnest in Masaccio: he learnt much, probably, from
Donatello: his great works of reference, studied by
almost all masters from his time to ours, are in
the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine Church at
* National Gallery, 582, 663.




FLORENTINE SUCCESSION OF PAINTERS. ii


Florence.  The Adam   and Eve there, with the
Baptism by St. Peter, are represented in Kugler,
in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and passim. The figure
in the Baptism, called the Shivering Youth, is
said by Count Lanzi, to form an era in Art. With it
and the other works in the Carmine, Art strides
definitely beyond Giotto.   Had Masaccio lived
longer, he would probably have anticipated the
mountain naturalist landscape of Turner. Nothing
is known of him, except that his name ended in
'accio-or, in other words, that everybody laughed at
and bullied him all his life (I402?-1443).  Paolo
Uccello, Filippo Lippi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and
Masaccio, were all working at onie time in Florence,
close to each other; or, as to Filippo and Masaccio,
at the same chapel, or even picture. I wonder if the
old walls are haunted. Probably not; but anyhow,
there is enough of the spirit of the painter left, in
the faded frescoes which old Italy half destroyed by
neglect, and young Italy thirsts to destroy by restoration.* Ghirlandajo's work is represented in the
National Gallery only by No. 296-one of the most
important pictures in the Gallery for the student.
1449 to I498 embraces his life in Florence. For
power of expression, of drawing the clothed form, of
* National Gallery, 626, his own portrait with red cap.




112  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


representing crowds of men in harmonious action,
for variety of character, sense of beauty, rapidity of
work, or careful tender elaboration-he is unsurpassed. He was Masaccio's best disciple; perhaps
for a time, Michael Angelo's best master; but two
such men never could live long in one studio, any more
than Titian and Tintoret. The church of St. Trinita,
with histories of St. Francis, and the frescoes of Sta
Maria Novella (now, and I trust mercifully, repainted)
contained in I867, the best examples of Ghirlandajo's
work in fresco yet remaining, unless it be the great
Last Supper in S. Marco.
These men's works bring us to the study of the
early drawings of Rafael and Michael Angelo. The
photograph and autotype have brought these within
almost everybody's reach; we shall see what use is
made of the vast facilities for study, and the rapid and
copious reproduction of artistic beauty, which are now
afforded us. Careful, correct study in pen and ink,
with hard pencil, and with brush and sepia from
Rafael or Michael Angelesque autotypes, ought certainly to be added to our Art-school course. And
those who will work at them for themselves, choosing
the simplest things first, and contenting themselves
with nothing short of right copy, or facsimile
measured to the twentieth of an inch, will not fail of




FLORENTINE SUCCESSION OF PAINTERS. 113


their reward. With the exception of Angelico, these
earlier men are naturalists, delightedly painting or
trying to paint all they see, rejoicing in their study and
record of God's works. And in this spirit of observation, admiration and record, they are one with Turner
and the modern school of landscape; who, finding
their own modern life unlovely, could not write down
its outward shows with the enjoyment of the Greek or
the Italian; but betook themselves to the beauty of
inanimate nature, and called on the spirit of the
mountains. They got them away far off, and abode in
the wilderness; they fled away, and for a time had some
rest. The names I have given are only representative
names, but many more might be given: Leonardo and
Luini might be added, or even substituted for Michael
Angelo and Rafael. But Tintoret and Veronese followed Michael Angelo; and the Venetian school, which
I must not talk of now, has a tie to him in the highreaching words of the former, II disegno di Michel
Angelo, 6 il colorito di Tiziano.-He is the central
figure of Christian Art, as Dante in poetry: the most
faithful to the greatest talents, from the beginning to
the end.


8




114  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE.
Now for our symbolism. The reason why I bring
this subject regularly before you is that Art, as a
matter of fact and historically speaking, is from its
very beginning necessarily involved with it, and in
two ways. First, because of the connexion of Art
with letters, of representation with written language,
of hieroglyphics with phonetics; and secondly,
because, as a matter of fact, Art has been employed
on symbolic teaching, principally religious, from the
very earliest times of Art or of visible religious
organization.  "Symbol, vuj/3oXov, avp/3oXa, tallies,
the two halves of a coin or like object which any
two contracting parties broke between them and
preserved; hence a token or ticket; or a watchword,
-'distinctive mark or formula; the creed of the Church,
a sigi-by which one knows a thing," &c. That is the
set of ideas which a reference to Liddell and Scott
at once brings before us. This notion runs through
them all; that the sy'mbol is something put, for convenience, in the place of something of equal or greater
value and importance, not now producible.  Now
words are signs or symbols, and stand for things like
pictures. What is their relation to each other?
A sign or symbol, say logicians, is either repre



SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE.  115


sentative, indicates a thing to your mind, and makes
you think of it-as a bunch of grapes over a house
door, indicating wine, is called a publichouse
sign; or it is vicarious, as a five-pound note stands
for five sovereigns, and the five sovereigns stand for
the labour of five men at a pound a week. Signs
are also natural, as laughter and tears, or they
are arbitrary.  D-o-g might have meant cat if
we had liked to make it so, only the ingenious little
boy who said it spelt cat was in a minority of
one. And talking of publichouse signs, they are
arbitrary to a degree. Why should a pig and whistle,
or a blue lion and bagpipes indicate the sale of
liquor? One sees, of course, that grapes do; perhaps,
the incongruity of the objects mentioned may artfully
symbolize intoxication. This is one of those things
evidently which no fellow, lecturer or other, can be
expected to explain. But all hieroglyphic or picturewriting, is representative symbolism: while the spelt
word composed of letters is a vicarious sign for the
thing which it is a name of. The bunch of grapes
reminds you of the juice of the vine, but you can't
drink it; the piece of paper passes vicariously for
the five pieces of gold, and you can spend it. So
the picture teaches the spectators; the word passes
current, for thought or thing.




ii6  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Now word-making and picture-making go on
together in the infancy of language: which implies
poverty of words, and progress in supplying new
words to express new thoughts. Savage orators are
always figurative and symbolic; and people who live
under civilization without using its advantages as they
should, are always running into new forms of expression, which are generally called by the name of Slang.
" Slang," says Mr. Ford in the Handbook of Spain, in
describing the peculiar language of the Madrid bullring, "is nearly always metaphorical." I remember
at the end of a Tennis-match, which had greatly
interested all Oxford under-graduates in my time,
hearing this remark, made by a friend of the winner" Well, I suppose all the cards have landed their pots."
That is to say, he supposed all the pack of men or
cards who composed his circle, had landed, secured
as it were by angling, their pots of money, as it were
treasure-trove.  I apprehend the extreme impropriety of the remark arose simply from the fact
that the occasion was vulgar, and metaphor unnecessary; he had no new meaning to express, and
he could have done without figure.  But when
Justice Ingleborough calls Die Vernon the heathbell of Cheviot, he uses metaphor to convey a new
idea in a right way previously unused. All of us,




SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE.  117


perhaps, know the value of simile in teaching. Those
who are so employed must always keep numbers
of trite comparisons and cut-and-dry illustrations
by them as a sort of stock in trade. The more
familiar idea is used to lead to, or take the place of
the more recondite or important one; that is symbolism or the use of symbol. We need not go into the
distinctions between words, as metaphor, parable,
allegory-the result is the same in all.
Now, many Art-symbols are compounded arbitrarily, and like nothing in nature as wholes-(I
have already said that their parts ought to be right
resemblances of nature)-and being unlike anything
in nature they are odd, and so-the word grotesque
comes to be applied to them. It is an Italian adjective, derived from KpV7TTW,, —crypt, place of concealment or cavern, says Prof. M6mmsen. Perhaps ideas
of Pan and the Fauns, and such like cavern-haunting
figures, combining noble and ignoble form, may be
connected with it-at all events so many symbolic
representations are grotesque in their appearance
that the two terms naturally come together in my
mind, and consequently in my lecture. And oddity
and incongruity being especially dear to the Lombards, and all the higher Goths, the grotesque enters
very largely into all northern Gothic. It is at Venice




II1  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


in particular, where Gothic and Byzantine meet, that
the eastern temper may be seen to prevail, and
the "grotesque laughter of the Goth" dies away
from architecture. It is loud in Verona and Pavia;
in Florence it is scarcely heard at all.  To one
coming from the south, it is at Ravenna that the
first notes of the Gothic laughter are found, in
S. Giovanni and the Duomo piers. We are right
in connecting grotesque with Gothic, when it means
play of humour, enjoyment of incongruity, and
natural delight in putting the wrong thing in the
wrong place, to see what it is like when there.
Dr. Riccabocca's getting into the stocks on that
principle is a touch of genuine northern Gothic.
Dante's Demons, and also Shakspeare's Witches are
great examples of serious Gothic grotesque; also
Dominie Sampson, and the later passages in the life
of David Deans, &c.   In eye-Art the grotesque
passes through Durer, Holbein and the architectural
carvers, away into the more serious caricature;
through Hogarth and Cruikshank to some works of
Leech, and many of Tenniel.
Now to go back to letter-symbols and picturesymbols. Some of the earliest historical records are
representative bas-reliefs, in Egypt, and also I think
in Assyria. In these Art does not illustrate history,




SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE.  119


it is the history; the record is all picture. In the
historical tablets or records of conquest at Wady
Maghara, 'in Sinai, Soris swings his cleaver in
relief over heaps of prostrate enemies, making history in the usual way; and besides that there are
representations of the animals and productions of
the conquered countries.  So Rameses at Aboo
Simbel. This is writing by pictures, and we want
to get from that to writing in letters, for this reason:
that the letters represent sounds, and are interchangeable for any number of words.  Any letter
will fit; and the hieroglyphs represent things, and
are not so conveniently interichangeable.  The
letters are not like anything in nature,- and can
be used, therefore, equally for the names of anything in nature; and the pictures or hieroglyphics
are more like one thing than another. Now the
progress into letters must have been something
like that from the old stereotype block book to
use of moveable types.   In the block-book, you.
know, all the text in a page was like a picture, and
you could not use the letters of one page to make
up the words of another; you can do it with moveable
types. Well, how were the hieroglyphic picture-blocks
broken up into moveable letters? By making a certain number of them represent sounds and not things,




120  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


and so forming an alphabet of sound-letters. And
they were arranged to mean sounds and not things,
thus: the initial sound of the name of a thing was
held to be meant always by the hieroglyphic picture
of that thing. Beth in Hebrew, Beit in Arabic, and
for aught I know, Booth in English, all mean house,
roof, shelter, &c. The initial sound of the name
Beth is B. The old hieroglyphic picture of Beth, a
house or shelter, 1 is made to mean the -B sound. (I
may say that the letter is somewhat like the black
camel or goats-hair screens which the Bedouin use for
tents, taken in perspective; and that in common
Arabic the tent is called 'the house'). N (Aleph)
Ox is clearly a rude sketch of that quadruped seen in
perspective, Gimel is the neck, head, and foreleg of
the camel; Sin or Shin, the coils of the serpent, &c.
However, picture-writing had made vast progress
before the phonetic systems, and it is doubtless connected with the great Egyptian gift of powerful outline. Professor Rawlinson says it was not abandoned
in Egypt till Christianity introduced the Coptic-an
alphabetic writing between Greek and Egyptian.
But I want to point out the connexion of Christian symbolism: how the same subjects were repeated for teaching from age to age by different
races. The first and great one, ordained by special




SYMBOLISSM AND THE GROTESQUE. 121


revelation, sanctioned and commanded on Mount
Sinai, is the Cherub.  Two forms there certainly
were of it: one known only to the priests, represented on the Ark, probably recognized by Ezekiel,
as a priest, in his first Vision; another and popular
form of it was wrought on the Temple doors, and veil,
and known to the people generally.   The whole
subject is connected with Assyrian and Egyptian
symbolism.  But there is no doubt that it is continued in Veronese griffinism, for cherub is gryps,
griffin; and the wheel by the Veronese cherub, or
griffin, is a reference to the Vision in the opening
chapter of Ezekiel.  But I must refer you to
Modern Painters, Vol. III., and to Dr. Hayman's
article in Smith's "Biblical Dictionary" on the
subject. We have no time for modern use or
misuse of angelic, or cherubic forms in Art; but
the Lombard monsters are scriptural to all intents
and purposes.
This is a list of the earlier Christian symbols
found in the Catacombs:-First, those not directly
scriptural. The Fish, as an anagram for our Lord's
name: the Ship of Souls, or of the soul, unless it
be considered as an Ark, and so a scriptural
emblem-this is found repeatedly in ancient sepulchral work.  The Cathedral of Torcello is itself a




122  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


symbolic temple-ship; and the Navicella of Giotto
at Rome is the great example of this emblem. With
these, the anchor and lyre, the eagle and chariot
rarely; the phoenix, pelican, and peacock. The hand
is found at Ravenna, and in sarcophagi, as representing the First Person of the Trinity.  Chief
scriptural symbols are the Good Shepherd, earliest
of all; the fish, as typical of the Christian soul; the
vine, lamb, dove, and olive; the cock, and palmbranch: also the lion, dragon, and serpent.  Of
symbolic or parabolic events, the Agape of bread and
fish, or the fish bearing loaves; Moses and the
Rock; the Holy Children; Noah in his square chest,
or ark; Daniel with the lions; Jonah, with gourd or
whale; Elijah in his chariot; Pharaoh and the Red
Sea, are of the earliest date of Christian Art.
Sometimes they are beautifully done, sometimes
grotesquely, but always they do mean this; that the
sound sleepers beneath the tufa arches slept in
Christ; holding by Him, as foretold in the Law, and
by the Prophets. Since 4I0, says Dr. M6mmsen, no
corpse has been deposited in the Catacombs; if it be
so, all who lie there are united in one faith and hope.
And the burden of all Christian symbolism is first
Christ, both God and Man, as foreshadowed in the Law,
and foretold by the Prophets; then Christ crucified,




SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE. 123


God submitting to death and conquering death for
man, and therein all pain or foretaste of death.
These typical subjects, then, are referred to in all
Christian Art work in Catacombs, Ravenna, Verona,
and so on down to Ammergau. But the great Christian
symbol comes next for us; and we cannot pass it, for
it faces us as soon as the Catacombs are closed, in
the early work of Ravenna. I may say, that no Cross
with the least pretence to antiquity occurs in the
Catacombs at all, on the highly trustworthy testimony of Father Martigny (whose "Dictionary of
Christian Antiquities" appears to be the best and
readiest of all manuals of sacred archaeology.)
It may be that the Cross was used in private
before Constantine; it probably could not be used
in public before he abolished the shameful punishment of crucifixion.  Like Christian adoption of
Pagan flower ornament, &c., for tombs, this was part
of the caution of times of persecution.  From his
time it was used as a symbol of our Lord's Humanity,
with or without reference to His Death as a part of
His Humanity. The earliest Crosses, as that called
the Lateran (which, I believe, to be similar to those
first erected or inlaid by Constantine, in his Baptistery, or elsewhere) are Baptismal Crosses; the
Four Rivers of Baptism are represented flowing from




124  CHRISTIAN ART AND S YIMBOLISM.


the Cross-foot, and derived from the Holy Dove,
which is always placed above the Cross. By one side
of the healing waters are the Lambs of the Christian
congregation: while the stag, representing the outer
Gentile desiring Baptism into the Faith, stands on the
other. The Cross is in its first use the symbol of Baptism into the Lord's death, or death with Him. The
early use at Ravenna is remarkable: for there and
up to the sixth century it stands truly as a symbol
representing the Person of the Lord, rather than the
manner of His Death. I think this falls in with the
view which late inquiries have led me to as to the
earliest origin of the Christian use of the Cross as
a symbol.   The first use of it derives, I think,
from the monogram of the Lord's name; and
represents His Person, as at Ravenna; standing
for His Humanity, for the sacrifice, or humiliation,
of His Life and Death taken as one. Most of
us know that the i or St. Andrew's Cross is
exchanged into the upright p- in the majority of
inscriptions, about the end of the third century.
That marks the transition from the letter-monogram
of the Lord's name, to the symbol which represented alike His Person, His Life, and His Death,
as the mind desired to contemplate them. There is a
mosaic in St. Apollinaris in Classe at Ravenna, of




SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE.  125


great doctrinal importance. It represents the Transfiguration; and in it the Hand is above all, as the
First Person; the Cross, ornamented and jewelled, as
it were, to the utmost power of the mosaicist, stands
for the Second; and this personification is repeated
till the seventh century. But, meanwhile, from the
fifth, attention was more strongly fixed on the
manner of the Lord's Death; and in the sixth century
the Lamb is added to the Cross, and placed on the
altar. Sometimes he is represented as wounded, as in
the Apocalyptic vision. The earliest representation of
the Crucifixion, setting aside the hideous Graffito of
the Palatine, is that in the ancient Syriac MS. of the
Laurentian Library at Florence-a work unique and
matchless, with twenty-four wonderful miniatures (I
think)-and distinguished from all others by this
detail,-that the soldiers in its picture of the Crucifixion are not drawing lots, or casting dice for the
coat without seam, but playing at mora for it on
their fingers. This is probably the very first instance
of a representation of the Crucifixion; and like
many early ones, it is joined to a picture of the
Resurrection. Of course, there is the widest practical
difference between it and what is called the use of
the separate crucifix as an object of devotion in later
days. Till the seventh century, the nearest approach




126  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


to the single crucifix in public use, was the crowned
Lamb bearing a Cross, placed at the intersection
of the limbs of the rood, or station-cross, as in the
Crosses of the Vatican and of Velitrae. Then at
the Quinisext Council, or Council in' Trullo, (in
a round domed chamber at Constantinople) at the
end of the seventh century-it is finally ordered
that the human figure of our Lord be placed henceforth on church crosses "instead of the Lamb of
former times." In the Cross of Mayence, I think, the
Lamb is on one side of the Tree, the crucified form
on the other; in the Cross of Velitrae the Lamb has
the symbols of the Four Evangelists on the reverse.
These come into their most frequent use about the
sixth century.*
These lectures, however, are concerned rather
with art than archeology; and I have touched on
this subject because representations of our Lord's
death form a part of the illuminations or miniatures
of almost all sacred MSS. from the seventh or eighth
century; and partly to draw a distinction which
already exists, I suppose, in most of our minds.
The object of these representations may be the
* This whole subject is admirably worked out in some papers in
DIDRON'S Annales Archeologiques, vols. xxvi, xxvii., by M. Grimoald
de St. Laurent.




SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE.


127


sincere and solemn commemoration of the central
event of the World's history; and the equally solemn
assertion of the mystery of our Lord's humanity and
death. Or it may be that of exciting passionate
emotion by representing His bodily sufferings and
physical pain. With the former object, I apprehend,
it is admissible and permissible, and consistent with
the feeling of our Church: with the latter I do not
think it is so. Something, at least, should be conceded to the feeling of Puritan Christianity; and it
should not be forgotten that only two, possibly three
crucifixes, are now known to exist among the eighty
millions of the Greek Church; and those secluded
in monasteries as sacred relics, rather than applied
to any use of worship.* Of course, as soon as it was
enjoined by the church as a subject of painting, it
became the most frequent of all; in MSS., in fresco,
and mosaics, in enamels, and carvings; at last,
it was set forth in mysteries, or acted pictures, from
Holy Scripture. It is adopted at Verona by the
Lombard sculptors, who follow the old custom
of representing the Lord on the Cross, robed and
crowned as King and Priest (as in the ancient
crucifix, called the Face of Lucca.) They place the
Lamb, however, on the keystone, over the door of
* See the Rev. T. TOZER'S Travels in Albania and Greece.




128  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


the Duomo; and on the front and bronze gates of
S. Zenone they repeat the ancient symbolisms; type
and antitype, as in the Catacombs. Adam and Eve
are set to plough and distaff; Noah stands in his
square "arca," as of old; and the Angel stays the
hand of Abraham, armed with a formidable straight
Gothic sword: the Brazen Serpent is also crucified
on the gates.
Noah-Callixtine Catacomb.  The Lombard NoahDoors of S. Zenone.
From the Lombard work the transition to the
MSS. &c., is easy; and in both, plain history-pictures
of events in the text accompany, and often prevail over symbolism; and mere fanciful ornament
or pleasure in beautiful curves and colours often
prevails in turn. We have not room to talk of MSS.




SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE. 129


now.   I had rather go on straight to the plays or
exhibitions which, as it seems to me, stood in the
place of paintings and illuminated MSS. for the
instruction of the poor.  From their earliest date
their most prominent subject of representation was
the mystery of the Lord's death. It seems that we
only know, or have heard scattered and dubious
accounts of the dark side of those representations,
and that they were rightly permitted as a means
of popular instruction, much needed before the
invention of printing.  A  knight or nobleman
might not read MS. very fluently (and observe,
any one who has ever,tried to read an old MS.
will know that the varying contractions and abbreviations used in every line must have made fluent
reading rather rare and difficult); consequently, if
the knight could afford it, he had his illuminated
Evangeliary or Psalter or Missal, in which he found
explanatory pictures with the text, of principal events,
with every possible device of colour and fanciful
design for pleasure in his reading. The poor man
had not this advantage; and therefore, besides the
church frescoes or mosaics, these acted pictures were
allowed him; which, with proper explanations from
his priest, or a regular chorus during the performance,
would really give him a certain acquaintance with
9




130  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


the main facts of the Old and New Testament, and
especially with the connection, by type and prophecy,
between the Old Testament and the New.    The
mystery-plays were by no means mere licensed outbursts of blasphemy. They have been represented as
a kind of safety-valve for disbelief and discontent;
a permitted Saturnalia of mockery and licence. This
generally permits the writer or speaker a good deal
of abuse of the Roman Catholic Church, which the
subject, in fact, does not call for, and which is highly
unnecessary. This was forcibly brought home to me
during a visit to Ober-Ammergau and the Passionplay last year, 9th July. I had expected an appeal
to emotion, like that of the Seven Stations at Nuremberg -a representation, not probably offensive, but
painful, and to be borne with and allowed for. What
I found was a course of instruction by acted pictures,
in the typical nature of persons and events in the Old
Testament. The first object and tendency of the
whole thing seemed doctrinal teaching; and that of a
character which I must style plain Bible teaching;
such as formed a great part of the Oxford passexamination in Divinity, when that was. The Law
and the Prophets and the history of Israel and its
characters were set forth to the people as foreshowing
the Gospel. Each scene of the Passion was preceded




SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE.  131


in the Passions-Vorstellung by its typical scene from
Hebrew history, expounded always to the people in
recitation or choric hymn, with noble voices and
modest gesture. The argument of the whole was the
Humanity and Death of God for Man's sake, to
atone for sin and make an end of evil; and the
witness of history thereto. It began with the Fall of
Man and the Vision of the Cross of Sacrifice, it
ended with the Lord's Ascension. And the whole
representation is a relic of the Church's symbolic or
pictorial teaching from the beginning.
Once more; the ancient themes of sepulchral or
church decoration are the Law, History, and Prophecies of the Hebrew Race, as pointing to the
Gospel; and the Lord's appearance and Miracles of
Mercy as representing the Gospel. His Death is
understood for the four first centuries, then symbolized, then openly represented. The first painted
lessons of Christian Hope are in the Catacombs,
where the Lord's own similitudes of himself are repeated in the form of the Good Shepherd and the
Vine. Then about the end of the fourth century, a
man of considerable genius, or at least of spirit both
devout and artistic, St. Paulinus of Nola, took up the
idea of pictorial teaching in earnest. Many churches
and Christian sepulchres were painted, probably




132  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


repainted, in his time. He had no sort of notion of
image-worship, or of stimulating devotion by appeal
to beauty, or by representation of bodily pain, or
anything of the kind.  His motto or leading idea,
expressed in one of his odd hexameters was Lex
antiqua Novam firmat, veterem Nova complet (or "The
old Dispensation bears witness to the Gospel which
fulfils it"), and that is the principle, the traditional
theme of Christian symbolism from the Catacombs
to Ammergau. Melchisedek's sacrifice, and that of
Abel are added to the list at Ravenna, in a most
important mosaic in St. Vitale. St. Paulinus' catalogue of emblems contributes also the History of
Joseph and the Passage of the Red Sea, and in early
mosaics at Ravenna, and in the first MSS. the Jordan
as the River of Baptism unto death in Christ takes
its part. The anagrammatic fish, the dove in all its
meanings, the palm and peacock, the fish and bread,
the lamb in both its senses, the four rivers, &c., are
all emblems of all Christian ages: and of these the
Old Testament types, Isaac, Joseph, Jonah, Daniel,
the Bread, the Rock, Elijah, &c., are duly repeated
at Ammergau. That is what the Passion-play really
is; the ancient Bible-teaching of the middle ages;
and those who were so taught, and paid earnest
attention, were taught very well.




SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE. I33


The old traditional symbolism seems to be thought
of no more: though great works like Hunt's Scapegoat, or Ary Scheffer's Christus Consolator, in some
degree take its place. It may revive with modifications, for the feeling in favour of church decoration
by fresco and mosaic is renewing itself, I trust, rather
vigorously. A good deal is doing in Yorkshire. I
may speak of some works by a painter, well-known
to painters, and best valued by his brethren,
Mr. Spencer Stanhope. I went to see his works in a
little grey church on a windy hill, not long built, but
weather-worn already, looking to the moors above
the Vale of Barnsley. Hoyland Swaine Church, they
call it. There was some of the best conventional
flower-ornament I ever saw, and a grand fresco in
the chancel, Our Lord adored by Angels, filling
the walls and roof. There is no doubt that if
church decoration goes on in fresco and mosaic, the
painters and sculptors must and will go back to the
ancient Graeco-Roman work of the Catacombs and
Christian Sarcophagi, for the original subjects which
appeal from the Gospel to the Law.
So much for the past of Christian symbolism, I
trust it has a future before it also. And now for the
kindred subject of which all Gothic work is so full.
The Grotesque, as we said, implied sport of mind; this




134  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


English people generally call humour, and connect it
with laughter. But in Italy, and to a great extent in
Germany, it is not necessarily ludicrous. Rafaelesque
or cinque-cento grotesques are graceful and fanciful,
by no means laughable or even ironical; nor yet is
much Venetian work of this nature, nor are Holbein's
religious woodcuts. The grotesque either arises from
the contrast between Art and the Actual, in northern
climates, where they are painfully opposed; or, from
the play of a great workman's mind, as when he
uses his full powers for the time only to record some
wandering of his fancy, as Durer so frequently does.
He is the great master of the serious grotesque.
Dr. Woltman says he is dearer to Germany for his
faults, the extraordinary flights of fancy, which are so
peculiarly German. I can only mention two of his
works here, both which are fairly intelligible, and are
probably well-known to most of us-the Knight and
Death, which appears to me to represent the mournful
ending of human power and valour, whether it be
meant to suggest hope in death, or deserved destruction; and the Melancholy which stands for the
brooding toil of human thought and labour.
Holbein comes about twenty-five years after Durer,
and I shall speak hereafter of his grotesques of the
Dance of Death, the Indulgence-mongers, and Christ




SYMBOLISMI AND THE GROTESQUE.  I35


the True Light. The effect of the two latter on the
mind of Germany at the Reformation is said to have
been very great. One is the most vigorous assertion of the personal illumination or direction of the
human spirit into necessary truth, in answer to
prayer and by the grace of "Christ the true Light"
-the other as mightily proclaims the efficiency of
personal repentance, like that of Manasses or David;
since indulgences and pardons are sold like merchandise, and the poor cannot buy them: the gist
of the picture is not so much the buying or selling
of God's forgiveness, as the vain cry of the helpless
beggar to the indulgence-dealer to take away his sins.
without money down. This woodcut opens the old
curious question of the comparative force of impression in poetry or painting. There is a contemporaneous flash of various converging ideas through the
eye into the brain at the instant, which is conveyed
by such works as these, and which seems to have a
subtle and piercing force even beyond poetry.
The Dance of Death is associated with Holbein's
wall-painting at Basle; of course, it is not the only
one;. that at Lucerne will be remembered, and it
was a common subject in the middle ages. People
walked with contented interest under the permanent
public sermon on their own death, as a thing they,




136  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


did not greatly fear. But this carries us once more
back to Pisa and Orgagna, and the tremendous
Triumph of Death, the Judgment and Inferno of
that man intolerably severe.  There are photographs of this last now to be had without difficulty.
You will see by it that the Florentine was less
merciful of conception than the German, who had not
been sharpened by civic feud and strife of cities, house
against house. The pitch of Italian hatred in the
middle ages has probably not been reached since; let
us hope not. And here, too, you see a beginning of
the tendency to seek a second Mediator in the Blessed
Virgin, and implore her to save men from Her Sonas He also may have been by trembling minds to
save them from His Father. The composition of
Orgagna's Judgment is compared by Messrs. Crowe
and Cavalcaselle to that of the Sistine. Both in an
important sense of the word are grotesques; for the
word really applies to representations where the
power of the workman necessarily falls short of an
unattainable and inexpressible subject.
One work there is of Michael Angelo's, which
may do well as a crowning example of the serious
grotesque, like Durer's Knight; and it also deals
with the most important of all subjects, and
gives us the great master's strange and mystic




SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE. 137


view of the Act of Death. I know that it is attributed by Kiigler to the obscure Rosso Fiorentino,
but I really think, it is only because the same
transparent brown has been used in it, which is
employed in a picture of Rosso's in the Uffizi. No
man but Michael Angelo could have painted the
original of those faces; and what is more, the cartoon
of the Bathing Soldiers has some hard features in it,
which are, I am sure, by the same hand as the Fates.
This is what I wrote of it, long ago, from the
picture:-Three mighty spinning women; aged beyond the ages; wrinkled but not withered; stronger
than men or the children of men; awful rather than
terrible. One stands a little behind: it is she who
metes out the length of the thread of life; and her
task is over, the appointed span is all past. Her
mouth is open, calling the name by which immortals
know the soul whose hour is come. There is a trace
of suspense and pain in her expression. She who
spins has turned her face from the thread, her work
too being done; and her eyes meet those of the fury
with the abhorred shears.  The latter is no fiend
or hateful Erinnys in the mind of Buonarotti; both
the sisters have a far-away look of strange pity; so
distant and so faint, it reminds one no more of human
tenderness than the evening Alpengliith recalls the




138   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.
sun's warmth. Yet it is there; and with it the lips are
just moved in the dawn of a strange smile, as if to
say: They who mourn unknowing shall yet understand. And the thread is between the shears, and the
sinews of the strong fleshless hand are set, and it is
closing them slowly; and still the grave eyes seek the
sister's face, expressionless, impenetrable, irrefragable.
"I am all that has been, and is, and shall be: and
no man hath ever lifted up my veil," said the statue
of Isis. It is as if Michael Angelo had indeed raised
it, and looked steadily on what it covered.




( I39 )


LECTURE V.
RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.
THE Laureate says that Arthur Hallam lies buried in
Florence, "by unfamiliar Arno, and the dome of
Brunelleschi "-the dome which Michael Angelo said
he would not imitate, and could not surpass. I do
not know how far, or in what sense, Florence is
unfamiliar to many English people. There are many
unforgotten dead who lie by unfamiliar Arno, and the
river and the dome have pretty close and deep
associations in many English minds. But Italy and
her great cities are, mentally speaking, the property
of Europe. Those of us who are taught to indulge.
in the dubious luxury of Thought or Imagination,
have their portion by Arno and by Tiber.   In
England, as in France, Germany, and wherever men
have thought, or hope, or brightness, or the spirit of
the singer in them, they look to Italy, and we
English, above all, to Venice, which belongs to us by.




140  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


right of Shakspeare and Byron, and all the outpouring
of island verse, good, bad, and indifferent, which has
gone forth over the Lagune. It would be curious to
trace the mingled feeling of admiration and dislike,
but still of mutual attraction, which has existed
between Italy and England for the last five hundred
years: for good or evil. I hope it has not been so
much for evil as is implied in the well-known cinquecento proverb, "Inglese Italianato e un diavolo
incarnate." Those who want to read a common-sense
exposition of the difference of the two characters may
consult Lord Macaulay's Essay on Machiavelli. And
when you hear of a plain, common-sense account of
a thing, you know it means about two-thirds of the
truth, put with force, clearness, and a total disregard
of the other third.
There are few terms, I think, which are more useful,
or harder worked, or more generally bewildering,
than the term Renaissance, or revival, or Renascence,
as Professor Arnold prefers to call it. It has that
inestimable quality of a new word, that everybody
can use it as he likes-just like a new toy. Nobody
knows exactly what it may or may not be applied
to.  Is it or was it a Renascence of Arts, or of
letters, or of thought, or of inductive science, or of
all of them? Then in what sense was the Art




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


Renascence of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
a fresh birth or return to life? In Art especially, had
nothing been done since Alaric and his Goths rushed in
at the Salarian gate, and brought night down on Rome
for three hundred years? That was the death-day of
Graeco-Roman Art, I have always said. But the
previous lectures have all gone on the understanding
that there was, in the course of the next thousand
years, a succession of revivals of Art in various forms,
some of them of extreme importance and beauty.
First at Ravenna, then at Verona and Pavia, then in
the earliest work of Venice and its mother city,
Torcello-(the daughter is like Horace's young lady,
filia pulclrior, and takes precedence of her mother
in history) -then in Sicily and Pisa, and then at
Florence, finally in Venetian oil-painting. I do
not mention Rome, and have never talked of a
Roman school: first because the true pictorial succession, of strong men in the right path inheriting
each others' teaching, goes through Florence and
Venice  from  Cimabue to Veronese:    secondly,,because all great artists formed in the north, were
sure to go and work at Rome some part of their
lives, and Rome was naturally rather the exhibition-room  than the school of Italy.  My use of
the word Renaissance, in fact, is very like that




142  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


indicated by Mr. Bryce in his admirable essay;
(which let all students of history take with their
Hallam or Sismondi). He dates the revival of learning and letters II00-I400, and says that "though the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are well chosen as
the period when the transcendent influence of Greece
began to work upon the world, there had long been
in progress a great revival, not only of learning," but,
as he subtly says, "of zeal for learning," which, being
directed to Rome, he calls the Roman Renaissance.
" It began," he says, in the twelfth century with the
passionate study of the Institutes of Justinian-the
thirteenth witnessed the rise of the "scholastic
philosophy," and he rightly puts in the fourteenth the
great masters of painting and of song, clustering
round the sad strength of Dante. Two of our earlier
lectures went to trace the Gothic revivals of painting, taught, or rather inspired, and called into
glad and emulous action, by Byzantinism and the
conventual relics of Graeco-Roman skill; and we
contended all through them that the forces of the
Teutonic mind, owing much, did not owe all, to
classical models.  The absolutely new  direction
which the Christian faith gave to the forces of poetic
thought was marked, we said from Professor Ruskin,
by the vastly greater attention paid by Gothic



RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.  I43


Christian artists to the expression of the face.* The
body in its health, and contented perfection to the
Greek: the expression of the spirit, its longings and
its passion, imperfection penetrated by inspiration,
sorrow burning into beauty-that to the Florentine.
To say that the latter owed much to the former, is
only to say that he was the latter in time; and that
he was not a fool. To say that the Florentine owed
the Greek his greatest success and full perfectness, is
altogether wrong. And that seems to me to be the
great error of the end of the last century and the
beginning of this one: to talk about the Middle Ages
as if they were obscured by absolute and prevailing
mental darkness, as well as by the darkness of physical
suffering. This error has provoked, as you know, a
very strong Gothic reaction in Art, which is still
in full vigour, though its direction is changed: as
we see by the poetry of Tennyson and Morris. I
decline characterizing either of them in conventional
praise; but Rossetti's painting and poetry, the lovely
verse of his sister, Burne Jones and his strong and
advancing school, Stanhope, Crane, Bateman, Clifford
and the rest-these bear witness enough to the
surviving.forces of northern Art: I write down their
names as they occur to me, without waiting to think
* See Frontispiece of Sibyl.




144  CHRISIIAN ART AND SYIMBOLISM.


of more. And this we must all feel, and our own
Gothic Renaissance enables us to give voice to it; that
the strength of our art is English strength; that you
can't turn an oak or a yew tree into an olive, although
we may try to learn, or must rediscover for ourselves,
some of the secrets of Greek greatness.  I have a
notion that greatness is greatness; and that it depends
on eternal principles; and accordingly that it is
not accurate to say we discover the secret of so-andso's greatness, as if he had dropped half-a-crown in
the street, and we had picked it up. The thing for
us is to work our way, if possible, to the conditions
under which greatness was found, and look to Him
who makes great and small. But, anyhow, Goths,
Saxons and Northmen we are, and we cannot be
Athenians; and the true way to follow Athenians
is not to go on for ever copying them, but work as
they worked, from the nature which they saw. And
if, as a people engaged in manufactures, we cannot see
nature now, as Christian and Hopeful could not see
Heaven under the shadow of Death " by reason of the
impediment which attends this place"-and other
places on the coal-field-then our first work is to
make the sight of natural beauty more and more accessible to ourselves, the people, and bring it into our
own reach in furniture and decoration of good design;




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


145


and preach to those beneath us, in faithful landscape,
the painters' gospel of green fields. It is not much,
but it is possible.
Now, we have before us to-day the two men whose
names are most entirely associated in art with the
Renaissance of the Cinque-Cento, the Greek Renaissance, or revival of Greek language and literature in
particular. Greek Art had begun to be revived when
Nicolo Pisano began its study; for Greek Art practically means, the closest study of the noblest natural
forms, of men and women. The religious Reformation
was a corollary or consequence of this Greek Revival,
in Germany and England; being only a part, as the
revival of letters was only a part, of that great expansion and outburst of the power and flower of the mind
of man which took place in those two centuries. The
religious side of the Renaissance may be said to be
the German or Cis-Alpine side of it: and we will
talk more of it, in entering on the subject of Direr's
and Holbein's great works. But in Italy, the new
life of the human spirit became artistic and literary,
not religious, for the life of its religion was trampled
out. The Protestantism of Michael Angelo, inherited
from Dante, nourished by Savonarola, shared by
Contarini and the Venetians, might have changed
the world, with Holbein's and Durer's, if Jesuitism,
IO0




146  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


statecraft, and the Curia had not prevailed at Trent.
The lesson Italy has left us from then to now, is that
(Bryce, p. 330), "Exclusive devotion to Art and literature (when religion and politics are alike closed)
cannot compensate for the departure of freedom and
a national spirit, and the activity of civic life. A
century after the golden days of Ariosto and Rafael,
Italian literature had become frigid and affected,
while Italian Art was dying of mannerism," and he
might have added, in great part of Rafaelism. And
though this inevitable Preface is too long already, I
must just dismiss, with hearty dislike and contempt,
the notion that tyranny or despotism nourish Art.
Art must have some patron it is true; but its best
patron is an educated people, taught to draw, or at
least to know by eye, form as connected with function.
You may have an age of Ptolemy with a despot; you
have had an age of Phidias under a free people, that
is to say, a people restrained by law at home, and
necessity of combat abroad.  With the death of
liberty in Florence, Art died there; Michael Angelo
would live there no longer, and no man rose after him.
People seem to forget that all the conditions which
made him were those of rather turbulent free cities.
It is easy to see what has made Rafael in all
times a central figure among painters, and the central




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


I47


figure of popular art. He is the most artistic of
artists: he was good and bright and beautiful himself: his soul had an entire delight in beauty, and
there is hardly any sensual feeling in his work; such
loveliness has seldom been set forth without impurity,
even where there is passion in it-he is not answerable for all his followers. All life went easily and:
delightfully with him, himself a delight to all men
and women, and he did not take life too easily, or
give himself to delight.  The earliest portraits, if
they do not show the man perfectly, show why the
man was loved, and why he was great. They are
so gentle and deep-eyed, as of a man who has
his share of power and command through love; who
will also see and know and learn continually; who
will not strive hard against the stream, but will mix
with the water and make it sweeter.  He was not
mighty with the mightiest.   Buonarotti, Titian,
Tintoret, Velasquez, the spiritual impact of these men
was not his; he had not the flame and heart, the
passion, or insight of the sons of " fire and morning."
But of all men he took learning most kindly, and
would learn from all men and things. His endless
industry is better understood perhaps than other men's,
from the wide dispersion of his slighter works, as well
as his finished pictures. We shall see directly, in




148  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


going through what are rightly called the periods of
his short life, the extraordinary bee-like facility of
getting more knowledge from every man, and assimilating power always, and making other men's power
his own; so that the Peruginesque early pictures
are Rafael's own, and nowise Perugino's, and even
the grim eye of Michael Angelo could hardly trace
where, or how, the youth half-envied half-regarded had
gently plagiarized, or let us say adopted, his thought.
Here I should much like an excursus about plagiarism
and its limits. Briefly, I should say that when you
use another man's help openly and confessedly, to
do some good thing which he has not done, and in
fair probability would not do, you are free before
the world of art and letters. But I am talking about
Rafael, who learnt his art from all men, being strong
enough to teach all.
These are the periods of his life, collated as
neatly as I can manage it with that of Michael
Angelo. For though these men were unconnected
with each other in their personal history, and were
scarcely even friends, they are the foremost men of
their day, and are so near each other in time and
place, and are so vividly contrasted with each other
in powers and character and career, that they must
always be taken together in Italian art-history. And




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.  I49


one of the educational needs of our time is the
careful and picturesque connection of art with history;
that is to say, the connection of what the painter did
with what he saw, and with the people he had round
him. One book there is beyond others, which suits
our period and subject almost exactly, though neither
Michael Angelo nor Rafael appear in it. It is the
novel of Romola, before-mentioned. I believe somebody said it was a very good book, very hard to
read; a statement apparently wrung from the poor
gentleman who wrote it by the necessities of reviewing.  He must be a weak brother or sister who
cannot read Romola from beginning to end, and
that reader must be an inattentive one who cannot
get from it such a picture of Florence and Florentines
in Michael Angelo's youth, as shall strengthen him
greatly in understanding Italian history.
In 1492 Columbus is waiting for ships for his first
voyage; Lorenzo de' Medici is dying at Careggi near
Florence; Michael Angelo Buonarotti, a boy of
seventeen, has been studying for the last three years
under his patronage, and has done a capital head of
an old Faun, and a bas-relief of Centaurs.* He has
been working in the Medici Gardens, the collection Or


* One is now in the Uffizi at Florence, the other in the Casa
Buonarotti.




150  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


museum in Oltrarno near the Pitti; and he has
studied Masaccio in the Carmine. In one or other of
these places he has had his own personal good looks
seriously impaired for life by the fist or mallet of the
huge and envious bully Torrigiano, who has flattened
his nose almost hopelessly. Perhaps he will think of
it in after days, when Raphael's fair eyes and delicate
face are stealing love and fame from him. Torrigiano
will carve and model, fight manfully sometimes, rave
and bully always, do or narrate about himself great
deeds "among the island bears " in England; whither
he will go to work for Henry VII. and VIII., and
where he may probably meet a Tedesco called Hans
Holbein. Finally he will die as the fool dies; break
his statue of the Virgin in a fit of passion, not unreasonable; be "examined," as Vasari mildly says,
by the Inquisition of Seville, and starve himself to
death in its dungeons. For Michael Angelo, men
thinK he has no master; he has been Domenico
Ghirlandajo's pupil a year, but they did not get
on; or rather, the lad got on too fast, and drew
with a strong line like Masaccio, and corrected his
master's drawing so that you could not say he was
far wrong; and one studio would not hold them
both.  There is a very pretty boy playing about
at Urbino, born nine years ago to John Santi,




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


ISI


or Sanzio, a good painter much regarded by the
Duke. They call him Rafael, and they say he will
make a draughtsman, and in two or three years more
he will go and begin to be immortal under Pietro
Perugino-they won't quarrel, one may be sure. But
in three dozen years and one the old master's eyes
will be strained once more, dim enough with tears
and time, at three score years and twelve, to finish
some of the work his dead pupil will have left behind.*
There is just ten years of time between the two young
masters-one is the square man, the other the round
one. All the great and true of all ages will respect
the corners of the elder; all men in all ages who
have capacity or understanding of tenderness or
loveliness will delight in the smoothness of the younger.
One is born into the evil time at endangered
Florence, and will take his share in what is going, if
need be; the other is safe among the hills, and will
early and late have the painter's immunity in war and
faction, like Giotto in earlier days. One is sharptongued already, with his high-bred pithy speech,
though rather too silent on the whole: Ghirlandajo
could not bear his father's contempt for painting. He
is passionate and self-restrained; the other has no
very violent impulses, and life runs pleasantly in his
*Fresco in S. Severo, Perugia. See Robinson, p. I43.




152  C'HRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


veins; his art secures him awhile from evil passions.
Just before Rafael goes to school with Perugino,
Buonarotti will have to ride hard out of Florence, with,
or some days before, the expelled Piero de' Medici;
and will escape to Bologna or Venice.  Ludovico
Sforza (patron of Lionardo di Vinci, who knows not
yet what a rival is at hand),-Sforza, Duke of Milan,
and traitorous curse of Italy, is just going to invite
the first French invasion, to which Piero will lend
himself shamefully, by giving up Florentine fortresses;
and to which Savonarola is pointing in his sermons,
at St. Marco, as a tempest of deliverance. The great
Dominican is at Careggi with Lorenzo; some say he
has bid him "Loose Florence,* or God will not loose
thy soul,"-and that Lorenzo defied him; a very
dubious tale altogether. But this is the point which
Hallam chooses "before," as he says, "the French
lances are shining in the defiles of the Alps,"-to
close the middle ages of Italian history.  At this
time, then, Alexander VI., the Borgia, the father
of Caesar and Lucrezia of blessed memory, is
sitting in Rome, after much bribery, as Vicar of
Christ on earth; and he is and represents in Rome,
as surely as the Roman eagles did in Jerusalem, the
Abomination of Desolation sitting in the Holy Place,
* Casa Guidi Windows.




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO,


where it ought not. Against him Savonarola has come
from Ferrara to Florence to testify; Michael Angelo
has heard him, and will not forget him, or ever
fear Popes overmuch. But the exile with Piero,
and also the escape to Bologna from Piero, must
have freed him from the shame and horror of the
sight in the great Piazza of Florence; when the Florentine prophet came forth racked near to death, to
be hanged and burnt for denying the Deity of the
father of Caesar Borgia.  The times were of the
nature considered by M. Taine the most favourable
for the production of great art. Everybody wore the
finest clothes conceivable, and indulged in the
grossest and most violent vices imaginable. He does
not say that Angelo or Rafael did either; but then
of course, they had the advantage of seeing other
people do it. You will see, however, that Rafael's
birth under ancestral government, and in a court; his
isolation from the political life of a free city, or one
which desired freedom; and his peaceful separated
artistic-conventual life, going happily off with Pinturrichio to Siena to paint the great library-were all
very different from Angelo's, who was bound to Piero
de' Medici for his father's sake; to Savonarola by faith
and conviction; and to Florence, which exiled the one
man, and hanged the other, by civic patriotism and




154  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISIM.


love of home. The noble of once-free Florence could
not take things quite easily; if Rafael did so more
successfully, we must not blame him.  He was a
painter, and his business was to paint. Angelo was a
man, and king of men; and his occupation in life was
not so simple. He (Angelo) saw Rome for the first
time, in 1496: Luther saw it fourteen years after:
while Julius II. warred for Bologna, strong in curses
and treason, and leagued with the northern vultures,
and the League of Cambray: while Angelo sat all day
perched on the wonderful scaffold of his own invention, which made his carpenter's fortune, painting
the Sistine ceiling, from I508 to 1511; and while
Rafael-a few rooms off-was hard at the frescoes
of the inhabited rooms of the Vatican, the Stanze,
on which, above all things, his fame will rest and
endure. Can you think of those three men together,
or so near? Yet, I suppose, the German monk was
taken to see the Pope's great painters at their work,
and the strange histories of the Old and New
Testament, which were now grown nearly all
over the Sistine ceiling; and Rafael's stately visions
of poets and philosophers submissive to the allruling Church; the miracle of Heliodorus, and
repulse of Attila.  Had Luther talked with the
painter on the high scaffold, both their lives, and




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


I55


the face of Europe and the world, might have been
changed.
Nothing impresses me much more, as a student
of history in a small way, than the advantage of
realizing men's possible meetings, and their slight
neighbourly knowledge of each other in the everyday-way of acquaintance. It is better than chronology, or mere memory of dates;-better to remember
the period by the men than the men by the period.
One has personal interest and imaginative sympathy
with the forms and faces of men; and there is no
interest in four figures; and it is simply a convenience in getting up a period to begin with the
fact that it was somebody's period; and that he
knew and dealt with this, that, and the other person.
Yet we must all remember, in realizing the period and
life of these great men, that they were not half such
great men in their period: a man is no more a prophet
in his own time than in his own country. Rafael
and Lionardo, and M. Angelo, were not ticketed
great or greatest, as they walked about Florencetheir work was not done nor approved: their preeminence was not settled. Lionardo, the eldest, was
the best known and admired, as favourite of the
Duke of Milan. Angelo would be talked of as our
ex-Medicean sculptor, with a turn for poetry, and




156 CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


a Roman reputation. Rafael probably was described as about the nicest young man ever yet
seen in Florence, just like Pico de Mirandola. He
must have been commended to clerical patrons,
for he seems now to have formed his lasting friendship with Baccio de la Porta, or our Brother
Bartholomew, in St. Marco. Think of those two in
the cloisters and cortiles, among Angelico's frescoes; perhaps in those days of violent death they
could bear well enough to think of the Brother
Girolamo Savonarola, lately dragged out of that convent to rack, and fire, and gallows. There is a sheet
of paper in the Oxford Rafael Gallery which may be
a remembrance of evenings at St. Mark's. It is the
well-known No. 28 in Mr. Robinson's book; several
heads and hands, and a sketch of the Battle of the
Standard. One of these heads is a portrait of Fra
Bartolomeo, and he probably sat or stood for another
-a very severe and perfect drawing, with hard silver
point. This goes back to I504-5. I could not help
anticipating a little, in time; especially as Michael
Angelo is one of the representatives of Italian
Protestantism, or the earnest and suffering layChristianity of religious men in Italy, under the
portentous Alexander VI. Florence and Savonarola
had prepared him pretty well for what he was to see




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


I57


at Rome of human or subter-human abomination.
He did not look on corruption and foul crimes, and
the dagger and poison of the Borgia supplementing
the sword of St. Peter, with the wide-eyed astonishment and piteous disenchantment of the pious
German. Probably he and Rafael made up their
minds to see as little as they could, except their art
and their models.
We must go back again from Luther's day in
Rome, I5IO, to the period in Florence, six years
before, which brings the two masters together in
the lovely city; and brings them also into contact
with their elder, the great Lionardo. Most of us are
aware that his cartoon of the Battle for the Standard
was executed in competition with Michael Angelo
and others, to adorn the new Hall of the Great
Council, which Bramante, Angelo, and the rest had
designed and completed.  Only fragments remain
either of this work or Angelo's Cartoon of Pisa. The
latter in particular is only known, I think, by the
old engraving of a part of it, called "The Bathing
Soldiers," where a number of men bathing in the
Arno, and suddenly called to battle, are struggling
hastily into clothes and armour, with an intense
expression of wrath and haste which cannot be forgotten by those who have seen it. It has seemed to




1I8  CHRISTIAAr ART AND SYMBOLISM.


me that the force of some of those hard faces was
put in by the same mind and hand which drew the
Fates of the Pitti Palace, described in the Fourth
Lecture. Rightly or wrongly, every easel picture of
Michael Angelo's is disputed. You hear people say
he never painted an oil picture; sometimes that
he never painted an easel picture; some of us may
remember the angry persistent denials about the
recently purchased Entombment in the National
Gallery. I don't know exactly what these general
statements mean. Do gentlemen really think that
he never rested a panel, or canvas, on an easel; or
that he never filled a brush with oil colour? What
is an oil picture? Very often, in the best times, and
by the best men-by the Venetians, by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, following their methods, and by Turner,it is a work begun in distemper, that is to say with
colours mixed up with size and water,-and finished
up with oil colours painted over when dry. I believe
that Mr. Watts, who has studied so much in Venice,
paints thus to this day; and I dare say Buonarotti
combined tempera with oil in his own way. But to
reject the Fates as his work; or the marvellous
Cleopatra with the asp at her breast, (which some
of us must have seen at the Leeds Exhibition,
or in London, in I870, and which, or one like it,




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.  I59


Vasari mentions as Andrea del Sarto's), is to take
on oneself the onus of finding somebody else who was
more likely to be author of such works. And, as I
said, it seems to me that the unfathomable face of
Atropos, and that intense loveliness so full of pain
and death, was beyond the power of any man who
ever painted, save Angelo alone; unless it were
Tintoret in after days.
Well, one thing is sure, that Lionardo's cartoon
of the Battle of the Standard hung on one wall of the
Palazzo del Gran Consiglio, and Michael Angelo's
cartoon of Pisa on another; that all the best painters
and sculptors in Italy studied them for months, that
Rafael studied them among others, and with greater
profit than any other; and that they were finally cut
to pieces and destroyed unrealized, like several of
Rafael's cartoons in after time; so that only fragments
of engravings, or more properly engravings of fragments of them, are now in existence.  But they were
great efforts of the masters' lives; and though there
is no doubt that the method of dividing out a man's
life and works into epochs or periods may be abused,
it is still very useful indeed for the student. The
period of the cartoon of Pisa is used by Mr. Robinson
in classifying the works of Michael Angelo, now in
the Oxford galleries. It is very convenient to dwell



60o CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


on it, because it brings him to Florence again, and
into daily contact with Lionardo and Rafael. I have
already said something of the advantage of mastering
one's chronology by means of grouping great men and
works together; and as there is no time now to go
through all the biography of either of our heroes, I
rather prefer to attempt sketches of times when they
were near each other. As yet there can have been
no notion of rivalry between them; nor do I think
that it was ever bitter or severe: it certainly in
after-time amounted to opposition and emulation
between the men and their methods alike;-fresco
against oil-colour. Their opposition seems rather to
have been pressed on by Bramante or others, than
to have been the fruit of personal enmity. The story
that Buonarotti told Rafael that he went about like
a prince with his court, and Rafael told him that he
went about like a hangman by himself, proves familiarity rather than dislike. Of that shortly; but at
present Michael Angelo was a draughtsman, and a
sculptor.  Rafael a draughtsman and a painter.
Rafael was eight years behind-eight years of such
labour and learning as his great contemporary alone
could get into the time. He was yet a student, a lad
of Perugino's and Pinturicchio's, with much to learn,
an endless capacity for learning; and with a style




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


I6I


to cast off-not that it was a bad one, but that he
had come to the end of it, and other work was prepared for him.* Of Michael Angelo as a student we
know nothing: he had no time of unripeness, or crudity, or imperfect handling and progressive work. He
went to school to learn, as himself said, to the end
of his eighty-ninth year; but nothing is known of
Ghirlandajo's, or any one's, claiming to have taught
him anything. We hear of him as master; then
as Divine Master. And, once for all, do not let us
quarrel with Vasari for the word, or undervalue that
good fellow. The Boswell of many Johnsons, he
was always faithful to his true love and respect for
the greatest of them all. He had a great literary and
artistic capacity. I believe I may quote Mr. Holman
Hunt's opinion of his portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici
as a work of the highest order. More, perhaps, than
he thought of, may, in truth, and fact, be implied
in the word he thus used. For, assuredly, those who
knew Michael Angelo from his earliest days did not
call him Divine Master till they had seen that God
was with him, and that signally.
Next year (I505) Julius II. has been three
years Pope; and he, like Mastino della Scala, or
Mr. Browning's Bishop of St. Praxead's, orders his
* The Sposalizio, now in the Brera, at Milan, dates 1504.
II




62   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


tomb during his life-time. Michael Angelo's great
David has just been set, where it stands now, in
the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. He has done a
great St. Matthew; * his marble Bacchus (Uffizi)
and the Kneeling Cupid, (now at South Kensington)
are remembered; there is no sculptor like him;
and Julius sends for him, and bids him design a great
mausoleum, with unlimited sculpture. The Slaves
in the Louvre, and Boboli Gardens; and the Moses,
who now sits gloomily, with bent brows, in the dim
lights of St. Pietro in Vincoli, are the finished relics
of the master's vast design. Years of his life, apparently the greatest part of years  5 I6-I7-I8, had
to be wasted in stone-quarrying at Carrara; under
quarrels with Julius, and neglect by Leo X., whose
Pagan dilettantism had little in common with his
spiritual power of design and earnest faith in Christ.
At least, he was sadly distracted from his great work;
and it was not right to make him a head quarryman.
But now, in I508, Julius does a new thing.  His
tomb was ordered three years ago, and is little
advanced, for he refused to see the master; who
thereon refused to stay with him, or work for him;
and who altogether took and maintained throughout
a very high line, with a very dangerous man. It is


* Academia at Florence.




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


I63


now settled between them that the tomb shall wait
yet longer. The Pope is thinking of the League of
Cambray, and the ruin of the semi-Protestant Venice,
and has no notion of dying just yet. What he will
do is to ornament the Sistine. It was to be a great
place of sculpture, all spirantia signa, marble life
unpainted: but Bramante is the architect of all the
Pope's new works, the Loggias, and new chambers of
the Vatican. He is of Urbino, and has a brilliant
young townsman by the name of Rafael Sanzio,
who is painting the new Vatican Stanze in fresco.
Both of them are highly popular, magnificent, handsome and so on; and Bramante does not want so much
money to go away from his works; and he interferes
and protests, in not unreasonable terror of the terrible
rival who is architect, sculptor, and engineer already.
Is he much of a painter? Bramante hopes not, and
persuades the Pope to insist on the Sistine being
adorned with paintings.  It is Urbino against
Florence: rather an intrigue, I am afraid; but a very
mild one for the sixteenth century in the Court of
Rome. Angelo, the sculptor, with his broken nose,
just like an antique, and his mystic piety, and spare
ascetic life, and short speech, may be a painter
perhaps, Bramante thinks; but with the brush he
surely never can come near our young townsman,




164  CHRISTIAA' ART AND SYMBOLISM.


who has got so much from him and the cartoon of
Pisa.
The Florentine sets to work, however; invents
his marvellous scaffolding all at once, and mounts
it. His design is Titanic. The ceiling shall be
a kind of floor of aether, and into it he carries
up vast columns in perspective towering into a
new heaven.   At first he does not understand
how to mix his fresco-plaster; and is in despair
to see his forms too dim.    His first picture;
the Deluge, has rather too many and too small
figures: by the time it is done he knows his tools
and his distance thoroughly. And then men see
what he can do-some part of it, at all events.
There is his Eve, the loveliest of all forms; there is
the Act of Creation; the Maker flying all abroad on
the wings of winds; the chain of prophecy from the
first Adam to the Second; and between these are vast
forms of apostle, prophet, martyr, sibyl, each the
shadow of a spirit on the wall. Rafael has something to learn yet of the grim aristocrat: and he
learns it, and owns it, with all his frank sweetness,
always sure of fame, and joy enough and to spare. I
think that this must have been the time when he
thanked God that he had been born to know and
see the work of Michael Angelo.  But he, too, is




RAFAEL AND JMICHAEL ANGELO.


I65


changed. What is called the First Period of Rafael *
ends, never to return again, with the paintings of the
four Stanze: that is to say, the " living" rooms of
the Papal Court in the time of Leo X. They are
the Camera della Segnatura, with the Dispute of the
Sacrament, the Parnassus, and the School of Athens;
the Stanza d'Eliodoro, with the repulse of Heliodorus; the Mass of Bolsena for Julius II., and the
Attila and Liberation of St. Peter to suit the taste
of Leo X. Then there is the Stanza dell' Incendio,
or of Charlemagne, containing the burning of the
Borgo, or suburb; and the Sala di Constantino, with
the defeat of Maxentius by the, first Christian Emperor: these last being painted entirely by Giulio
Romano, and other pupils, from Rafael's designs;
those of the third room are so in a greater or less
degree. These are his great and central works, extending over his Roman Period, so called: the earlier
part of it, as Mr. Robinson's excellent work puts
it, from I508 to 1512, and the later to 1517, and
on to his death in I520. By these, and neither by
Fornarinas,  nor by  dark-eyed  Contadinas   as
Madonna di Sisto, nor by red Popes and Cardinals,
-his powers and his faithfulness to them are to be


* His Peruginesque or earliest manner may be said to end with the
Sposalizio, about 1504.




166  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


judged. So, in effect, says Sir Joshua Reynolds;
I do not know whose judgment ought to prevail
against his.
It is admitted on all hands that the influence of
Michael Angelo on the mind of Rafael was considerable; but as Mr. Robinson acutely remarks, it
was much greater on Giulio Romano and Rafael's
pupils. And the fact of their having done so much
of Rafael's later frescoes certainly makes the work
more Michelangelesque. But if the Sistine and the
Stanze were at that time viewed as rival works in
fresco, Rafael seems to have left the field to his
opponent for the rest of his life; and instead of
challenging him any more in fresco, to have pushed
on oil painting against fresco. And in the opinion
of the Roman public he did so quite victoriously;
perhaps it was this which drew out the older man's
remark that fresco was work for men, oil painting
for women (pray excuse the thoroughly uncivil and
improper nature of the observation, but he certainly
must have been out of temper at the time). There
can be no doubt that fresco, more than any other
art-work, calls for the greatest efforts of the greatest
man. However, Rafael reigns with Pope, court and
people till the day of his death, the other makes
designs for Sebastian del Piombo, and tries to get




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


I67


Venetian colours on his own drawing; as Tintoret
actually did in the next century.
Altogether Rafael has the best of it; right or
wrong, he is the man of the times, and has gone with
the times. He found art the servant of religion, and
then he pursued it religiously and did best of all.
By the time he had come to the Stanze frescoes,
he had made up his mind that art belonged to
Apollo, and he went on with it just as cheerfully;
who Rafael belonged to, perhaps, he had left off
asking. It cannot be doubtful, I think, that when he
paints on one wall Christ, as Lord and Chief of the
Domain of Theology; and on the other Phcebus
Apollo, as Lord of the Domain' of Poetry, Art, and
Inspiration; he proclaims the separation of religion
from art, declaring practically that Rafael painted no
longer as servant of Christ, but as a student of
classical literature, and as servant of Julius or Leo,
those marvellous classical vicars of Christ. All artists
had held hitherto, and Angelo held still, that the
faith was true, and therefore supplies the highest
motives for art.  Rafael inaugurated, meaning no
harm, the new artistic persuasion, zealously insisted
on to this day; that mythologic fable is beautiful,
and therefore supplies the highest motives for art.
One side said for centuries: truth first, and beauty




I68  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


will follow, and she did follow. The other said:
beauty at any rate, and all the world will follow.
So they did, and she led them the way of the
stranger that flattereth with her words; and art
became prostitution, and Italy became a scorn and
ruin, a land despised or mourned for, in all places
where God and honour reigned.
So Rafael and Michael Angelo went different
ways in life, and were separated and opposed in
spirit, and partly or wholly jealous of each other.
And one died, and the other lived on for the time in
Florence; he may have gone there in disgust, leaving
Sebastian del Piombo to paint in oil against Rafael.
The Raising of Lazarus in the National Gallery
is probably one of these compounded pictures. But
now in I520, the year of Rafael's death, the mighty
sculptures of the Medici Chapel, in St. Lorenzo in
Florence, are begun, for the sepulchres of the brothers
of Urbino, nephews of Lorenzo the old Magnificent
patron-Giuliano and Lorenzo. How the names were
misplaced, so that the bright and fortunate soldier
Lorenzo is supposed to be represented by the statue
of the gloomy heart-struck Giuliano, is difficult to say,
but so it seems to be; the whole subject will be found
in vol. ii. of Grimm's Life.*  I have said something
* See Miss Bunnett's Translation,




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


I69


of these before, especially of this statue, called the
Thought of Michael Angelo. As an expression of
the aim and the power of spiritual art it is perhaps
the chief work of the world.
Nine years after, Florence had her last interval of
freedom, so they were pleased to call it, for two
years (1528-30), and fought hard for her stormy
liberty.  Savonarola's pupils had been brought up
at least to fight for honour and civil life; and her
chief artist became her chief engineer, seizing with
his sure eye on her strong point of defence, and
fortifying San Miniato; having to fly to Venice
at last, when all was lost or betrayed. Clement VII.
pardoned him at the fall of 'the Republic, and
till 1534 he lived between Florence and Rome,
working principally on the tombs of the Laurentine
Sacristy. In that year he went to Rome, where
he remained till his death in 1564. The Last Judgment of the Sistine was begun in 1534, completed in
154I. The Crucifixion, for Vittoria Colonna, was a
work of this period; the tomb of Julius II. was at last
completed on a reduced scale, and Moses seated in
St. Peter in Vinculis.  And his great labours as
architect of St. Peter, and the unfinished Deposition
in the Duomo at Florence, fill up the measure of
one of the lives of highest honour ever won by man.




170  CHRISTIAN ART AND SY"MBOLISM.


Immortal honour; I do not know what the words
mean, but they belong to the life and death of
Michael Angelo; as far as one human creature has
right to say them of another at all.
In the Oxford collection there is a drawing of
Vittoria Colonna, the one woman whom Michael
Angelo loved, who having been wedded once, and
widowed, and clinging to her first vows, could not
accept his hand, or yet reject his love. It is a noble
and delicate face, bearing out what we know of her.
In a time of utter licence and universal temptation,
when all sins one can or cannot name were matter of
pleasure and convenience in Italy, these two lived
and met in austere purity of grave affection; heading
the Protestant feeling of Italy, dwelling with their
Venetian friends on prospects of reform in religion,
hoping always for the future of their country, and
dying in hope deferred.  That I believe is what
the rapturous school call frigid. Anyhow there is
much honour and faith in it.   At all events I
greatly prefer frigid purity to vice, hot or cold.
Judge of their love by this, that when Vittoria
died, the stoical master, who had never complained
to man before, broke out in utter lamentation and
bitter weeping, and mourned for this especially,
that never in life, not till now when she lay dead




RAFAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO.


171


before him, had he once kissed her hand. I suppose
he did it then. For him, when his time came, they
laid him in Santa Croce, where Dante should have
lain. Ilaia -yr ra4oc for them both, as Pericles said
of the valiant slain-all earth is their monument.
Rafael, you will see, of course, died in the zenith
of his power. Had he lived forty-four years more,
like his great rival, one hardly-knows what he would
have done; unless he had gone to Venice. Had he
lived to learn Titian's colour, Velasquez in after days
would not have so definitely and absolutely preferred
Titian's works as he did. His life is a very perfect
one in art, and it was an amiable and harmless one
considering his temptations.  He, too, was better
than his times. But in the records of the medieval
Faith hardly a greater or truer Christian seems to
have lived than the aged master, whose last poem
willingly declared the vanity of the art which was
his glory, and who spoke these dying words to his
household:- " In your passage through this life
remember the sufferings of Jesus Christ."




172  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


LECTURE VI.
DURER AND HOLBEIN.
I PREFER cutting our usual bit of descriptive introduction very short this time; and it shall be in better
words than any of mine. This is Professor Arnold's
contrast between Italy and Germany-for we talk of
Northern art to-day:Even thus of old, from the pomp
Of Italian Milan, the fair
Flower of marble of white
Southern palaces;-steps
Bordered by statues, and walks
Terraced, and orange bowers
Heavy with fragrance;-the blond
German Kaiser full oft
Long'd himself back to the fields,
Rivers, and high-roof'd towns
Of his native Germany.
You can hardly have a briefer or better sketch. But
for the real difference between the German and the
Italian Renaissance, it is well understood to have been




DURER AND HOLBEIN.


173


a religious one; and I fear we can only conclude that
the presence, the power, and the example of the
Popes-and their temporal power on the sunny side
the Alps-was the immediate and active cause of the
difference. Vital and personal religion in Italy being
all on the side of reform, the Papacy stamped out
reform; and religious persons had to be satisfied, if
they could, with the faith of Alexander VI. and
Leo. X.; and with the Holy Sacraments as administered by the commissioned delegates of Alexander VI.
and Leo. X.: whatever manner of men they were.
So it was, that either the Protestantism of denial, or
an indifference too perfect to trouble itself to deny,
seems to have gained ground all over Italy; first, after
the death of Savonarola in I493: just as political
freedom and civic independence died out, in the subjugation of Florence, in I530. Michael Angelo, you
will remember, left Florence, and the Duke Lorenzo;
and Night and Day, for Rome, finally in I534. He
could dwell among the wrecks of Pagan temples,
though not with the ruins of the liberty of his own
land; and so possessed his soul in patience. But in
the North, the German national life, especially that
of the free cities, was sturdy and vigorous, cultivated,
and often noble. The agricultural population was
perhaps worse and worse oppressed by the aristo



174 CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


cracy as the central power of the Empire decayed.
But the peasants lived on; and gathered strength, and
even intelligence, mainly through religious instruction. Germany had never been like Italy in the time
of Augustus, and afterwards.  She had not fallen
under the curse of slave labour, and the degradation
and depopulation which surely follows it;-which
Julius Caesar foresaw, and had begun to strive with.
Mediaeval serfdom, bad as it was, was a far less evil than
pagan slavery, and cultivation by Familiae Rusticae
working in chains. It is impossible to go into this
subject now; for it requires a large book to itself:
the question, I mean, of how far the early-mediaeval
weakness and desolation of North Italy was connected
with the old Roman system of slave labour. The
Imperial divisions of land out in colonies,-no longer
colonies of free Roman soldier-farmers, like Northumbrian or Scottish borderers, but systems of slave
gangs, without even right of marriage,* without hope
of progress, or recognition, or mercy-all this, of
course, collapsed instantly on the approach of Ostrogoths or Lombards; because every slave who could
lift his hand naturally burnt his master's house and
joined the invaders.  Probably the cruelties attributed to Alboin were a good deal connected with
* Only "Contubernium."




DURER AND HOLBEIN.


I75


the revenge of savage slaves on merciless masters.
I know not exactly where to direct you for this
subject: but between Gibbon,* Mommsen, Merivale
and others, it should be possible to get a competent knowledge of it. At all events it can hardly
be disputed that in Italian history civic life, with
aristocratic or dynastic rule, are everything: or
that in Germany a great rural population existed,
which showed its power at the Reformation, moved in
the first instance by genuine zeal for the Christian
Faith; or that, as Dr. Woltmann says, the Reformation failed in Germany, in as far as it did fail, because
the free cities did not stand faithfully enough by the
religious protest of the country folk, or second their
demands for justice, as under Goetz, of the Iron hand.
Then, again, German free cities did not hate each other
with Italian bitterness; they had not to look on for
generations in helplessness and mutual treachery and
hatred, while their broad lands were made the prey and
arena of foreigners. It made no difference, as far as
real unity or Pan-Italic feeling was concerned, whether
Florence were the tributary of the Pope, or the
oppressive mistress of Pisa. Political and spiritual
hopelessness drove Italians to make their country


* Decline and Fall, Ch. ii., p. 42, and especially Milman's Notes,
op. 47, 48, ed. I846.




176  CHRISTIAN ART A:ND SYMBOLISM.


the library, the museum, the gallery, the musictheatre of Europe, in hopes that she might cease to
be the battle-field of Europe. We had better show
less self-seeking and narrowness ourselves, before we
blame dead men for want of patriotism, or comment
complacently on the decay of Italy. Her art and
glory are her own: her martyrs to the Faith died
also: her distresses really date in their causes from the
Social Wars of old Rome; and even from that decay
of the Roman or Latin free country-population,
which may be said to have begun with Hannibal and
Canne.
From the novel of Romola, and the chapter on
Diirer and Salvator, in Vol. v. of Modern Painters,
an idea of the different moral conditions of Italy
and of Germany at the Renaissance may be obtained
on the easiest possible terms; that is to say, in the
clearest, most graphic, and truest language.  We
have now to compare the lives of Diirer and Holbein
in far different scenes and conditions. Mr. Scott's or
Mrs. Hamerton's Lzfe of Diirer, and Miss Bunnett's
translation of Woltmann's Holbein, rest on careful
survey of original authorities, and, in fact, are all
that can be desired; they refresh their readers and
exhaust their subjects, and one can say no more.
Let us have a skeleton chronology of the two lives




DURER AND HOLBEIN.


177


first. Diirer was born in Nuremberg in 1471, and
died there in 1528; rich, honoured, henpecked, his
work completed-to all Germans the first name in
German Art. Holbein was born in Augsburg, as
seems after all most probable, in 1495 or '98. His
name, however, is identified with Basel, as his father
went there early in his life; and his greatest works
were done there.  He died in I543 (not in '55, the
usual date)-in England, of the plague, which seems
to have visited London at shorter intervals, and with
more implacable virulence, than any other capital of
Europe. And his is the greatest German name in
Art, as Direr's is the chief name in German Art.
The leading divisions or epochs of both lives
seem to be as follows:- Diirer was married to
Agnes Frey in I494 (Michael Angelo was just
flying from Florence with Piero de' Medici, and
Rafael went to school with Perugino next year).
From November, 1486, he had been learning to
paint with Wohlgemuth, of Nuremberg. His father,
goldsmith and designer, must have previously taught
him to draw, model, and engrave-and he had made a
very good Seven Stations of the Cross at home. Three
years with Wohlgemuth, four years of Wanderjahre,
make 1486-7 into 1493; and he was married as
soon as he returned from his first travels. There is
12




178  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYM.BOLISM.


no time to discuss Agnes Frey: she was rather hard
in money matters, and strict in mind, if she had any
mind.   But Pirkheimer, Diirer's great friend and
patron, and her great opponent, seems to have been
as much too joyous in his notions, as she was too
severe.  Mr. Scott says, with much contempt, that
she was of the stuff that saints are made of: which
indicates anxiety on his part to show that he does
not think much of saints.  Perhaps he is used to
Scottish saints, as his notion of them is evidently
founded on Agnes Frey's characteristics of painful
strictness in religious duty and " close grip of the
siller."  The fact is that Durer and she were poor
up to I506: that after that date he made money
fast, but spent it continually in purchases of pretty
things and curiosities, for which his taste was insatiable: also, he was the victim of continual piracies
and imitations of his copperplates by Marc Antonio
and others, and was too patient and easy with his
many debtors. This he himself avows and lamentsand I daresay his wife lamented it too-in what
terms can never be known, and perhaps it is better
so. Born '71, married '94, was in Venice in I506,
after which year the tide of fortune fairly turned in
his favour, twenty years before Holbein went to
England-the year of Columbus's death. Up to this




DURER AND HOLBEIN.


179


(I quote from Mr. Scott's list) his chief paintings
are his father's, his own and his brother's portraits,
now in Munich; the multitudinous Calvary now in
Florence-a pictorial history indeed, where, as German
painters were wont to do, he takes the historian's
privilege, and repeats figures and events on the
same canvas-and a votive picture for Pirkheimer
on the death of his wife Crescentia. His engravings
were very numerous already. The woodcut illustrations of the Apocalypse are of this date. The
Woman with the Wild Man is supposed to be his
earliest work, with the Holy Family and the Butterfly-these are, in part, reproductions of Martin
Schongauer, or Schon Martin, Handsome Martinwho, as Mr. Scott says, was virtually Dtirer's master.
The Shield with Death's Head, Adam and Eve,
Satyr's Family, Little and Great White Horse, and
Holy Family date from 1504-1506. How different
a style of Art was in full action at Florence; where
Lionardo was drawing the Battle of the Standard,
and Michael Angelo the cartoon of Pisa, with that
pretty lad from Urbino watching their hands.
At Venice, in I506, Durer was on terms of friendship with John Bellini, then eighty years of age,
who stood up for him in the talks and councils
of the painters; and he must have known Car



i8o  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLIS.1~.


paccio, then advanced in life; also Marco Basaiti,
Giorgione, and Titian. His letters are chiefly about
Pirkheimer's affairs, his loves and commissions:
jewels and carpets are to be bought, and Direr
trades as well as he can-his great Altar-piece is
a success, and all his pictures sold but one. Some
of the painters hate him, he is warned not to eat
or drink with them, and they all say his works are
very unlike the antique (not a doubt of it). He has
misfortunes-his bales of cloth are burnt in a firea debtor runs away with eight of his hard-won
ducats, &c.: in short, he came back to Nuremberg
decidedly a sadder man, and not much richergrieved to lose the sun of Venice, and not much
pleased to meet Mrs. Durer, I fear. But after this
time, his engravings, like Nuremberg's hand, go
through every land, and he grows rich in spite
of fraudulent debtors and artist-thieves. When a
man is worth piracy and forgery, to a person of
Marc Antonio's acknowledged powers and skill-he
must infallibly get something himself; and Direr
henceforth got enough, and was well content. For
his rights, he did not care for them; his charity
"sought not her own." In I509 he begins to write
poetry; rough, simple, and wise, with a piety both
mystical and practical, dwelling like Michael Angelo




D URER AND HOLBEIAN


I8I


on the Divinity and Sufferings of Christ for Man;
desiring suffering and endurance for himself; and giving
grave, moderate advice for life, like George Herbert's
Temple. Mr. Scott has translated some of it so very
well, as to enable me quite to get over his remark
about saints. Next year Luther is in Rome.
And now we come to the period of the greatest
designs on copper; either of religious tendency, as
St. Hubert and the two St. Jeromes, or allegorical,
like Melancholy and the Knight and Death, dated
1513, the Flodden year. The meaning of the first
will probably never be settled. Some say it is the
end of the strong wicked man, just overtaken by
Death and Sin, whom he has served on earth; it is
said that the tuft on the lance indicates his murderous character, being of such unusual size; you know
the use of that appendage was to prevent blood
running down from the spear-head to the hands.
They also think the object under the horse's offhind foot is a snare, into which the old oppressor
is to fall instantly. The expression of the faces may
be taken either way: both good men and bad may
have hard regular features; and both good men and
bad would set their teeth grimly on seeing Death
with the sands of their life run out. Some say they
think the expression of Death gentle, or only admoni



182  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


tory, as the author of Sintram; and I have to thank
the authoress of the Heir of Redcliffe for showing me
a fine impression of the plate, where Death certainly
had a not ungentle countenance, snakes and all. I
think the shouldered lance and quiet firm seat on
horseback, with gentle bearing on the curb-bit, indicate grave resolution in the rider, and that a robber
knight would have had his lance in rest: then there
is the leafy crown on the horse's head; and the horse
and dog alike move on so quietly, that I am inclined
to hope the best for the Ritter. The Melancholy is
one of the most characteristic efforts of the Gothic
mind to express its meditations on its own activity
and its end. Her other name is Reflection, or modern
self-analysis. As yet she labours in hope: "in the
sciences. in mathematics, in hand-work, in architecture: the bell is there to call to labour, the
child beginning its labours with budding wings
that must grow yet for many a day -the wolfhound, for the loving service of the brute creation;
and the Mistress of all, lost in thought; regardless of the price of all her gains, but crowned with
fresh herbage, and with the rainbow of hope before
her; "-that is Direr's allegory of the Vanity of
Human Inventions.
In 1515-16-17-18 he was at Augsburg, working for.




DURER AND HOLBEIN.


I83


the Emperor Maximilian, who died in January, 1519
-always Direr's careful and honouring, almost loving
friend-and Durer determined to go to the Netherlands, where Charles V. was to hold court at Antwerp.
The year before, 1518, the Indulgences had been sold
in Wittenburg, and Luther's voice had been heard.
And in two years more, during which Direr has been
in Holland and Belgium conferring with Erasmus and
Quinter Matsys, living en prince, giving and receiving
endless presents, and filling his great insatiable eyes
with all manner of sights, there comes this sudden
outbreak in his journal-there is fire in the gentlest
of mankind.   One can fancy the wrath of the
burghers of Antwerp; they would soon have graver
cause for anger, and show it too.
"On Friday (after or before) Pentecost, 1521,
comes a tale to Antwerp that they had captured
Martin Luther traitorously. The Emperor Charles's
herald was given him with safe conduct. On his
journey, in an unfriendly place, he said 'he dared no
more be with him,' and rode from him. Then were
there ten horse (report had exactly doubled the real
number) who carried away traitorously the pious
man, enlightened with the Holy Ghost, and who was
a follower of the true Christian belief, and whether
he still lives, or whether they have murdered him
*




184  CHRISTIAN ART AND SY,1MBOLISM.


I wot not. If he has suffered, it is for the Christian
truth against the unchristian papacy, which works
against the freedom of Christ, exacting from us our
blood and sweat, whereby to feed itself in idleness
while the people famish. It is very sad and heavy to
me that God allows so much false teaching and
blindness in men we call fathers, and permits the excellent worth of religion to be falsified and removed"
-then follow prayers of exceeding earnestness and
beauty, which I cannot read now. Then he goes
on, "And so this man, who has written more clearly
than any other for I40 years, to whom Thou hast
given a spirit so evangelic, being gone, raise us up
another who will be able to gather all the world into
the faith, and bring Turks, Pagans, Indians, within
the Christian fold. O Erasmus, of Rotterdam, where
wilt thou dwell? Knight of Christ, ride by His side,
thou mayest yet win the martyr's crown."..
Ah me, scarcely Erasmus. As we know, it was all
quite unnecessary; Luther's captivity was a prearranged matter among his friends, Frederick of
Thun, and others, and had been determined on by
them at Worms as his best chance of safety. The
secret must have been well kept. But the passage
is an important one in art-history. For Durer has
always been looked on as a representative German;




DURER AND HOLBEIN.


i8j


much more so than Erasmus, and as much so as
Luther; and this passage shows not only how deeply
his whole nature was moved, but how fixed, and
powerful, and far above all other thoughts of his
heart, was his personal Christianity. This is German
Protestantism, and this is Protestantism in its right
sense, or in its positive sense. In the literal sense
of the word, as we all see, it is a negative term,
meaning inability to hold a doctrine, or conviction
of its falsehood: a man's Protestantism in this sense
means what he does not believe. But the real use of
the word is for strict personal belief in the Second
Person of the Trinity. One may certainly think that
Diirer's prayers, founded on mistaken news, utterly
vain as to immediate fulfilment, were granted in the
end; one may see how the notion of violent death in
witness to the faith was already before the eyes of
thinking men: and if Erasmus's heart failed him,
Luther's did not.*
Erasmus sat to Direr, Quintin Matsys, and
Holbein, living in their circle, and as their friend.
Those who compare his face with Luther's will
see something of the value of portraiture to
History. And this seems the best place for me
* See Froude's History of England, vol. vi., p. 353: description of
the death of Cardmaker, prebendary of Wells, from Foxe, vol vii.




I86  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


to call attention to two highly characteristic comparisons-that between the faces of the Reformers
Erasmus and Luther, and the painters, Durer and
Holbein. Luther and Holbein are all hearty German
animalism; theirs are powerful and trustworthy faces:
Diirer's is the perfection of manly beauty, with the
idealist eyes of inner vision-Erasmus's refined lineaments are certainly such as to give occasion to Luther
to say, after their quarrel, and Erasmus's treatise on
Free-will against him, that the picture was like the
man, full of craft and malice. "A comment," said the
late Sir James Stephen, "on the countenance of that
illustrious scholar," as depicted by Holbein, "from
which it is impossible altogether to dissent."
For Diirer's return to Nuremberg, with his vast
accumulation of curiosities and pretty things, Mr.
Scott's book ought to be consulted; also for the best
rapid description of the beloved old Franconian city;
for a sketch of his hero's contemporaries, and two
capital etchings of his house, still standing quite as in
his days, opposite the Thiergarten Thor.  Nuremberg may be reached easily in less than thirty hours
from London. It struck me forcibly, during a visit
there last June, how very advantageous to a student
of German history, or to an artist (and all artists
ought to know something of German history) a visit




DURER AND HOLBEIN.


I87


to that city must be.  For with ever so little
preliminary reading: with ever so shadowy notions
about Gothic architecture; with but a little of the
artist's eye of external interest alone-you can
see the Middle Age civic life just as it was. No
modernized houses are allowed within the walls; and
the walls are entire all round. You can mount the
Castle Tower and look across the wide rich plain,
and know that Gustavus Adolphus did so morning
after morning in 1632, watching Wallenstein's leaguer.
Red sandstone walls and tiles, and green trees, make
rich music of colour for you; the Pegnitz goes
racing through the town, muddy and over-hasty, like
modern life; and modern life gains upon the town
very little more than the Pegnitz. There are the two
"sides," St. Sebald's and St. Lorenz's; with their two
great churches; the same steep roofs and steep
streets, and bold projecting dormer windows and
massy stone porte-cocheres-and much the same sort
of men, horses, and carts, clattering, shouting and
whip-cracking from under them. The Fair Fountain
is there; it was there in Diirer's day, Peter Vischer's
great work; Adam Krafft's Sacraments-Hauslein
(the ambry for the Consecrated Elements) was just,
finished; and there it stands in the Lorenz-Kirche;
Veit Stoss's wood-carving is everywhere; Cranach's




188  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


and Wohlgemuth's, and Handsome Martin's works,
and one unmistakeable painting of Diirer's own, are
all within shot of each other. But when you have
had your fill of artistic and antiquarian enjoyment,
and are quite full of contempt for the modern
time, then go to the Rath-haus, or at present to
the Laufer-Thor, and ask the cheery old woman,
who lives there, to show you the Burghers' FolterKammer, the torture-chambers and dungeons under
the walls, and the Iron Maiden. Then you will
understand that the discipline of those days, if wholesome, was secret and severe; that burghers had racks
as well as nobles, and were capable of abuse in
private quarrel; and of revenge, such as neither individuals nor society would take now. Men were reckless
then, and took life and death freely; they were not
sordid and cruel by greed as we are; but, for all that,
their anger was fierce and their wrath was cruel. And
Nuremburghers were the best and most ingenious
burghers in Germany; but they had their prisoners
in cells under the walls and moat, whom no man
dared to ask after; and they showed their ingenuity
in dealing with those prisoners by the choice piece of
smith-work, called the Iron Maiden.
It is an irregularly triangular iron box, like a
large fiddle-case: outside it is roughly moulded and




DURER AND HOLBEIN.


i89


painted, with the round face, stomacher, and long skirts
of a damsel of Nuremberg. It opens straight down the
front, and there is just space for the figure of a bound
man to be placed against the iron back inside.
Then the doors were shut on him with the aid of a
powerful windlass, " langsam, Herr, sehr langsam ""very slowly indeed," said the old lady above mentioned, with intense sensational enjoyment-and
there are eleven long spikes on these doors, which
all riddled the poor wretch at once, two in particular
piercing his eyes-langsan.  When he was done
with, the Maiden's doors opened again, and also a
trap-door at her feet, into a deep oubliette full of
water. The frontal and upper bones of two or three
crania were produced, found there recently; the
Maiden had kissed or crunched off the face and lower
skull. I could not make out when she was last used;
but it struck me that her abolition, and that of the
various infernal machines which dwelt in her company (all worn with use), was an improvement which
ought to be credited to these sad times.
There, at Nuremberg, Direr died, beloved of all
men, in 1528: the Emperor Max had ennobled him;
he had lived generously, if not extravagantly; he was
still a rich man; his work was done early and with
great honour: with greater moral dignity, more love




90o  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


and deep respect than Rafael's. Their friendship, as
craftsmen, is well known; and how the Italian sent
the German a drawing "to show him his hand," and
received engravings in return.  I hope he did not
hand them over to Marc-Antonio.
As great a man as either was living between
Augsburg and Basel, and now and then at Ulm.
Hans Holbein, the younger, has been trained by
Hans Holbein, the elder, in oil painting, and wood
engraving, more particularly, since his birth in I495
or '98: he has had work in the Emperor's Palace, at
Augsburg, he has illustrated a Bible in such style as
has not been seen either North or South of the Alps;
he has been at Lucerne, perhaps as far as Milan; and
has been much impressed with Mantegna, and more
with Lionardo; he has done endless designs for silver,
iron and wood; he has painted Erasmus's portrait, and
illustrated the Praise of Folly; his woodcuts are
seconding Luther, and flying from town to town, by
every city and spire in the wide wide German land.
And at Basle he has painted a Dance of Death, in
fresco, and has dove it again in woodcut:-such a
strong terrible unquailing proclamation that death has
'his day for all of us, and is to be met valiantly, as
has not been heard before. The year before Diirer's
death, Holbein goes to England-returns to Basle




DURER AND HOLBEIN.              19I
in I529, the great and grievous Iconoclastic year,
when all the churches were stripped-and to England
in 1532, where he remained till his death in 1543
(the year after James V. had died of Solway Moss),
except for a short visit to Brussels and the Low
Countries.  He was and is the strongest portraitpainter in the North. Direr and Holbein must have
met or been near each other, but it is not on record that
they were acquainted, that I know of. And their
difference is this, as artists-Diirer is the last man
of the German Middle Ages-profoundly Germanof the mediaeval spirit, yet full of the new love of
beauty; Holbein is as markedly modern.   He is
Teutonic-modern, not classical or.imitative; he is
Hans Holbein, son of Hans Holbein, and there is no
such other man; but the modern spirit is his; Michael
Angelo is as great in a higher way, but in an absolutely different way. The Renaissance which Holbein
represents is the new birth of fresh seeking, of new
thought, of newly inspired appeal to Nature, of faith
in Nature and determination to prevail with her, and
win both beauty and blessing from her. In him, as
in Angelo, it is religious, because both of them were
capable of spiritual thought and aspiration. In many
painters it is thirst for beauty only: and their fall is
prepared for them. In men of science it is simple




192  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM..


activity of mind on their study, or determination
to turn the light of their reason conscientiously,
and as far as ever it will go, on all things connected with their study, and to prove all things.
This spirit was methodized and reduced to rule
through Bacon, and the inductive Philosophy; and
it has gone on and striven ever since, we partly
know how. The study of nature could hold by the
Aristotelian limits and barriers of thought no longer.
At the end of the Middle Ages, as Professor Maurice
pithily says, "men saw that the popes were governed
by the doctors, and the doctors by the categories" of
Aristotle- by his classification of all things for
logical purposes. And men rose up and said, We,
and a number of things on which we will have truth,
if God will, are not rightly provided for in the categories; and we will have new arrangements for new
phenomena. Let us look at facts; at the facts of
old; principally at the Greek language, and its
literature, and the remnants of its art: and at the
present facts of nature, what God has given us to see
and to know on Earth of Earth. In an evil hour
Theology was set, for base worldly reasons, against
all this, and the quarrel has never been healed. But
many men are beginning to see that Theology and
Science, as things of the many-sided mind, have their




' URER AND HOLBEIN.


193


mutual limits, and really are not opposed to each
other; and their dispute is, I trust, settling into a
general boundary question; so far adjusted by this
time, that rival professors own to each other that
physical experiment and spiritual experience are both,
after all, real things: and when that is granted, firm
ground is reached.
Now as Michael Angelo is the great Idealist of
Modern or re-born art, so Holbein is its great Realist
or Naturalist. Both desired truth first, beauty afterwards: but the Italian's longing was for spiritual
truth, discerned with the eye of the imagination;
the German's gift and nature was to see and draw
visible things as they are. He has seen death; and
the Dead Christ upon the Cross is drawn unflinchingly from the death, not only with purpose to
proclaim His submission to death (which is the
real intention of the Crucifix):-but because Hans
Holbein saw every sad detail and token of departed
life in some corpse laid before him, and it was his
duty and necessity to paint what he saw. "Know
we not death, the outward signs?" He has seen rude
evil faces of dull insult-and the soldiers mocking our
Lord are terrible in their uncomprehending everyday cruelty. They are like Hogarth-and Holbein
is so, very often in his rougher or grosser faces.
I3




194  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Vice puts nearly the same mark on men's faces at
all times.
There are two great excellences, however, which
distinguish the noble German or Northern spirit of
Holbein from the men of the Renaissance in Italy:
that is to say, from the second-rates, like Cellini or
Salvator, who fell in with its irreligion and license in
reckless despair; or from Giulio Romano, and the
classicists, and their academic arrogance. There is
neither pride in his portraits, nor sensuality in any of
his work. What he sees, he paints, but he insinuates
no evil: he did not look for it or think of it himself.
Dance of Death or Praise of Folly, or hard, welldrawn protest against indulgences, or broad fun of
grotesque, or portrait of lady, or noble, or scholar:
there is the right drawing which he learnt for himself
untaught, the colour of the best Northern colourist,
the weight of meaning, the strong character in touch
and line, and lineament; and the grace and rightness
which asserts itself against grotesqueness, even in
such woodcuts as the Expulsion from Paradise, where
death sports before the fallen pair.
His works divide themselves into allegories and
histories, chiefly religious-and portrait: the two first,
generally speaking, were the work of his earlier days,
at home in Augsburg, or Basel: the latter employed




Di"RER AND HOLBEIN.


195


him continually in England. There is a capital letter
from Erasmus (most of us have read it, I believe), of
advice to Holbein, how to behave in England: and I
have no doubt he followed it. Erasmus's general
opinion of English people is favourable: the rich are
highly cultivated, and particularly good to strangers,
though he admits the lower classes are very rough.
Yet, he says, they are just, and want no more than is
due. The great pride of the whole race he speaks of
as an essential part of its character; yet, he says,
they have reason to be proud. In short, his Teutonic
tastes were well satisfied here: with Sir Thomas
More and his household, before the evil days of persecution and shaking of nations, while More was
Chancellor, and first man of letters in England, while
Henry VIII. was yet the delight of the whole land,
with the Brandon and Wyatt by his side, and all his
mighty men who loved him-the scholar of Basel saw
the bright side of England. But it is curious to
notice how very different the feelings of Frenchmen
or Italians (always excepting Venetians) seem to have
been towards this country, whether they came here
or we went there. Our Italian proverb of the Tudor
age, above quoted, expresses a good deal. "Inglese
Italianato e un diavolo incarnate."  One custom
Erasmus delights in: it is, he says, a nie genug




I96  CHRISTIAN ART AND S-YAIBOLISM.


gepriesene Sitte-a habit never enough to be praised.
It is the allowed indulgence in that manner and
custom, which is proverbially said, in the West of
England, to be out of season when the gorse is out
of bloom (that is to say, never). English women,
he says, are not only very pretty, but very good;
and you are not only allowed, but expected, to
kiss any acquaintance on meeting her, and parting
from  her.   He probably meant this for a caution,
as well as encouragement, to his favourite painter.
These are a few lines of Morris's about a yet more
ancient England, which must come in hereForget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam, and piston stroke;
Forget the spreading of the hideous town,
Think only of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small and white and clean,
The clear Thames border'd by its gardens green:
Think, that below bridge the green lapping waves
Smite some few keels that bear Levantine staves,
Cut from the yew-wood on the burnt-up hill,
And pointed jars that Greek hands toiled to fill,
And treasured scanty spice from some far sea;
Florence gold cloth and Ypres napery,
And cloth of Bruges, and hogsheads from Guienne,
While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's pen
Moves over bills of lading, &c., &c.
Holbein's Dance of Death is connected in our
minds with the cloister wall at Basel, the opposite
street to which is still called Todtentanz. But it is
doubtful if he ever did paint on that wall-the old




DURER AND HOLBEIN.              197
Klingenthal Dance of the Dead was there before
him.  It is the wonderful series of woodcuts of
Holbein's drawing which really will carry down his
name for ever in connection with the contrast of
Death and Life. A great name is associated with
him in it, that of Lutzelburger, the admirable formschneider or woodcutter.  I cannot stop to praise
him as he deserves; but the fourth number of Fors
Clavigera contains, not a woodcut of his hand, but a
copy or facsimile utterly undistinguishable from an
original print, and due to the exceeding skill of
Mr. Burgess. It is the Expulsion from Paradise,
Death rejoicing over his prey. And, as our space
is limited, we must spend the rest of it on considerations of this and Holbein's other religious or
semi-religious works, and of his portraits, German
and chiefly English.
You probably will not remember that I made
mention of the block-books of the later Middle Ages
in my fourth lecture, noting the difference between
their way of printing text and illustrations altogether,
in woodcut stereotype, like a picture; and the later
improvement of movable types, separate letters,
which were interchangeable, and could be used for
any other text. Well, as writing was derived from
hieroglyphics or pictures, so printing went through




198  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


an analogous process, and the movable types or
letters were derived from the earliest rough wooden
blocks of illustrative  pictures.  Wood   engraving
began, I believe, with playing cards,* and other
cards, calendars, &c.  Of course, it soon began to
be applied to letters and books. Now, the great
social importance of printing was, of course, the
overpowering numbers in which copies of a new
thought or idea could thus be circulated. There was
no keeping out the vernacular Bibles; and still less
such powerful comments on them as the Indulgencemongers or the Lamp of Truth. They carried their
meaning with a glance, and it went deep, and never
came away.     Erasmus and Hutten chastised the
Pope with whips, but these prints were scorpions.
Every sinful man who looked at the IndulgenceShop for five minutes, would know that German men
therein protested to him that he might repent himself
for himself to Christ, since Christ gave him the desire
to repent; and that that was better than buying pardon
in the market of monks, who would let poor men die
under sin because they could not pay for salvation.t
* In the conventual use of playing cards, says Dr. Woltman, the
court cards were eminent saints.
t The True Light is thought to contain even a portrait of Erasmus
among the blinded clergy. He had by this time turned against the
Reformation. (Date of Woodcut, 1524).




D JURER AND HOLBEIN.


199


This is the power of Picture; the whole chain of
thought, all that is meant by the Doctrine or Teaching of Individual Repentance, flashed on a man at
once. So also with the Dance of Death. In another
paper, I said that the most important Triumph of
Death of the earlier days is that by Orgagna, at
Pisa. Like that great work, Holbein's Dance of
Death, or of the Dead, is accompanied by a foreshowing of the Judgment of Mankind. And I think
I hinted that the Florentine took a severer and more
despairing view of the consummation of all things
than the Augsburger. In the Pisan fresco, Hell has
the better, in short, and few are saved: in the last
of Holbein's woodcuts, the just alone stand before
their Lord rejoicing.  Yet all throughout warning
is given, by threatening text on text, that the sinner
risks dying in his sins, unless he repents. "What
will ye do in the end thereof?-Gedenk das EndMemorare novissima"-is the all-embracing motto of
the work.  But there is a tone of half-humorous
reflection throughout, on the grand Equality of
Death.  It is not spiteful or envious: the poor
pedlar, with his heavy pack, is hurried off by Death
as pitilessly, and goes as unwillingly, as the stern
old noble who turns on the Destroyer, and does
fierce unavailing battle. Indeed, in some of the later,




200  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


verses, which are supposed rightly to express the
painter's mind, Death says only to his valiant victim,
"Come thou with me, good sword." But go we all
must, quoth the painter, and each will go from his
daily life, from ploughing or grinding at the mill;
and undoubtedly, ye shall go from the midst of your
sins, if ye will practise them. 0, king and emperor,
cardinal and pope, queen, ploughman, burgher, soldier,
old crone and little child, painter, scholar, apothecary,
ploughboy, thief, and all-privileged Fool-you must
depart forgoodorevil. Therefore-what? Do not,as
Orgagna says, turn hermits and live on hind's milk;
but do justly, love mercy, walk humbly in Christ's
name; and, above all, fear not. It is not all Christian,
this mood of Holbein's-there is in it the Northern
death-defiance, and the spirit which greeted the
last enemy like an earthly foeman, with scornful
welcome; meeting him as Antar the Arab met his
enemies;-"even as the ground receives the first of
the rain."
The Virgin, with Lily of the Valley, and St.
Sebastian are of Holbein's earlier time in Basel. Of
the great Passion and the Apocalypse, and, finally, of
Samuel and Saul, Rehoboam and the Town-hall
paintings, I have one or two specimens here. Realism,
character, the mind of one who saw and marked
r I




DURER AND HOLBEIN.


201


every action, great and small, with the inner eye;
Scripture in symbol, according to Hans Holbeinsuch it is for ever.   And his grand industry in
all decorative metal-work-clocks, hilts, scabbards,
lamps-every variety of really noble and original
cinque-cento, that too must pass us by. For his
portraiture, it begins for us with his early sketchbooks in Augsburg. Kaiser Max; Kunz of the
Roses, his fighting jester, one of the brightest, most
shrewd and valiant of men; Jacob Fugger, first head
of that great house-and others without end-all
are very rapid and in hard point lines-the men
are written down at once, and there we have them.
Dr. Woltman gives all these and more.
Among the endless.English portraits; we have,
most of us, heard of the first portrait of Sir Thomas
More, and that of Archbishop Wareham: of the
family piece of Sir Thomas More, Margaret Roper
and others, which Dr. Woltman says is a good copy;
of Cromwell, the Malleus Monachorum, at Wilton
House; of the Whitehall portrait of Anne Boleyn; of
Henry VIII., and Jane Seymour.* But the number
of indifferent copies which pass for Holbein's in
* Dr. Woltman gives a woodcut from a wall-painting, of Henry VII.
and Henry VIII.; a stranger contrast in appearance, as it seems, than
any other father and son who ever were represented together before
or since.




202  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


England is even greater than their number anywhere
else; not only are Flemish and even Italian portraits
referred to him; but his portrait of Morett at Dresden
is attributed to Lionardo da Vinci; and so on. One
of these copies remains in Oxford; perhaps from the
woodcut, perhaps from the original portrait, of Sir
Thomas Wyatt; and it has made an impression on
me, not from its merit as a painting, for it has none;
but from the likeness which it still preserves to the
woodcut, and, therefore, to the subject. Sir Thomas
Wyatt was one of the most brilliant men of the time
-soldier and poet-and he seems to have made himself popular, and to have died in his prime, when all
men loved to look on him, and when his gallantry
and beauty were really a pleasure to all people. His
and his master's early popularity stood much on
their grandeur of appearance, and also on their always
being to be seen by all men. They had none of the
Eastern pride of state in solitude; they headed every
national pageant; they were, in short, fit to be seen
like Greeks; the sight of them pleased the people,
and they knew it. Wyatt certainly is this: it is
wonderful how his face tells the tale of Tudor rule.
Its pride is very great indeed; yet it is high and keen
rather than unamiable: it is not evil pride, conviction
of his own superiority, but expression of the accus



DURER AND HOLBEIN.


203


tomed and ripened habit of command: the look of
strongest among the strong. The eye is wide opened
and thoughtful; not incapable of tenderness, but
totally unaccustomed to be lowered before any earthly
man or thing. He looks on all men, not in bravado;
but being what he is, he has right, and he knows that
none should take offence if his long eye takes note
of them: most men he has seen think his look does
them honour. And his pride will go lightly through
rough work; he is the sort of fellow to pull and draw
with the men; he is like his master, and can draw
a bow with any man in the Life Guards: his neck
was evidently, by the portrait, a mass of sinews, and
his muscular strength tremendous.  In short, his
haughtiness is not dull, but capable of sympathy, at
least with all stout fellows; and his own race feel,
about him and his like, that Rome may bear the pride
of those of whom herself is proud.
Those who compare this face, and the many
others of which it is a type,* with the Spanish ideal of
Alva-the face of unsympathizing pride-may gather
some idea of the power of English aristocracy in its
palmy time, and of what it stood on; and of why its
influence has survived so many years. While that


* There are some good examples of ancient English faces in Millais'
illustrations to Tennyson,-" The Sleeping Palace."




204  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


sort of man survives in any line of life, and has a fair
start, forward he will be, for good or evil; generally
for the former. When there are none such, or not
enough of them, then-times            are  come    I do   not
desire to see.*
* Compare the following most important and concentrated passage
from Miiller, Chips, vol. iii. pp. 20-22, " German Literature:""It is only among the lower clergy that we find the traces of genuine
Christian piety and intellectual activity;-branded by obese prelates and
obtuse magistrates as mysticism and heresy. The orders of Franciscans
and Dominicans, founded I208 and I215, and intended to act as church
spies and confessors, began to fraternize, in many parts of Germany,
with the people against the higher clergy. The people were hungry
and thirsty after religious teaching.  They had been systematically
starved, or fed with stones. Part of the Bible had been translated for
the people, but what Ulfilas was free to do in the fourth century was
condemned by the prelates assembled at the Synod of Trier in 1231.
Nor were the sermons of the itinerant friars in towns and villages
always to the taste of bishops and abbots.  Brother Berthold (died
1272) was a Franciscan.  He travelled about the country, and was
revered by the people as a saint and prophet. The doctrine he preached,
though it was the old teaching of the Apostles, was as new to the
peasants who came to hear him, as it had been to the citizens of Athens
who came to hear St. Paul. The saying of S. Chrysostom that
Christianity had turned many a peasant into a philosopher, came true
again in the time of Eckhart (died 1329) and Tauler (I36I). Men
who called themselves Christians had been taught, and had brought
themselves to believe, that to read the writings of the Apostles was a
deadly sin. Yet in secret they were yearning after that forbidden
Bible. They knew that there were translations; and though those
translations had been condemned by Popes and Synods, the people
could not resist the temptation of reading them."




( 205 )


LECTURE VII.
LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.
I THINK it may be as well if I go back to-day
to one or two observations in former lectures. This
is to be a practical one, containing remarks on
actual drawing, especially from Nature.  And one
earlier statement I made was, that doing was
better than talking; that on the whole, more art is
learnt by copying some beautiful thing from nature
than by looking at other men's work-and that till
you know how to draw lines accurately, and to lay
on tints evenly, you will learn Art best by learning to do so. Therefore, I say to all here, Go
and learn to draw something right. You have a
good art-school, and may go there to begin with.
As soon as you know something of the use of the tools;
and of the power and accuracy of your own vision,
take up, I should say, Ruskin's Elements of Drawing
from Nature, and work out his lessons vigorously;




206  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


or go to very simple subjects in the open, and do
your very best. I do not say this so much to those
who are proficients in music, or zealous students of
music: though the example of hundreds of men and
women will show you that talent is really a blank
cheque you can fill up as you like, and that the
fineness of nerve which revels in delicate sound
will also get and give delight from tender colour. I
only say, If you live in, or are being educated for,
middle, or lower or upper middle life, life is long
enough for you to take up one or both of these accomplishments, or artistic studies, to be the comfort
and the help of your spirit while you live. You have
time for it, and you will always have time. I have seen
with wonder and extreme pleasure, what the hardworking hands of this county can do in music, and
I think they have also capacity for the other line of
art; and I think that, in all probability, some of them
may have natural tendencies to follow it. The fact is,
Study of Nature is really necessary to you if you want
to get your proper share of the right sort of pleasure
in this world; and for the most part you cannot study
nature without drawing from nature. Vigorous feeling
for art is shown here in the buying of pictures; and
the best are generally landscapes: where somebody
has gone and bought pictures of what he knew and




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


207


liked in nature. And the great thing is to vary and
extend our study of scenery, and to observe every
spring and summer, and all the thunderstorms, or
April gleams, and all the sunsets; and, if we can possibly get up, a number of sunrises. (I do not rest too
much on this, because it might induce some enthusiasts to omit going to bed at all.) Anyhow, you
ought to look on nature as much as you can, in as
varied forms as you can, and make your painters do
the same. Make them paint your favourite effects;
do not encourage them to go on repeating themselves,
or their hack subjects, but give a man, if you are able,
opportunity and encouragement to do his very best,
and do not let him only reiterate the one or two
things which he may have made ahit with: if you
like a man's work, try and get him to the top of his
work-no greater kindness can be done by man to
man. Rich people, I think, ought to buy highpriced and large pictures, to prevent the artist's life
being quite frittered away with bits, and dots, and
splashes, and what are technically called "potboilers." It is right to buy what you like, but you
ought to like the highest kind of things best-wild
scenery as well as home scenery; the dales and the
lakes, Switzerland, Scotland, the East, the sea, the
clouds, and the ways of the elements in general.




208  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Some allusion was made in my second paper to
the account given by Professor Max Miller of the gradual deification of the powers of nature, that is to
say, of that comparison between their agency and
human agency, through which it may be supposed
that some knowledge of personal Deity was drawn
from them, with or without help from primal tradition or revelation. The Aryan herdsman, we said,
saw natural agency everywhere, in all around him;
he felt personal agency going on within him in the
will of his heart, and the strength of his hand. He
reasoned from his own agency to that of nature, and
said, not It thunders, but He thunders; not It rains,
but He sends the rain. I said that St. Paul seems
to recognize this, since he tells the people of Lystra
and Athens that God showed Himself, at least, that
He left not Himself without witness, in heathen
eyes, by giving them rain and fruitful seasons. We
saw that the tendency of the Greek was to go far
beyond this acceptance of natural signs of God;
and that he made himself gods in his own image
-statues, or signs, as Romans called them. Yet,
for a time, we said, he did not lose hold of the
idea of and hope in One God; seeking Him wrongly,
through anthropomorphism or the beauty of man;
naming the statues he made Agalmata, or glories,




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


209


or representations of glory,* Divine and human;
things of joy and beauty. And now for ourselves:
it has pleased God to refer us to the natural beauty
of ravens and lilies, and to the natural signs of
rain and fruitful seasons, as His common gifts to
righteous and unrighteous: and He drew image
after image from natural things; so that it is best
for us to consider if, in some real sense which we
do not define, these things be not signs of Him,
and therefore Agalmata, glories and things to rejoice
in. There is no reason for our losing hold of thie
ancient, natural, and visible evidences of God's working, whereby men felt after Him  unknown 'in old
days. We are also to see Him in His works. We
are to look on beauty, in the sense of aptitude
of structure, as a sign of the mind of a contriver;
that is Paley's argument from the watch. We are
to look on pure beauty, on colour and form, as
signs of the nature of One in whom is all beauty;
as Agalmata, and things of glory. And that is the
principle, that is the good, if there is any good, in
English Naturalist Art, principally landscape-that
is the good, as distinguished from the pleasure, of
our subject of to-day-sketching from Nature. The
pleasure men take in forms and colours and their
* t' o7  rig ayaXX fra,, Hesych:
I4




210  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


manipulation is not the good, but the fun of the
thing.  I am quite aware that a pious spirit will
not make a correct draughtsman, of itself; and there
are many undevout men who are good artists, technically speaking, as there  have been  undevout
astronomers who were not mad. And I should
say that such men, if they really love their work,
will find the time they spend at it the best and
loftiest of their life, and that somehow it will do them
good. However, we must now talk only of pictures
and picture-making, and of that department of it
which we call sketching, especially from Nature.
Now, what is sketching and what is Nature, in this
compound notion?
I suppose sketching means incomplete drawing.
And what I want you all to agree in at the outset
is, that it does not mean imperfect drawing. In as
far as a sketch is right, it is perfect so far: in as
far as it is wrong, you must treat it as nothingrub it out, and set it right.  To sketch is to set
down part of a whole subject on paper rightly;*
as its outline and other leading lines.  The word
is used for making experimental lines and forms to
see how you like them-which is merely tentative,
and need not be considered here. Again, the word
* Not the whole of a part of a subject, which is a study. See infria.




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


211


sketch is used, more correctly, for drawing from
natural objects, as much as you can in a limited
time-the words sketch from Nature being so far
different in meaning from the words draw from
Nature, that, in using the latter, you imply that
you have time to complete your work, and produce
a drawing instead of a sketch.
Then for the word Nature, it means things. as
you see them, in the first instance: only we are
to distinguish drawing from Nature from drawing
from models or copies. And in that way I suppose
Nature means anything which has life or growth in
it, anything organic; something which is not done
entirely by the hand of man. Neither a drawing
from a statue, nor an elevation of a steam-engine
can be called drawings from Nature; they are drawings from  the object.  A  blacking-bottle is an
object, a double wallflower growing out of it is
Nature; and Tim Linkinwater felt it so, and was
affected accordingly.
Then for another word-Study.   I suppose a
study is a carefully-finished record in form, or colour
and form-the whole of some part of a picture, or of
a single object-highly finished, perhaps entirely
for the sake of the execution. A sketch, as distinguished from a study, will generally mean the




22 2CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


completion of a stage of the whole picture, or a part
of the whole of it, as a study is the whole of a part.
A sketch for a picture will be the lines or light and
shade of the whole subject: the study will be the
whole or completion of a part of a picture: only,
when the rest of the picture is done, it ought to fall
into its right place, perhaps an unimportant one.
And the greatness of a picture or a painter may be
said to depend on his power of giving devoted attention to study of all the parts of his work, keeping
them all the while in the proper relation to each
other. The strongest man is he who makes you see
that he is greatest in great things, without being
wrong, or indeed incomplete in anything.
But now we, or some of us, want to go out next
spring, and draw in the woods or by the waters,
and bring home pretty drawings. Well, the first
thing is to be able to draw something right at home.
And there are two lines of study, which I think all
intending sketchers ought to carry on in your art
school. In the first place, freehand and gradation;
in the next, study in sepia. Do some careful copies
of branches, from Hatton's photographs and the Liber
Studiorum, as soon as ever you have learnt the
broader characteristics-of trees from Harding. First
learn the facts of form, and store your mind with




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


213


characteristics-of trees, suppose, and foliage; and to
do this you must draw in chalk or pencil. Then, when
you have gained some knowledge to express, take the
best instrument to express it: the fullest and the
finest, the most rapid and subtle; begin with the
water-colour brush at once, as soon as you know forms
by heart. And set to work with this purpose, to
learn to use the brush as a pencil or drawing
instrument. Learn to make sharp triangular cutting
touches, and to run them into each other so as to
create a form; keep a brush and sepia at hand, and
be always creating three or four leaves, or a spray at
a distance. Block out a tree form in pencil, and
determine with pencil what the outlines of leaves
and trunk are to be, till you know what you want
to do, or what to do next. Then do it, with the
brush.
And here we come to Mulready's celebrated saying,
which runs through all art and every operation of
art, and is as applicable to Titian painting a Doge
as to a pupil-teacher making a study of a cast of
blackberries: "Know what you have to do, and do
it." The first part comes first, of course. In every
sketch and drawing, you must know what you want
to do, and also how much you can't do. For want of
that many of us are always trying to do, or to get in,




214  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


too much, and so fail to get anything in quite right.
" Know what you have to do;" that is to say, have a
leading and well-defined idea, which shall be always
the principal idea and feature in your work; let that
be central, and let all the parts, as painters call them,
all the minor ideas, minister to it.
There is a portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti at
Denmark Hill, which you will find partly described
in my book,* with reference to this point. It would
not matter to Lionardo or to Titian in what order
they did their work. Neither would care whether he
painted his accessories first, or the face and form of
his subject. For both he and Lionardo knew alike
what the face and form would be before they painted
it; each had the power of conceiving of his picture,
and seeing it within his head, as the Laureate says,
before he touched the canvas. (Don't forget that
expression, as it is the briefest and strongest account
of the imaginative gift which you can possibly have.)
This is what knowing what you want to do means, or
what you have to do. You must be able, and you
can in some degree learn, to have a sure and precise
and tenacious vision of what the white paper will be
like when your drawing is finished on it, and it isn't
white any more. It is not so difficult when you have
*Oxford Art-Manual. Macmillan, i868.




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.            215
Nature or the object before you; because, when you
have forgotten your original whole conception in its
parts, and in the processes of its execution, you can
often look back on the scene you are working from
and patch it up again tolerably. But even with a
landscape before your eyes in Nature's colours, you
must try to know beforehand what it will be on
your block, when it is done in the pigments of
Messrs. Winsor and Newton.
To be a drawing at all, every drawing must have
passed through your brain and be the result of a
rapid act of memory. You observe the form of
a bough and put it down on your paper, but
you must look at the paper and paint from memory
so far. And this is the lamentation and mournful
tale of all sketchers, that Nature won't wait for
them, and changes incessantly; nor only that, but
that she changes with a gigantic and terrible
rapidity of varying phases of beauty which turns
their heads and confounds them altogether. It is
so-we shall join in the lament directly. But take this
also with you: you must consider your picture before
you begin, not only till you have a distinct notion of
what you want it to be when finished, but till you
have a notion of all its stages, so as to be able to see
where you are at every process and stage of your




216   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.
work, near or far from your first intention and
thought. For in proportion to your tenacity and
faith to your first thought will be the power of your
picture, almost to a certainty. This is the secret
both in rapid sketches and finished pictures, to have
and to be true to a leading idea: as Turner said, to
paint one's impression-the mental image of the
coming work. These are some lines of Browning's
from  Pippa Passes. The. young sculptor speaks;
he is a capital fellow, though perhaps a little priggish.
He says he
Bids each conception stand while, trait by trait,
His hand transfers its lineaments to stone.
that is to say, he is able to prod down his leading
idea and never lose hold of it, while he does all its
accessories, difficult and interesting as they may be.
Now, something of this you must be doing in every
picture and every part of your picture. Every touch
must be a thought or a part of a thought, in theory
and almost in practice; and all these parts or minor
notions must come at last to be organic parts of the
whole, that whole being your finished drawing, the
realization of your thought, the record of what your
eye and mind have seen. The Duke Lorenzo is
called, and most rightly, "the Thought of Michael
Angelo."  He saw that form in the block of marble,




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


217


and chipped away till all the world may see it; that
was his expression, as all remember, about gradually
finding the statue in the block, as he transferred the
form to the marble from his brain; where it lay pent,
like a spirit in prison, behind the bar of his heavy
brows. And he cut the dress and its details with
patient precision and minuteness, for joy of the
strength that he knew was in him, to make the
brooding face and gesture rule every detail.  He
could make the highest part of his work prevail over
all the others, whichever he did first.  So could
Lionardo: it made no difference to him whether he
painted his pebbles in first, or the features of his
Virgin; he knew very well which people would look
at when his work was done. So with Titian: he paints
a gold girdle and bracelet, or a Doge's gold lace, as if
he had the soul of a jeweller; but when the face is
done, of doge or lady, who can look at anything else
before it? The rich dress and ornament minister to
the presence and the bearing of the subject, and say,
this man or this woman adorned their fine clothes
better than their clothes adorned them. Their state
would not have become them, but that they themselves were kingly. Or at least Titian would have
them so, and conceived of them in their best hour,
fixing them down then and thus.




218  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Therefore in sketching, as in all else, the right
facts in their right order make up, and are the whole
thing. As Swift said of writing, it is true of painting,
right words in right places. And you begin a drawing with the outline, because the boundaries or
separating lines of its masses of colour are generally
the leading facts in it. What you see-now do remember this-is a certain number of patches of colour
relieved variously against each other, or blent with
each other. What strikes your eye most is the relief
of those colours against each other, and you naturally draw lines to represent the boundaries of such
relief.
These are outlines. The principle of water-colour
is from light to dark. Your high light may be white
paper or oxide of zinc. Your dark shades cannot be
darker than lamp-black; and in theory the lampblack touches ought to be put on last, and all the
others in gradation of depth.  Sky line, principal
forms of cloud, middle distance, foreground, and
something there to lead into the picture,-all this
is expressible by line, and, till you are powerful
workmen, all this ought to be faithfully drawn with
a hard pencil before you put on any colours at all;
that is to say, when you mean to complete a drawing as a composition or record of your observation of




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


219


Nature. I say a composition, because a sketch with
a leading idea, any combination of ideas expressed in
form or colour, anything more than a study of a
single object, without backgrounds, is ipso facto a
composition. Composition means putting together
with object and purpose, and your leading idea is that
object and purpose. Rizpah is the leading idea in
this mezzotint; there are plenty of others, but they
all centre in and minister to Rizpah and her dead
sons. Turner had seen these trees in Yorkshire,
most likely; and the sheaves of barley harvest in
many lands; and the broad moonrise on many a
night, and the leopard at Exeter Change; and the
sad mother and her torch within his head. And he
brought all the other ideas together to minister to
and set off his thought of her. What you care for
most in a sketch you must make every one else care
for most; that is composition, and it is necessary to
every sketch which you intend others to see, as a
drawing of anywhere or anything. You may oftenand it is the best thing you can do, very commonlymake rapid studies of colour, whose only object is to
record that at such and such a time, for instance, on
such and such a mountain, there was a glow, which
you caught the hue of with carmine and cadmium
* See Plate in Turner's Liber Studiorum.




220  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


yellow, stippling with carmine again to form, putting
rose madder and blue shadows, glazing with chrome
when it got too cold, or spotty, &c. In this case
the colour is your leading idea, and the principal
parts of the picture will be where it is richest, and
where you have caught its richness best.
The essence of sketching, you will always and
most rightly be told, is character. To say what
is that always comes to something like this; if you
have to draw a fox and goose, the fox ought to look
intensely foxy and the goose intensely goosy, like
Mr. Bretton Riviere's three years ago; or if, as Sir
Joshua Reynolds said, your subject was a cat or a
fiddle, the cat ought to be thoroughly feline and the
fiddle should express violinism in general. Character
in art means the expression of the inward and special
nature of the thing drawn. What Carlyle effects in
history is the painter's aim in picture-record, —to give
the individuality, the quiddity, as old logicians called
it, of his subject. There is something in every man
which distinguishes him from all other men; so there
is in every rock or tree-at all events, you would not
choose either rock or tree to draw if it were not
distinguishable from others, and had no quiddity.
But for momentary variations of character, for special
emotion, the character of a special scene, look at the




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


221


dog in Cephalus and Procris, all canine sympathy
and grief; at the leopard in Rizpah, irresolute, watchful, impatient; at the tree-trunks in Jason, all
bristling with horror and suspense; at the ineffable
attitude of the Duke Lorenzo. Seize thus on the
specialty of everything you draw, and make others
see it, and then you have the master in you. Do it
in correct form, i.e., light and shade, and you are a
master draughtsman. Do it in beautiful colour with
correct form, and you are a painter also. But this
account of character quite falls in with what we have
been saying about a leading idea being necessary to
a picture, and the composition of a picture meaning,
proper adjustments of all its parts, or minor ideas, to
bring out its leading idea. Its leading idea is its
character, its smaller ideas are the touches which
compound the character, or are composed into it.
Character is a Greek word, which means deep marking; it is from Xapaaorw, to engrave or plough deeply;
harass, I suppose, is from the same root. Where the
plough and the harrow have gone over a man there
you generally see some lines on his face; that is his
XapaKT7lp or character, the writing of his ways on his
look, the seal on his forehead, perhaps, of what sort of
service he has served. Every man's fate is written
on his forehead by the hand of God, Persians say.




222  CHRISTIAN ART AND SY.MBOLISM.


And so all things have their histories; and the marks
of their histories in themselves are their character or
specialty. You have read, or know, about the growth
and gradual building up of a tree, and how all his
life and trials and accidents and successes record
themselves in his fibres as he is built up. That is
character; an oak's is different from a birch's; and a
park oak's is different from an oak growing out of the
rocks by a torrent side. Their features differ according to their position and prosperity, as men's faces
differ according to their conditions; only that the oak
has not had any moral choice in bringing himself to
what he is, and the man has. And it is the instinct
and habit of seizing on features, combining them,
remembering them, reproducing them, which makes a
great poet or painter in its higher grades, and a good
sketcher when it is possessed in a moderate degree
and faithfully improved.
Now, the lines of the plates in Turner's Liber
Studiorum  are quite visible, and the plates are
easily accessible in autotype facsimile: they are his
own lines, etched with his own hand on the copperi.e., drawn freely as he liked on the wax etchingground with which the copper had been carefully
encrusted; and then bitten with nitric acid.
In this lecture, as in others, I have tried to show




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


223


you works which really bore the hand of the master
himself; and I have made as little use as possible of
copies. The trees and foliage of the Liber Studiorum
may be followed with great advantage. I should recommend everybody who means to sketch next summer
(beginners in particular) to draw these or some such
forms over and over again. And, indeed, it would
be well, as was hinted in the first of these papers,
if all who mean to be judges of drawing, all who
expect to have to form opinions about Art or decoration, would go through the simple study of form I
suggest.  To see anything really you must know
how to draw something. And I trust you will not
be disappointed with this lecture because it goes so
much into technical directions for actual drawing, or
for preparing to draw from Nature. For Art is riXvni,
and lectures about Art must be technical: it is doing,
and not talking; and criticism even of naturalist
pictures and landscapes must be based on knowledge of Nature; and not only an artist, but a
physiologist will tell you how essential the study
of drawing is to acquiring that.  I would, then,
whether I meant to study drawing regularly or not,
copy some such lines as these. I would first make a
tracing in pencil, so as to get a faint outline on white
paper. Then I would take a softish quill pen with




224  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISMi.


a broad point, set the original, my photograph,
or Liber Studiorum, before me, and draw the forms,
touch for touch and line for line to the hundredth of
an inch with brown ink, or feeding my pen with sepia
from a brush; not merely inking the faint pencil
outline, but using it for guide, and drawing about
one-eighth of an inch from it. It is very difficult
and tiresome; but you do learn from it, and you
learn exactly what the sketcher wants, the power of
rapid expression in line. Every hour spent over
Turner's trees is so many minutes gained in every hour
of open-air sketching; and so much power gained of
making rapid memoranda; which are as necessary as
drawing from Nature, as laboured studies with unlimited time. Though, N.B., the laboured studies must
be made, and made conscientiously, before you can
make a pen-and-ink drawing of your own thus in
Turner's style. "Turner's style" means putting in all
the facts right: and you must aim at this too. You
must not only imitate what he did, by copying the Liber
Studiorum, but you must find out how he did it by
copying similar objects in Nature. Copying Rafael, or
copying Turner in the best sense is not the same thing
as copying a Rafael drawing or a Turner etching. It is
not so much making facsimiles of their drawingsthough that is necessary-as working from Nature in




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


225


the way they worked. First see Nature in Turner;
you can learn to do so in the Liber Studiorum or in
some of the many works at South Kensington. Then
go out sketching and verifying him; see Turner in
Nature; and make notes of her, as he did in the Liber,
and the early sketches.
As we are all of us too well aware, the great
thing in sketching is not to get hurried or bothered;
to know always where you are in your picture, and
what you really are drawing, at every touch. This is
knowing what you want to do, and doing it all
through your picture, and keeping before you the
original idea of what it is to be; and enough has
been said about this before. Of course, if you find
-as who does not?-that you lose your head in
your work, the only thing is to take a subject with
less in it, or take a bit of your subject first. The
round central trees in Rizpah, or the Y-shaped
trunks in Cephalus and Procris, will give you
trouble enough, if you can get every line in your
work to answer every line in Turner's; and nothing
else will do.
But now, there are sketchers and sketchers; and
at this time, as well you know, great advances have
been made in technical realization since Turner's
time. Portable tents and huts arise; months are
IS




226  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


spent on Highland moors, or weeks in Swiss glaciers;
and a degree of elaborate finish has been reached
which is often genuine finish by added fact;-not
mere polish or stipple, but thorough working out.
You will see the perfection of Turner's finish by
reading the illustrated chapter on " Finish," in Modern
Painters, Vol. III. But there are later masters of true
finish whose works are easier to understand, and whose
high completion is more obvious. The two surviving
Hunts, with Mr. Brett and Mr. Inchbold, seem to
me to be the best examples you can study from in this
way, especially as all four are brilliant colourists.*
And let two or three in a year, at least, of your outof-door drawings be drawings indeed; that is to say,
studies in colour, with plenty of time given them on
the spot, and such arrangement for your own comfort
on the spot as shall enable you to work at them in
comfort; for without comfort at your work, you can't
keep up your attention.  Rapid outlines you are
pretty sure to make; they take no time. The thing
is to choose an easy, interesting subject, where you
can say in one or two words what the main
interest is; something you really like, when you
can say why you like it, and know what you want
to do. This is its character; and whatever else


* Mr. Goodwin's colour is as correct and instructive as it is vivid.




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


227


you do, get this. Rocks in a beck, or a deep
pool, or a bay in a lake, or, best of all, a small
mountain tarn with a good cliff over it; two or three
old houses or sheds with a tree;-something you
really like, and little enough of it. Then take it up
and work two or three hours a day at it, at the same
time of day, till you really can see no more to do.
You will not be satisfied, nobody ever is who is worth
a rush; but you will have learnt facts and gained
strength. We will come to this again. To go back,
I said there were sketchers and sketchers, and all
draughtsmen from Nature may be divided into two
classes-those who naturally look for and see masses,
and change, and motion in Nature, and those who
look for and see detail and minute structure and
delicate form.  I say look for and see, because
(abused as the saying is) it is quite true that what
you look for you will see in Nature. And of course I
mean that the man of sweeping lines and masses
ought to be able to draw blades of grass and
veins of leaves in his foreground in the right degree
of elaboration, as Turner did; and also that the'
man of detail must be able to put in his clouds and
distance faithfully, like Brett or Inchbold.  I taker
Mr. Alfred Hunt as nearest the Turner type; and
Mr. Holman Hunt stands by himself as almost a




228  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


martyr to his own intensity of perception, in distance
or foreground.
I suppose every sketcher belongs to one or other
of these two classes; and I think, also, if he is pretty
high in either class, if he can draw ferns right, or if
he can draw clouds right, he has it in his power to
do pretty well in the other class also. But the difference between these men in their work is, that ferns
will generally wait for you, and the clouds will not.
The pre-Rafaelite can elaborate his subject day by
day: the Turnerian is driven to imaginative effort,
and must fall back on stores of former knowledge of
cloud. His mind and memory work harder-the
other man's eye works closer. But Turner's own coup
d'ceil, or capacity for taking an impression of a
picture from Nature, and fixing it all on his mind so
as to be able to paint it afterwards, seems quite
unexampled in the history of art and of mankind.
And his memory and knowledge of Nature were so
colossal and unfathomable that he could supply the
facts of a scene as he went on painting it —and
better and truer, and more multitudinous facts than
any other man's. He, then, never sacrificed the power
of rapid production, and knocked off a drawing full
of detailed facts in a couple of hours.
Holman Hunt's wonderful tenacity of purpose,




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


229,keenness of eye, and power of hand, enable him to
paint very rapidly indeed; and he really does so.
But I think he carries his conscientious feeling about
invariably painting everything from the object itself
too far, to the loss of valuable time. The Isabel was
rapidly painted, though of course elaborately; but
so much time was lost in getting its properties together-in getting a particular flower-pot made for the
basil, and in special contrivances to keep that
identical basil alive and flourishing while he drew it
leaf by leaf, and so on-that the picture was delayed
for months; but, at all events, it was glorious when
it was done.
One of the best writers on sketching I know is
Mr. Hamerton. The Painters' Camp, especially for
all who love the North country, too, contains all the
detail of preparations for painting from Nature with
elaborate comfort-for comfort is necessary to elaboration. And he gives close and detailed description of effects and special scenes, which are admirable
examples of notes made in writing to assist sketches
in line: that part of his book cannot be read too
often. And it is another reason for doing a little
real drawing, that close, well-marked description in
writing is scarcely possible now, without the painter's
eye.




230  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


For a regular open-air drawing, you must take to
it as you would to any other water-colour drawing.
I have only time to speak of water-colour; and
besides, while you are still students of form, it is
infinitely easier to draw accurate forms with the
water-colour brush than with the hog-hair tool. So
begin your open-air sketch with a very light coat of
yellow ochre to secure your outline, and then run a
thin grey over your distance to keep things together.
Then paint manfully into that, according to planned
form, drawing things as you see them; first, laying
their lightest tint all over, then cutting out forms on
that by patches of darker hue. Put on everything
in a patch of definite form, and let the edges dry
without softening off, unless they are evidently
wrong, or unless you have good reason. For the
strongest painter is he who does most with the edges
of water-colour touches or patches, who is always
drawing crisp forms with his brush.
But now for your first out-door subject.  It
should, I said, be something you like well enough
to work out A outrance, but which is not overpowering; which has not too much material, and which
allows you to work coolly, and not get into a state of
emotion or flutter. And I have a fancy myself for something which has calm water and reflections in it to




LANDSCAPE SKETCHIANG.


231


begin with. It makes you draw things twice over without fatigue, both ways up; and it teaches you to make
so many practical observations about reflection. It
gives you a leading idea of calm, and a principal
feature to enforce it by; consequently, you almost
always find that such a sketch composes itself well.
But, of course, those who will draw architecture
steadily, and match their colours as they put them
on their correct outlines, will gain more distinctly and
certainly. One or two of Prout's lithographs should
be always at hand in every art-school, and must
be copied with real exactness in pencil. If you will
take up and work out some of his subjects-pieces
of them, I mean-in pencil during the winter, you will
be much better able to do architecture on occasion.
But, remember, that architecture and trees will
change every month or week of the summer,
in  colour and relations of colours.  In  spring
and summer colour you must do what you can
for yourselves. Prout's colouring will not help you
much for bright green leaves against delicate grey
stone, for instance. And in architecture beware of
too heavy shadows: remember that a dark shadow
thirty yards off is not so dark as one at ten yards;
and that shadows are gradated as well as lights, or
rather that shadows and lights alike are only patches.




232  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


of darker or lighter colour. But the sharpness and
correct edge of a dash of pale shadow will often give
a picture far more light than black oppositions
of darkness.* And here, as a North-countryman by
family, connexions, and fancies, let me congratulate
you on living within reach of the most characteristically beautiful scenes in the North country.  As
far as I have seen, there are two places, for town and
wilderness, where the beauty of Old England is specially great, and where it is intelligible at a glance;
where sentiment, form, and colour strike any beholder
at once-Wharfedale and Winchester; the whole
spirit of the North country, in two or three miles,
and the Saxon and quasi-Arthurian city. It was no
wonder that old Turner's heart went so after the
shores of Wharfe. No one who has seen them will
ever forget them; but they, and the Dales, and
Craven were the land he loved best to the day of
his death; and he literally wept when he remembered
them,
There is another thing in these Liber Studiorum
sketches-that in all of them the leaves and vegetation are brought so near the eye in the extreme
foreground, that they determine with precision the


* I think that for strong yellow light, as in harvest fields, brown
madder is the hue for foreground shadows.




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


233


distance of the figures from the eye. Also observe
the lead into the picture in each of them. As in the
etching, so in the finished mezzotint, Turner makes
you go into and through his work in his way. And
see, in Cephalus and Procris, the distance and perspective given, by the way through the wood, in
the centre and the interlacing trunks. Little things,
perhaps; but they are just the things which one
remembers in some sketch of one's own, and when
they are put in they make no small difference.
This brings me to Perspective; and I know not
what to say about it so near the end of my lecture.
Think you are always drawing through a sheet of
glass, upon its surface, and that your paper is that
sheet. No knowledge of perspective will make a drawing beautiful; but any ignorance of it will put one all
wrong: and a gross ignorance of it is ruinous. And
I cannot tell you what easily-perceptible mistakes
are, or used to be, made, not only by men with
great names, but by men who deserved them:
mistakes not only visible to good draughtsmen, but
which made amateurs feel that something certainly was wrong.   All I can say is, learn to
draw a square box, and then imagine it in the
middle of your paper, whatever you draw, and mind
the vanishing points along its imaginary sides. The




234  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


most common mistakes in perspective are those
made in drawing lake shores, which too often
awaken in the mind the thought of a willow-pattern
plate. But perspective is very necessary in drawing
tree forms.  Look at the two plates in Modern
Painters, Vol. V. "The Dryad's Toil" and "The
Dryad's Waywardness," they are both of the same
bough. Therefore, in all your studies from Nature
at home, of boughs and branches of trees, remember
to make two drawings of each bough, one sideways,
and one end on.
I am still inclined to recommend Harding's
Lessons on Trees to those who are just beginning
to draw trees, though Turner's are far better:
Harding's are easier at first, and he gives you
exercise after exercise for the hand, like scales on
a piano, and nobody else does. And he gives you
such broad characteristics of the different trees, that
imitating them must be of great use at first. Do
it with brush and sepia, as well as with pencil or
chalk, and as soon as you have got some knowledge
of the shapes of masses, and character of trunk and
boughs in the different trees, go to Turner's lines
and to Nature. Harding's typical forms should be
practised in large, on a black board or a sheet of
cartridge paper; this will teach you to draw from




LANDSCAPE SKETCHING.


235


the shoulder. All tree-drawing is a symbolic shorthand; but Turner's, when you have learnt it, is an
universal system of it, and should be used alternately with the photographs. I would use tracing
paper at first with both-anything for exactness.
I wish, and it may yet be possible, that every artschool might be supplied with copies of Turner's
simpler coloured works, so accurate as to give a real
transferable or translatable idea of his markings and
their significance; for that is his power, the amount
of meaning in all his lightest touches.
Finally, you will be always making rapid sketches
in line on journeys. I have nothing to say against
it; but do write down on each something, at least,
about the colours you mean to put on; and do
try to put some of them on before you have forgotten all, or driven one sketch out of your mind
by another.  Many very able and conscientious
artists are content to go out for an hour or two
of sketching and note-taking, and to return home
to put on colour, and carry out notes made on
the spot, in a finished work.  But never let the
hastier outlines or maps of scenes gain on you in
your sketch-book. Make, if you like, careful complete outlines, pen and ink them over, and keep them
as memoranda of facts, or as charts in detail of




236   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.
pictures to be painted. Your sketch-book, properly
so called, ought to be filled, not with fully-considered
or finished pictures at all, but with faithful notes in
form or colour, or rapid memoranda of the lines of
natural compositions-memoranda made of things
which "come nicely" —as sketchers say.  Incompleteness, not imperfection, is the law of sketching,
and I hope it will not be a burdensome one to you.




( 237 )


LECTURE     VIII.
POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.
WHEN I remember the quite passionate pleasure I
used to take in landscape, especially wild mountain
scenery, a few years ago, I am surprised at two
things-one is that it is so much moderated, yet
extended; and the other, that I have so much of it
left post certas hyemes.
There certainly are phases of mind; one does pass
through differing conditions of thought and feeling.
I remember that the painter of several of the greatest
sacred pictures which ever were painted, Mr. Holman
Hunt, said to me years ago, "I cannot paint any
more sacred subjects: people ask me why I don't do
a Light of the World every year, and I can only say,
it would not come out of my heart now in the same
way; the phase of mind for that work is past. I
can't repeat it for money." And Mr. Millais, also, as
well as Mr. Dante Rossetti, paint no more definitely




238  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


religious subject. I do not admit the "Moses, Aaron,
and Hor" into the category of sacred subjects; it is
a wonderful study of two old men, one of them twice
repeated-an aged Hebrew of sedentary habits he
seems to have been, and about as like Moses as he is
like Fagin. I do not believe these men's feelings or
regard for religion or religious work to be any colder.
In the first case it was the painter's all-searching conscientiousness which spoke; it was his will not to
force himself on sacred work which did not call him
from within. And, indeed, men jealous of their own
motives, and revering sacred subjects, are scared from
it now, by the hideous display of pious pictures, done
for the market, which annually stare on us in the
Academy. There is a religious market, and pictures
painted for it appear to me the very reverse of
sacred. Besides, men are led on into the world and
its great joys and sorrows; and their early sacred
work is like the morning-service of their long day,
Perhaps one or other of them may return to it later,
Be the day weary, or never so long,
At length it ringeth to evensong.
But nothing can be weaker or worse than attempts.
to take up sacred work when you are not really called
to it. I suppose most men who have any spiritual
life or consciousness at all would gladly be called to.




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


239


it with sense of power and talent; but certainly those
who are so are few. When I have thought of the
possibility, if there ever were one, of myself taking
up a sacred subject, I have soon become aware that
the feelings I should have pursued it with would not
have been sacred in any strict sense. The subjects
which occur to one out of Holy Scripture really have
for motives some human feeling, or action, or terror,
or depend on high landscape. I once used to put
down subjects for pictures which I should like to '
see painted, from the Old Testament in particular,
These were one or two.   Zebah and Zalmunna,
when the son of Gideon could not rise up and
slay them, being a youth and tender, and they
gravely bade the father do what was needful in his
strength-the motive is only grave endurance of
death. Or I still wish Mr. Watts or Mr. Armitage
would paint the scene on the hot rocks of Adummim,
when David longed in his thirst, and said, " Oh that
one would bring me water from the well of Bethlehem,
that is by the gate; " and when the three mighty ones
broke through a host for their master:-but he poured
out the water to the Lord. That, is after all, a feat of
arms-only it and the next strangely illustrate the
character which was after God's own heart. Again,
the answer to Abishai, when he asked leave to take off




24O  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


the head of the dog who cursed David. Hath not
the Lord said unto him, Curse David? I used to have
some vague idea of a sunrise on the hills of Moab
(the long crimson line of Abarim), which should realize
how the water came by the way of Moab, red as
blood in the level Eastern light, at the bidding of
Elisha. And I actually did make and exhibit two
drawings from Arabia Petraea, after an expedition
to Mount Sinai in '62. These are almost the only
ideas or impressions, of possible "sacred" pictures
that ever passed through my mind; and I should
certainly have desired to have such ideas more than
any other form of idea.  Every one is right in
drawing what he sees and most enjoys the sight of, but
few men, and those not often in their lives, have the
inner vision of sacred history or symbol borne in and
presented to them, praying to be painted, so that their
desire and delight is to realize it in form and colour.
Now a lecture or two ago I spoke of the asceticism
of the early and medieval church as flight into the
wilderness from the distress and corruption of ordinary life at the time; and the modern English spirit
of landscape painting seems in some sense a modi,
fication of this feeling. A Benedictine or Byzantine
monk escaped into the cloister, and painted or inlaid
saints with gold backgrounds and traditional features




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


241


partly because he was hopeless in this life, and had
hope with the saints; partly because the Lombards
admired his work, and spared his throat and his cell
in consequence. (I leave out, though it is most
material, that, as a further consequence, he was
generally able to teach some of them the Faith, or
raise them to better thoughts of it.) Angelico fled
into St. Mark's and Fiesole, because Bianchi and
Neri, Guelphs and Ghibellines, greater arts, smaller
arts, and Ciompi, were fighting to death in the streets
of Florence, and he had no stomach for civic massacre.
Turner fled away into Craven out of Maiden Lane
because life was utterly hideous and unlike any
divine work on earth in Maiden Lane; and he desired
to see and record God's work on earth. A lad of our
own day will give up notions of advancement in a
trade or profession, or let himself be crowded out of
it, because he thinks he can live frugally by painting
landscape, and that that will suffice for pleasure in
life. These are, or were, all practical ways of giving
up life to art or for art: that is to say, in the hope of
living humbly by and for it. They are all forms of
resigning the ordinary successes of life.  In some
spiritual motive is pronounced; in others it is latent.
A certain sacrifice is undertaken, at our own risk if
we have mistaken our call and our powers. So it is
i6




242  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


with all aims. But in painting it is perhaps truer
than in anything else, that the wolf's gallop wins, the
long gallop that never tires, the steady day's work
through the life-time.
And as the great and chief examples of this
preference of Nature before all, we have men like
Scott and Wordsworth, born in the purple of the
heather and in the gold of gorse and broom, stoutly
holding their life the best, before all men, and persuading all men too.
Let us just consider what a very new thing the
national taste for landscape is; for it affects wild
landscape in particular.
Nobody really cared for mountain scenery either
among the Greeks, or the age of chivalry; or in
the Renaissance, in a genuine way.    Mountain
scenery, wildness of impression, solitude, and loneliness, which is the pensive feeling of solitude: these
are sources of great delight to vast numbers of men
and women in our own time, and they were sources
of unmitigated disgust to our great grand parents,
or even a generation later. People looked on the
mountain world as they did on the other world, with
about as much idea of ever going to it of their own
accord.  Yet then, as now, and in all ages since
Nimrod bent his first bow of primaval horn, or




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


243


Isaac went into the field to meditate, two, or let us
say three, classes of men have belonged to the mountains, and the mountains to them.  Monk, herdsmen, hunter; prayer, food, pastime: these represent
the three needs or crafts of men in a rough time, and
their reign is in woods and hills, and all we call silvan
and wild scenery. The sheep, and the goats, and
the deer: to this day on the hills of Palestine you
shall see the white sheep and black goats feeding
together, one flock after another, and have one more
gleam of light on the Lord's foreshadowing of Judgment. And to this day the deer and the sheep feed,
avoiding each other, on highland moors; recalling,
in the quaint symbolism of Nature, the ancient baptismal crosses and frescoes, where the sheep represent the Christian Church, and the hart thirsting for
the waterbrooks is the heathen catechumen, desiring
the waters of baptism.
Now, in my theory of landscape-highly incomplete as it is-I am only going to take into account
the hunter and the monk, because they take to the hill
voluntarily, as the modern painter does; they and
their interests and thoughts are not confined to this
or that valley, like the shepherd's; in short, I speak
of them as developed and educated persons —the
one sadly taking his meditation, the other, if he be an




244  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Englishman, mournfully taking his pleasure, amid
mountain scenery. The only good St. Bernard could
see in the mountains was that they are inhabited by
the beasts; well, it is the nature of all Celts and
Scandinavians, and most Teutons, to go to the mountains in search of the beasts. And modern mountaineering is only a variety of the chase, or takes the
place of field sports: you get exercise -there is
some risk to your neck, and your mind is fully and
pleasantly employed without strain on it.   No
doubt a real painter will observe things very well,
even though he likes woodcraft; and so far contemplation and sport may very possibly go together.
But still we have the two sorts of men to this
day, in modern phases: the hunter who goes to
the hill for physical exercise, the monk who goes
there for ascetic exercise. For I need hardly tell my
audience that asceticism really means the taking of
exercise, and that St. Paul's text, " Bodily exercise
profiteth little," is not an encouragement to sedentary
habits, but rather a caution against too great bodily
austerities. Hunter and monk seek the hills even
now; but there is another variety, the non-Christian
recluse, who flees away, not to seek God, but avoid
mankind: the Byronian or Shellevian, of whom the
world is not worthy, or for whom it is perhaps too hot.




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


245


This sort of person will never make a painter, though
he may write good enough verse. Read Lord Byron's
description of the storm at Geneva, whereJura bellows through her pitchy cloud
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud.
Right good verse; but those who will read the passage will see that he cannot help comparing light
and darkness to black eyes in women; in short,
here, as elsewhere, all his view of Nature is passionladen. He looks at the Alps in the dark mirror of
his hatred of home-just as a French sketcher looks
at them in his camera obscura. Both do good work,
but neither can see good colour; and to this day
Byron has, and deserves his determined admirers;
and French landscape has, and deserves that amiable
philosophe-persifleur, M. Taine, whom I do not in
the least wish to disparage, for a great deal of what
he says about English art is quite true - only there
are principles of art anterior to the views of David and
Ingres. And let us pass by the Byronian admiration
of wild Nature or pure Nature, for it is only a form of
the hatred of men. He is a monk, but too much in the
way of his own Giaour, who makes such an unedifying
end as a "lone Caloyer."  The difference between
him and the true, or "frommer monch," is that he
goes to the hills because he hates men; and the true




246  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


monk because he hates the hills themselves.  He
care for their beauty, not he!  He has given up
his fellow-men, and embraced pain for its own
sake; he will have no pleasure in snow, or pines,
or gentianelle, or Alpine-rose.  "We do   not
come here to look at the mountains," said the
Carthusian of the Grande Chartreuse to him who
asked wonderingly why the row of cells inhabited
by the monks only looked into the dreary courtyard of the monastery, not on the valley of the
Dead Guiers?   This is the ancient knightly or
mediaeval view of the mountains as places of penance,
marked far too contemptuously by Cervantes when
he makes Don Quixote betake himself to nude
penitential exercise in the Sierra. It is a genuine
and formidable frame of mind: you have it in
Launcelot as well as in Don Quixote. Don Quixote,
as a character, is simply to be admired and imitated
in every possible way, being a mirror of knighthood
and gentlemanhood, and holding up to modern
Englishmen the mirror of a great many qualities they
ought to have, and sometimes have not. But this
temper of mind is gone by from us; we must repent
at home, and smart at home; and it is no more use
to go into wild scenery to nurse one's spiritual wound,
and grow better men, than it is to buy a stool to be




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


247


melancholy upon, with a view to poetic composition.
Retirement and meditation are good; but you can
and must have them in a flat country also; we
can't all have hermitages or live up trees; and those
who desire to lead a life of repentance must do it
where they stand.
At all events, the true Carthusian is no painter,
nor will he make one. And yet the true painter will
have something of the monk's spirit of loneliness in
him. I cannot help thinking Mr. Ruskin's Carthusian
must have been rather morose, or perhaps rather
French; he may have embraced the opportunity of
making a point; or of indirectly expressing his
superiority to the Englishman's simple and sincere
delight in earth, air, and water. But before I go to
the truest and tenderest of Anglo-religious landscapists, whom I take to be Mr. Keble, there come
two great names, who, in fact, are gigantic Caryatides
at the gates of modern landscape art. They are
Wordsworth and Scott; and nothing can more
strongly confirm what has been said about the
novelty of the British taste for landscape for its own
sake in Wordsworth's time, than the hacknied saying
that he created the taste by which alone he is to be
enjoyed.
One cannot really put great geniuses into what




248   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.
they call "a correct card;" and most well judging
people must feel it very disagreeable when small men
classify great ones. But there are beyond doubt
two characters or sorts of men to whom the mountains
are assigned, and who have in them the origin of the
English love for scenery and mountain-drawing. It
comes, I say, from the spirit of the hunter and of the
monk. And I should say that Scott represents the
former spirit in its highest form, and Wordsworth the
other in its purest essence. One is active, the other
contemplative. And here, like so many others, I
must necessarily pay a tribute of general, particular,
and unlimited respect to a man whose works I never
delighted in as I ought to have done; though capable
of feeling his greatness in many passages. Everybody
must be able to see something like commanding
grandeur in the character of the chief of two or
three men who could live, poor, and beloved, and
laborious, in this mercenary nineteenth century "on
the hills like gods together, careless of mankind " as
far as gain or getting on was concerned; but with
power over and sympathy for all men together, and
chiefly for simple life, for woodcutters and pedlars,
and the afflictions of poor women. To read Wordsworth rightly one must simply ignore his defiant or
self-confident passages, and that egotism which is




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


249


unavoidable, when a man devouring his spirit alone,
oLop3arac, speaks out his inner thoughts. Much of it
came from early persecution and the fly-blowing of
reviewers. It is his immense strength of humility
with the humble and understanding of the simple; it
is the deep all-searching heart, which makes Wordsworth so great; not the refinement or even the asceticism  which he was proud of, but the sympathy
which he had by the grace of God. Read him till
you find enough to delight in; and get that by heart,
or read it again and again, and every word of it will
do you good. I suppose, with the mass of readers,
his fame will always stand on the Indications of
Immortality, and on the moral greatness which all
men feel in him. I do not think a man who ate so
many grouse as he must have eaten during his sojourn
at the lakes, ought to have anathematized all field
sports, as he seems to do in Hartleap Well. But his
views as to the hunter place him for ever at the top of
the contemplative class. Perhaps his crucial passage
of description is that of the Four Yews of Borrowdale.
And this I must say I have seen, that study of landscape and steady painting, and care for beauty of
scenery, do much towards bringing the sporting
painter ever nearer to the contemplative side, simply
because he has not time for sport. But to say that




250  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISIM


the popular taste of English people for landscape is
not closely connected with their love of chase and
adventure; or to expect a man to care for a highland
picture that does not remind him of grouse and deer;
or to say he ought to like a representation of Swiss
mountains that he don't want to get to the top of,
that will not do either.* Nothing can be worse or
more contemptible than what are called sporting
pictures, as a rule, which dwell on the chase and the
killing, not on the landscape. I need hardly mention
them, I do not think of them; they are not art at
all. Still the killing of game has to be done; those
who object to it must not eat partridge or pheasant
And if the killing were wrong, it would demoralize
men more than it does, so it seems to me, and make
them unfit to enjoy and represent landscape, instead
of filling them with delight in it. I cannot go into the
subject: at all events you have Scott at the head of
the active, and Wordsworth in command of the
contemplative, brigade.
Now, this is why, to a landscape painter, Scott's
* I may say that Leech's caricatures escape condemnation, and rise
to a very great height on the other side-partly from their perfection
as character-partly from their admirable landscape. He never really
knew his own great powers, I think. The Academy, as Mr. Millais
implies in his evidence, ought to have taught him his own importance
and rescued him from illustrating Soapey Sponge, &c. No man ever
drew horse, dog, man or woman more brilliantly.




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


25i


landscape stands before Wordsworth's -that he
altogether forgets Scott in it.  It is not greater,
but simpler; and also there is more colour.  Scott
is of the old rejoicing, unanalytic race, who enjoyed
scenery, they knew not why, and lost themselves in
its simple and sincere pleasure.  One cannot help
feeling, even in the Indications of Immortality, the
truth of the unusually wicked remark of our great
critic, that Wordsworth cannot help congratulating
Nature on having him to look at her.   If so, as
I have said, it is a consequence of the cheerful
brutality of the critics of that remote period (of
course there are no such people now) —in short,
bullying only provokes self-assertion. Scott had no
such trial: he was not compelled to self-analysis':
people took what he wrote so easily and with such
pleasure-in the Border Minstrelsy he hit at once
on a national vein of feeling, and then he was
essentially jolly, and could face the strongest toddy,
when in search of original ballads. Morally, he had
not indeed the hard training of the Englishman, the
austere Dantesque honour, the content to live on
little, desiring always less and less, without a thought
of money-making or sale of his talents in the best
market-all high thinking and low living. He who
tempts by making rich, in some degree got the




252  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


better of Scott. But before he thought of making
a great fortune, and while he revelled in his vigour
of life and strength, he did see with rapid bright
intuition, and describe with fluent accuracy of
observation, forgetting himself altogether in Nature.
I said in the first lecture what a colourist he was.
One cannot quote everything; but please look at the
opening description of the Lady of the Lake, and the
early part of the fifth canto; at the red sunset in
Rokeby, at the description of Loch Coruishk in the
Lord of the Isles, with the sail through the islands;
and various descriptions in Waverley, The Antiquary,
and Guy Mannering.   In all these there is much
Nature and little Scott: he is lost in delighted
observation and record.
Wordsworth  has to work out Wordsworth's
thoughts of immortality on a May morning; he
feels hardly up to it, he says, and has to invite a
happy shepherd-boy to shout round him, and let
him hear his shouts. Fancy the boy doing it now.
Imagine him careering round the bard, as if round
a snow-white ram determined to go the wrong way;
waving his arms in the fervour of early droverhood.
Imagine the "young varmint" shouting and tramping
in lace-up highlows, and, finally, expecting sixpence.
I can't get over it. I have enough boys of my own




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


253


to know what they are like, and the noise they make
is much more calculated to give me intimations of
my mortality than of the contrary.
There is none of the Gothic laughter in Wordsworth: he is great, he is real, he is earnest, and
all that, like life; but he does not, like life, admit
the existence of cakes and ale; and they are real
phenomena after all. And what you call the Gothic
laughter is not exactly that of the buffoon or comic
man.   In its true form it justly points to blots and
marks false notes, nor does it diminish, but enhance,
the greatness of a great man. There must be men like
Wordsworth or Dante-unaffectedly raised above
others, not sharing the rudeness or the jollity of
Homeric or Scandinavian gods and heroes. But we
are ordinary beings, at least I am, very much so:
I cannot breathe their empyrean very long, and I
know it to be far above my own region. Scott
was as true a Goth as Smid, the son of Troll-he
is one of us: he puts Nature above himself. If you
want to understand the Gothic laughter, read Scott
on Davie Deans, and imagine the form of that elder
in the action of "uttering his famous pamphlet called
the Cry of ane Howl in the Wilderness." Contrast
him with Duncan, of Knockdunder, and conceive that
worthy's indignation,-" Pecause, when I talk to him




254   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.
of peasts, he answers me out of the Pible, which is
not coot treatment for a shentlemans."  Wordsworth's cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep
to encourage him. Natural objects in Scott behave
more naturally; he tells you what he saw or heard
them do, and what he thought them like; so graphically in form, colour, and character, that he sets you
beside them, forgetful of himself and yourself, and
all but his scene; — coast, or lake, or hill-side, or
sunset. And that is Art and Nature, or Naturalist
Art. The other line is purist and philosophic, and
perhaps a greater line, for him to whom it is given to
follow it. But it will not make a sketcher, because
you can't paint a waterfall blowing a trumpet.
Scott's greatness admits of the fellowship of
smaller men, he having always lived contentedly
with them, regarded by them for other reasons and
qualities than those which made him great, and he
suffered accordingly.  Wordsworth's character and
career were apart from  all men, ascetic-contemplative: he could condescend to men of low estate,
and love and understand the poor-that is to say,
the Westmoreland peasantry, whom he knew. That
is best of all; but he never met his equals, as equals,
face to face. He went out from among us. And
it is the worst sign about our modern society that




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


255


earnest religion and high intellect alike seem to
shrink from its venality or from its frivolity. Poets
and parsons, if there be any sincerity or genuineness
about them, care neither for political or local chicane,
and therefore they are outcasts from the thoughts,
the interests, and desires of nine-tenths of the male
population of the realm.  It is no use upholding
spiritual motive before men whose motives are purely
pecuniary: it is no use telling men that purely
pecuniary motives will lead them to heaven, because
they won't. That really seems to me one reason
why the clergy are alienated, as the middle-class
press is always saying, from the middle-class laitybecause they cannot tell them how to serve God and
mammon comfortably at the same time. And poets,
like Wordsworth, earnestly desiring spiritual life, are,
on the face of it, servants of anything but mammon,
and just as entirely " alienated" from the lay Philistine as he is, who bids him give up dubious gain and
gambling and meanness in the name of Christ.
It is with something like delight that I go on
from Wordsworth-a great man of whom I really am
not worthy, and Scott, as great, to me more loveable,
but less pure and flawless in character-to a man
who seems to me about the happiest of modern
Englishmen in his life and death. I never saw Mr.




256  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Keble but once; in Oxford of course; his name had
been a household word for thirty years; yet in a
place where public opinion goes by common-rooms
and young men's sets, not by households at all; and
where popularity generally lasts about six weeks, and
seldom extends over two terms-he was reverently
regarded by all who had regard for any spiritual
thing. As his name is entirely identified with the
Anglican Church, and as the Anglican Church is, for
I do not know how many years to come, to be the
subject of political agitation, his name will be defiled
accordingly; he will be used and abused for party
purposes. Yet by the grace given him, by favour of
God in mind, education, and circumstance, he has
done what nobody else has done so well; he has subjected a first-rate intellect entirely to the Faith; and
served that first, and intellectual aspiration afterwards,
with a pre-eminent singleness of choice. Being on
a line of promotion, he deliberately let it pass
him; having tangible power continually within reach,
he said fair spiritual influence was enough for him;
having command of the votes of many men, he
chose rather to appeal to their souls. I have only
to speak of his power of description in landscape: I
wonder if it ever passed through his mind that he
had any-probably not, or he never realized or cared




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


257


for the fact. He seems to me an extraordinary man
in modern times, because he was confessedly a genius
without being a professional genius, devoted to the
elaboration of himself in print; and a man of letters
who put letters in their right and subordinate place
in his own soul.
Here is a man, as far as I can speak of him without personal knowledge, who seems to have accepted
success with a pre-eminent coolness and understanding, wonderfully unlike other men's. Hle seems
to have taken impressions as they came, on a
mind most sensitive, retentive and re-echoing, and
to have uttered them again with wonderful simplicity,
sometimes quietly, sometimes with conscious power,
but always as the English parson, well informed in
his form of the Faith, content to speak accordingly.
But no one can doubt that Keble might have been
a great popular describer if he had liked, who reads,
" They know the Almighty's power," &c., or "Go up
and watch the new-born rill;" or the many sketches
of thorough English scenery and seasons, of willows
by the brooks, and their "lessons sweet of spring
returning," and dun November days, and their red
sunsets and golden leaves. These are incidentally
given, for his mind, picturesque as it was, seems
never to have turned aside to the picturesque in its
I7




258  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


pursuit of devout thought. And that is what men
cannot understand. They can realize the fact that
he did not care for promotion: they cannot imagine
that he did not care for the praises of all reviews.
The struggle for public success among intellectual
and literary second-rates is so hard that they cannot
understand a man ever undervaluing success who
really can get it.  "Artists are envious, and the
world profane," said Heine,*: now here, in Keble
the Anglican purist, you have a man in whom the
Christian Faith has entirely cast out artistic envy.
It is this recognition that great poetic success is
not the chief good, to be sung, and scrambled,
and toiled and intrigued for against rivals, which
distinguishes him so much, and places him with
Wordsworth and Scott, mighty ones who knew
no envy.  And I think the 'Oos of the Church
of England is manifested in this man's words, and
also in his silence, in a manner worthy the attention
of all who are capable of giving it. For that character is impressed with ancient English qualities,
now attributed chiefly to the class called "gentle"
men and women, but once honoured by all the
race, before the days of self-advancement and
equality and advertising.  Nor have they died out
* "New Poems," by Prof. Arnold. "Heine's Grave."




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.


259


of any class of us yet, I well trust. They are the
qualities of reticence, of self-restraint, of love of
barren honour, of preference of others' advantage to
one's own; of practical sense of unworthiness, and
acceptance of the rough side of things in faith. And
these qualities make strong men and women; and the
class which possesses them, as a class, will die very
hard, and its strength will be best known, or only
known, in its hour of danger.
This has nothing to do with landscape sketching,
apparently, but in fact the connection is close. If
you cannot submit to do without applause and
success, you will not see genuineness of poetical
character. If you do not care for genuineness of poetic
character, you won't understand much about description. If you do not care for poetic description you
will hardly see reality with anything of the painter's
eye. And nothing, I think, encourages a painter so
much as to find his own observations confirmed in
poetry, and to see what he has recorded in form and
colour "done" also in cunning words.  Therefore
read as much Wordsworth and Scott as ever you
can; I take it for granted that everybody who cares
for landscape at all has Tennyson pretty well by
heart. I am not going to talk about the Laureate,
because he has been reviewed, analyzed and adored;




260  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


lectured upon and concordanced, and sat upon, and
sat at the feet of, and had meanings discerned in him,
and been intellectually manipulated over to that
extent that one's thoughts about him seem reduced
to the consistency of mashed potatoes; pleasing but
inorganic.
But get all you can of him by heart, and you will
be glad of it afterwards; especially the early poems:
their landscape and music together will be no small
help to your landscape and colour: he requires a
course of lectures with illustrations. And if you will
only get enough line-drawing into your work, and
get forms right, I do not see why you should be
denied considerable license in the use of your imagination or fancy.  If you can really draw, try and
illustrate Tennyson if you like; or take subjects from
the endless gallery of that true painter-poet, the
author of yason and the Earthly Paradise. If you
can't help imagining what a scene, or a place, or an
event really looked like at such a time, and a notion
of what it was like comes to you, and you want to
draw it, do draw it, only draw it right at your peril.
You should not of course think of drawing landscape
you have not seen; that can lead to nothing but
childish failure; but a certain license of composition
you ought,to have. You would not like to write




POETRY OF LANDSCAPE.             261
poetic descriptions in bad grammar: you would like
to cut your verses or your sentences to a point
always, like pencils; and in the same way you ought
not to be able to bear pictures or sketches in which
good feeling strives with bad drawing. And cling to
Turner and out-door subjects, or natural still-life, like
shells and flowers, as soon as you are fit to practise
them; that is to say, as soon as you can draw well
in free-hand and from models.




262  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLIS~M.


LECTURE IX.
ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.
IN my last practical lecture, it may, perhaps, be
thought a doubtfully good recommendation to young
students to begin from Nature and with the brush,
as soon as they have learnt a little what correct
outline and fine gradation are, by practice with the
chalk or soft-point. Now, in the first place observe,
I partly said then, and I now say, that you must
faithfully use pen and sepia in all your work, as in
copies from Holbein and the Liber Studiorum. And
further, I am sure that study from these masters and
from Nature will, from the first and throughout, make
up to you whatever deficiencies may exist in the
course of our Art-schools. It must be remembered
that in their origin they were hardly meant to be
artistic at all; only meant as schools where artizans
could learn to draw patterns, and if possible, to
invent them. Then people found, under Prof. Ruskin




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


263


and others, that to invent means a great deal, that
you can't get good Art out of nothing, or have
good patterns without good Art; that is to say,
without the study of the highest forms of painting
and sculpture: since all excellent ornament and
decoration was derived from schools of drawing and
sculpture of the great human subject. So the Artschools must now afford instruction in the highest
forms of Art.  You cannot teach men to invent
ornament, if they only study ornament: that is to
say, other men's inventions. You cannot do a good
design of your own without study of your own from
Nature; with it, you may do anything, according to
your capacity, 'and you may progressively enlarge
your capacity. There may be mechanical work, and
hands without brains; and I consider it an evil.
But looking at our Art-schools only in the commercial point of view, they were intended to enable
our decorative manufacturers to learn to design
patterns of their own, not merely to copy other
people's. Therefore your schools must aim at producing painters. The success of Mr. Burchett at the
Royal Academy is now yearly emulated by many of
his pupils, I trust. But I think the prize system as
well as the training course now requires modification
in some such way as the following.




264  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Much has been said, not only brilliantly but
rightly, on the need of clear thought in this country,
as opposed to the spirit of mere labour. It is a
deficiency, the deficiency in all our people, that
they think, imagine, invent too -little, and work too
hard. To be hard at work anyhow is enough, because
it puts away the malady of thought-few people seem
to look on thought as a valuable thing meant to
lead them right. If a man be fully employed, that
is considered enough for him, whether he be employed
in a degrading and mindless way, or in noble and
developing labour. This is the principle on which
our great industrial fortunes are made. Huge profits
are obtained by division of labour; the operations
of work are subdivided till the most of the workers
acquire only a monotonous and contemptible dexterity; and men get mindless in making pin-heads,
or turning screws and washers. I believe that work
was meant to be enjoyed as well as endured. It is a
part of the curse that is on the earth; but those who
endure it patiently and well generally find it easier.
Artistic feeling is an alleviation of toil. And so
men whose work has no pleasure or thought in it are
naturally malcontents in all trades; they get thinking, as they say, and that is an evil instead of a good.
And they are not altogether wrong, for they suffer




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


265


by limitation of their intelligence through overdivision of labour; it takes from them the mental
development they ought to gain from their work.
But I have observed also, even in the higher handicrafts, (as with carpenters and masons, for example)
that men's minds get sadly limited, so as to care only
for what they can do well themselves, and that they
learn not only indifference, but contempt for higher
things. If a man can make a box or chest he takes
his stand on its utility, and does not see that it
would be any better for being carved, or he any
better for carving it ever so well. In short, our
English motto, "Do one thing well," will not bear
pressing too far; and the mass of English people
always do press every notion too far. It seems as
difficult for a man to get hold on an idea as it is for
him to get a horse to suit him; but he will infallibly
ride either to death when he has got it, and never
have another if he can help it. And so in the lower
walks of life one or two operations seem to be
enough for a mind. That is why we can't get Art or
good patterns out of the English artizans; because
they are not artizans, and never learn a whole Art,
or to do anything they can take pride or pleasure in.
They are not taught any Art properly by the capitalist, who is the master-tradesman; -whereas all




266  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


high or liberal Art must be taught by the master's
hand.  Now   the Art and Science schools and
examinations are at length established by the State:
to do the work, and give the education which the
capitalist ought to have provided. And I am naturally
anxious that the teaching which they afford should
come into proper workable contact with other education, with that of the primary schools if possible;
and I desire greatly to see the best boys in parish
schools have opportunities and proper training for
the art-and-science examinations. The schools are
there, and all kinds of young people connected with
trade and commerce, and sometimes real working
men, come into them.
And here I must quote a few lines from Professor
Huxley: I had not seen them when I wrote what
has just gone before, and I need not say with what
satisfaction I came upon them in his Lay Sermons
and Lectures, p. 62:-" A great step in this direction
(that of general scientific education) has already been
made by the establishment of science-classes under the
Department of Science and Art-a measure which
came into existence unnoticed, but which will, I believe,
turn out to be of more importance to the welfare of the
people than manypolitical changes, over which the noise
of battle has rent the air. Under these regulations,




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


267


a schoolmaster can set up a class in one or more
branches of science: his pupils will be examined,
and the State will pay him at a certain rate for all
who succeed in passing." Last year the Professor
had about 2,000 sets of papers, and the mathematical
examiners twice as many.
But State Art-teaching has to be more or less
adapted to the pupils; that is to say, to what they
can do, and what they like to do. For it is quite
impossible to prevent the wishes and ideas of the whole
body of pupils in a school from bearing on what is
taught, or anyhow on what is learnt. Consequently
teaching is somewhat narrow and mechanical; and
it limits itself too often to dexterity in the operations
of Art, mere learning the use of the tools, without
remembering that the tools are to be used really to
interpret Nature and express thought.  So that the
competitive system, and the way in which prizes are
allotted, seems now to require modification; as
ministering to this English admiration for labour as
against thought, and the English taste for mere
dexterity in minor operations, which excludes advance,
and progress, and honourable effort at something
worthy of beings with minds. People cannot see that,
though it is indispensable to learn to copy a cast
rightly, it is not much to have done it; but that




268  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


learning to do it is only a lesson towards learning to
do something from Nature rightly, and invent something again from that, and go on from that, sailing for
evermore on the Sempre-si-fa-maggiore. He who can
do one thing well is persuaded there is nothing else
worth doing. We want men and women in every class
of life to possess and develop some of the artistic
faculties; some of that power of mental vision which
sees character and seizes on marked features; and
to have some hand education, sufficient for ability to
record it. We want more thought, quicker insight,
more pleasure in gaining hold on new truth. For
knowledge is gain, and fresh truth is fresh life, in the
most literal sense, to any who has learned to care for
the culture of his own spirit. And the ordinary education or non-education of poor men in England is all
against this; on one hand, they are told they must be
content with their station, and must never think about
anything except what they are taught by the S. P.
C. K.; on the other, if they are town workmen, they
are spoken of and treated as mere hands; they are
not taught to take pleasure in invention or progress;
if they have any thought, it is to get more money
for less work. The feeling of a good workman, who
does his very best with time and material for the
work's sake, is strictly artistic. Though he may not




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


269


work at fine Art but at rough, the true craftsman
is the   artist at heart:    or he    would   be, were    it
not for his indifference     to   progress and    the narrowness    of his   interest in   his craft.    High    and
low,   they   are  all the    same:     an  engraver    has
learnt to imitate mist effect very nicely, and that
is all he cares for in his work, and he tells
you that Albert Direr did not know much about
aerial perspective.     Exactly   in  the   same    way   a
carpenter who can take off shavings exquisitely well
does not think of drawing or carving, but remains
content with a quasi-artistic manipulation of shavings,
Exactly in the same way do some excellent artistmasons, great friends of mine, having learnt to cut
several varieties of lily rather well, go on carving
lilies till I am sick of the sight of them, and, in fact,
till the mechanical unenjoyed work is sickening.
Now you'll excuse my saying that the present Artteaching and competition system ministers to this.*
* The usual training by straight lines, and drawing curves by the
use of such lines, seems occasionally to. make the pupil ignore curve
altogether, and literally finish his work on the forms of its straight
blocking-out. There are leaves, nicely arranged and cut leaf patterns,
on capitals and spurs of the pillars of the Oxford Museum, where all
the leaf curves are utterly lost, character entirely missed, and the
sides of them mere straight lines, bent or cut to awkward points, with
great central ribs. Our pupils must not rest in knowing how to draw
straight lines in order to imitate curves; they must know that Nature
is all curves, and pursue the beautiful ones with choice and feeling.




270  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMI~BOLISM.


It is monotonous; it leads only to knowledge of the
use of tools, and allows people to go on too long in
mere competitive dexterity.
Grown persons go on for ever doing light-andshade copies of casts.  At present I believe the
principle is that a student of any age, who has not
got a prize, may go in for any of the prizes; but that,
having once obtained a prize, he cannot have it again,
or any inferior one. This I have no doubt did capitally when there were but few pupils fit to compete at
all; but now great general attention has been drawn
to the prizes: there is a crowd competing for them,
as there should be; but very few of all that crowd
have an idea beyond getting a medal for dexterity in
stippling and hatching. They get to think there is
nothing to look for in Nature but objects to stipple
and hatch, and no reward except medals. Competition is good for school-teaching perhaps, but it is very
bad for the competing artist; it shuts his eyes to
everything which does not pay. Besides, harmless
pleasure in mere neat execution grows to vanity; one
gets a bronze medal; and straightway all the energies
of one's being are concentrated on getting a gold one.
I don't know what becomes of the gold medallists;
I hope they turn out painters; but I should think
a good many of them were in danger of becoming




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


27I


mercenary, and thinking only of selling pictures, not of
painting them; or of growing conceited and priggish,
and so falling into the hopeless region of the third-rate.
Another thing has struck me in looking over
exhibitions of prize drawings under the department
system, and that is that hard-point drawing, the use
of pen and ink or sepia, or of the point of the brush
as a drawing instrument, is hardly enough encouraged.
I certainly should like to see some prizes for etching
on copper, by advanced students; or for good studies
from Rafael's or Michael Angelo's fine-lined drawings
with hard pencil on metal point. The more skilful
draughtsmanship we can get from our engravers the
better. The fact is a great deal has been taught and
learnt in these schools since they began, and I should
say the standard of their competition work ought to be
advanced,-perhaps somehow in this way,  I would
have a stringent superannuation law as to all the lower
Department prizes for the object or mere still life.
After such an age or after so many years of competition, in either or both, the student shall compete no
more in that class or for that prize. It will not do to
have a number of senior pupils, especially ladies with
great command of leisure, competing year after year
in copying casts, and hatching and stippling their
lives away, under the impression that they are study



272  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


ing art, whereas they are only sticking, not very
fairly, in the way of younger students. I should like
to see a senior department of competition, where the
prizes should be ail for work from Nature. They
would have to be carefully classified, of course; and
might be broadly divided into works in light and
shade, and works in colour: the prizes should be
very varied, ranging from oil landscape or figures,
painted up for exhibition, down to three-hour sketches
in the open air, and studies of single objects, as a
stone or a branch with a few leaves. I include also
decorative treatment and analysis of flowers, &c.
After three or four times, or a term of years' competing, in the cast or object school, I should superannuate a student whether he or she has gained a prize
or not, and I should send him into the Nature-competition school. If a medallist, or at least a prizeman,
he might go in without examination. If not so distinguished, I should make him do a simple drawing in
a given time in school, to be sure he had skill enough
to be allowed to compete. Then the subjects should
be gradated in difficulty, and nobody should compete
more than a stated number of times; and I think I
would settle that sending in a very bad drawing
should exclude the unfit competitors for the next
year, always getting rid of the worst by a preliminary




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trial also, as in the Middle class Examinations. You
see there is no pity in competition, if we are to have
it. A drawing is either good enough, in promise or
performance, or it is altogether too bad. The difficulty of every school and system of instruction is to
know what to do with the fourth-rates, with those
who cannot have anything but their labour for their
pains. I hold that that is enough; I think every
one who tries honestly to get artistic skill will succeed
in finding happy employment; but he ought not to
run against others if he cannot win.  Competition
interferes with true feeling; it takes away singleness
of mind, and care for art and Nature only. I have
said it reduces art to medal-hunting in the first
place, and picture dealing in the second. At present
I suppose it must continue, but I dislike it altogether,
and should be glad to think that art-students in
England had a little more in them of the fire that is
not the fire ot gain or of contention. "They that
run in a race run all." It is curious how St. Paul
appeals to the full energies of his, hearers by the
image of a race, rejecting at the same time the idea
of competition one against the other, and bidding all
so run that they may obtain. The spiritual life of
faith and the spiritual life of art are led on the same
conditions of hope in the unseen.




274  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


And this brings us back to what we started with,
that art is a spiritual object in itself, not a mere
pursuit of fame or money.  "This does not come
with houses or with gold." We believe it to be
capable of developing and elevating the spirit of
man; as an energy or pursuit, irrespectively of what
is popularly called success. And it is impossible, as
we said, to agree as to what success is: to one man it
is to do, or know, good things; to another to get nice
things; to a third, to be thought that which he is
not. These lectures concern the first of these classes
only; and we began them by setting forth what the
study of naturalist art might do in a humble way for
ordinary people-saying that what we desired most
was art for the people, and that, if any great
stride in advance is made in our time, it will be
probably made by some man from among the
multitude, like Blake or Turner; and that popular
art-education on any sound principles must always
give greater chances of awakening genius and drawing out power from thence. And I speculated on a
systematic connexion and working together, one day,
of our Science and Art Department with primary
and secondary schools; in the hope of organizing
public examination and competitive education, so as,
as far as possible, to neutralize the bad moral effect of




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275


that continued intellectual money scramble, to which
it seems our generation is doomed. For as yet there is
no sign that any great class of English people care
for learning or thought, or the work of intellect, or
anything that does not pay in money. And as you
cannot keep up an art-school without medals, so
your only chance of pressing on education anywhere
is to tell the rich they can't keep their dominant
position without it, and the poor that they cannot live
without it at all. Of course there are endless exceptions and admixtures of higher character: the spread
of popular education will really be brought about by
the good qualities of the British people, and not by
their bad ones-by their general benevolence, not by
their great covetousness. You may get a town fuli
of rough people to grow less rough; but only by
individual appeal to the goodwill and benevolence
which is in them, and which you can only develop
by showing goodwill of your own to them. And
the great lesson and confession of the Education
Bill is that this is done in this country mainly on
Christian principles and by Christian people, and
that it cannot be done without Christianity: culture
won't work without love; and when you deal with that
you deal with Him who is Love, and He with you.
Then we said something of the need of culture




276  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


in England, and of natural beauty and its study as
a means of culture, and how the hideous life we lead
by making this country the workshop of the world,
and ourselves, consequently, the spinners and stokers
of creation, shuts off natural beauty altogether from
many who might be happy in it. I did not express
any hope about our one day leaving off spinning a
little, and not stoking quite so hard, or our ceasing to
infect our own air and poison our own rivers; I
should be very glad to do so if I could. And we
said that art was a spiritual thing; and art-work an
expression of the delight of man's spirit in the beauty
of God's work. We also took note of a passage in
Exodus, and others in the New Testament, which
speak of diversities of gifts, and of the artistic gift
as a gift of the Spirit of God.  We divided art
thus. It might be expression of (delight in) ideal
or spiritual beauty, saying that in the highest
forms of beauty in Divine perfection, the ideal and
spiritual coincided. Also, we said art-work might
be applied to man's uses, especially to education,
which is spiritual, and to enjoyment of common life
and commerce, which is tangible; and we saw that
art is not really applied to use till good works of
common art and common life are brought within the
reach of the people. And I did not say then what I




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


277


say now, that I cannot see why a carpenter should
not learn drawing enough to enable him to carve, or
a mason either. The Ammergau work, in particular,
shows what may be done, and it would fill up times of
bad weather and health, or of slack.work. Nor did I
say (what I think Yorkshire and possibly Norfolk
men may know better than I do), what capital surfacecarved oak used to be in the cottages and farms all
over the West Riding, done for love and for pleasure;
as genuine art-work in a humble way as Rafael's
frescoes are in a grand way. Then, having settled
that art as the interpreter of God's work in Nature
was a good thing, we considered that it is an old
thing, and that such as we have is connected with
such as the Greek race had in early days; and we
began to consider some of the qualities which enabled
them to take such a lead, and position of command,
in symbol-interpretation of Nature. We find that,
after their lights, they, that is to say, their greatest
"exemplaria," did what we wish to do in our best
moments, and made their art a liturgy or ministry
or service to their gods. We saw that the Greek in
search of God traced Him by certain foot and handmarks in Nature without, and in his own spirit and
moral life within: that, like other nations, he thought
that somebody made the rain and fruitful seasons and




278  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


their beauty, and that somebody also made right
and right-dealing persons; and from his notions of
beautiful and right-doing men he got various wonderful conceptions of what the upper powers of right and
Nature must be like. The best men, we said, would
get farthest in this search, feeling after one God,
each according to his light. Then-we said, symbolic
Nature-worship became idolatry, because Greeks
insisted on seeing or being shown God in their own
form, and lost hold of righteousness and of Him, and
so lost unity, and disregarded household love and
honour of women; and that as they lost hold on
right, and lost hope of finding the Doer of right, their
art fell all into technical dexterity or sensual trifling;
and their idolatry became first earthly, then sensual;
then at length devilish, when the faith arose and
defied the false gods. Accordingly, we saw that
Christianity could not be expected to pay much
attention to statues of Apollo and Athene, because
Christians had been so often burnt and tortured in
the name of Apollo and Athene. But as to the use of
art for teaching any good thing, or giving any harmless pleasure to men, it seemed that Christians of the
second century were quite as willing to use it as we
are now; and that such art as was possible, in the
sudden blackness of darkness which began with Alaric,




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


279


was continued by religious men for religious purposes,
there being no possibility of any one else's doing so,
between York and Constantinople. That is, A.D. 4IO,
marks the end of Graeco-Roman Art; and nothing
but Byzantinism remains until the earliest Lombard
work about Verona and Pavia in the eleventh
century.  Rome, and especially Ravenna, are the
cities where the great mosaics still remain to show
the extraordinary gift of colour which was still left,
or rather which seems to have sprung up between
Greek and   Ostrogoth.  Placidia, Theodoric, and
Justinian are the three names with whom   these
works are connected, and those three names span
the extreme darkness of Italy from desolation to
desolation, from Attila to Alboin. That is to say,
Galla Placidia died in the same year when Attila
was beaten back on Northern Italy, from Chalons,
in 450-centre of fifth century. And Narses invited
Alboin at the end of Justinian's reign in 568..
Torcello was then built, the mother city of Venice.
With Alboin and the Lombards, hammer-men all,
begins the Lombard sculpture of Verona, with its
realism of huntings and battles, its historical record
of Scripture and the faith, and its griffin symbolism,
which repeated, strangely, and for the last time in
sincere purpose, the Mosaic and divinely-prescribed




280  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


symbol of the Cherub. That is all till the eleventh
century, when a new architecture begins the great
Renaissance of art at Pisa, under Lombard and
Byzantine forms of extreme beauty, when the
Pisan Duomo and Baptistery and the leaning Campanile were built, to contend with the piazzas of
Florence and Venice (and I think successfully) for
the title of the most perfect group of buildings of
any age or time. That is at the end of the eleventh
century. Nicolas of Pisa marks the early thirteenth
century; Cimabue and Giotto the late thirteenth
century. There is a century of Giotteschi; Masaccio,
and a constellation arise in the fifteenth century;
and at its end Ghirlandajo is dying, and Michael
Angelo is rising in Florence and Rafael in Urbino.
John Bellini was near his end in Venice, when Diirer
was there in 1506: Holbein had been born in I498.
Design and drawing are perfected by these men; and
in the next century (sixteenth) colour is perfected in
the Venetian school, which centres in Titian, Tintoret,
and Veronese: just after whose time Velasquez is in
Spain and Italy, the aloe-flower of Spanish art.
After Veronese art has finally given up the
service of religion and betakes herself to mythology,
completing the change which Rafael began.  The
best men left go with Nicolo Poussin and Claude




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


281


to portrait and landscape and pastoralism.  And
the Dutch and Flemish school rises in beautiless
strength, with Rembrandt, Rubens, and Cuyp at its
head; Rubens being big enough for equal division
between mythology, portrait, and landscape. There
is nothing new till Hogarth, Gainsborough, Blake,
and Turner, whose lives overlap. There is a skeleton
of the historical part of these lectures to help your
memory.* Take the three epochs, Greek and GraecoRoman, Byzantine, Florentine: and the leading names
and times thus in a mnemonic. I always prefer to
remember history by groups of names and events,
men and their deeds, to getting it up by dates.
V. century B.C. Marathon-Phidias-Elgin Marbles.
V. century A.D. Alaric-Theodoric-Ravenna.
Giotto to Angelo, XIV.-XVI.
Remember that Phidias was done to death in
432, outbreak-year of Peloponesian war; that Mummius took Corinth, B.C. 146; that Graeco-Roman art
came to an end in Alaric's great year, 4Io; that
Ghirlandajo was four years old when Muhammad II.
took Constantinople in 1453; that Lorenzo de
Medici died in Columbus' year (1492); that Albert
* See Memorial Chart.




282  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


Diirer's great work was published in the Flodden
year (1513); that Veronese died in the Armada year
(1588); that Turner ceased to exhibit (dying two
years after) in the Exhibition year, 1851.
I do not lay much stress on the usual employment of the word Renaissance, as it applies to art.
There is no doubt about the revival of letters in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but art, which
teaches without letters, had begun to revive when the
Lombard chisels began to work in St. Zenone and
St. Ambrogio, at Milan, at Pavia, and at Lucca.
Also, I am inclined to protest against your thinking
of Florentine sculpture as derivative, and based on
imitation of Greek models.  Nicolo Pisano and
others were helped by Greek models; but their
energies and their objects were alike their own. No
broken-nosed antiques were needed to teach the
blood of Alboin and Agilulf that beauty is beautiful;
and as they never reached the Greek perfection in
representing the body and limbs, so no Greek ever
approached, or thought of, or sought for, their power
of facial expression.
Then we had a lecture on Symbolism: from the
Cherub and Griffin, through the Catacombs and the
Ravennese mosaics; through the history of the
Cross and the Crucifix; and the parallel systems of




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


283


illuminating churches with fresco for poor men who
could not read; and illuminating missals and Evangeliaries for rich people, who read more pleasantly
and intelligently with the pictures.  Also, we said
that the mysteries of the Middle Ages appeared to
have been intended for sound doctrinal instruction,
however abused they probably may have been; and
we referred to the last surviving example of themthe Passions-Vorstellung of Ober-Ammergau in
Bavaria. And I maintained that there is a symbolic
tradition, so to speak, running through all Christian
times, from the earliest to the latest; that it is used
continually to enforce and impress the truth of the
Lord's Incarnation and Death for Man; and to teach
how that was foretold or foreshadowed in the history
of Israel, in the Law and the Prophets, by sacrifice
and other typical actions, and also by typical persons.
In fact, that there has been a system of Churchsymbolism, or preaching in picture; and that the
ancient subjects of decoration in Catholic Churches,
besides representations of the Person and Humanity
of the Saviour, are, properly speaking, the typical
persons, objects and events of the Old Testament,
and the Miracles of Mercy in the New.
We also made some remarks on the serious
and comic grotesque, illustrating what was said by




284  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


examples from Albert Durer, Hans Holbein, and
Michael Angelo; and occupied two lectures with
comparison or contrast between Durer and Holbein,
Rafael and Buonarotti. Then we betook ourselves
to practical considerations on landscape drawing from
Nature, examining the meanings of various terms
and rules. It appeared that drawing in the open air
is like drawing anywhere else, only more difficult:
first, for want of comforts and appliances; secondly,
for want of time, since Nature is always changing,
and no scene is the same for any length of time
together.  Success then depended, as it seemed,
first in possessing, or becoming possessed with, a
definite leading idea, or feeling, in our work, and
understanding how to make the feature of the picture
which conveys our leading idea the principal feature
to all spectators. Thus, in a lake scene, whose leading idea is calm, we shall probably call attention to
the reflections in its calm depths, or the solid motionless forms of rocks in repose.  In a torrent sketch,
where force and violence of motion is our leading
idea, the lines of broken hurrying water, and wreaths
of falling or flying foam, will probably have to be
made chief features by being placed in the principal light, or they may be made prominent by other
means. By examining some of Turner's etchings of




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


285


the principal lines of his subjects we saw, that artful
arrangements of line, and still more of light and
shade, have much to do with leading the eye of the
spectator to the artist's chosen points in the picture,
and that the whole science of composition consisted
in this-to have a leading thought to express, to get
it into the principal place in your picture, and to
surround it with accessory or minor facts bearing
upon it, and explaining or enforcing it: causing the
eye by their arrangement to enter the picture as if
it were a real scene, and to understand the proper
bearings and relations to each other of all the facts
in it. Turner's power of leading the eye an unconscious captive, by force of drawing and artful use of
perspective, were just glanced at; also the extraordinary significance and expressive power of his
line-drawing. It seemed that such clinging to the
leading idea would give that greatly-desired quality
called character to our work, because the leading
idea of everything is in its character or principal
marking; also that the universally-applicable precept of Mulready, to know what one has to do
and do it, was no other, in fact, than an exhortation
to choose the main and vital feature to draw on
one's paper, and draw it with proper adjuncts in
proper places.  Easy to say and hard to do, no




286  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


doubt; but the methodical effort to seize on main
features becomes easier with practice; and also the
tenacity of the mind in holding by a leading feature,
through all the changes and chances of various
operations of realization may be greatly increased
by practice also. And on clearness and tenacity of
view depends our knowledge what we are really going
to do, and how to do it.
My last lecture was a scrambling Theory of
English Naturalist Landscape, based on rough analysis
of the English love of Nature, especially of wild
scenery; and illustrated by reference to three great
names in poetry, Scott, Wordsworth, and Keble. I
omitted Tennyson, because his descriptions range
over the whole school of English landscape, that is
to say, all representation of every phase of scenery;
and would require a long course of lectures, illustrated
from Turner and others. It would be well, indeed, if
somebody would write them; but he must be a strong
landscape painter and observer, whenever he arises.
Some of us probably know the difficulty of finding a
good poetical description of high Alpine scenery.
They will perhaps remember how painfully so excellent a describer as Rogers fails, in the short poem
called Morning on the Alps, purely from never having
seen what he is describing; how he talks of chasing




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


287


roebuck (he means chamois) through the snow with
hound and horn (you might as well pursue salmon
with hound and horn); how he seems to imagine that
an alpenstock is made of iron, and used as a leapingpole for giant bounds from one aiguille to another.
That is failure, by a man who did not often fail. For
partial success, there are some good lines of glacier
description in Kingsley's Saint's Tragedy; and Coleridge's well-known Hymn in the Valley of Chamounix,
is good, though rather general in its description. We
all know the difficulty; and let those who want to see
it overcome, and to see the whole spirit of high landscape in a small octavo page and a half, read the Idyll
at the end of the Princess, "Come down, 0 Maid."
The Slade Professor at Oxford once pronounced it to
me " the finest piece of pure description in English or
any other language," and I think he was simply right.
There is no time to read it now, and most of us
would like to take time over it.
Well, last lecture came to this: that English
people generally liked Alpine scenery for the sake of
adventure, and the excitement of wild natural form;
or else because they enjoy the sensation or emotion
of loneliness. And we said, when you can draw
rightly you are right in indulging your imagination,
and drawing subjects illustrative of other men's




288  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISMA.


thoughts; but that, bright as your imaginations may
be, nothing will make up for your pictures being ill
drawn, false or forced in light and shade, or muddy
in colour.  A  good idea in bad perspective is
thoroughly disgusting; and particularly so if it is a
borrowed idea, and you are setting a poet's description all wrong in another person's eye. Just as a
bad description of his work to a painter, is a bad
illustration of his work to a poet. It is an injustice;
it spoils his idea by misinterpretation; and all incompetent or superfluous criticism is of the same
nature.
And once more, in conclusion, let me just say how
important it seems to me that everybody should
learn some kind of art or craft. Women are better
off than men very commonly, in as far as they can all
make something. Stockings, or shirts, or puddings
are really good things; and it is certainly better to
be able to make, than only to eat and wear out.
We are always reading of highly-educated men who
have to act as sheep-washers or shoe-blacks, or unskilled labourers in the colonies, because they can't
make a nail on the anvil, or solder the bottom of a
kettle, or dovetail the sides of a box together, or shoe
a horse, or rub him down, or know how many feeds a
day he ought to have in work; or make a pea-jacket,




ART, CRAFT, AND SCHOOLS.


289


or even sew on a button, or milk a cow, or know how
long it takes to roast a leg of mutton, or whether, if
you want to boil it, you should put it in hot water or
cold to begin with. The traditionary school-games,
I know, give strength, activity, and harmonious action
of hand and eye. It is a question, however, whether
some time might not be taken from games, and given
to any art or craft a lad may fancy. Drawing and
music, I have no doubt, flourish here, and perhaps at
present one can hardly ask for more. But all lads
like carpentering, and in my time I had enough of
the Northman in me to become a bit of a smith. I
should think that all schools ought to compete for
Whitworth's craftsman-scholarships, if it were only to
learn what a craft is worth. It is a thing I should
desire for myself and my sons to understand a craft
or minor art as well as a fine art, or a working
man's work as well as my own. As I would desire
that a smith should know something of drawing for
refinement, so I think a gentleman should be able to
make a nail, for understanding of hand-craft. And
also, that he and the craftsman may understand each
other. For as I said before, the craftsman's view is
but narrow: and he cannot believe that any gentleman has cunning of hand enough to know the value
of skilled labour.  Nor does he understand the
I9




290  CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.


connexion between Culture and Design. I remember
somebody in the glass business once set up his
throat against the late Lord Derby because he
had translated Homer and couldn't make a glass.
If he himself had been able to make a glass fit to be
seen there would have been more in his observation;
but as a British glassmaker he probably could do
nothing except what was rather ugly and expensive.
Just before this lecture was first delivered I had
the dissatisfaction of comparing a Venice glass, blown
at once with little time or labour, graceful, serviceable, lovely in wandering veins of transparent colour,
with an English chimney ornament, useless, laborious,
painted here, engraved there, cut in this place, crosscut in that, utterly dull and tasteless in shape and
decoration, and costing probably about four times
the price of the Venetian.  Classical knowledge
would teach our glass-workmen better forms if they
had it. But every man should know a craft, that is
quite true, especially all whom the craftsman calls
" swells." You know so much more of the great mass
of men when you know something of their work:
you are so much more at one with them when they
know you appreciate their skill and the worth of their
hands' cunning: it is a mutual understanding.  "I
must have you gentlemen to pull and draw with the




ART, CRAF7; AND SCHOOLS.


29I


men," said Francis Drake; and he got a very considerable place in history on that principle. Read
the passage about Amyas Leigh and the Elizabethan
discipline at sea, when all adventurous Englishmen
were one, gentle and simple, friends bound in ties of
strictest discipline-soldiers, sailors, craftsmen, hunters, terrible and beloved by land and sea. And
that discipline was inherited from the noble training
of early feudal times, which was quite as democratic,
between gentle blood and gentle blood, as it was
strict in gradation of rank below the salt. A good
knight was the equal of kings, and might have kings'
sons among his pages to clean his spurs and hold his
stirrup. Something like this exists still with squires
of the right sort, and their out-of-door servants.
And I trust it is so, in many trades, between masters
and workmen; but all division of labour, all mindless
work and complication of mechanism, goes sadly
against it. To ride and shoot thoroughly well are the
craft of the hunter; and woodcraft is equal in value
as a possession of the body and mind to knowledge
of any other craft; but in this country it comes in
only as an expensive amusement.  I am not going
to say anything against cricket or the traditionary
games, though I used always to like rowing best.
Football has a symbolic value, I suppose, because




292   CHRISTIAN ART AND SYMBOLISM.
it teaches one to shin and cut down one's fellowcreatures all through life. Still I think learning a
craft worth something to every boy.
And here we come to the end of a lecture and the
beginning of a subject. These papers may end here.
The connexion between Art and Poetry, archaeology
and history, is daily better understood, and they
may, I trust, be a contribution in that direction.
It matters little if they close arbitrarily, for there is
no end to talk of art, and the skill that wins grace.
As Aristotle said, "The end is in the energy,"-and
the labour is the reward. As Tennyson says,We know the merry world is round
And we may sail for evermore.
-sail. away at last into the sunrise, like Turner's
Ulysses-so may it be with all of us.
THE END.


London: Printed by SMITH, ELDER AND CO., Old Bailey, E. C.




I
I




MEMORIA  CHART.


I divide Art, or accessible Works of Art, before the Cinquecento, into two epc
I. Greek or Graeco-Roman (say 500 B.C.), from Ageladas and Phidias to ta
as transition date from Greek to Graeco-Roman.
2. Byzantinism and the successive artistic Renaissances, Ostrogothic (?) Lorn
Michel Angelo. Let this begin with the Ravennese work of Fifth Century, and end
birth of Holbein: Michel Angelo, seventeen years old; Rafael, nine.


ohs of about i,ooo years each.
ing of Rome by Alaric, 4IO A.D.: taking 125 B.C. (capture of Corinth by Mummius)
iard, Pisan, Florentine: till Italo-Gothic skill in Drawing culminates in Rafael and
with 1492 (Columbus' year, and death of Lorenzo de Medici), six years before the


Firs
Afasters.
Accessible


Epoch I.-Greek and Graeco-Roman, Sixh Century B.C. to Fifth Century A.D.
Culminating Period, that of Athenian Supremacy, fr m Persian to end of Peloponnesian War, 490-405.
It School. Traces of Spiritual Motive.                 Second School. Naturali n verging on Sensualism.           Third School. Graeco-Roman (including Rhodian Work), or
Fifth and Sixth Centuries B.C.                                Fourth and Thir Centuries B.C.                         Academic School of Science and Eclectic Copying
Ageladas.
Phidias.   Myron.    Polycleitus.                         Praxiteles. Sco'as. Lysippus.                           Cleomenes.    Agesander.   Athenodorus, &c.
Works.   Elgin Marbles.                                         Fauns, Aphrodite (copies), &c.                                    Nude Germanicus (?).
Two Discoboli (copies), &c.                                                                                 Laocoon, &c., considered as a work of Pliny's age.
[Graeco-Roman Art may be said to end where Byzantinism has its origin, i.4, in the Early Christian sepulchral work in fresco, mosaic, and bas-relief,
from Second Century to Fifth Century.]
Epoch II.-Byzantinism         to Early School of Florence, and so on to Cinquecento [450 (say) to 1492 A.D.]:KS in Fortress Cities (a), or Cities of Refuge (b).                                                                 LOMBARNTINE SCHOOL  f DrawiCHES, e.Eleventh Century to
Cinquecento.
St. Ambrogio, Mila,i.                                  Cimabue.
(a) Ravenna, 450-568.                                   St. Michele, Pavia. i   Seventh Century.               Giotto (Giotteschi), died 1336.
ila to Alboin, Chalons to Forum Julii.]               a          Ditto.  Lucca                                      Orgagna, dead in 376              Van Eyck, 1366.
St. Zenone, Verona                                           Eleventh Century.              Angelico, died 1455; Pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli.
lacidia.  Theodoric.   Justinian.                                                                                j Masaccio, died 1429.
(b)        Pisan or Lombar -Byzantine.                          Ghirlandajo, died I493.           At Bologna.
11o, Duomo of. Sixth to Eleventh Centuries.                                                                                                        Francia, born 450..                                    Buschetto, Tenthad Eleventh Centuries.                Michel Angelo, born 1475.      Correggio, born 1496.
Venice: St. Mark's.                                   Nicolo Pisano, Twelfth Century.                        Rafael, 1483, at Urbino; with Perugino and Pinturicchio.
Nicoo PianoTwe~h Cetur{


GREF.K WOR
[Att
P
(b) Torce]


Cinquecento: Venetian Schooliof Colour, &c. Moderns.
Remember theseyears:-1504. Year of Rafael's Sposalizio and Michel Angelo'sjCartoon of Pisa; Lionardo at Florence (Standard), Luini his great Lombard pupil,
Holbein his disciple. 1506. Diirer at Venice, with John Bellini and Carpaccio, bosh near their end: Giorgione and Titian in 1510: Luther, Rafael, and Michel Angelo
in Rome at same time.     1513. Flodden year (Tintoret born year before, I512); Diier's Knight and Death, &c.; Rafael finished the Camera della Segnatura(Stanze).
1588, Armada year. Veronese died.     Velasquez born eleven years after, 1599.
CLASSICAL AND PASTORAL.                                           FLEsIUSH.                           Holbein, died in England 1543. Northern Master of Cinquecento.
N. Poussin, 1594.  Claude, i6oo.                            Rubens, born I5i7. Vandyke                          ENGLISH REALISTS, Portrait and Landscape.
Hogarth, born 102 years after Velasquez, 1697, died 1764.
French Moderns. Revolution-Classics.                        Cuyp.                                            Reynolds, born 1723, died 1788.
David, Ingres, &c.                                  Vandevelde, &c. Dutch Realism.Blake (idealist), born               1757, died 1827
Turner, born 1773, died 1853.




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