OF THE UN1VER5 ITY Of 1LLI NOIS Tom Turner Collection 7S0. “2 IS98 The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN THE ART OF ENGLAND AND THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https://archive.org/details/artofenglandpleaOOrusk THE ART OF ENGLAND AND THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND LECTURES GIVEN IN OXFORD IN 1883—1885 BY JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D. HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD DURING HIS SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADE PROFESSORSHIP NEW EDITION IN SMALL FORM GEORGE ALLEN, SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON AND 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD, LONDON 1898 [A ll rights reserved ] [The following lectures on ‘ The Art of England ’ and ‘ The Pleasures of England ' were originally published separately. ] Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. At the Ballantyne Press J T < nuyjA I*vv ZuS^wy.' 'W ns*)- ^ /318 CONTENTS THE ART OF ENGLAND LECTURE I M \ Realistic Schools of Painting . D. G. Rossetti and W. Holman Hunt LECTURE II Mythic Schools of Painting E. Burne-Jones and G. F. Watts LECTURE III Classic Schools of Painting Sir F. Leighton and Alma Tadema LECTURE IV Fairy Land ....... Mrs. Allingham and Kate Greenaway LECTURE V The Fireside £ PAGE I 32 62 96 • 131 John Leech and John Tenniel VI CONTENTS LECTURE VI PAGE The Hill-Side 166 George Robson and Copley Fielding APPENDIX 203 INDEX .231 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND LECTURE I The Pleasures of Learning . 263 Bertha to Osburga LECTURE II The Pleasures of Faith 294 Alfred to the Confessor LECTURE III The Pleasures of Deed 331 Alfred to Cceur de Lion LECTURE IV The Pleasures of Fancy 366 Cceur de Lion to Elizabeth NOTES 398 INDEX • 399 THE ART OF ENGLAND THE ART OF ENGLAND LECTURE I REALISTIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING D. G. ROSSETTI AND W. HOLMAN HUNT Delivered gtk March 1883 I. I AM well assured that this audience is too kind, and too sympathetic, to wish me to enlarge on the mingled feelings of fear and thankfulness, with which I find myself once again permitted to enter on the duties in which I am conscious that before I fell short in too many ways ; and in which I only have ven- tured to ask, and to accept, your farther trust, in the hope of being able to bring to some of their intended conclusions, things not, in the nature of them, it seems to me, beyond what yet remains of an old man’s energy; but, 2 THE ART OF ENGLAND before, too eagerly begun, and too irregularly followed. And indeed I am partly under the impression, both in gratitude and regret, that Professor Richmond’s resignation, however justly motived by his wish to pursue with uninterrupted thought the career opened to him in his profession, had partly also for its reason the courtesy of concession to his father’s old friend ; and his own feeling that while yet I was able to be of service in advancing the branches of elementary art with which I was specially acquainted, it was best that I should make the attempt on lines already opened, and with the aid of old friends. I am now alike comforted in having left you, and encouraged in return ; for on all grounds it was most desirable that to the imperfect, and yet in many points new and untried code of practice which I had instituted, the foundations of higher study should have been added by M^. Rich- mond, in connection with the methods of art- education recognized in the Academies of Europe. And although I have not yet been able to consult with him on the subject, I trust that no interruption of the courses of figure study, thus established, may be involved in I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 3 the completion, for what it is worth, of the system of subordinate exercise in natural his- tory and landscape, indicated in the schools to which at present, for convenience' sake, my name is attached ; but which, if they indeed deserve encouragement, will, I hope, receive it ultimately, as presenting to the beginner the first aspects of art, in the widest, because the humblest, relation to those of divinely organized and animated Nature. 2. The immediate task I propose to myself is to make serviceable, by all the illustration I can give them, the now unequalled collection possessed by the Oxford schools of Turner drawings and sketches, completed as it has been by the kindness of the Trustees of the National Gallery at the intercession of Prince Leopold ; and furnishing the means of progress in the study of landscape such as the great painter himself only conceived the scope of toward the closing period of his life. At the opening of next term, I hope, with Mr. Macdonald’s assistance, to have drawn up a little synopsis of the elementary exercises which in my earlier books have been recom- mended for practice in Landscape, — a subject 4 THE ART OF ENGLAND which, if you look back to the courses of my lectures here, you will find almost affectedly neglected, just because it was my personal province. Other matters under deliberation, till I get them either done, or determined, I have no mind to talk of ; but to-day, and in the three lectures which I hope to give in the course of the summer term, I wish to render such account as is possible to me of the vivid phase into which I find our English art in general to have developed since first I knew it : and, though perhaps not without passing deprecation of some of its tendencies, to rejoice with you unqualifiedly in the honour which may most justly be rendered to the leaders, whether passed away or yet present with us, of England’s Modern Painters. 3. I may be permitted, in the reverence of sorrow, to speak first of my much loved friend, Gabriel Rossetti. But, in justice, no less than in the kindness due to death, I believe his name should be placed first on the list of men, within my own range of knowledge, who have raised and changed the spirit of modern Art : raised, in absolute attainment ; changed, in direction of temper. Rossetti added to the I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 5 before accepted systems of colour in painting, one based on the principles of manuscript illumination, which permits his design to rival the most beautiful qualities of painted glass, without losing either the mystery or the dignity of light and shade. And he was, as I believe it is now generally admitted, the chief intellec- tual force in the establishment of the modern romantic school in England. 4. Those who are acquainted with my former writings must be aware that I use the word 1 romantic 1 always in a noble sense ; meaning the habit of regarding the external and real world as a singer of Romaunts would have regarded it in the Middle Ages, and as Scott, Burns, Byron, and Tennyson have regarded it in our own times. But, as Rossetti’s colour was based on the former art of illumination, so his romance was based on traditions of earlier and more sacred origin than those which have in- spired our highest modern romantic literature. That literature has in all cases remained strongest in dealing with contemporary fact. The genius of Tennyson is at its highest in the poems of ‘ Maud,’ ‘ In Memoriam/ and the ‘Northern Farmer’; but that of Rossetti, 6 THE ART OF ENGLAND as of his greatest disciple, is seen only when on pilgrimage in Palestine. 5. I trust that Mr. Holman Hunt will not think that in speaking of him as Rossetti’s disciple I derogate from the respect due to his own noble and determined genius. In all living schools it chances often that the disciple is greater than his master j and it is always the first sign of a dominant and splendid intellect, that it knows of whom to learn. Rossetti's great poetical genius justified my claiming for him total, and, I believe, earliest, originality in the sternly materialistic,* though deeply re- verent, veracity, with which alone, of all schools of painters, this brotherhood of Englishmen has conceived the circumstances of the life of Christ. And if I had to choose one picture which represented in purity and complete- ness this manner of their thought, it would be Rossetti's ( Virgin in the House of St. John.' 6. But when Holman Hunt, under such im- pressive influence, quitting virtually for ever the range of worldly subjects, to which be- longed the pictures of Valentine and Sylvia, of Claudio and Isabel, and of the 1 Awakening * See § 31. I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 7 Conscience/ rose into the spiritual passion which first expressed itself in the ' Light of the World/ an instant and quite final differ- ence was manifested between his method of conception, and that of his forerunner. To Rossetti, the Old and New Testaments were only the greatest poems he knew ; and he painted scenes from them with no more actual belief in their relation to the present life and business of men than he gave also to the ‘ Morte d’Arthur’ and the ‘Vita Nuova/ But to Holman Hunt, the story of the New Testa- ment, when once his mind entirely fastened on it, became what it was to an old Puritan, or an old Catholic of true blood, — not merely a Reality, not merely the greatest of Realities, but the only Reality. So that there is nothing in the earth for him any more that does not speak of that ; — there is no course of thought nor force of skill for him, but it springs from and ends in that. So absolutely, and so involuntarily — I use the word in its noblest meaning — is this so with him, that in all subjects which fall short in the religious element, his power also is shortened, and he does those things worst which are easiest to other men. 8 THE ART OF ENGLAND Beyond calculation, greater, * beyond com- parison, happier, than Rossetti, in this sin- cerity, he is distinguished also from him by a respect for physical and material truth which renders his work far more generally, far more serenely, exemplary. 7. The specialty of colour-method which I have signalized in Rossetti, as founded on missal painting, is in exactly that degree conventional and unreal. Its light is not the light of sunshine itself, but of sunshine diffused through coloured glass. And in object-painting he not only refused, partly through idleness, partly in the absolute want of opportunity for the study of nature in- volved in his choice of abode in a garret at Blackfriars, — refused, I say, the natural aid of pure landscape and sky, but wilfully per- verted and lacerated his powers of conception with Chinese puzzles and Japanese monsters, until his foliage looked generally fit for noth- ing but a fire-screen, and his landscape distances like the furniture of a Noah’s Ark from the nearest toy-shop. Whereas Holman Hunt, in the very beginning of his career, fixed his mind, as a colourist, on the true I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 9 representation' of actual sunshine, of growing leafage, of living rock, of heavenly cloud ; and his long and resolute exile, deeply on many grounds to be regretted both for himself and us, bound only closer to his heart the mighty forms and hues of God’s earth and sky, and the mysteries of its appointed lights of the day and of the night — opening on the foam — “ Of desolate seas, in — Sacred — lands forlorn.” 8. You have, for the last ten or fifteen years, been accustomed to see among the pictures principally characteristic of the English school, a certain average number of attentive studies, both of sunshine, and the forms of lower nature, whose beauty is meant to be seen by its light. Those of Mr. Brett may be named with especial praise ; and you probably will many of you remember with pleasure the study of cattle on a Highland moor in the evening by Mr. Davis, which in last year’s Academy carried us out, at the end of the first room, into sudden solitude among the hills. But we forget, in the enjoyment of these new and healthy pleasures connected with painting, to whom we first owe them IO THE ART OF ENGLAND all. The apparently unimportant picture by Holman Hunt, ‘The Strayed Sheep/ which — painted thirty years ago — you may perhaps have seen last autumn in the rooms of the Art Society in Bond Street, at once achieved all that can ever be done in that kind : it will not be surpassed — it is little likely to be rivalled — by the best efforts of the times to come. It showed to us, for the first time in the history of art, the absolutely faithful balances of colour and shade by which actual sunshine might be transposed' into a key in which the harmonies possible with material pigments should yet produce the same im- pressions upon the mind which were caused by the light itself. 9. And remember, all previous work what- ever had been either subdued into narrow truth, or only by convention suggestive of the greater. Claude’s sunshine is colourless, — only the golden haze of a quiet afternoon ; — so also that of Cuyp : Turner’s, so bold in conven- tionalism that it is credible to few of you, and offensive to many. But the pure natural green and tufted gold of the herbage in the hollow of that little sea-cliff must be recognized I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT I I for true merely by a minute’s pause of atten- tion. Standing long before the picture, you were soothed by it, and raised into such peace as you are intended to find in the glory and the stillness of summer, possessing all things. IO. I cannot say of this power of true sun- shine, the least thing that I would. Often it is said to me by kindly readers, that I have taught them to see what they had not seen : and yet never— in all the many volumes of effort — have I been able to tell them my own feelings about what I myself see. You may suppose that I have been all this time trying to express my personal feelings about Nature. No ; not a whit. I soon found I could not, and did not try to. All my writing is only the effort to distinguish what is constantly, and to all men, lovable, and if they will look, lovely, from what is vile or empty, — or, to well trained eyes and hearts, loathsome; — but you will never find me talking about what I feel, or what I think. I know that fresh air is more wholesome than fog, and that blue sky is more beautiful than black, to people happily born and bred. But you will never find, except of late, and for special reasons, effort of mine to I 2 THE ART OF ENGLAND say how I am myself oppressed or comforted by such things. II. This is partly my steady principle, and partly it is incapacity. Forms of personal feeling in this kind can only be expressed in poetry ; and I am not a poet, nor in any articulate manner could I the least explain to you what a deep element of life, for me, is in the sight merely of pure sunshine on a bank of living grass. More than any pathetic music, — yet I love music, — more than any artful colour — and yet I love colour,— more than other merely material thing visible to these old eyes, in earth or sky. It is so, I believe, with many of you also, — with many more than know it of themselves ; and this picture, were it only the first that cast true sunshine on the grass, would have been in that virtue sacred : but in its deeper meaning, it is, actually, the first of Hunt’s sacred paint- ings — the first in which, for those who can read, the substance of the conviction and the teaching of his after life is written, though not distinctly told till afterwards in the sym- bolic picture of 'The Scapegoat.’ "All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 13 every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” 12. None of you, who have the least acquaint- ance with the general tenor of my own teaching, will suspect in me any bias towards the doc- trine of vicarious Sacrifice, as it is taught by the modern Evangelical Preacher. But the great mystery of the idea of Sacrifice itself, which has been manifested as one united and solemn instinct by all thoughtful and affec- tionate races, since the wide world became peopled, is founded on the secret truth of benevolent energy which all men who have tried to gain it have learned — that you cannot save men from death but by facing it for them, nor from sin but by resisting it for them. It is, on the contrary, the favourite, and the worst falsehood of modern infidel morality, that you serve your fellow-creatures best by getting a percentage out of their pockets, and will best provide for starving multitudes by regaling yourselves. Some day or other — probably now very soon — too probably by heavy afflictions of the State, we shall be taught that it is not so ; and that all the true good and glory even of this world — not to 14 THE ART OF ENGLAND speak of any that is to come, must be bought still, as it always has been, with our toil, and with our tears. That is the final doctrine, the inevitable one, not of Christianity only, but of all Heroic Faith and Heroic Being; and the first trial questions of a true soul to itself must always* be, — Have I a religion, have I a country, have I a love, that I am ready to die for ? 13. That is the Doctrine of Sacrifice; the faith in which Isaac was bound, in which Iphi- genia died, in which the great army of martyrs have suffered, and by which all victories in the cause of justice and happiness have been gained by the men who became more than conquerors through Him that loved them. And yet there is a deeper and stranger sacrifice in the system of this creation than theirs. To resolute self-denial, and to adopted and accepted suffering, the reward is in the conscience sure, and in the gradual advance and predominance of good, practically and to all men visible. But what shall we say of involuntary suffering, — the misery of the poor and the simple, the agony of the helpless and the innocent, and the perishing, as it seems in I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT IS vain, and the mother weeping for the children of whom she knows only that they are not ? 14. I saw it lately given as one of the in- controvertible discoveries of modern science, that all our present enjoyments were only the outcome of an infinite series of pain. I do not know how far the statement fairly represented — but it announced as incapable of contradiction — this melancholy theory. If such a doctrine is indeed abroad among you, let me comfort some, at least, with its absolute denial. That in past aeons, the pain suffered throughout the living universe passes calculation, is true ; that it is infinite, is untrue ; and that all our enjoyments are based on it, contemptibly untrue. For, on the other hand, the pleasure felt through the living universe during past ages is incalcu- lable also, and in higher magnitudes. Our own talents, enjoyments, and prosperities, are the outcome of that happiness with its energies, not of the death that ended them. So manifestly is this so, that all men of hitherto widest reach in natural science and logical thought have been led to fix their minds only on the innumerable paths of 1 6 THE ART OF ENGLAND pleasure, and ideals of beauty, which are traced on the scroll of creation, and are no more tempted to arraign as unjust, or even lament as unfortunate, the essential equiva- lent of sorrow, than in the sevenfold glories of sunrise to deprecate the mingling of shadow with its light. 15. This, however, though it has always been the sentiment of the healthiest natural philosophy, has never, as you well know, been the doctrine of Christianity. That religion, as it comes to us with the promise of a kingdom in which there shall be no more Death, neither sorrow nor crying, so it has always brought with it the confession of calamity to be at present in patience of mystery endured : and not by us only, but apparently for our sakes, by the lower crea- tures, for whom it is inconceivable that any good should be the final goal of ill. To- wards these, the one lesson we have to learn is that of pity. For all human loss and pain, there is no comfort, no interpre- tation worth a thought, except only in the doctrine of the Resurrection ; of which doc- trine, remember, it is an immutable historical I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT I 7 fact that all the beautiful work, and all the happy existence of mankind, hitherto, has depended on, or consisted in, the hope of it. 1 6. The picture of which I came to-day chiefly to speak, as a symbol of that doctrine, was incomplete when I saw it, and is so still ; but enough was done to constitute it the most important work of Hunt’s life, as yet ; and if health is granted to him for its com- pletion, it will, both in reality and in esteem, be the greatest religious painting of our time. You know that in the most beautiful former conceptions of^ the Flight into Egypt, the Holy Family were always represented as watched over, and ministered to, by attendant angels. But only the safety and peace of the Divine Child and its mother are thought of. No sadness or wonder of meditation re- turns to the desolate homes of Bethlehem. But in this English picture all the story of the escape, as of the flight, is told, in ful- ness of peace, and yet of compassion. The travel is in the dead of the night, the way unseen and unknown ; — but, partly stooping from the starlight, and partly floating on the B I 8 THE ART OF ENGLAND desert mirage, move, with the Holy Family, the glorified souls of the Innocents. Clear in celestial light, and gathered into child - garlands of gladness, they look to the Child in whom they live, and yet, for them to die. Waters of the River of Life flow before on the sands : the Christ stretches out His arms to the nearest of them ; — leaning from His mother's breast. To how many bereaved households may not this happy vision of conquered death bring, in the future, days of peace ! 17. I do not care to speak of other virtues in this design than those of its majestic thought, — but you may well imagine for your- selves how the painter's quite separate and, in its skill, better than magical, power of giving effects of intense light, has aided the effort of his imagination, while the passion of his subject has developed in him a swift grace of invention which for my own part I never recognised in his design till now. I can say with deliberation that none even of the most animated groups and processions of children which constitute the loveliest sculpture of the Robbias and Donatello, can more than rival I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 19 the freedom and felicity of motion, or the subtlety of harmonious line, in the happy wreath of these angel-children. 18. Of this picture I came to-day chiefly to speak, nor will I disturb the poor impression which my words can give you of it by any immediate reference to other pictures by our leading masters. But it is not, of course, among these men of splendid and isolated imagina- tion that you can learn the modes of regarding common and familiar nature which you must be content to be governed by — in early lessons. I count myself fortunate, in renewing my effort to systematize these, that I can now place in the schools, or at least lend, first one and then another, some exemplary drawings by young people — youths and girls of your own age — clever ones, yes, — but not cleverer than a great many of you : — eminent only, among the young people of the present day whom I chance to know, in being extremely old-fashioned ; — and, — don’t be spiteful when I say so,— but really they all are, all the four of them — two lads and two lassies — quite provokingly good. 19. Lads, not exactly lads perhaps — one of them is already master of the works in the 20 THE ART OF ENGLAND ducal palace at Venice ; lassies, to an old man of sixty-four, who is vexed to be beaten by them in his own business — a little older, perhaps, than most of the lassies here, but still brightly young ; and, mind you, not artists, but draw- ing in the joy of their hearts — and the builder at Venice only in his playtime — yet, I believe you will find these, and the other drawings I speak of, more helpful, and as I just said, exemplary, than any I have yet been able to find for you ; and of these, little stories are to be told, which bear much on all that I have been most earnestly trying to make you assured of, both in art and in real life. 20. Let me, however, before going farther, say, to relieve your minds from unhappily too well-grounded panic, that I have no intention of making my art lectures any more one-half sermons. All the pieces of theological or other grave talk which seemed to me a necessary part of my teaching here, have been already spoken, and printed ; and are, I only fear at too great length, legible. Nor have I any more either strength or passion to spare in matters capable of dispute. I must in silent resignation leave all of you who are led by I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 2 I your fancy, or induced by the fashion of the time, to follow, without remonstrance on my part, those modes of studying organic beauty for which preparation must be made by depriv- ing the animal under investigation first of its soul within, and secondly of its skin without. But it chances to-day that the merely literal histories of the drawings which I bring with me to show you or to lend, do carry with them certain evidences of the practical force of religious feeling on the imagination, both in artists and races, such as I cannot, if I would, overlook, and such as I think you will your- selves, even those who have least sympathy with them, not without admiration recognize. 21. For a long time I used to say, in all my elementary books, that, except in a graceful and minor way, women could not paint or draw. I am beginning, lately, to bow myself to the much more delightful conviction that nobody else can. How this very serious change of mind was first induced in me it is, if not necessary, I hope pardonable, to delay you by telling. When I was at Venice in 1876 — it is almost the only thing that makes me now content 22 THE ART OF ENGLAND in having gone there, — two English ladies, mother and daughter, were staying at the same hotel, the Europa. One day the mother sent me a pretty little note asking if I would look at the young lady's drawings. On my some- what sulky permission, a few were sent, in which I saw there was extremely right-minded and careful work, almost totally without know- ledge. I sent back a request that the young lady might be allowed to come out sketching with me. I took her over into the pretty cloister of the church of La Salute, and set her, for the first time in her life, to draw a little piece of grey marble with the sun upon it, rightly. She may have had one lesson, after that — she may have had two ; the three, if there were three, seem to me, now, to have been only one ! She seemed to learn every- thing the instant she was shown it — and ever so much more than she was taught. Next year she went away to Norway, on one of these frolics which are now-a-days necessary to girl-existence ; and brought back a little pocket-book, which she thought nothing of, and which I begged of her : and have framed half a dozen leaves of it (for a loan to I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 23 you, only, mind,) till you have enough copied them. 22. Of the minute drawings themselves, I need not tell you — for you will in examining them, beyond all telling, feel, that they are ex- actly what we should all like to be able to do ; and in the plainest and frankest manner show us how to do it — or, more modestly speaking, how, if heaven help us, it can be done. They can only be seen, as you see Bewick Vignettes, with a magnifying glass, and they are patterns to you therefore only of pocket-book work ; but what skill is more precious to a traveller than that of minute, instantaneous, and un- erring record of the things that are precisely best ? For in this, the vignettes upon these leaves differ, widely as the arc of heaven, from the bitter truths of Bewick. Nothing is recorded here but what is lovely and honour- able : how much there is of both in the peasant life of Norway, many an English traveller has recognised ; but not always looking for the cause or enduring the conclusion, that its serene beauty, its hospitable patriotism, its peaceful courage, and its happy virtue, were dependent on facts little resembling our modern 24 THE ART OF ENGLAND English institutions ; — namely, that the Nor- wegian peasant “is a free man on a scanty bit of ground which he has inherited from his forefathers ; that the Bible is to be found in every hut; that the schoolmaster wanders from farm to farm ; that no Norwegian is confirmed who does not know how to read ; and no Norwegian is allowed to marry who has not been confirmed. ” I quote straightforwardly, (missing only some talk of Parliaments ; but not caring otherwise how far the sentences are with my own notions, or against,) from Dr. Hartwig’s collected descriptions of the Polar world. I am not myself altogether sure of the wisdom of teaching everybody to read : but might be otherwise persuaded if here, as in Norway, every town had its public library, “while in many districts the peasants annu- ally contribute a dollar towards a collection of books, which, under the care of the priest, are lent out to all comers.” 23. I observe that the word ‘ priest * has of late become more than ever offensive to the popular English mind ; and pause only to say that in whatever capacity, or authority, the essential function of a public librarian must I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 25 in every decent and rational country be edu- cational ; and consist in the choosing, for the public, books authoritatively or essentially true, free from vain speculation or evil suggestion : and in noble history or cheerful fancy, to the utmost, entertaining. One kind of periodical literature, it seems to me as I study these drawings, must at all events in Norway be beautifully forbidden, — the “Journal des Modes.” You will see evi- dence here that the bright fancying alike of maidens’ and matrons’ dress, capable of prettiest variation in its ornament, is yet ancestral in its form, and the white caps, in their daily purity, have the untroubled constancy of the seashell and the snow. 24. Next to these illustrations of Norwe- gian economy, I have brought you a drawing of deeper and less imitable power : it is by a girl of quite peculiar gift, whose life has hitherto been spent in quiet and unassuming devotion to her art, and to its subjects. I would fain have said, an English girl, but all my pre- judices have lately had the axe laid to their roots one by one, — she is an American ! But for twenty years she has lived with her mother 26 THE ART OF ENGLAND among the peasants of Tuscany — under their olive avenues in summer — receiving them, as they choose to come to chat with her, in her little room by Santa Maria Novella in Florence during winter. They come to her as their loving guide, and friend, and sister in all their work, and pleasure, and — suffering. I lean on the last word. 25. For those of you who have entered into the heart of modern Italy know that there is probably no more oppressed, no more afflicted order of gracious and blessed creatures — God's own poor, who have not yet received their consolation, — than the mountain peasantry of Tuscany and Romagna. What their minds are, and what their state, and what their treatment, those who do not know Italy may best learn, if they can bear the grief of learning it, from Ouida’s photographic story of * A Village Commune f ; yet amidst all this, the sweetness of their natural character is undisturbed, their ancestral religious faith unshaken — their purity and simplicity of household life uncorrupted. They may perish, by our neglect or our cruelty, but they can- not be degraded. Among them, as I have I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 27 told you, this American girl has lived — from her youth up, with her (now widowed) mother, who is as eagerly, and, which is the chief matter, as sympathizingly benevolent as herself. The peculiar art gift of the younger lady is rooted in this sympathy, the gift of truest expression of feelings serene in their rightness ; and a love of beauty — divided almost between the peasants and the flowers that live round Santa Maria del Fiore. This power she has trained by its limitation, severe, and in my experience unexampled, to work in light and shade only, with the pure pen line : but the total strength of her intellect and fancy being concentrated in this engraver's method, it expresses of every subject what she loves best, in simplicity undebased by any accessory of minor emotion. She has thus drawn in faithfullest portrai- ture of these peasant Florentines, the loveliness of the young and the majesty of the aged : she has listened to their legends, written down their sacred songs; and illustrated, with the sanctities of mortal life, their traditions of immortality. 26. I have brought you only one drawing 28 THE ART OF ENGLAND to-day ; in the spring I trust you shall have many, — but this is enough, just now. It is drawn from memory only, but the fond memory which is as sure as sight — it is the last sleep from which she waked on this earth, of a young Florentine girl who had brought heaven down to earth, as truly as ever saint of old, while she lived, and of whom even I, who never saw her, cannot believe that she is dead. Her friend, who drew this memorial of her, wrote also the short story of her life, which I trust you will soon be able to read.* Of this, and of the rest of these drawings, I have much to say to you ; but this first and last, — that they are representations of beautiful human nature, such as could only have been found among people living in the pure Christian faith — such as it was, and is, since the twelfth century ; and that, although, as I said, I have returned to Oxford only to teach you technical things, this truth must close the first words, as it must be the sum of all that I may be permitted to speak * See the frontispiece to The Story of Ida, by “Francesca.” G. Allen, 1883 (Ed. 1898). I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 29 to you, — that the history of the art of the Greeks is the eulogy of their virtues ; and the history of Art after the fall of Greece, is that of the Obedience and the Faith of Christianity. 27. There are two points of practical import- ance which I must leave under your con- sideration. I am confirmed by Mr. Macdonald in my feeling that some kind of accurately testing examination is necessary to give con- sistency and efficiency to the present drawing- school. I have therefore determined to give simple certificates of merit, annually, to the students who have both passed through the required course, and at the end of three years have produced work satisfactory to Mr. Macdonald and myself. After Easter, I will at once look over such drawings as Mr. Macdonald thinks well to show me, by students who have till now complied with the rules of the school ; and give certificates accordingly ; — henceforward, if my health is spared, annually : and I trust that the ad- vantage of this simple and uncompetitive ex- amination will be felt by succeeding holders of the Slade Professorship, and in time 30 THE ART OF ENGLAND commend itself enough to be held as a part of the examination system of the University. Uncompetitive , always. The drawing cer- tificate will imply no compliment, and convey no distinction. It will mean merely that the student who obtains it knows perspective, with the scientific laws of light and colour in illustrating form, and has attained a certain proficiency in the management of the pencil. 28. The second point is of more importance and more difficulty. I now see my way to making the collection of examples in the schools, quite representa- tive of all that such a series ought to be. But there is extreme difficulty in finding any books that can be put into the hands of the home student which may supply the place of an academy. I do not mean merely as lessons in drawing, but in the formation of taste, which, when we analyse it, means of course merely the right direction of feeling. 29. I hope that in many English households there may be found already — I trust some day there may be found wherever there are children who can enjoy them, and especially in country village schools — the three series of I. ROSSETTI AND HOLMAN HUNT 31 designs by Ludwig Richter, in illustration of the Lord’s Prayer, of the Sunday, and of the Seasons. Perfect as types of easy line draw- ing, exquisite in ornamental composition, and refined to the utmost in ideal grace, they represent all that is simplest, purest, and happiest in human life, all that is most strengthening and comforting in nature and in religion. They are enough, in themselves, to show that whatever its errors, whatever its backslidings, this century of ours has in its heart understood and fostered, more than any former one, the joys of family affection, and of household piety. For the former fairy of the woods, Richter has brought to you the angel on the threshold; for the former promises of distant Paradise, he has brought the perpetual blessing, “ God be with you ” : amidst all the turmoil and speeding to and fro, and wandering of heart and eyes which perplex our paths, and betray our wills, he speaks to us in unfailing memorial of the message — “ My Peace I leave with you/’ LECTURE II MYTHIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING E. BURNE-JONES AND G. F. WATTS Delivered 12 th and 16th May 1883 30. It is my purpose, in the lectures I may be permitted henceforward to give in Oxford, so to arrange them as to dispense with notes in subsequent printing; and, if I am forced for shortness, or in oversight, to leave anything insufficiently explained, to complete the passage in the next following lecture, or in any one, though after an interval, which may naturally recur to the subject. Thus the printed text will always be simply what I have read, or said ; and the lectures will be more closely and easily connected than if I went always on without the care of explanatory retrospect. 31. It may have been observed, and perhaps 32 II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 33 with question of my meaning, by some readers, that in my last lecture I used the word “ materialistic ” * of the method of conception common to Rossetti and Hunt, with the greater number of their scholars. I used that ex- pression to denote their peculiar tendency to feel and illustrate the relation of spiritual creatures to the substance and conditions of the visible world ; more especially, the familiar, or in a sort humiliating, accidents or employ- ments of their earthly life; — as, for instance, in the picture I referred to, Rossetti’s Virgin in the house of St. John, the Madonna’s being drawn at the moment when she rises to trim their lamp. In many such cases, the incidents may of course have symbolical meaning, as, in the unfinished drawing by Rossetti of the Passover, which I have so long left with you, the boy Christ is watching the blood struck on the doorpost ; — but the peculiar value and character of the treatment is in what I called its material veracity, compelling the spectator’s belief, if he have the instinct of belief in him at all, in the thing’s having verily happened ; and not being a mere poetical fancy. If the * Ante, § 5. C 34 THE ART OF ENGLAND spectator, on the contrary, have no capacity of belief in him, the use of such representation is in making him detect his own incredulity; and recognize, that in his former dreamy acceptance of the story, he had never really asked himself whether these things were so. 32. Thus, in what I believe to have been in actual time the first — though I do not claim for it the slightest lead in suggestive influence, yet the first dated example of such literal and close realization — my own endeavour in the third volume of ‘ Modern Painters ’ (iv. 4, § 16) to describe the incidents preceding the charge to Peter, I have fastened on the words, “ He girt his fisher's coat about him, and did cast himself into the sea,” following them out with, “ Then to Peter, all wet and shivering, staring at Christ in the sun ; ” not in the least supposing or intending any symbolism either in the coat or the dripping water, or the morning sunshine ; but merely and straitly striving to put the facts be- fore the readers’ eyes as positively as if he had seen the thing come to pass on Brighton beach, and an English fisherman dash through the surf of it to the feet of his captain — once dead, and now with the morning brightness on his face. II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 35 33. And you will observe farther, that this way of thinking about a thing compels, with a painter, also a certain way of painting it. I do not mean a necessarily close or minute way, but a necessarily complete, substantial, and emphatic one. The thing may be expressed with a few fierce dashes of the pencil ; but it will be wholly and bodily there ; it may be in the broadest and simplest terms, but nothing will be hazy or hidden, nothing clouded round, or melted away : and all that is told will be as explanatory and lucid as may be — as of a thing examined in daylight, not dreamt of in moonlight. 34. I must delay you a little, though perhaps tiresomely, to make myself well understood on this point ; for the first celebrated pictures of the pre-Raphaelite school having been ex- tremely minute in finish, you might easily take minuteness for a speciality of the style, — but it is not so in the least. Minuteness I do somewhat claim, for a quality insisted upon by myself, and required in the work of my own pupils ; it is — at least in landscape — Turnerian and Ruskinian — not pre-Raphaelite at all : — the pre-Raphaelism common to us all is in the 36 THE ART OF ENGLAND frankness and honesty of the touch, not in its dimensions. 35. I think I may, once for all, explain this to you, and convince you of it, by asking you, when you next go up to London, to look at a sketch by Vandyke in the National Gallery, No. 680, purporting to represent this very scene I have been speaking of, — the miracu- lous draught of fishes. It is one of the too numerous brown sketches in the manner of the Flemish School, which seem to me always rather done for the sake of wiping the brush clean than of painting anything. There is no colour in it, and no light and shade ; — but a certain quantity of bitumen is rubbed about so as to slip more or less greasily into the shape of figures; and one of St. John’s (or St. James’s) legs is suddenly terminated by a wriggle of white across it, to signify that he is standing in the sea. Now that was the kind of work of the Dutch School, which I spent so many pages in vituperating through- out the first volume of 1 Modern Painters ’ — pages, seemingly, vain to this day; for still, the brown daubs are hung in the best rooms of the National Gallery, and the loveliest II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 37 Turner drawings are nailed to the wall of its cellar, — and might as well be buried at Pompeii for any use they are to the British public ; — but, vain or effectless as the said chapters may be, they are altogether true in that firm state- ment, that these brown flourishes of the Dutch brush are by men who lived, virtually, the gentle, at court, — the simple, in the pothouse : and could indeed paint, according to their habitation, a nobleman or a boor; but were not only incapable of conceiving, but wholly unwishful to conceive, anything, natural or supernatural, beyond the precincts of the Presence and the tavern. So that they especially failed in giving the life and beauty of little things in lower nature; and if, by good hap, they may sometimes more or less succeed in painting St. Peter the Fisher's face, never by any chance realize for you the green wave dashing over his feet. 3 6. Now, therefore, understand of the oppo- site so called ( Pre-Raphaelite/ and, much more, pre-Rubensite, society, that its primary virtue is the trying to conceive things as they are, and thinking and feeling them quite out : — believing joyfully if we may, doubting bravely, 33 THE ART OF ENGLAND if we must, — but never mystifying, or shrink- ing from, or choosing for argument’s sake, this or that fact ; but giving every fact its own full power, and every incident and accessory its own true place, — so that, still keeping to our illustrations from Brighton or Yarmouth beach, •in that most noble picture by Millais which probably most of you saw last autumn in London, the i Caller Herrin’/— picture which, as a piece of art, I should myself put highest of all yet produced by the Pre-Raphaelite school ; — in that most noble picture, I say, the herrings were painted just as well as the girl, and the master was not the least afraid that, for all he could do to them, you would look at the herrings first. 37. Now then, I think I have got the manner of Pre-Raphaelite * Realization ’ — * Verification’ — ‘ Materialization ’ — or whatever else you choose to call it, positively enough asserted and defined : and hence you will see that it follows, as a necessary consequence, that Pre- Raphaelite subjects must usually be of real persons in a solid world — not of personifica- tions in a vaporescent one. The persons may be spiritual, but they are II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 39 individual, — St. George, himself, not the vague idea of Fortitude; St, Cecily herself, not the mere power of music. And, although spiritual, there is no attempt whatever made by this school to indicate their immortal nature by any evanescence or obscurity of aspect. All transparent ghosts and unoutlined spectra are the work of failing imagination, — rest you sure of that. Botticelli indeed paints the Favonian breeze transparent, but never the Angel Ga- briel ; and in the picture I was telling you of in last lecture,* — if there be a fault which may jar for a moment on your feelings when you first see it, I am afraid it will be that the souls of the Innocents are a little too chubby, and one or two of them, I should say, just a dimple too fat. 38. And here I must branch for a moment from the direct course of my subject, to answer another question which may by this time have occurred to some of my hearers, how, if this school be so obstinately realistic, it can also be characterized as romantic. When we have concluded our review of the present state of English art, we will collect the general evidence of its romance ; meantime, I * Ante, § 16, seq . 40 THE ART OF ENGLAND will say only this much, for you to think out at your leisure, that romance does not consist in the manner of representing or relating things, but in the kind of passions appealed to by the things related. The three romantic passions are those by which you are told, in Wordsworth’s aphoristic line, that the life of the soul is fed. “We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love.” Admiration, meaning primarily all the forms of Hero Worship, and secondarily, the kind of feeling towards the beauty of nature, which I have attempted too feebly to analyze in the second volume of ‘ Modern Painters ’ ; — Hope, meaning primarily the habit of mind in which we take present pain for the sake of future pleasure, and expanding into the hope of * another world ; — and Love, meaning of course whatever is happiest or noblest in the life either of that world or this. 39. Indicating, thus briefly, what, though not always consciously, we mean by Romance, I proceed with our present subject of enquiry, from which I branched at the point where it had been observed that the realistic school could only develope its complete force in representing II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 41 persons, and could not happily rest in personi- fications. Nevertheless, we find one of the artists whose close friendship with Rossetti, and fellowship with other members of the Pre- Raphaelite brotherhood, have more or less identified his work with theirs, yet differing from them all diametrically in this, that his essential gift and habit of thought is in personification, and that, — for sharp and brief instance, — had both Rossetti and he been set to illustrate the first chapter of Genesis, Rossetti would have painted either Adam or Eve ; but Edward Burne-Jones, a Day of Creation. And in this gift, he becomes a painter, neither of Divine History, nor of Divine Natural History, but of Mythology, accepted as such, and understood by its symbolic figures to represent only general truths, or abstract ideas. 40. And here I must at once pray you, as I have prayed you to remove all associations of falsehood from the word romance, so also to clear them out of your faith, when you begin the study of mythology. Never confuse a Myth with a lie, — nay, you must even be cautious how far you even permit it to be called a fable. 42 THE ART OF ENGLAND Take the frequentest and simplest of myths for instance — that of Fortune and her wheel. Enid does not herself conceive, or in the least intend the hearers of her song to conceive, that there stands anywhere in the universe a real woman, turning an adamantine wheel whose revolutions have power over human destiny. She means only to assert, under that image, more clearly the law of Heaven’s continual dealing with man , — “ He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.” 41. But in the imagined symbol, or rather let me say, the visiting and visible dream, of this law, other ideas variously conducive to its clear- ness are gathered ; — those of gradual and irre- sistible motion of rise and fall, — the tide of Fortune, as distinguished from instant change or catastrophe; — those of the connection of the fates of men with each other, the yielding and occupation of high place, the alternately appointed and inevitable humiliation : — and the fastening, in the sight of the Ruler of Destiny, of all to the mighty axle which moves only as the axle of the world. These things are told or hinted to you, in the mythic picture, II.. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 43 not with the impertinence and the narrow- ness of words, nor in any order compelling a monotonous succession of thought, — but each as you choose or chance to read it, to be rested in, or proceeded with, as you will. 42. Here then is the ground on which the Dramatic, or personal, and Mythic, or personi- fying, schools of our young painters, whether we find for them a general name or not, must be thought of as absolutely one — that, as the dramatic painters seek to show you the substantial truth of persons, so the mythic school seeks to teach you the spiritual truth of myths. Truth is the vital power of the entire school, — Truth its armour — Truth its war- word ; and the grotesque and wild forms of imagination which, at first sight, seem to be the reaction of a desperate fancy, and a terrified faith, against the incisive scepticism of recent science, so far from being so, are a part of that science itself : they are the results of infinitely more accurate scholar- ship, of infinitely more detective examination, of infinitely more just and scrupulous in- tegrity of thought, than was possible to any 44 THE ART OF ENGLAND artist during the two preceding centuries ; and exactly as the eager and sympathetic passion of the dramatic designer now assures you of the way in which an event happened, so the scholarly and sympathetic thought of the mythic designer now assures you of the meaning, in what a fable said. 43. Much attention has lately been paid by archaeologists to what they are pleased to call the development of myths : but, for the most part, with these two erroneous ideas to begin with — the first, that mythology is a temporary form of human folly, from which they are about in their own perfect wisdom to achieve our final deliverance ; the second, that you may conclusively ascertain the nature of these much - to - be - lamented misapprehensions, by the types which early art presents of them ! You will find in the first section of my 1 Queen of the Air/ contradiction enough of the first supercilious theoty ; — though not with enough clearness the counter statement, that the thoughts of all the greatest and wisest men hitherto, since the world was made, have been expressed through mythology. 44. You may find a piece of most convincing II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 45 evidence on this point by noticing that when- ever, by Plato, you are extricated from the play of logic, and from the debate of points dubitable or trivial ; and are to be told somewhat of his inner thought, and highest moral conviction, — that instant you are cast free in the elements of phantasy, and delighted by a beautiful myth. And I believe that every master here who is interested, not merely in the history, but in the substance , of moral philosophy, will con- firm me in saying that the direct maxims of the greatest sages of Greece, do not, in the sum of them, contain a code of ethics either so pure, or so practical, as that which may be gathered by the attentive interpretation of the myths of Pindar and Aristophanes. 45. Of the folly of the second notion above- named, held by the majority of our students of ‘ development ’ in fable, — that they can estimate the dignity of ideas by the symbols used for them, in early art ; and trace the succession of thought in the human mind by the tradition of ornament in its manufactures, I have no time to-day "to give any farther illustration than that long since instanced to you, the difference between the ideas conveyed by 46 THE ART OF ENGLAND Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles, (much more, Hesiod’s of that of Herakles,) and the impression which we should receive from any actually contemporary Greek art. You may with confidence receive the restoration of the Homeric shield, given by Mr. A. Murray in his history of Greek sculpture, as authori- tatively representing the utmost graphic skill which could at the time have been employed in the decoration of a hero’s armour. But the poet describes the rude imagery as pro- ducing the effect of reality, and might praise in the same words the sculpture of Donatello or Ghiberti. And you may rest entirely satis- fied that when the surrounding realities are beautiful, the imaginations, in all distinguished human intellect, are beautiful also, and that the forms of gods and heroes were entirely noble in dream, and in contemplation, long before the clay became ductile to the hand of the potter, or the likeness of a living body possible in ivory and gold. 4 6. And herein you see with what a deeply interesting function the modern painter of mythology is invested. He is to place, at the service of former imagination, the art which II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 47 it had not — and to realize for us, with a truth then impossible, the visions described by the wisest of men as embodying their most pious thoughts and their most exalted doctrines : not indeed attempting with any literal exactitude to follow the words of the visionary, for no man can enter literally into the mind of another, neither can any great designer refuse to obey the suggestions of his own : but only bringing the resources of accomplished art to unveil the hidden splendour of old imagination ; and showing us that the forms of gods and angels which appeared in fancy to the prophets and saints of antiquity, were indeed more natural and beautiful than the black and red shadows on a Greek vase, or the dogmatic outlines of a Byzantine fresco. 47. It should be a ground of just pride to all of us here in Oxford, that out of this University came the painter whose indefati- gable scholarship and exhaustless fancy have together fitted him for this task, in a degree far distinguishing him above all contemporary European designers. It is impossible for the general public to estimate the quantity of 48 THE ART OF ENGLAND careful and investigatory reading, and the fine tact of literary discrimination, which are signified by the command now possessed by Mr. Burne-Jones over the entire range both of Northern and Greek Mythology, or the tenderness at once, and largeness, of sympathy which have enabled him to harmonize these with the loveliest traditions of Christian legend. Hitherto, there has been adversity between the schools of classic and Christian art, only in part conquered by the most liberal-minded of artists and poets : Nicholas of Pisa accepts indeed the technical aid of antiquity, but with much loss to his Christian sentiment; Dante uses the imagery of iEschylus for the more terrible picturing of the Hell to which, in common with the theologians of his age, he condemned his instructor ; but while Minos and the Furies are represented by him as still existent in Hades, there is no place in Paradise for Diana or Athena. Contrariwise, the later revival of the legends of antiquity meant scorn of those of Christendom. It is but fifty years ago that the value of the latter was again perceived and represented to us by Lord Lindsay : and it is only II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 49 within the time which may be looked back to by the greater number even of my younger auditors, that the transition of Athenian mythology, through Byzantine, into Christian, has been first felt, and then traced and proved, by the penetrative scholarship of the men be- longing to this Pre-Raphaelite school, chiefly Mr. Burne-Jones and Mr. William Morris, — noble collaborateurs, of whom, may I be forgiven, in passing, for betraying to you a pretty little sacredness of their private life, — that they solemnly and jovially have break- fasted together every Sunday, for many and many a year. 48. Thus far, then, I am able with security to allege to you the peculiar function of this greatly gifted and highly trained English painter; and with security also, the function of any noble myth, in the teaching, even of this practical and positive British race. But now, when for purposes of direct criticism I proceed to ask farther in what manner or with what precision of art any given myth should be presented — instantly we find ourselves in- volved in a group of questions and difficulties which I feel to be quite beyond the proper 50 THE ART OF ENGLAND sphere of this Professorship. So long as we have only to deal with living creatures, or solid substances, I am able to tell you — and to show — that they are to be painted under certain optical laws which prevail in our present atmosphere ; and with due respect to laws of gravity and movement which cannot be evaded in our terrestrial constitution. But when we have only an idea to paint, or a symbol, I do not feel authorized to insist any longer upon these vulgar appearances, or mortal and temporal limitations. I cannot arrogantly or demonstratively define to you how the light should fall on the two sides of the nose of a Day of Creation ; nor obstinately demand botanical accuracy in the graining of the wood employed for the spokes of a Wheel of Fortune. Indeed, so far from feeling justified in any such vexatious and vulgar requirements, I am under an instinctive impression that some kind of strangeness or quaintness, or even violation of probability, would be not merely admis- sible, but even desirable, in the delineation of a figure intended neither to represent a body, nor a spirit, neither an animal, nor a vegetable, but only an idea, or an aphorism. Let me, II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 5 I however, before venturing one step forward amidst the insecure snows and cloudy wreaths of the Imagination, secure your confidence in my guidance, so far as I may gain it by the assertion of one general rule of proper safe- guard ; that no mystery or majesty of intention can be alleged by a painter to justify him in careless or erroneous drawing of any object — so far as he chooses to represent it at all. The more licence we grant to the audacity of his conception, the more careful he should be to give us no causeless ground of complaint or offence : while, in the degree of importance and didactic value which he attaches to his parable, will be the strictness of his duty to allow no faults, by any care avoidable, to disturb the spectator’s attention, or provoke his criticism. 49. I cannot but to this day remember, partly with amusement, partly in vexed humiliation, the simplicity with which I brought out, one evening when the sculptor Marochetti was dining with us at Denmark Hill, some of the then but little known drawings of Rossetti, for his instruction in the beauties of Pre- Raphaelitism. LIBRARY OF ILONOIS 52 THE ART OF ENGLAND You may see with the slightest glance at the statue of Coeur de Lion, (the only really interesting piece of historical sculpture we have hitherto given to our City populace), that Marochetti was not only trained to perfectness of knowledge and perception in the structure of the human body, but had also peculiar delight in the harmonies of line which express its easy and powerful motion. Knowing a little more, both of men and things, now, than I did on the evening in, question, I too clearly apprehend that the violently variegated seg- ments and angular anatomies of Lancelot and Guenevere at the grave of King Arthur must have produced on the bronze-minded sculp- tor simply the effect of a knave of Clubs and Queen of Diamonds ; and that the Italian master, in his polite confession of inability to recognize the virtues of Rossetti, cannot but have greatly suspected the sincerity of his entertainer, in the profession of sympathy with his own. 50. No faults, then, that we can help, — this we lay down for certain law to start with ; therefore, especially, no ignoble faults, of mere measurement, proportion, perspective, and the II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 53 like, may be allowed to art which is by claim, learned and magistral ; therefore bound to be, in terms, grammatical. And yet we are not only to allow, but even to accept gratefully, any kind of strangeness and deliberate differ- ence from merely realistic painting, which may raise the work, not only above vulgarity, but above incredulity. For it is often by realizing it most positively that we shall render it least credible. 51. For instance, in the prettiest design of the series, by Richter, illustrating the Lord's Prayer, which I asked you in my last lecture to use for household lessons ; — that of the mother giving her young children their dinner in the field which their father is sowing, — one of the pieces of the enclosing arabesque repre- sents a little winged cherub emergent from a flower, holding out a pitcher to a bee, who .stoops to drink. The species of bee is not scientifically determinable ; the wings of the tiny servitor terminate rather in petals than plumes; and the unpretentious jug suggests nothing of the clay of Dresden, Sevres, or Chelsea. You would not, I think, find your children understand the lesson in divinity 54 THE ART OF ENGLAND better, or believe it more frankly, if the hymen- opterous insect were painted so accurately that, (to use the old method of eulogium on painting,) you could hear it buzz; and the cherub completed into the living likeness of a little boy with blue eyes and red cheeks, but of the size of a humming-bird. In this and in myriads of similar cases, it is possible to imagine from an outline what a finished picture would only provoke us to deny in contempt. 52. Again, in my opening lecture on Light and Shade, the sixth of those given in the year 1870, I traced in some completeness the range of ideas which a Greek vase-painter was in the habit of conveying by the mere opposition of dark and light in the figures and background, with the occasional use of a modifying purple. It has always been matter of surprise to me that the Greeks rested in colours so severe, and I have in several places formerly ventured to state my conviction that their sense of colour was inferior to that of other races. Neverthe- less, you will find that the conceptions of moral and physical truth which they were able with these narrow means to convey, are far loftier than the utmost that can be gathered II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 55 from the iridescent delicacy of Chinese design, or the literally imitative dexterities of Japan. 53. Now, in both these methods, Mr. Burne- Jones has developed their applicable powers to their highest extent. His outline is the purest and quietest that is possible to the pencil ; nearly all other masters accentuate falsely, or in some places, as Richter, add shadows which are more or less conventional. But an outline by Burne-Jones is as pure as the lines of engraving on an Etruscan mirror; and I placed the series of drawings from the story of Psyche in your school as faultlessly exemplary in this kind. Whether pleasing or displeasing to your taste, they are entirely masterful; and it is only by trying to copy these or other such outlines, that you will fully feel the grandeur of action in the moving hand, tranquil and swift as a hawk’s flight, and never allowing a vulgar tremor, or a momentary impulse, to impair its precision, or disturb its serenity. 54. Again, though Mr. Jones has a sense of colour, in its kind, perfect, he is essentially a chiaroscurist. Diametrically opposed to Rossetti, who could conceive in colour only, 56 THE ART OF ENGLAND he prefers subjects which can be divested of superficial attractiveness; appeal first to the intellect and the heart ; and convey their lesson either through intricacies of delicate line, or in the dimness or coruscation of ominous light. The heads of Medea and of Danae, which I placed in your schools long ago, are re- presentative of all that you need aim at in chiaroscuro ; and lately a third type of his best work, in subdued pencil light and shade, has been placed within your reach in Dr. Acland’s drawing-room, — the portrait of Miss Gladstone, in which you will see the painter’s best powers stimulated to their utmost, and reaching a serene depth of expression unattain- able by photography, and nearly certain to be lost in finished painting. 55. For there is this perpetually increasing difficulty towards the completion of any work, that the added forces of colour destroy the value of the pale and subtle tints or shades which give the nobleness to expression ; so that the most powerful masters in oil painting rarely aim at expression, but only at general character : and I believe the great artist whose name I have II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 57 associated with that of Burne-Jones as repre- senting the mythic schools, Mr. G. F. Watts, has been partly restrained, and partly op- pressed, by the very earnestness and extent of the study through which he has sought to make his work on all sides perfect. His constant reference to the highest examples of Greek art in form, and his sensitiveness to the qualities at once of tenderness and breadth in pencil and chalk drawing, have virtually ranked him among the painters of the great Athenian days, of whom, in the sixth book of the Laws, Plato wrote: — “You know how the intently accurate toil of a painter seems never to reach a term that satisfies him ; but he must either farther touch, or soften the touches laid already, and never seems to reach a point where he has not yet some power to do more, so as to make the things he has drawn more beautiful, and more apparent. /caWtco re /cal c fravepcorepa ” 56. Of course within the limits of this lec- ture there is no possibility of entering on the description of separate pictures ; but I trust it may be hereafter my privilege to carry you back to the beginning of English historical art, 58 THE ART OF ENGLAND when Mr. Watts first showed victorious powers of design in the competition for the frescoes of the Houses of Parliament — and thence to trace for you, in some completeness, the code of mythic and heroic story which these two artists, Mr. Watts and Mr. Burne-Jones, have gathered, and in the most deep sense written, for us. To-day I have only brought with me a few designs by Mr. Burne-Jones, of a kind which may be to some extent well represented in photograph, and to which I shall have occa- sion to refer in subsequent lectures. They are not to be copied, but delighted in, by those of you who care for them, — and, under Mr. Fisher’s care, I shall recommend them to be kept out of the way of those who do not . They include the Days of Creation ; three outlines from Solomon’s Song; two from the Romance of the Rose; the great one of Athena inspiring Humanity ; and the story of St. George and Sabra. They will be placed in a cabinet in the upper gallery, and will by no means be intruded on your attention, but made easily accessible to your wish. II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 59 57. To justify this monastic treatment of them, I must say a few words, in conclusion, of the dislike which these designs, in common with those of Carpaccio, excite in the minds of most English people of a practical turn. A few words only, both because this lecture is already long enough, and besides, because the point in question is an extremely curious one, and by no means to be rightly given account of in a concluding sentence. The point is, that in the case of ordinary painters, however peculiar their manner, people either like them, or pass them by with a merciful contempt or condemnation, calling them stupid, or weak, or foolish, but without any expression of real disgust or dislike. But in the case of painters of the mythic schools, people either greatly like them, or they dislike in a sort of frightened and angry way, as if they had been personally aggrieved. And the persons who feel this antipathy most strongly, are often extremely sensible and good, and of the kind one is extremely unwilling to offend ; but either they are not fond of art at all, or else they ad- mire, naturally, pictures from real life only, such as, to name an extremely characteristic 6o THE ART OF ENGLAND example, those of the Swiss painter, Vautier, of whom I shall have much, in another place, to say in praise, but of whom, with the total school he leads, I must peremptorily assure my hearers that their manner of painting is merely part of our general modern system of scientific illustration aided by photography, and has no claim to rank with works of creative art at all : and farther, that it is essentially illiterate, and can teach you nothing but what you can easily see without the painter’s trouble. Here, for instance, is a very charming little picture of a school girl going to her class, and telling her doll to be good till she comes back ; — you like it, and ought to like it, because you see the same kind of incident in your own children every day; but I should say, on the whole, you had better look at the real children than the picture. Whereas, you can’t every day at home see the Goddess Athena telling you yourselves to be good, — and perhaps you wouldn’t altogether like to, if you could. 58. Without venturing on the rudeness of hinting that any such feeling underlies the English dislike of didactic art, I will pray II. BURNE-JONES AND WATTS 6 I you at once to check the habit of carelessly blaming the things that repel you in early or existing religious artists, and to observe, for the sum of what is to be noted respecting the four of whom I have thus far ventured to speak — Mr. Rossetti, Mr. Hunt, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Watts, — that they are, in the most solemn sense, Hero-worshippers ; and that, whatever may be their faults or shortcomings, their aim has always been the brightest and the noblest possible. The more you can admire them, and the longer you read, the more your minds and hearts will be filled with the best knowledge accessible in history, and the loftiest associations conveyable by the passionate and reverent skill, of which I have told you in the ‘ Laws of Fesole/ that “All great Art is Praise.” LECTURE III CLASSIC SCHOOLS OF PAINTING SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA Delivered iqth and 23rd May 1883 59. I HAD originally intended this lecture to be merely the exposition, with direct reference to painting and literature, of the single line of Horace which sums the conditions of a gentleman’s education, be he rich or poor, learned or unlearned : “ Est animus tibi, — sunt mores et lingua, — fidesque,” ‘animus’ being that part of him in which he differs from an ox or an ape ; ' mores,’ the difference in him from the ‘ malignum vulgus ’ ; ( lingua,’ eloquence, the power of expression ; and ' fides,’ fidelity, to the Master, or Mistress, or Law, that he loves. But since I came to London and saw the exhibitions, I have thought good to address my discourse more III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 6 3 pertinently to what must at this moment chiefly interest you in them. And I must at once, and before everything, tell you the delight given me by the quite beautiful work in portraiture, with which my brother-professor Richmond leads and crowns the general splen- dour of the Grosvenor Gallery* I am doubly thankful that his release from labour in Oxford has enabled him to develope his special powers so nobly, and that my own return grants me the privilege of publicly expressing to him the admiration we all must feel. 60. And now in this following lecture, you must please understand at once that I use the word ‘ classic/ first in its own sense of senatorial, academic, and authoritative ; but, as a necessary consequence of that first meaning, also in the sense, more proper to our immediate subject, of Anti-Gothic ; antagonist, that is to say, to the temper in which Gothic architecture was built : and not only antagonist to that form of art, but contemptuous of it ; unforgiving to its faults, cold to its enthusiasms, and impatient of its absurdities. In which contempt the classic mind is certainly illiberal ; and narrower than 6 4 THE ART OF ENGLAND the mind of an equitable art student should be in these enlightened days : — for instance, in the British Museum, it is quite right that the British public should see the Elgin marbles to the ‘best advantage ; but not that they should be unable to see any example of the sculpture of Chartres or Wells, unless they go to the miscellaneous collection at Kensington, where Gothic saints and sinners are confounded alike among steam thrashing-machines and dyna- mite-proof ships of war ; or to the Crystal Palace, where they are mixed up with Rim- mel’s perfumery. 61. For this hostility, in our present English schools, between the votaries of classic and Gothic art, there is no ground in past history, and no excuse in the nature of those arts themselves. Briefly, to-day, I would sum for you the statement of their historical continuity which you will find expanded and illustrated in my former lectures. Only observe, for the present, you must please put Oriental Art entirely out of your heads. I shall allow myself no allusion to China, Japan, India, Assyria, or Arabia : though this restraint on myself will be all the III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 6 5 more difficult, because, only a few weeks since, I had a delightful audience of Sir Frederick Leighton beside his Arabian fountain, and beneath his Aladdin’s palace glass. Yet I shall not allude, in what I say of his designs, to any points in which they may perchance have been influenced by those enchantments. Similarly there were some charming Zobeides and Cleopatras among the variegated colour fancies of Mr. Alma Tadema in the last Grosvenor; but I have nothing yet to say of them : it is only as a careful and learned inter- preter of certain phases of Greek and Roman life, and as himself a most accomplished painter, on long-established principles, that I name him as representatively 1 classic.’ 62. The summary, therefore, which I have to give you of the course of Pagan and Gothic Art must be understood as kept wholly on this side * of the Bosphorus, and recognizing no farther shore beyond the Mediterranean. Thus fixing our termini, you find from the earliest times, in Greece and Italy, a multitude of artists gradually perfecting the knowledge and representation of the human body, glorified by the exercises of war. And you have, north of E 66 THE ART OF ENGLAND Greece and Italy, innumerably and incorrigibly savage nations, representing, with rude and irregular efforts, on huge stones and ice-borne boulders, on cave-bones and forest-stocks and logs, with any manner of innocent tinting or scratching possible to them, sometimes beasts, sometimes hobgoblins — sometimes, heaven only knows what ; but never attaining any skill in figure-drawing, until, whether invading or in- vaded, Greece and Italy teach them what a human being is like ; and with that help they dream and blunder on through the centuries, achieving many fantastic and amusing things, more especially the art of rhyming, whereby they usually express their notions of things far better than by painting. Nevertheless, in due course we get a Holbein out of them ; and, in the end, for best product hitherto, Sir Joshua, and the supremely Gothic Gainsborough, whose last words we may take for a beautiful recon- ciliation of all schools and souls who have done their work to the best of their knowledge and conscience, — “ We are all going to Heaven, and Vandyke is of the company.” 63. “We are all going to Heaven.” Either that is true of men and nations, or else that III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 6j they are going the other way ; and the ques- tion of questions for them is — not how far from heaven they are, but whether they are going to it. Whether in Gothic or Classic Art, it is not the wisdom or the barbarism that you have to estimate — not the skill nor the rude- ness; — but the tendency . For instance, just before coming to Oxford this time, I received by happy chance from Florence the noble book just published at Monte Cassino, giving fac- similes of the Benedictine manuscripts there, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. Out of it I have chosen these four magnificent letters to place in your schools — magnificent I call them, as pieces of Gothic writing ; but they are still, you will find on close examina- tion, extremely limited in range of imaginative subject. For these, and all the other letters of the alphabet in that central Benedictine school at the period in question, were com- posed of nothing else but packs of white dogs, jumping, with more contortion of themselves than has been contrived even by modern stage athletes, through any quantity of hoops. But I place these chosen examples in our series of lessons, not as patterns of dog-drawing, but 68 THE ART OF ENGLAND as distinctly progressive Gothic art, leading in- fallibly forward — though the good monks had no notion how far, — to the Benedictine collie, in Landseer’s ‘ Shepherd’s Chief Mourner,’ and the Benedictine bulldog, in Mr. Britton Riviere’s ‘ Sympathy.’ 64. On the other hand, here is an enlarge- ment, made to about the proper scale, from a small engraving which I brought with me from Naples, of a piece of the Classic Pompeian art which has lately been so much the admi- ration of the aesthetic cliques of Paris and London. It purports to represent a sublimely classic cat, catching a sublimely classic chicken ; and is perhaps quite as much like a cat as the white spectra of Monte Cassino are like dogs. But at a glance I can tell you, — nor will you, surely, doubt the truth of the telling, — that it is art in precipitate decadence; that no bettering or even far dragging on of its existence is possible for it ; that it is the work of a nation already in the jaws of death, and of a school which is passing away in shame. 65. Remember, therefore, and write it on the very tables of your heart, that you must III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 6g never, when you have to judge of character in national styles, regard them in their deca- dence, but always in their spring and youth. Greek art is to be studied from Homeric days to those of Marathon ; Gothic, from Alfred to the Black Prince in England, from Clovis to St. Louis in France ; and the combination of both, which occurs first with absolute balance in the pulpit by Nicholas of Pisa in her baptistery, thenceforward up to Perugino and Sandro Botticelli. A period of decadence follows among all the nations of Europe, out of the ashes and embers of which the flame leaps again in Rubens and Vandyke ; and so gradually glows and coruscates into the intermittent corona of indescribably various modern mind, of which in England you may, as I said, take Sir Joshua and Gainsborough for not only the topmost, but the hitherto total, representatives; total, that is to say, out of the range of landscape, and above that of satire and caricature. All that the rest can do parti- ally, they can do perfectly. They do it, not only perfectly, but nationally ; they are at once the greatest, and the Englishest, of all our school. The Englishest — and observe also, therefore 70 THE ART OF ENGLAND the greatest : take that for an universal, ex- ceptionless law ; — the largest soul of any country is altogether its own. Not the citizen of the world, but of his own city, — nay, for the best men, you may say, of his own village. Patriot always, provincial always, of his own crag or field always. A Liddesdale man, or a Tynedale; Angelico from the Rock of Fesole, or Virgil from the Mantuan marsh. You dream of National unity! — you might as wed strive to melt the stars down into one nugget, and stamp them small into coin with one Caesar’s face. 66. What mental qualities, especially English, you find in the painted heroes and beauties of Reynolds and Gainsborough, I can only discuss with you hereafter. But w T hat external and corporeal qualities these masters of our masters love to paint, I must ask you to-day to consider for a few moments, under Mr. Carlyle’s guidance, as well as mine, and with the analysis of ‘ Sartor Resartus.’ Take, as types of the best work ever laid on British canvas, — types which I am sure you will without demur accept, — Sir Joshua’s Age of Innocence, and Mrs. Pelham feeding chickens; III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 7 I Gainsborough's Mrs. Graham, divinely doing nothing, and Blue Boy similarly occupied ; and, finally, Reynolds' Lord Heathfield mag- nanimously and irrevocably locking up Gib- raltar. Suppose, now, under the instigation of Mr. Carlyle and i Sartor/ and under the counsel of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, we had it really in our power to bid Sir Joshua and Gainsborough paint all these over again, in the classic manner. Would you really insist on having her white frock taken off the Age of Innocence ; on the Blue Boy's divesting himself of his blue ; on — we may not dream of anything more classic — Mrs. Graham's taking the feathers out of her hat ; and on Lord Heathfield's parting, — I dare not sug- gest, with his regimentals, but his orders of the Bath, or what else ? 67. I own that I cannot, even myself, as I propose the alternatives, answer absolutely as a Goth, nor without some wistful leanings towards classic principle. Nevertheless, I feel confident in your general admission that the charm of all these pictures is in great degree dependent on toilette ; that the fond and graceful flatteries of each master do in no 72 THE ART OF ENGLAND small measure consist in his management of frillings and trimmings, cuffs and collarettes ; and on beautiful flingings or fastenings of investiture, which can only here and there be called a drapery , but insists on the perfectness of the forms it conceals, and deepens their harmony by its contradiction. And although now and then, when great ladies wish to be ' painted as sibyls or goddesses, Sir Joshua does his best to bethink himself of Michael Angelo, and Guido, and the Lightnings, and the Auroras, and all the rest of it, — you will, I think, admit that the culminating sweet- ness and rightness of him are in some little Lady So-and-so, with round hat and strong shoes ; and that a final separation from the Greek art which can be proud in a torso without a head, is achieved by the master who paints for you five little girls’ heads, without ever a torso ! 68. Thus, then, we arrive at a clearly in- telligible distinction between the Gothic and Classic schools, and a clear notion also of their dependence on one another. All jesting apart, — I think you may safely take Luca della Robbia with his scholars for an exponent III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 73 of their unity, to all nations. Luca is brightly Tuscan, with the dignity of a Greek; he has English simplicity, French grace, Italian devotion, — and is, I think, delightful to the truest lovers of art in all nations, and of all ranks. The Florentine Contadina rejoices to see him above her fruit-stall in the Mercato Vecchio ; and, having by chance the other day a little Nativity by him on the floor of my study (one of his frequentest designs of the Infant Christ laid on the ground, and the Madonna kneeling to Him) — having it, I say, by chance on the floor, when a fashion- able little girl with her mother came to see me, the child about three years old — though there were many pretty and glittering things about the room which might have caught her eye or her fancy, the first thing, never- theless, my little lady does, is to totter quietly up to the white Infant Christ, and kiss it. 69. Taking, then, Luca, for central between Classic and Gothic in sculpture, for central art of Florence, in painting, I show you the copies made for the St. George’s Guild, of the two frescoes by Sandro Botticelli, lately bought by the French Government for the Louvre. 74 THE ART OF ENGLAND These copies, made under the direction of Mr. C. F. Murray, while the frescoes were still untouched, are of singular value now. For in their transference to canvas for carriage much violent damage was sustained by the originals ; and as, even before, they were not presentable to the satisfaction of the French public, the backgrounds were filled in with black, the broken edges cut away ; and, thus repainted and maimed, they are now, dis- graced and glassless, let into the wall of a stair-landing on the outside of the Louvre galleries. You will judge for yourselves of their de- servings ; but for my own part I can assure you of their being quite central and classic Florentine painting, and types of the manner in which, so far as you follow the instructions given in the 'Laws of Fesole/ you will be guided to paint. Their subjects should be of special interest to us in Oxford and Cam- bridge, as bearing on institutions of colleges for maidens no less than bachelors. For these frescoes represent the Florentine ideal of education for maid and bachelor, — the one baptized by the Graces for her marriage, and III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 75 the other brought to the tutelage of the Great Powers of Knowledge, under a great presiding Muse, whose name you must help me to inter- pret; and with good help, both from maid and bachelor, I hope we shall soon be able to name, and honour, all their graces and virtues rightly. Five out of the six Sciences and Powers on her right hand and left, I know. They are, on her left — geometry, astronomy, and music ; on her right — logic and rhetoric. The third, nearest her, I do not know, and will not guess. She herself bears a mighty bow, and I could give you conjectural interpretations of her, if I chose, to any extent ; but will wait until I hear what you think of her yourselves. I must leave you also to discover by whom the youth is introduced to the great conclave ; but observe, that, as in the frescoes of the Spanish Chapel, before he can approach that presence he has passed through the ‘ Strait Gate/ of which the bar has fallen, and the valve is thrown outwards. This portion of the fresco, on which the most important significance of the whole depended, was cut away in the French restoration. ;6 THE ART OF ENGLAND 70. Taking now Luca and Sandro for standards of sweet consent in the feelings of either school, falling aside from them according to their likings or knowledge, you have the two evermore adverse parties, of whom Lord Lindsay speaks, as one studying the spirit, and the other the flesh : but you will find it more simply true to say that the one studies the head, and the other the body. And I think I am almost alone among recent tutors or professors, in recommending you to study both, at their best, and neither the skull of the one, nor skeleton of the other. 71. I had a special lesson, leading me to this balance, when I was in Venice, in 1880. The authorities of the Academy did me the grace of taking down my two pet pictures of St. Ursula, and putting them into a quiet room for me to copy. Nowin this quiet room where I was allowed to paint, there were a series of casts from the iEgina marbles, which I never had seen conveniently before ; and so, on my right hand and left, I had, all day long, the best pre-Praxitelite Classic art, and the best Pre-Raphaelite Gothic art : and could turn to this side, or that, in an instant, to enjoy either ; III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA J J — which I could do, in each case, with my whole heart ; only on this condition, that if I was to admire St. Ursula, it was necessary on the whole to be content with her face, and not to be too critical or curious about her elbows ; but, in the iEgina marbles, one’s principal attention had to be given to the knees and elbows, while no ardent sympathies were ex- cited by the fixed smile upon the face. 72. Without pressing our northern cherubic principle to an extreme, it is really a true and extremely important consequence that all por- traiture is essentially Gothic. You will find it stated — and with completely illustrative proof, in ‘Aratra Pentelici/ — that portraiture was the destruction of Greek design ; certain exceptions being pointed out which I do not wish you now to be encumbered with. You may under- stand broadly that we Goths claim portraiture altogether for our own, and contentedly leave the classic people to round their chins by rule, and fix their smiles by precedent : we like a little irregularity in feature, and a little caprice in humour — and with the condition of dramatic truth in passion, necessarily accept dramatic difference in feature. 78 THE ART OF ENGLAND 73. Our English masters of portraiture must not therefore think that I have treated them with disrespect, in not naming them, in these lectures, separately from others. Portraiture is simply a necessary function of good Gothic painting, nor can any man claim pre-eminence in epic or historic art who does not first excel in that. Nevertheless, be it said in passing, that the number of excellent portraits given daily in our illustrated papers prove the skill of mere likeness-taking to be no unfrequent or particularly admirable one ; and that it is to be somewhat desired that our professed portrait- painters should render their work valuable in all respects, and exemplary in its art, no less than delightful in its resemblance. The public, who are naturally in the habit of requiring rather the felicity and swiftness of likeness than abstract excellence in painting, are always ready to forgive the impetuosity which re- sembles force ; and the interests connected with rate of production tend also towards the en- couragement of superficial execution. Whereas in a truly great school, for the reasons given in my last lecture,* it may often be inevitable, * Ante, § 33. III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 79 and sometimes desirable, that works of high imaginative range and faculty should be slightly traced, and without minuteness finished ; but there is no excuse for imperfection in a portrait, or failure of attention to its minor accessories. I have long ago given, for one instance of perfect portraiture, Holbein's George Guysen, at Berlin, quite one of the most accomplished pictures in the world ; and in my last visit to Florence none of the pic- tures before known in the Uffizii retained their power over me so completely as a portrait of a lady in the Tribune, which is placed as a pen- dant to Raphael's Fornarina, and has always been attributed to Raphael, being without doubt by some earlier and more laborious master; and, by whomsoever it may be, un- rivalled in European galleries for its faultless and unaffected finish. 74. I may be permitted in this place to ex- press my admiration of the kind of portrai- ture, which, without supporting its claim to public attention by the celebrity of its subjects, renders the pictures of Mr. Stacy Marks so valuable as epitomes and types of English life. No portrait of any recognized master 8o THE ART OF ENGLAND in science cpuld be more interesting than the gentle Professor in this year’s Academy, from whom even a rebelliously superficial person like myself might be content to re- ceive instruction in the mysteries of anatomy. Many an old traveller’s remembrances were quite pathetically touched by his monumental record of the * Three Jolly Postboys’; and that he scarcely paints for us but in play, is our own fault. Among all the endeavours in English historical painting exhibited in recent years, quite the most conscientious, vivid, and instructive, was Mr. Marks’ rendering of the interview between Lord Say and Jack Cade ; and its quiet sincerity was only the cause of its being passed without attention. 75. In turning now from these subjects of Gothic art to consider the classic ideal, though I do so in painful sense of transgressing the limits of my accurate knowledge, I do not feel entirely out of my element, because in some degree I claim even Sir Frederick Leighton as a kindred Goth. For, if you will overpass quickly in your minds what you remember of the treasures of Greek antiquity, you will find that, among them all, III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 8 I you can get no notion of what a Greek little girl was like. Matronly Junos, and tre- mendous Demeters, and Gorgonian Minervas, as many as you please ; but for my own part, always speaking as a Goth, I had much rather have had some idea of the Spartan Helen dabbling with Castor and Pollux in the Eurotas, — none of them over ten years old. And it is with extreme gratitude, therefore, and unqualified admiration, that I find Sir Frederick condescending from the majesties of Olympus to the worship of these unap- palling powers, which, heaven be thanked, are as brightly Anglo-Saxon as Hellenic ; and painting for us, with a soft charm peculiarly his own, the witchcraft and the wonderfulnesg of childhood. 76. I have no right whatever to speak of the works of higher effort and claim, which have been the result of his acutely observant and enthusiastic study of the organism of the human body. I am indeed able to recognize his skill ; but have no sympathy with the subjects that admit of its display. I am enabled, however, to show you with what integrity of application it has been gained, 82 THE ART OF ENGLAND by his kindness in lending me for the Ruskin school two perfect early drawings, one of a lemon tree, — and another, of the same date, of a Byzantine well, which determine for you without appeal, the question respecting neces- sity of delineation as the first skill of a painter. Of all our present masters, Sir Frederick Leighton delights most in softly - blended colours, and his ideal of beauty is more nearly that of Correggio than any seen since Cor- reggio's time. But you see by what precision of terminal outline he at first restrained, and exalted, his gift of beautiful vaghezza. 77. Nor is the lesson one whit less sternly conveyed to you by the work of M. Alma Tadema, who differs from all the artists I have ever known, except John Lewis, in the gradual increase of technical accuracy, which attends and enhances together the expanding range of his dramatic invention; while every year he displays more varied and complex powers of minute draughtsmanship, more especially in architectural detail, wherein, somewhat priding myself as a specialty, I nevertheless receive continual lessons from him ; except only in this one point, — that, III. SIR F. LEIGHTON AND ALMA TADEMA 83 with me, the translucency and glow of marble is the principal character of its substance, while with M. Tadema it is chiefly the super- ficial lustre and veining which seem to attract him ; and these, also, seen, not in the strength of southern sun, but in the cool twilight of luxurious chambers. With which insufficient, not to say degrading, choice of architectural colour and shade, there is a fallacy in his classic idealism, against which, while I re- spectfully acknowledge his scholarship and his earnestness, it is necessary that you should be gravely and conclusively warned. 78. I said that the Greeks studied the body glorified by war; but much more, remember, they studied the mind glorified by it. It is the drives 'A^LXrjosy not the muscular force, which the good beauty of the body itself signifies ; and you may most strictly take the Homeric words describing the aspect of Achilles showing himself on the Greek rampart as representative of the total Greek ideal. Learn by heart, unforgettably, the seven lines — Avrap A^iWevs copro Ail afi(fn 8’ Adrjvr, fl/jiois IfydipLOicn (3a\ } AljiBa dvcrcravoeacrav' 8 4 THE ART OF ENGLAND Apapl Se oi K6(j)a\fj vecfios ecrTecjie Sea deacov Xpvcreov , etc S’ avrov Sale (jxXoya irapi^avococrav. r Hvlo^oi S’ e/C7r\r) Newspapers. London, as an art-school, 198. ,, its effect on artists, 209 seqq. ,, its misery, 141. Love, defined, 38. Luca della Robbia, children of, 17, 106. INDEX 249 Luca della Robbia, ‘ Nativity ’ by, story of child kissing, 68. ,, „ ,, unites Classic and Gothic art, 68. Luini, children by, 106. ,, his best works at Milan, 197. Lycurgus, the laws of, and beauty, 83. Macdonald, A. (author’s assistant at Oxford), 2, 184. , , copy of Turner by, 122. Magazines, modern cheap, 130. Manchester Exhibition, 1857, 82. Mantegna’s tree-drawing, 206. Manufactures and children, 107. ,, English, 148. Marks, H. Stacey, his pictures 1 The Professor,’ * Three Post- boys,’ ‘ Lord Say and Jack Cade,’ 74. Marochetti, qualities of greatness, 49. ,, his * Richard Coeur de Lion,’ ib. ,, sees Rossetti’s drawings at Herne Hill, ib. Marriage, honour to, 85. Marshall, Mr. Herbert, pictures of (Old Water-colour Society, 1884), 209. Materialistic conception of Rossetti and Hunt, 5, 31. See Realism. Microscope, use of the, in seeing art, 117-8. See Bewick. Millais, J. E. , ‘Caller Herrin’,’ a Pre-Raphaelite work, 36. Mino da Fesol6, children by, 106. Minuteness of work in art, 35. Misery, 13. ,, of the poor in London, 141. Missals, Gothic, 63. Mist, Scotch, 167. Mitford, Miss, and feeling for children, 109. Modernism, selfish greed of, 12. See Infidelity. Monte Cassino, Benedictine MS. at, 63. Moral philosophy and Greek myths, 44. Moran (American artist), 89. ‘ Mores ’ defined, 59. Morris, W. , lecture on ‘Art and Plutocracy,’ 187. ,, friendship with Burne-Jones, 47. 250 THE ART OF ENGLAND Morris, W. , maxim that excellence of work depends on our joy in it, 179. ,, ,, on mythology, 47. Mountains, love of, in Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth, 167, 174-5. ,, ,, author’s early, ib. , 174. Mouse, fables of town and country, etc. , 102. Murray, A., on Greek sculpture (Achilles’ shield), 45. , , C. F. , his copies of Botticelli’s frescoes on education, 69. Muses, the laws of the, 81. Musical instrument for Coniston school, 152. Mystery, idea of, in ancient art, 78. ,, of conception, no excuse for carefess treatment, 48. Mythic art, its teaching and truth, 42. ,, ,, dislike of, by practical people, 5 7. Mythology, 40. ,, men’s wisest thoughts expressed in, 43. ,, painting of old, by a modern painter, his function, 46. Myths, in art, with what precision to be given, 48. ,, defined, 40. ,, development of, 43. ,, moral philosophy and, 44. , , power of noble, 48. ,, how far representative of the ideas they symbolize, 45. National Gallery, pictures badly hung in the, 35, 162. ,, ,, Turner drawings in its cellars, 155. ,, ,, See Teniers , Vanderneer, Vandyke . National unity, impossible, 65. See Great Men. Nature, author’s love of, 10 seqq. ,, beauty of untouched, 120, 122. ,, feeling for, 38. ,, materials of, adapted to art, 126. Newspapers, illustrated, good portraiture in the, 73. , , , , influence of, 94. ,, ,, Italian comic, 139. Niccola Pisano, engrafts classicism on Christian art, 47. ,, ,, unites Classic and Gothic art, e.g. his pulpit, 6S- INDEX 251 Nineteenth century, domestic spirit of, 29. See Modernism . Nitro-glycerine, compels belief, 93. Norway, peasant life in, 22. ,, every town has its library, ib. Numa, 83. Old-fashioned, distinction of being, 18. Old Water-colour Society, in former years, 159. ,, ,, ,, ,, Exhibition (1884), 209. Orcagna, 128, 165. ,, imaginative vision of, 101. Oriental art, 61. Ouida’s ‘Village Commune,’ 25. Oxford, — education the ford of life, 87. ,, ,, but not a means of livelihood, 188. ,, otto, 78. ,, town ruined by improvements, 123, 146, 187-9. ,, Magdalen Bridge, widened, 87. ,, Museum, and Dr. Acland, 177. ,, St. John’s gardens, 123. ,, Schools, the new, 146. ,, Taylorian (Ruskin Art Schools and Galleries), cata- logues to, 147. author’s plans for certificates of merit, etc., 27, 156, 190. ,, figure -study at, 1, 146. ,, limited room in, 146. ,, pictures, etc. , in : — Bewick’s woodcuts, 135. Burgmaier’s woodcuts, ib. legend on a harmonicon, 152. drawing by Copley Fielding, 168. ‘ Sunset at Rome,’ 165. Tintoret, ‘Doge Mocenigo,’ 153. Turner drawings, 2, 122. Pain, pleasure not its outcome, 14. Painter, difficulty of finish, 55. ,, to paint what he sees, not what he wishes to see, 183. 252 THE ART OF ENGLAND Painting, manner of, compelled by realism, 33. Palmerston, ‘ Punch’ on, 140. Paris, Louvre, Botticelli’s frescoes in the, 69. Parliament, Houses of, Watts’ designs for frescoes, 56. Paton, Sir Noel, fairy pictures of ‘ Titania,’ ‘ Fairy Raid,’ 99. Pencil, the best instrument for fine work, 115. Personal feelings, expressible only in poetry, 11. Personification in art, 39. Perugino, children by, 106. ,, crowns Gothic art, 65. Peter, drowning of, * Modern Painters ' on the, 32. Pets, children’s, 91. Photographs and art, 57. ,, of Burne-Jones’ pictures, 56. ,, and portraiture, 54. Physiognomy, study of, and character, 147. Picardy, wood-carving of, 127. Pictures, only recently made a common means of decora- tion, 88. Pindar, myths of, 44. Pisa, Niccola Pisano’s pulpit at, 65. Pity, the lesson to be learnt, 15. Plato, myths used by, for his highest teaching, 44. ,, on finish in painting (“ Laws” quoted), 55. Pleasure, not the outcome of pain, 14. Poetry, boldness of expression in great, 185. ,, ' the only means of giving personal feelings, 11. ,, perfect, precedes perfect painting, 62. Political economy, author’s paradoxes of, 125. Pompeian art, specimen of, 64. Poor, the, and beauty, 142. ,, ,, dwellings of, to be orderly, or there can be no art, 123. ,, ,, misery of, 13. See Italy. Portraiture, all, is Gothic, 72. ,, great portraits must also be great pictures, 73 ,, modern, desire to be painted as proud or grand, 81. ,, perfect examples of. See Florence , Holbein. , , power of, a common gift, 73. Power, the noblest, man’s own strength, 118. Praise. See Criticism. INDEX 253 Pre-Raphaelitism, modern, defined, 34, 36. ,, ,, dislike of, by practical people, 57. ,, ,, minuteness of work in, not essential, 34. ,, ,, personification and, 37. ,, ,, the school of, 5. ,, ,, truth of, 45. Press, the public, its value, 94. Price, everything has but one just, 125. Priest, dislike of the word by English public, 23. Priesthood of Western world, its character, 80. Profession, choice of a, and means of livelihood, 189. Progress, the direction more important than the distance reached, 63. Prout, S., 159. Public opinion and the press, 94. ‘ Punch,' the artists of, townsmen, 150. ,, the laws of beauty, 139. ,, Bedell, Sir Pompey, 148. ,, Bull, John, the farmer, ib. ,, 1 defends his pudding,’ 151. ,, children in, 143. ,, on the Continent, 150. ,, the founders of, 136. ,, girls in, 143. ,, illustrations to, best sketch in, 136, 141. ,, ‘ immortal periodical,’ 139. ,, on manufactures, says but little, 148. ,, politics of, 140. See under Gladstone and others. ,, on the poor, does not give their beauty, 141. ,, as expressing public opinion, 148. ,, social types in, 141. ,, on society and wealth, 143. ,, quoted, 85. ,, See Du Maurier, Leech , Tenniel. Puritan, old, view of the Bible, 6. Pyrrhic dance, the, 80. See Byron. Railroads and scenery, 208. ,, as subjects of landscape art, 119. Raphael’s children, 106. 254 THE ART OF ENGLAND Realism in art, 121. ,, its value as compelling belief, 31. ,, as affecting manner and minuteness of work, 33. Religion and repose, 190. Rembrandt’s children, 107. Renaissance, luxury of the, 106. ,, poison of the, 81. Repose of mind, 190. Resurrection, the, the mainspring of all lovely work, 15. Rethel, Alfred, his ‘ Death the Avenger’ and ‘ Barbarossa,’ 100. Retsch’s ‘Faust,’ ‘Leonora,’ ‘Poetry,’ 101. Reynolds, Sir J. , 62. ,, ,, children by, 107. ,, ,, dress, painting of, 67. ,, ,, faults of, 195. ,, ,, formality in, 164. ,, ,, compared with Gainsborough, 193. ,, ,, greatness of, 65, 194. s , ,, exhibition of his works at Academy and Grosvenor Gallery (1883), 194. ,, ,, his variety, ib. 5 , ,, pictures by : — * Mrs. Abington ’ as ‘ Miss Prue,’ 194. ‘ Age of Innocence,’ 66. * Cherubs’ heads’, 67. ‘ Mrs. Nesbitt’ as ‘ Circe,’ 194. ‘ Mrs. Pelham,’ 66. ‘Mrs. Sheridan’ as ‘St. Cecilia,’ 194. Richmond, George, old friend of author, 1. ,, Prof. W., at Oxford, 1. ,, ,, figure-study classes of, 145. ,, ,, resigns the chair, 1. , , , , portraits by, Grosvenor Gallery ( 1883), 59. Richter, Ludwig, children by, 108. ,, ,, designs of, 29. ,, ,, outlines of, 53. ,, ,, ‘ Lord’s Prayer,’ 51. , , ,, ‘ Wide Wide World,’ 144. Rivalry, evils of, 104. Riviere, B., his ‘Sympathy,’ 63. INDEX 255 Robbia. See Luca. Robson, 159. , , inventive power small, 170. , , temper of, 176. ,, ‘ outlines of Scotch scenery,’ 177-8. ,, picture of, copied, 176. Rolfe’s engraving of ‘ Ida,’ 115. Romagna, the poor of, 28. Roman Catholics and the Bible, 85. Romance, of an artist in his subject, 159. , , definition of, 38. ,, meaning of word, 3, 160. Rome, the pomp of, 80. ,, sunset at (picture Oxford schools), 165. Rossetti, D. G. , anatomy of, 49. ,, ,, and the Bible, 6. ,, ,, his colour, 4, 7. ,, ,, not a chiaroscurist, 54. ,, ,, exhibition of his works (1883), 192. ,, ,, genius of, when highest, 4. , , , , a hero-worshipper, 58. , , . , Holman Hunt his disciple, 4. ,, ., ,, ,, compared with him, 6. ,, ,, “ material veracity ” of, 5, 31. ,, ,, Marochetti’s view of his drawings, 49. ,, ,, painting of, its faults, 7. , , , , poetical genius of, 5. ,, ,, and the romantic school, its chief force, 3. , , , , temper of, 7. , , , , works of : — ‘ Passover ’ (Oxford schools), 31. ‘Virgin in House of St. John,’ 5, 31. Rubens, children of, 107. ,, and the Renaissance, 65, 107. Sacrifice, the doctrine of, 12. St. Augustine in England, 151. St. Cecilia, 37. See Reynolds. St. Christopher, 85-7. See Alexander. 256 THE ART OF ENGLAND St. Columba in England, 151. St. Genevieve, 85. St. George, 37. St. George’s guild, drawings of, lent to Oxford, 147. St. Ursula, Venice Academy, 71. Satire, power of, 144. See Leech. Scenery, destruction of, 156. ,, northern and southern, compared, 167. ,, and railroads, 208. ,, Scott’s, Sir W. , love of, ib. Scepticism and science, 42. Schaff hausen, railway over the falls of, 208. Science, French book for a child on, 184. ,, modern, on pain and pleasure, 14. ,, and scepticism, 42. ,, suggestions for, 90. Scotch mists, 167. Scott, Sir W. , influence of, on landscape art, 166. ,, ,, love of mountains, 174. ,, ,, scenery of, 167. ,, ,, romance of, 4. ,, ,, ‘Monastery,’ its faults, 98. ,, ,, * White Lady of Avenel,’ ib. Severn, Mr. Arthur, picture of Westminster (1884), 209. Shakspeare, 1 Midsummer Night’s Dream ’ on fairies, 97. ,, quoted, ib. Sheridan, Mrs. See Reynolds. Sibyl, a Tuscan, 84. See Alexander. Sight, the unaided, and art, 118. ,, does not change in quality, 182. ,, and colour, ib. ,, a great painter’s, authoritative, 183. Simplon, the, railroad over, 208. Sketch-book, no artist uses a block-book, 204 n . Sky, the blue of the, and sunlight, 201 seq. ,, cyanometer, author’s, 203. ,, after storm, described by Wordsworth, 184. Smoke nuisance, the modern, ib. Soul, the best questions of a true, 12. South America, hideous illustrations of, 131. INDEX 257 Stanfield, as influenced by Turner, 158. Storm Cloud, the, 199 seqq. Strahan's ‘ Magazine for Youth,’ June 1879, 101. Strength, the noblest, that of unaided man, 118. Suffering, accepted and involuntary, 13. Sun, the description of (May 20, 1884), 201. Sunset, the ‘demoniac’ beauty of the (Americanism), 132, 184. Sunshine, author’s love of, inexpressible, 10. See Claude , Cuyp , Hunt , Turner. Symbolism in realistic art, Pre-Raphaelitism, 31-2. Symbols do not give the dignity of the ideas they represent, 45 . 48 . Symonds, Miss (Oxford), drawing by Copley Fielding in posses- sion of, 179. Sympathy, intellectual, ‘ no man can enter fully into the mind of another,’ 46. Tadema, Alma, classic in what sense, 61. , , , , marble painting of, 77. , , , , technical accuracy of, ib. ,, ,, tone of revolutionary rage in, 80. ,, ,, twilight of his pictures, 79. ,, ,, works of : — Grcsvenor Gallery Collection , 79. Pyrrhic dance, ib. Taine, M., on the growth of art, 211. Taste, the formation of, 28. Tendency, the direction more important than the distance reached, 65. Teniers’ ‘ Chateau at Perck,’ National Gallery, 162. Tenniel, his imagination, and Tintoret’s, 153. , , his power and tone, 139. ,, what he might have done, 153. ,, ‘Punch’ founded by, 136. , , works of : — Cartoons Nos. 38-48, 150. ‘John Bull defends his pudding,’ 151. * Liberty and France,’ 150. R 258 THE ART OF ENGLAND Tennyson, his genius highest in ‘Maud,’ ‘In Memoriam,’ and Northern Farmer,’ 4. ,, romantic, 4. ,, quoted : — ‘Idylls of the King’ — “Turn, fortune, turn thy wheel,” 40. 'In Memoriam,’ liv. — “The final goal of ill,” 15 - Terror in art, 101. Thebes, the seven against, 80. Theseus, 160. Tintoret, masses of, 153. , , pictures by : — the new addition to National Gallery, 162 71 . Doge Mocenigo (Oxford schools), 153. Titian, drawing of trees by, 206. Tobacco, 198. Topffer, Swiss caricaturist, his life, 145. ,, his ‘ Histoire d’ Albert,’ ib. Toys for children, what they like, 91. Transparency defined, 137. Tree-drawing, modern, as compared with Titian’s, 206. Truth, the, in Pre-Raphaelite art, 42. ,, in Turner, 121. Turner, his character and genius, 157. ,, paints clouds, but never a flower, 196. ,, foregrounds of, no flower in any, 157. ,, his landscape, beyond all other, not representative of it, ib. ,, effect of, on contemporary art, 157-8. ,, minuteness in his work, 34. ,, sadness of, 157. ,, sight of, 183. ,, sunshine of, its bold conventionalism, 9. ,, truth, his magic in his, 121. ,, works of : — ‘Loire,’ 121. National Gallery drawings, 35, 156. Oxford, drawings at, 2, 56. Tuscany, the poor of, 25, 84. INDEX 259 Valerius, 160. Vanderneer, his ‘Canal Scene’ (National Gallery), 162 n. ,, the ‘ Evening Landscape’ (National Gallery), ib. Vandyke, children by, 107. ,, Gainsborough’s last words on, 62. ,, and the Renaissance, 65, 164. ,, ‘ Draught of Fishes’ by (National Gallery), 35, 162. Vautier, Swiss artist, 57. Venice, Academy, Carpaccio’s S. Ursula, 71. ,, master of works at Ducal Palace (G. Boni), 19. Virtues, the, and Greek art, 26. Visions of great men, 101. Vivisection, 20. Vulgarity of selfishness, 161. Wainscoting, old English, 127. War, and Greek art, 78. Water, effect on colour of a drop of, 18 1. Water-colour, old English, its methods and labour, 172-3. Watts, G. F., completeness of his work, 55. ,, ,, Greek feeling in, i b. , , , , hero-worship of, 58. ,, ,, Houses of Parliament frescoes, designs for, 56. Wealth, evils of, 108. Weather, good and bad, 169. ,, bad, worse in lowlands than in highlands, 206. ,, modern, its deterioration, and recent phenomena (May 20, 1884), 199 seqq. ,, the effect of it on artists, 204, 207. Wilkie, children by, 108. Wilson, Richard, the first sincere landscape artist, 166. Women cannot paint, author’s saying that, 21. Wood-carving, mediaeval, 128. Woodcutting : American, 137. ,, ,, not meant to print blots, 133. ,, ,, cheap, 131. ,, ,, ease and danger of, 129-30. ,, ,, flesh tint, rendering of, 137. ,, ,, modern methods of, 136. ,, ,, sculpture and wood as material for, 128. 260 THE ART OF ENGLAND Woodcutting, transparency in, how given, 137. ,, ,, readily expresses ugliness or terror, 131. Wordsworth, children of, 109. ,, love of mountains, 174. ,, Society, 209. ,, quoted: — ‘ Excursion,’ Book ii. , 174. Sonnets — “ We live by admiration,” 38. “ The world is too much with us,” Work, goodness of, in proportion to our joy in it, 179. Youth, praise of modern English, 154. THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND LECTURE I THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING BERTHA TO OSBURGA Delivered 18th and 20 th October 1884 I. IN the short review of the present state of English Art, given you last year, I left necessarily many points untouched, and others unexplained. The seventh lecture, which I did not think it necessary to read aloud, furnished you with some of the corrective statements of which, whether spoken or not, it was extremely desirable that you should estimate the balancing weight. These I pro- pose in the present course farther to illus- trate, and to arrive with you at, I hope, a 263 264 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND just— you would not wish it to be a flattering — estimate of the conditions of our English artistic life, past and present, in order that with due allowance for them we may deter- mine, with some security, what those of us who have faculty ought to do, and those who have sensibility, to admire. 2. In thus rightly doing and feeling, you will find summed a wider duty, and granted a greater power, than the moral philosophy at this moment current with you has ever con- ceived ; and a prospect opened to you besides, of such a Future for England as you may both hopefully and proudly labour for with your hands, and those of you who are spared to the ordinary term of human life, even see with your eyes, when all this tumult of vain avarice and idle pleasure, into which you have been plunged at birth, shall have passed into its appointed perdition. 3. I wish that you would read for introduc- tion to the lectures I have this year arranged for you, that on the Future of England, which I gave to the cadets at Woolwich in the first year of my Professorship here, 1869; and which is now placed as the main I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 265 conclusion of the u Crown of Wild Olive ” : and with it, very attentively, the close of my inaugural lecture given here ; for the matter, no less than the tenor of which, I was reproved by all my friends, as irrelevant and ill-judged ; — which, nevertheless, is of all the pieces of teaching I have ever given from this chair, the most pregnant and essential to whatever studies, whether of Art or Science, you may pursue, in this place or elsewhere, during your lives. 4. The opening words of that passage I will take leave to read to you again, — for they must still be the ground of whatever help I can give you, worth your acceptance. “ There is a destiny now possible to us — the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We are still unde- generate in race : a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey. We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now finally betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an in- heritance of honour, bequeathed to us through 26 6 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND a thousand years of noble history, which it should be our daily thirst to increase with splendid avarice ; so that Englishmen, if it be a sin to covet honour, should be the most offending souls alive. Within the last few years we have had the laws of natural science opened to us with a rapidity which has been blinding by its brightness ; and means of transit and communication given to us, which have made but one kingdom of the habitable globe. “ One kingdom ” ; — but who is to be its king? Is there to be no king in it, think you, and every man to do that which is right in his own eyes ? Or only kings of terror, and the obscene empires of Mammon and Belial ? Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings ; a sceptred isle ; for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts ; — faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions — faithful servant of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires ; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 267 in her strange valour, of goodwill towards men ? 5. The fifteen years that have passed since I spoke these words must, I think, have con- vinced some of my immediate hearers that the need for such an appeal was more pressing than they then imagined ; — while they have also more and more convinced me myself that the ground I took for it was secure, and that the youths and girls now entering on the duties of active life are able to accept and fulfil the hope I then held out to them. In which assurance I ask them to-day to begin the examination with me, very earnestly, of the question laid before you in that seventh of my last year’s lectures, whether London,* as it is now, be indeed the natural, and therefore the heaven-appointed outgrowth of the in- habitation, these 1800 years, of the valley of the Thames by a progressively instructed and disciplined people ; or if not, in what measure and manner the aspect and spirit of the great city may be possibly altered by your acts and thoughts. * Ante, “ The Art of England,” § 198. 268 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND 6. In my introduction to the Economist of Xenophon I said that every fairly educated European boy or girl ought to learn the history of five cities, — Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, and London ; that of London includ- ing, or at least compelling in parallel study, some knowledge also of the history of Paris. A few words are enough to explain the reasons for this choice. The history of Athens, rightly told, includes all that need be known of Greek religion and arts. That of Rome, the victory of Christianity over Paganism ; those of Venice and Florence sum the essential facts respecting the Christian arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Music; and that of London, in her sisterhood with Paris, the development of Christian Chivalry and Philosophy, with their exponent art of Gothic architecture. Without the presumption of forming a distinct design, I yet hoped at the time when this division of study was suggested, with the help of my pupils, to give the outlines of their several histories during my work in Oxford. Variously disappointed and arrested, alike by difficulties of investigation and failure I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 269 of strength, I may yet hope to lay down for you, beginning with your own metropolis, seme of the lines of thought in following out which such a task might be most effectively accomplished. 7. You observe that I speak of architecture as the chief exponent of the feelings both of the French and English races. Together with it, however, most important evidence of character is given by the illumination of manuscripts, and by some forms of jewellery and metallurgy : and my purpose in this course of lectures is to illustrate by all these arts the phases of national character which it is impossible that historians should esti- mate, or even observe, with accuracy, unless they are cognizant of excellence in the afore- said modes of structural and ornamental craftsmanship. 8. In one respect, as indicated by the title chosen for this course, I have varied the treatment of their subject from that adopted in all my former books. Hitherto, I have always endeavoured to illustrate the personal temper and skill of the artist ; holding the wishes or taste of his spectators at small 270 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND account, and saying of Turner you ought to like him, and of Salvator, you ought not, etc., etc., without in the least considering what the genius or instinct of the spectator might otherwise demand, or approve. But in the now attempted sketch of Christian history, I have approached every question from the people’s side, and examined the nature, not of the special faculties by which the work was produced, but of the general instinct by which it was asked for, and enjoyed. Therefore I thought the proper heading for these papers should represent them as descriptive of the Pleasures of England, rather than of its Arts. 9. And of these pleasures, necessarily, the leading one was that of Learning, in the sense of receiving instruction; — a pleasure totally separate from that of finding out things for yourself, — and an extremely sweet and sacred pleasure, when you know how to seek it, and receive. On which I am the more disposed, and even compelled, here to insist, because your modern ideas of Development imply that you must all turn out what you are to be, and I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 27 I find out what you are to know, for your- selves, by the inevitable operation of your anterior affinities and inner consciences : — whereas the old idea of education was that the baby material of you, however accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to be by ex- ternal force, and ancestral knowledge, bred ; and treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic vase, to be shaped or mannered as they chose, not as it chose, and filled, when its form was well finished and baked, with sweetness of sound doctrine, as with Hybla honey, or Arabian spikenard. io. Without debating how far these two modes of acquiring knowledge — finding out, and being told — may severally be good, and in perfect instruction combined, I have to point out to you that, broadly, Athens, Rome, and Florence are self-taught, and internally developed ; while all the Gothic races, with- out any exception, but especially those of London and Paris, are afterwards taught by these ; and had, therefore, when they chose to accept it, the delight of being instructed, without trouble or doubt, as fast as they could read or imitate ; and brought forward 272 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND to the point where their own northern in- stincts might wholesomely superimpose or graft some national ideas upon these sound instructions. Read over what I said on this subject in the third of my lectures last year (§ 62 et seqq.) } and simplify that already brief statement further, by fastening in your mind Carlyle’s general symbol of the best attain- ments of northern religious sculpture, — “ three whale-cubs combined by boiling,” and reflect- ing that the mental history of all northern European art is the modification of that grace- ful type, under the orders of the Athena of Homer and Phidias. II. And this being quite indisputably the broad fact of the matter, I greatly marvel that your historians never, so far as I have read, think of proposing to you the question — what you might have made of yourselves without the help of Homer and Phidias : what sort of beings the Saxon and the Celt, the Frank and the Dane, might have been by this time, untouched by the spear of Pallas, unruled by the rod of Agricola, and sincerely the native growth, pure of root, and ungrafted in fruit of the clay of Isis, rock of Dovrefeldt, and I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 273 sands of Elbe ? Think of it, and think chiefly what form the ideas, and images, of your natural religion might probably have taken, if no Roman missionary had ever passed the Alps in charity, and no English king in pilgrimage. 12. I have been of late indebted more than I can express to the friend who has honoured me by the dedication of his recently published lectures on ( Older England } ; and whose eager enthusiasm and far collected learning have enabled me for the first time to assign their just meaning and value to the ritual and imagery of Saxon devotion. But while every page of Mr. Hodgett’s book, and, I may gratefully say also, every sentence of his teaching, has increased and justified the respect in which I have always been by my own feeling disposed to hold the mythologies founded on the love and knowledge of the natural world, I have also been led by them to conceive, far more forcibly than hitherto, the power which the story of Christianity possessed, first heard through the wreaths of that cloudy superstition, in the substitution, for its vaporescent allegory of a positive and 274 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND literal account of a real Creation, and an instantly present, omnipresent, and compas- sionate God. Observe, there is no question whatever in examining this influence, how far Christianity itself is true, or the transcendental doctrines of it intelligible. Those who brought you the story of it believed it with all their souls to be true, — and the effect of it on the hearts of your ancestors was that of an un- questionable, infinitely lucid message straight from God, doing away with all cifficulties, grief, and fears for those who willingly received it, nor by any, except wilfully and obstinately vile persons, to be, by any pos- sibility, denied or refused. 13. And it was precisely, observe, the vivacity and joy with which the main fact of Christ’s life was accepted which gave the force and wrath to the controversies instantly arising about its nature. Those controversies vexed and shook, but never undermined, the faith they strove to purify, and the miraculous presence, errorless precept, and loving promises of their Lord were alike undoubted, alike rejoiced in, by I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 2J $ every nation that heard the word of Apostles. The Pelagian’s assertion that immortality could be won by man’s will, and the Arian’s that Christ possessed no more than man’s nature, never for an instant — or in any country — hindered the advance of the moral law and intellectual hope of Christianity. Far the contrary; the British heresy concerning Free Will, though it brought bishop after bishop into England to extinguish it, remained an extremely healthy and active element in the British mind down to the days of John Bunyan and the guide Great Heart, and the calmly Christian justice and simple human virtue of Theodoric were the very roots and first burgeons of the regeneration of Italy.* But of the degrees in which it was possible for any barbarous nation to receive during the * Gibbon, in his 37th chapter, makes Ulphilas also an Arian, but might have forborne, with grace, his own defini- tion of orthodoxy : — and you are to observe generally that at this time the teachers who admitted the inferiority of Christ to the Father as touching his Manhood, were often counted among Arians, but quite falsely. Christ’s own words, “My Father is greater than I,” end that controversy at once. Arianism consists not in asserting the subjection of the Son to the Father, but in denying the subjected Divinity. 2 7 6 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND first five centuries, either the spiritual power of Christianity itself, or the instruction in classic art and science which accompanied it, you cannot rightly judge, without taking the pains, and they will not, I think, be irksome, of noticing carefully, and fixing permanently in your minds, the separating characteristics of the greater races, both in those who learned and those who taught. 14. Of the Huns and Vandals we need not speak. They are merely forms of Punishment and Destruction. Put them out of your minds altogether, and remember only the names of the immortal nations, which abide on their native rocks, and plough their unconquered plains, at this hour. Briefly, in the north, — Briton, Norman, Frank, Saxon, Ostrogoth, Lombard; briefly, in the south, — Tuscan, Roman, Greek, Syrian, Egyptian, Arabian. 15. Now of these races, the British (I avoid the word Celtic, because you would expect me to say Keltic ; and I don’t mean to, lest you should be wanting me next to call the patroness of music St. Kekilia), the British, including Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Scot, I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 277 and Piet, are, I believe, of all the northern races, the one which has deepest love of external nature ; — and the richest inherent gift of pure music and song, as such ; separated from the intellectual gift which raises song into poetry. They are naturally also religious, and for some centuries after their own conversion are one of the chief evangelizing powers in Christendom. But they are neither apprehensive nor receptive ; — they cannot understand the classic races, and learn scarcely anything from them ; per- haps better so, if the classic races had been more careful to understand them . 16. Next, the Norman is scarcely more apprehensive than the Celt, but he is more constructive, and uses to good advantage what he learns from the Frank. His main characteristic is an energy, which never ex- hausts itself in vain anger, desire, or sorrow, but abides and rules, like a living rock : — where he wanders, he flows like lava, and congeals like granite. 17. Next, I take in this first sketch the Saxon and Frank together, both pre-emi- nently apprehensive, both docile exceedingly. 278 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND imaginative in the highest, but in life active more than pensive, eager in desire, swift of invention, keenly sensitive to animal beauty, but with difficulty rational, and rarely, for the future, wise. Under the conclusive name of Ostrogoth, you may class whatever tribes are native to central Germany, and develope them- selves, as time goes on, into that power of the German Csesars which still asserts itself as an empire against the licence and insolence of modern republicanism, — of which races, though this general name, no description can be given in rapid terms. 18. And lastly, the Lombards, who, at the time we have to deal with, were sternly indocile, gloomily imaginative, — of almost Norman energy, and differing from all the other western nations chiefly in this notable particular, that while the Celt is capable of bright wit and happy play, and the Norman, Saxon, and Frank all alike delight in caricature, the Lombards, like the Arabians, never jest. 19. These, briefly, are the six barbaric nations who are to be taught : and of whose native arts and faculties, before they re- ceive any tutorship from the south, I find no I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 279 well-sifted account in any history : — but thus much of them, collecting your own thoughts and knowledge, you may easily discern — they were all, with the exception of the Scots, practical workers and builders in wood ; and those of them who had coasts, first rate sea- boat builders, with fine mathematical instincts and practice in that kind far developed, neces- sarily good sail-weaving, and sound fur-stitch- ing, with stout ironwork of nail and rivet ; rich copper and some silver work in decora- tion — the Celts developing peculiar gifts in linear design, but wholly incapable of drawing animals or figures; — the Saxons and Franks having enough capacity in that kind, but no thought of attempting it ; the Normans and Lombards still farther remote from any such skill. More and more, it seems to me won- derful that under your British block-temple, grimly extant on its pastoral plain, or beside the first crosses engraved on the rock of Whithorn — you English and Scots do not oftener consider what you might or could have come to, left to yourselves. 20. Next, let us form the list of your tutor nations, in whom it generally pleases you to 28 o THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND look at nothing but the corruptions. If we could get into the habit of thinking more of our own corruptions and more of their virtues, we should have a better chance of learning the true laws alike of art and destiny. But, the safest way of all, is to assure ourselves that true knowledge of any thing or any creature is only of the good of it ; that its nature and life are in that, and that what is diseased, — that is to say, unnatural and mortal, — you must cut away from it in contemplation, as you would in surgery. Of the six tutor nations, two, the Tuscan and Arab, have no effect on early Christian England. But the Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian act together from the earliest times ; you are to study the influence of Rome upon England in Agricola, Constantius, St. Benedict, and St. Gregory; of Greece upon England in the artists of Byzantium and Ravenna ; of Syria and Egypt upon England in St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanase. 21. St. Jerome, in central Bethlehem; St. Augustine, Carthaginian by birth, in truth a converted Tyrian, Athanase, Egyptian, I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 28 I symmetric and fixed as an Egyptian aisle ; Chrysostom, golden mouth of all ; these are, indeed, every one teachers of all the western world, but St. Augustine especially of lay, as distinguished from monastic, Christianity to the Franks, and finally to us. His rule, expanded into the treatise of the City of God, is taken for guide of life and policy by Charlemagne, and becomes certainly the fountain of Evan- gelical Christianity, distinctively so called, (and broadly the lay Christianity of Europe, since, in the purest form of it, that is to say, the most merciful, charitable, variously applicable, kindly wise.) The greatest type of it, as far as I know, is St. Martin of Tours, whose character is sketched, I think in the main rightly, in the Bible of Amiens ; and you may bind together your thoughts of its course by remembering that Alcuin, born at York, dies in the Abbey of St. Martin, at Tours ; that as St. Augustine was in his writings Charle- magne's Evangelist in faith, Alcuin was, in liv- ing presence, his master in rhetoric, logic, and astronomy, with the other physical sciences. 22. A hundred years later than St. Augus- tine, comes the rule of St. Benedict — the 282 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND Monastic rule, virtually, of European Chris- tianity, ever since — and theologically the Law of Works, as distinguished from the Law of Faith. St. Augustine and all the disciples of St. Augustine tell Christians what they should feel and think : St. Benedict and all the disciples of St. Benedict tell Christians what they should say and do. In the briefest, but also the perfectest dis- tinction, the disciples of St. Augustine are those who open the door to Christ — “ If any man hear my voice ” ; but the Benedictines those to whom Christ opens the door — “ To him that knocketh it shall be opened.” 23. Now, note broadly the course and action of this rule, as it combines with the older one. St. Augustine’s, accepted heartily by Clovis, and, with various degrees of understanding, by the kings and queens of the Merovingian dynasty, makes seemingly little difference in their conduct, so that their profession of it remains a scandal to Christianity to this day ; and yet it lives, in the true hearts among them, down from St. Clotilde to her great grand- daughter Bertha, who in becoming Queen of Kent, builds under its chalk downs her own I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 283 little chapel to St. Martin, and is the first effectively and permanently useful missionary to the Saxons, the beginner of English Erudi- tion, — the first laid corner stone of beautiful English character. 24. I think henceforward you will find the memorandum of dates which I have here set down for my own guidance *more simply useful than those confused by record of unimportant persons and inconsequent events, which form the indices of common history. From the year of the Saxon invasion 449, there are exactly 400 years to the birth of Alfred, 849. You have no difficulty in re- membering those cardinal years. Then, you have Four great men and great events to remember, at the close of the fifth century. Clovis, and the founding of Frank Kingdom ; Theodoric and the founding of the Gothic Kingdom ; Justinian and the founding of Civil law ; St. Benedict and the founding of Religious law. 25. Of Justinian, and his work, I am not able myself to form any opinion — and it is, I think, unnecessary for students of history to 284 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND form any, until they are able to estimate clearly the benefits, and mischief, of the civil law of Europe in its present state. But to Clovis, Theodoric, and St. Benedict, without any question, we owe more than any English historian has yet ascribed, — and they are easily held in mind together, for Clovis ascen&ed the Frank throne in the year of St. Benedict’s birth, 481. Theodoric fought the battle of Verona, and founded the Ostro- gothic Kingdom in Italy twelve years later, in 493, and thereupon married the sister of Clovis. That marriage is always passed in a casual sentence, as if a merely political one, and while page after page is spent in follow- ing the alternations of furious crime and fatal chance, in the contests between Fredegonde and Brunehaut, no historian ever considers whether the great Ostrogoth who wore in the battle of Verona the dress which his mother had woven for him, was likely to have chosen a wife without love ! — or how far the perfectness, justice, and temperate wisdom of every ordinance of his reign was owing to the sympathy and counsel of his Frankish queen. I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 285 26. You have to recollect, then, thus far, only three cardinal dates : — 449. Saxon invasion. 481. Clovis reigns and St. Benedict is born. 493. Theodoric conquers at Verona. Then, roughly, a hundred years later, in 590, Ethelbert, the fifth from Hengist, and Bertha, the third from Clotilde, are king and queen of Kent. I cannot find the date of their marriage, but the date, 590, which you must recollect for cardinal, is that of Gregory’s accession to the pontificate, and I believe Bertha was then in middle life, having perse- vered in her religion firmly, but inoffensively, and made herself beloved by her husband and people. She, in England, Theodolinda in Lombardy, and St. Gregory in Rome: — in their hands, virtually lay the destiny of Europe. Then the period from Bertha to Osburga, 590 to 849 — say 250 years — is passed by the Saxon people in the daily more reverent learning of the Christian faith, and daily more peaceful and skilful practice of the humane arts and duties which it invented and inculcated. 286 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND 27. The statement given by Sir Edward Creasy of the result of these 250 years of lesson is, with one correction, the most simple and just that I can find. “ A few years before the close of the sixth century, the country was little more than a wide battle - field, where gallant but rude warriors fought with each other, or against the neighbouring Welsh or Scots ; unheeding and unheeded by the rest of Europe, or, if they attracted casual attention, regarded with dread and disgust as the fiercest of barbarians and the most untameable of pagans. In the eighth century, England was looked up to with admiration and gratitude, as superior to all the other countries of Western Europe in piety and learning, and as the land whence the most zealous and successful saints and teachers came forth to convert and enlighten the still barbarous regions of the continent.” 28. This statement is broadly true ; yet the correction it needs is a very important one. England, — under her first Alfred of Northumberland, and under Ina of Wes- sex, is indeed during these centuries the most learned, thoughtful, and progressive of I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 287 European states. But she is not a missionary power. The missionaries are always to her, not from her : — for the very reason that she is learning so eagerly, she does not take to preaching. Ina founds his Saxon school at Rome not to teach Rome, nor convert the Pope, but to drink at the source of knowledge, and to receive laws from direct and unques- tioned authority. The missionary power was wholly Scotch and Irish, and that power was wholly one of zeal and faith, not of learning. I will ask you, in the course of my next lecture, to regard it attentively; to-day, I must rapidly draw to the conclusions I would leave with you. 29. It is more and more wonderful to me as I think of it, that no effect whatever was produced on the Saxon, nor on any other healthy race of the North, either by the luxury of Rome, or by her art, whether con- structive or imitative. The Saxon builds no aqueducts — designs no roads, rounds no theatres in imitation of her, — envies none of her vile pleasures, — admires, so far as I can judge, none of her far -carried realistic art. I suppose that it needs intelligence of a 288 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND more advanced kind to see the qualities of complete sculpture : and that we may think of the Northern intellect as still like that of a child, who cares to picture its own thoughts in its own way, but does not care for the thoughts of older people, or attempt to copy what it feels too difficult. This much at least is certain, that for one cause or another, everything that now at Paris or London our painters most care for and try to realize of ancient Rome, was utterly- innocuous and unattractive to the Saxon : while his mind was frankly open to the direct teaching of Greece and to the methods of bright decora- tion employed in the Byzantine Empire : for these alone seemed to his fancy suggestive of the glories of the brighter world promised by Christianity. Jewellery, vessels of gold and silver, beautifully written books, and music, are the gifts of St. Gregory alike to the Saxon and Lombard ; all these beautiful things being used, not for the pleasure of the present life, but as the symbols of another; while the drawings in Saxon manuscripts, in which, better than in any other remains of their life, we can read the people’s character, are rapid I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 289 endeavours to express for themselves, and convey to others, some likeness of the reali- ties of sacred event in which they had been instructed. They differ from every archaic school of former design in this evident corre- spondence with an imagined reality. All previous archaic art whatsoever is symbolic and decorative — not realistic. The contest of Herakles with the Hydra on a Greek vase is a mere sign that such a contest took place, not a picture of it, and in drawing that sign the potter is always thinking of the effect of the engraved lines on the curves of his pot, and taking care to keep out of the way of the handle ; — but a Saxon monk would scratch his idea of the Fall of the angels or the Temptation of Christ over a whole page of his manuscript in variously explanatory scenes, evidently full of inexpressible vision, and eager to explain and illustrate all that he felt or believed. 30. Of the progress and arrest of these gifts, I shall have to speak in my next ad- dress ; but I must regretfully conclude to-day with some brief warning against the com- placency which might lead you to regard them T 290 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND as either at that time entirely original in the Saxon race, or at the present day as signally characteristic of it. That form of complacency is exhibited in its most amiable but, therefore, most deceptive guise, in the passage with which the late Dean of Westminster concluded his lecture at Canterbury in April 1854, on the subject of the landing of Augustine. I will not spoil the emphasis of the passage by comment as I read, but must take leave after- wards to intimate some grounds for abate- ment in the fervour of its self-gratulatory ecstasy. 31. “Let any one sit on the hill of the little church of St. Martin, and look on the view which is there spread before his eyes. Immediately below are the towers of the great abbey of St. Augustine, where Chris- tian learning and civilization first struck root in the Anglo-Saxon race ; and within which now, after a lapse of many centuries, a new institution has arisen, intended to carry far and wide, to countries of which Gregory and Augustine never heard, the blessings which they gave to us. Carry your view on — and there rises high above all the magnificent pile I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 2Q1 of our cathedral, equal in splendour and state to any, the noblest temple or church that Augustine could have seen in ancient Rome, rising on the very ground which derives its consecration from him. And still more than the grandeur of the outward buildings that rose from the little church of Augustine and the little palace of Ethelbert have been the institutions of all kinds of which these were the earliest cradle. From Canterbury, the first English Christian city, — from Kent, the first English Christian kingdom — has by degrees arisen the whole constitution of Church and State in England which now binds together the whole British Empire. And from the Christianity here established in England has flowed, by direct consequence, first the Chris- tianity of Germany ; then, after a long interval, of North America; and lastly, we may trust, in time, of all India and all Australasia. The view from St. Martin’s Church is indeed one of the most inspiriting that can be found in the world; there is none to which I would more willingly take any one who doubted whether a small beginning could lead to a great and lasting good ; — none which carries us more 292 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND vividly back into the past, or more hopefully forward into the future. ,, 32. To this Gregorian canticle in praise of the British constitution, I grieve, but am compelled, to take these following historical objections. The first missionary to Ger- many was Ulphilas, and what she owes to these islands she owes to Iona, not to Thanet. Our missionary offices to America as to Africa, consist I believe principally in the stealing of land, and the extermination of its proprietors by intoxication. Our rule in India has introduced there, Paisley instead of Cashmere shawls : in Australasia our Christian aid supplies, I suppose, the pious farmer with convict labour. And although, when the Dean wrote the above passage, St. Augustine’s and the cathedral were — I take it on trust from his description — the principal objects in the pros- pect from St. Martin’s Hill, I believe even the cheerfullest of my audience would not now think the scene one of the most inspiriting in the world. For recent progress has entirely accommodated the architecture of the scene to the convenience of the missionary workers above enumerated ; to the peculiar necessities I. BERTHA TO OSBURGA 293 of the civilization they have achieved. For the sake of which the cathedral, the monastery, the temple, and the tomb, of Bertha, contract themselves in distant or despised subservience under the colossal walls of the county gaol. LECTURE II THE PLEASURES OF FAITH ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR Delivered 25 th and 2 *]th October 1884 33. I WAS forced in my last lecture to pass by altogether, and to-day can only with momentary definition notice, the part taken by Scottish missionaries in the Christianizing of England and Burgundy. I would pray you therefore, in order to fill the gap which I think it better to leave distinctly, than close confusedly, to read the histories of St. Patrick, St. Columba, and St. Columban, as they are given you by Montalembert in his i Moines d’Occident.’ You will find in his pages all the essential facts that are known, encircled with a nimbus of enthusi- astic sympathy which I hope you will like better to see them through, than dis- torted by the blackening fog of contemptuous II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 295 rationalism. But although I ask you thus to make yourselves aware of the greatness of my omission, I must also certify you that it does not break the unity of our own immediate subject. The influence of Celtic passion and art both on Northumbria and the Continent, beneficent in all respects while it lasted, expired without any permanent share in the work or emotion of the Saxon and Frank. The book of Kells, and the bell of St. Patrick, represent sufficiently the peculiar character of Celtic design ; and long since, in the first lecture of the Two Paths/ I explained both the modes of skill, and points of weakness, which rendered such design unprogressive. Perfect in its peculiar manner, and exulting in the faultless practice of a narrow skill, it remained century after century incapable alike of inner growth, or foreign instruction ; inimitable, yet incorrigible ; marvellous, yet despicable, to its death. Despicable, I mean, only in the limitation of its capacity, not in its quality or nature. If you make a Christian of a lamb or a squirrel — what can you expect of the lamb but jumping — what of the squirrel, but pretty spirals, traced with his tail ? He 296 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND won’t steal your nuts any more, and he’ll say his prayers like this — *; but you cannot make a Beatrice’s griffin, and emblem of all the Catholic Church, out of him. 34. You will have observed, also, that the plan of these lectures does not include any reference to the Roman Period in England ; of which you will find all I think necessary to say, in the part called Valle Crucis of ‘ Our Fathers have told us.’ But I must here warn you, with reference to it, of one gravely false prejudice of Montalembert. He is entirely blind to the conditions of Roman virtue, which existed in the midst of the corruptions of the Empire, forming the char- acters of such Emperors as Pertinax, Carus, Probus, the second Claudius, Aurelian, and our own Constantius ; and he denies, with abusive violence, the power for good, of Roman Law, over the Gauls and Britons. 35. Respecting Roman national character, I will simply beg you to remember, that both St. Benedict and St. Gregory are Roman patricians, before they are either monk or pope ; respecting its influence on Britain, I * Making a sign. II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 297 think you may rest content with Shakespeare’s estimate of it. Both Lear and Cymbeline belong to this time, so difficult to our appre- hension, when the Briton accepted both Roman laws and Roman gods. There is indeed the born Kentish gentleman’s protest against them in Kent’s — “ Now, by Apollo, king, Thou swear’st thy gods in vain but both Cordelia and Imogen are just as thoroughly Roman ladies, as Virgilia or Calphurnia. 36. Of British Christianity and the Arthu- rian Legends, I shall have a word or two to say in my lecture on u Fancy,” in con- nection with the similar romance which sur- rounds Theodoric and Charlemagne : only the worst of it is, that while both Dietrich and Karl are themselves more wonderful than the legends of them, Arthur fades into intangible vision : — this much, however, re- mains to this day, of Arthurian blood in us, that the richest fighting element in the British army and navy is British native, — that is to say, Highlander, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish. 2g8 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND 37. Content, therefore (means being now given you for filling gaps,) with the esti- mates given you in the preceding lecture of the sources of instruction possessed by the Saxon capital, I pursue to-day our question originally proposed, what London might have been by this time, if the nature of the flowers, trees, and children, born at the Thames - side, had been rightly understood and cultivated. 38. Many of my hearers can imagine far better than I, the look that London must have had in Alfred’s and Canute’s days.* I have not, indeed, the least idea myself what its buildings were like, but certainly the groups * Here Alfred’s Silver Penny was shown and commented on, thus : — Of what London was like in the days of faith, I can show you one piece of artistic evidence. It is Alfred’s silver penny struck in London mint. The character of a coinage is quite conclusive evidence in national history, and there is no great empire in progress, but tells its story in beautiful coins. Here in Alfred’s penny, a round coin with L.O.N.D.I.N.LA. struck on it, you have just the same beauty of design, the same enigmatical arrangement of letters, as in the early inscription, which it is “the pride of my life” to have discovered at Venice. This inscription (“ the first words that Venice ever speaks aloud”) is, it will be remem- bered, on the Church of St. Giacomo di Rialto, and runs, being interpreted — “ Around this temple, let the merchant’s law be just, his weights true, and his covenants faithful.” II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 299 of its shipping must have been superb ; small, but entirely seaworthy vessels, manned by the best seamen in the then world. Of course, now, at Chatham and Portsmouth we have our ironclads, — extremely beautiful and beau- tifully manageable things, no doubt — to set against this Saxon and Danish shipping; but the Saxon war-ships lay here at London shore — bright with banner and shield and dragon prow, — -instead of these you may be happier, but are not handsomer, in having, now, the coal-barge, the penny steamer, and the wherry full of shop boys and girls. I dwell however for a moment only on the naval aspect of the tidal waters in the days of Alfred, because I can refer you for all detail on this part of our subject to the wonderful opening chapter of Dean Stanley's History of Westminster Abbey, where you will find the origin of the name of London given as u The City of Ships." He does not, however, tell you, that there were built, then and there, the biggest war- ships in the world. I have often said to friends who praised my own books that I would rather have written that chapter than any one of them ; yet if I had been able 300 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND to write the historical part of it, the con- clusions drawn would have been extremely different. The Dean indeed describes with a poet’s joy the River of wells, which rose from those “ once consecrated springs which now lie choked in Holywell and Clerkenwell, and the rivulet of Ulebrig which crossed the Strand under the Ivy bridge ” ; but it is only in the spirit of a modern citizen of Belgravia that he exults in the fact that “ the great arteries of our crowded streets, the vast sewers which cleanse our habitations, are fed by the life-blood of those old and living streams ; that underneath our tread the Tyburn, and the Holborn, and the Fleet, and the Wall Brook, are still pursuing their ceaseless course, still ministering to the good of man, though in a far different fashion than when Druids drank of their sacred springs, and Saxons were baptized in their rushing waters, ages ago.” 39. Whatever sympathy you may feel with these eloquent expressions of that entire com- placency in the present, past, and future, which peculiarly animates Dean Stanley’s writings, I must, in this case, pray you to II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 3OI observe that the transmutation of holy wells into sewers has, at least, destroyed the charm and utility of the Thames as a salmon stream, and I must ask you to read with attention the succeeding portions of the chapter which record the legends of the river fisheries in their relation to the first Abbey of West- minster ; dedicated by its builders to St. Peter, not merely in his office of corner- stone of the Church, nor even figuratively as a fisher of men, but directly as a fisher of fish : — and which maintained themselves, you will see, in actual ceremony down to 1382, when a fisherman still annually took his place beside the Prior, after having brought in a salmon for St. Peter, which was carried in state down the middle of the refectory. 40. But as I refer to this page for the exact word, my eye is caught by one of the sen- tences of Londonian * thought which con- stantly pervert the well-meant books of pious England. "We see also,” says the Dean, “ the union of innocent fiction with worldly craft, which marks so many of the legends Not Londinian. 302 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND both of Pagan and Christian times.” I might simply reply to this insinuation that times which have no legends differ from the legen- dary ones merely by uniting guilty, instead of innocent, fiction, with worldly craft ; but I must farther advise you that the legends of these passionate times are in no wise, and in no sense, fiction at all ; but the true record of impressions made on the minds of persons in a state of eager spiritual excitement, brought into bright focus by acting steadily and frankly under its impulses. I could tell you a great deal more about such things than you would believe, and therefore, a great deal more than it would do you the least good to hear; — but this much any who care to use their common sense modestly, cannot but admit, that unless they choose to try the rough life of the Christian ages, they cannot understand its practical consequences. You have all been taught by Lord Macaulay and his school that because you have Carpets instead of rushes for your feet ; and Feather- beds instead of fern for your backs; and Kickshaws instead of beef for your eating; and Drains instead of Holy Wells for your II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 303 drinking; — that, therefore, you are the Cream of Creation, and every one of you a seven- headed Solomon. Stay in those pleasant circumstances and convictions if you please ; but don’t accuse your roughly bred and fed fathers of telling lies about the aspect the earth and sky bore to them , — till you have trodden the earth as they, barefoot, and seen the heavens as they, face to face. If you care to see and to know for yourselves, you may do it with little pains ; you need not do any great thing, you needn’t keep one eye open and the other shut for ten years over a microscope, nor fight your way through icebergs and darkness to knowledge of the celestial pole. Simply, do as much as king after king of the Saxons did, — put rough shoes on your feet and a rough cloak on your shoulders, and walk to Rome and back. Sleep by the roadside, when it is fine, — in the first outhouse you can find, when it is wet ; and live on bread and water, with an onion or two, all the way ; and if the experiences which you will have to relate on your return do not, as may well be, deserve the name of spiritual ; at all events you will not be disposed to let other 304 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND people regard them either as Poetry or Fiction. 41. With this warning, presently to be at greater length insisted on, I trace for you, in Dean Stanley’s words, which cannot be bettered except in the collection of their more earnest passages from among his interludes of graceful but dangerous qualification, — I trace, with only such omission, the story he has told us of the foundation of that Abbey, which, he tells you, was the Mother of London, and has ever been the shrine and the throne of English faith and truth. “The gradual formation of a monastic body, indicated in the charters of Offa and Edgar, marks the spread of the Benedictine order throughout England, under the influence of Dunstan. The 1 terror’ of the spot, which had still been its chief characteristic in the charter of the wild Offa, had, in the days of the more peaceful Edgar, given way to a dubious * re- nown.’ Twelve monks is the number tradition- ally said to have been established by Dunstan. A few acres further up the river formed their chief property, and their monastic character was sufficiently recognized to have given to the II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 305 old locality of the ‘ terrible place ’ the name of the 1 Western Monastery/ or ‘ Minster of the West/ ” The Benedictines then — twelve Benedictine monks — thus begin the building of existent Christian London. You know I told you the Benedictines are the Doing people, as the disciples of St. Augustine the Sentimental people. The Benedictines find no terror in their own thoughts — face the terror of places — change it into beauty of places,- — make this terrible place, a Motherly Place— -Mother of London. 42. This first Westminster, however, the Dean goes on to say, “ seems to have been overrun by the Danes, and it would have had no further history but for the combination of circumstances which directed hither the notice of Edward the Confessor.” I haven’t time to read you all the com- bination of circumstances. The last clinching circumstance was this— “ There was in the neighbourhood of Wor- cester, 1 far from men in the wilderness, on the slope of a wood, in a cave deep down in the grey rock/ a holy hermit ‘of great age, u 306 the pleasures of England living on fruits and roots.’ One night, when after reading in the Scriptures ' how hard are the pains of hell, and how the enduring life of Heaven is sweet and to be desired/ he could neither sleep nor repose, St. Peter appeared to him, ' bright and beautiful, like to a clerk/ and warned him to tell the King that he was released from his vow ; that on that very day his messengers would return from Rome ; ” (that is the combination of circumstances — bringing Pope’s order to build a church to release the King from his vow of pilgrimage) ; “that 'at Thorney, two leagues from the city/ was the spot marked out where, in an ancient church, 'situated low/ he was to establish a perfect Benedictine monastery, which should be ' the gate of heaven, the ladder of prayer, whence those who serve St. Peter there, shall by him be admitted into Paradise.’ The hermit writes the account of the vision on parchment, seals it with wax, and brings it to the King, who compares it with the answer of the messengers, just arrived from Rome, and determines on carrying out the design as the Apostle had ordered. 43. “The ancient church, 'situated low/ II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 307 * indicated in this vision the one whose attached monastery had been destroyed by the Danes, but its little church remained, and was already dear to the Confessor, not only from the lovely tradition of its dedication by the spirit of St. Peter ; ” (you must read that for yourselves ;) “ but also because of two miracles happening there to the King himself. “ The first was the cure of a cripple, who sat in the road between the Palace and ‘ the Chapel of St. Peter/ which was ‘ near/ and who explained to the Chamberlain Hugolin that, after six pilgrimages to Rome in vain, St. Peter had promised his cure if the King would, on his own royal neck, carry him to the Monastery. The King immediately con- sented ; and, amidst the scoffs of the court, bore the poor man to the steps of the High Altar. There the cripple was received by Godric the sacristan, and walked away on his own restored feet, hanging his stool on the wall for a trophy. “ Before that same High Altar was also believed to have been seen one of the Eucha- ristical portents, so frequent in the Middle 308 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND Ages. A child, * pure and bright like a spirit/ appeared to the King in the sacramental ele- ments. Leofric, Earl of Mercia, who, with his famous countess, Godiva, was present, saw it also. “ Such as these were the motives of Edward. Under their influence was fixed what has ever since been the local centre of the English monarchy.” 44. “ Such as these were the motives of Edward,” says the Dean. Yes, certainly; but such as these also, first, were the acts and visions of Edward. Take care that you don’t slip away, by the help of the glycerine of the word u motives,” into fancying that all these tales are only the after colours and pictorial metaphors of sentimental piety. They are either plain truth or black lies ; take your choice, — but don’t tickle and treat your- selves with the prettiness or the grotesque- ness of them, as if they were Anderssen’s fairy tales. Either the King did carry the beggar on his back, or he didn’t; either Godiva rode through Coventry, or she didn’t ; either the Earl Leofric saw the vision of the bright child at the altar — or he lied like II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 309 a knave. Judge, as you will ; but do not Doubt. 45. “The Abbey was fifteen years in building. The King spent upon it one-tenth of the property of the kingdom. It was to be a marvel of its kind. As in its origin it bore the traces of the fantastic and childish ” (I must pause, to ask you to substitute for these blameful terms, 'fantastic and childish/ the better ones of 'imaginative and pure’) “character of the King and of the age; in its architecture it bore the stamp of the peculiar position which Edward occupied in English history between Saxon and Norman. By birth he was a Saxon, but in all else he was a foreigner. Accordingly the Church at Westminster was a wide-sweeping inno- vation on all that had been seen before. ' Destroying the old building/ he says in his charter, ' I have built up a new one from the very foundation/ Its fame as a 'new style of composition , lingered in the minds of men for generations. It was the first cruciform church in England, from which all the rest of like shape were copied — an expression of the increasing hold which, in the tenth century, 3io THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND the idea of the Crucifixion had laid on the imagination of Europe. The massive roof and pillars formed a contrast with the rude wooden rafters and beams of the common Saxon churches. Its very size — occupying, as it did, almost the whole area of the present building — was in itself portentous. The deep foundations, of large square blocks of grey stone, were duly laid ; the east end was rounded into an apse; a tower rose in the centre, crowned by a cupola of wood. At the western end were erected two smaller towers, with five large bells. The hard strong stones were richly sculptured ; the windows were filled with stained glass ; the roof was covered with lead. The cloisters, chapter-house, refectory, dormitory, the in- firmary, with its spacious chapel, if not com- pleted by Edward, were all begun, and finished in the next generation on the same plan. This structure, venerable as it would be if it had lasted to our time, has almost entirely vanished. Possibly one vast dark arch in the southern transept, certainly the substruc- tures of the dormitory, with their huge pillars, ‘ grand and regal at the bases and capitals/ II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 3 I I the massive, low-browed passage leading from the great cloister to Little Dean's Yard, and some portions of the refectory, and of the infirmary chapel, remain as specimens of the work which astonished the last age of the Anglo-Saxon and the first age of the Norman monarchy.” 4 6. Hitherto I have read to you with only supplemental comment. But in the next following passage, with which I close my series of extracts, sentence after sentence occurs, at which as I read, I must raise my hand, to mark it for following deprecation, or denial. “ In the centre of Westminster Abbey thus lies its Founder, and such is the story of its foundation. Even apart from the legendary elements in which it is involved, it is impos- sible not to be struck by the fantastic char- acter of all its circumstances. We seem to be in a world of poetry.” (I protest, No.) “ Edward is four centuries later than Ethelbert and Augustine ; but the origin of Canter- bury is commonplace and prosaic compared with the origin of Westminster.” (Yes, that's true.) " We can hardly imagine a figure 312 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND more incongruous to the soberness of later times than the quaint, irresolute, wayward prince whose chief characteristics have just been described. His titles of Confessor and Saint belong not to the general instincts of Christendom ; but to the most transitory feel- ings of the age.” (I protest, No.) “ His opinions, his prevailing motives, were such as in no part of modern Europe would now be shared by any educated teacher or ruler.” (That's true enough.) “ But in spite of these irreconcilable differences, there was a solid ground for the charm which he exercised over his contemporaries. His childish and eccentric fancies have passed away;” (I protest, No ;) “ but his innocent faith and his sympathy with his people are qualities which, even in our altered times, may still retain their place in the economy of the world. Westminster Abbey, so we hear it said, sometimes with a cynical sneer, some- times with a timorous scruple, has admitted within its walls many who have been great without being good, noble with a nobleness of the earth earthy, worldly with the wisdom of this world. But it is a II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 3 I 3 counterbalancing reflection, that the central tomb, round which all those famous names have clustered, contains the ashes of one who, weak and erring as he was, rests his claims of interment here, not on any act of power or fame, but only on his artless piety and simple goodness. He, towards whose dust was attracted the fierce Norman, and the proud Plantagenet, and the grasping Tudor, and the fickle Stuart, even the Independent Oliver, the Dutch William, and the Hanoverian George, was one whose humble graces are within the reach of every man, woman, and child of every time, if we rightly part the immortal substance from the perishable form.” 47. Now I have read you these passages from Dean Stanley as the most accurately investigatory, the most generously sympa- thetic, the most reverently acceptant account of these days, and their people, which you can yet find in any English history. But consider now, point by point, where it leaves you. You are told, first, that you are living in an age of poetry. But the days of poetry are those of Shakespeare and Milton, not of Bede : nay, for their especial wealth in 3i4 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND melodious theology and beautifully rhythmic and pathetic meditation, perhaps the days which have given us i Hiawatha/ ( In Memoriam/ i The Christian Year/ and the ‘ SouFs Diary ’ of George Macdonald, may be not with disgrace compared with those of Caedmon. And nothing can be farther different from the temper, nothing less conscious of the effort, of a poet, than any finally authentic document to which you can be referred for the relation of a Saxon miracle. 48. I will read you, for a perfectly typical example, an account of one from Bede’s 1 Life of St. Cuthbert.’ The passage is a favourite one of my own, but I do not in the least anticipate its producing upon you the solem- nizing effect which I think I could command from reading, instead, a piece of 1 Marmion/ * Manfred/ or * Childe Harold.’ . . . u He had one day left his cell to give advice to some visitors; and when he had finished, he said to them, ‘ I must now go in again, but do you, as you are inclined to depart, first take food ; and when you have cooked and eaten that goose which is II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 315 hanging on the wall, go on board your vessel in God’s name and return home.’ He then uttered a prayer, and, having blessed them, went in. But they, as he had bidden them, took some food ; but having enough pro- visions of their own, which they had brought with them, they did not touch the goose. “ But when they had refreshed themselves they tried to go on board their vessel, but a sudden storm utterly prevented them from putting to sea. They were thus detained seven days in the island by the roughness of the waves, and yet they could not call to mind what fault they had committed. They there- fore returned to have an interview with the holy father, and to lament to him their de- tention. He exhorted them to be patient, and on the seventh day came out to console their sorrow, and to give them pious exhor- tations. When, however, he had entered the house in which they were stopping, and saw that the goose was not eaten, he reproved their disobedience with mild countenance and in gentle language : ( Have you not left the goose still hanging in its place ? What wonder is it that the storm has prevented 3 1 6 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND your departure? Put it immediately into the caldron, and boil and eat it, that the sea may become tranquil, and you may return home.’ “ They immediately did as he commanded ; and it happened most wonderfully that the moment the kettle began to boil the wind began to cease, and the waves to be still. Having finished their repast, and seeing that the sea was calm, they went on board, and to their great delight, though with shame for their neglect, reached home with a fair wind. Now this, as I have related, I did not pick up from any chance authority, but I had it from one of those who were present, a most reverend monk and priest of the same monas- tery, Cynemund, who still lives, known to many in the neighbourhood for his years and the purity of his life. ,> 49. I hope that the memory of this story, which, thinking it myself an extremely pretty one, I have given you, not only for a type of sincerity and simplicity, but for an illustration of obedience, may at all events quit you, for good and all, of the notion that the believers and witnesses of miracle were poetical persons. II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 3 I J Saying no more on the head of that allegation, I proceed to the Dean’s second one, which I cannot but interpret as also intended to be injurious, — that they were artless and childish ones; and that because of this rudeness and puerility, their motives and opinions would not be shared by any statesmen of the present day. 50. It is perfectly true that Edward the Confessor was himself in many respects of really childish temperament ; not therefore, perhaps, as I before suggested to you, less venerable. But the age of which we are examining the progress, was by no means represented or governed by men of similar disposition. It was eminently productive of — it was altogether governed, guided, and instructed by — men of the widest and most brilliant faculties, whether constructive or speculative, that the world till then had seen ; men whose acts became the romance, whose thoughts the wisdom, and whose arts the treasure, of a thousand years of futurity. 51. I warned you at the close of last lecture against the too agreeable vanity of supposing that the Evangelization of the world began 318 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND at St. Martin’s, Canterbury. Again and again you will indeed find the stream of the Gospel contracting itself into narrow channels, and appearing, after long-concealed filtration, through veins of unmeasured rock, with the bright resilience of a mountain spring. But you will find it the only candid, and there- fore the only wise, way of research, to look in each era of Christendom for the minds of culminating power in all its brotherhood of nations; and, careless of local impulse, momen- tary zeal, picturesque incident, or vaunted miracle, to fasten your attention upon the force of character in the men, whom, over each newly-converted race, Heaven visibly sets for its shepherds and kings, to bring forth judgment unto victory. Of these I will name to you, as messengers of God and masters of men, five monks and five kings; in whose arms during the range of swiftly gainful centuries which we are following, the life of the world lay as a nursling babe. Remember, in their successive order, — of monks, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St. Martin, St. Bene- dict, and St. Gregory; of kings, — and your national vanity may be surely enough appeased II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 319 in recognizing two of them for Saxon, — Theo- doric, Charlemagne, Alfred, Canute, and the Confessor. I will read three passages to you, out of the literal words of three of these ten men, without saying whose they are, that you may compare them with the best and most exalted you have read expressing the philosophy, the religion, and the policy of to- day, — from which I admit, with Dean Stanley, but with a far different meaning from his, that they are indeed separate for evermore. 52. I give you first, for an example of Philosophy, a single sentence, containing all — so far as I can myself discern — that it is possible for us to know, or well for us to believe, respecting the world and its laws. “ Of God’s universal Providence, ruling all, and comprising all. “ Wherefore the great and mighty God ; He that made man a reasonable creature of soul and body, and He that did neither let him pass unpunished for his sin, nor yet excluded him from mercy ; He that gave, both unto good and bad, essence with the 320 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND stones, power of production with the trees, senses with the beasts of the field, and understanding with the angels ; He from whom is all being, beauty, form, and order, number, weight, and measure ; He from whom all nature, mean and excellent, all seeds of form, all forms of seed, all motion, both of forms and seeds, derive and have being ; He that gave flesh the original beauty, strength, propagation, form and shape, health and symmetry; He that gave the unreason- able soul, sense, memory, and appetite; the reasonable, besides these, phantasy, under- standing, and will ; He, I say, having left neither heaven, nor earth, nor angel, nor man, no, nor the most base and contemptible crea- ture, neither the bird’s feather, nor the herb’s flower, nor the tree’s leaf, without the true harmony of their parts, and peaceful concord of composition : — It is in no way credible that He would leave the kingdoms of men and their bondages and freedom loose and uncomprised in the laws of His eternal providence.”* * From St. Augustine’s ‘ Citie of God,’ Book V., ch. xi. (English trans., printed by George Eld, 1610.) II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 3 2 I 53. This for the philosophy.* Next, I take for example of the Religion of our ancestors, a prayer, personally and passionately offered to the Deity conceived as you have this moment heard. “ O Thou who art the Father of that Son which has awakened us, and yet urgeth us out of the sleep of our sins, and exhorteth us that we become Thine ; ” (note you that, for apprehension of what Redemption means, against your base and cowardly modern notion of ’scaping whipping. Not to take away the Punishment of Sin, but by His Resurrection to raise us out of the sleep of sin itself ! Compare the legend at the feet of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah in the golden Gospel of Charles le Chauve f : — “ Hie Leo Surgendo portas confregit Averni QUI NUNQUAM DORMIT, NUSQUAM DORMITAT IN iEVUM j ”) “ to Thee, Lord, I pray, who art the supreme * Here one of the “Stones of Westminster ” was shown and commented on. + At Munich : the leaf has been exquisitely drawn and legend communicated to me by Professor Westwood. It is written in gold on purple. (See below, §§ 102 and no n. Ed. 1898.) X 322 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND truth ; for all the truth that is, is truth from Thee. Thee I implore, O Lord, who art the highest wisdom. Through Thee are wise all those that are so. Thou art the true life, and through Thee are living all those that are so. Thou art the supreme felicity, and from Thee all have become happy that are so. Thou art the highest good, and from Thee all beauty springs. Thou art the intellectual light, and from Thee man derives his understanding. “ To Thee, O God, I call and speak. Hear, 0 hear me, Lord ! for Thou art my God and my Lord ; my Father and my Creator ; my ruler and my hope ; my wealth and my honour; my house, my country, my salva- tion, and my life ! Hear, hear me, O Lord ! Few of Thy servants comprehend Thee. But Thee alone I love * indeed, above all other things. Thee I seek : Thee I will follow : Thee I am ready to serve. Under Thy power 1 desire to abide, for Thou alone art the Sovereign of all. I pray Thee to command me as Thou wilt.” 54. You see this prayer is simply the * Meaning — not that he is of those few, but that, without comprehending, at least, as a dog, he can love. II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 323 expansion of that clause of the Lord’s Prayer which most men eagerly omit from it , — Fiat voluntas tua. In being so, it sums the Chris- tian prayer of all ages. See now, in the third place, how far this king’s letter I am going to read to you sums also Christian Policy. “ Wherefore I render high thanks to Al- mighty God, for the happy accomplishment of all the desires which I have set before me, and for the satisfying of my every wish. “Now therefore, be it known to you all, that to Almighty God Himself I have, on my knees, devoted my life, to the end that in all things I may do justice, and with justice and rightness rule the kingdoms and peoples under me ; throughout everything preserving an impartial judgment. If, heretofore, I have, through being, as young men are, impulsive or careless, done anything unjust, I mean, with God’s help, to lose no time in remedy- ing my fault. To which end I call to witness my counsellors, to whom I have entrusted the counsels of the kingdom, and I charge them that by no means, be it through fear of me, or the favour of any other powerful 324 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND personage, to consent to any injustice, or to suffer any to shoot out in any part of my kingdom. I charge all my viscounts and those set over my whole kingdom, as they wish to keep my friendship or their own safety, to use no unjust force to any man, rich or poor ; let all men, noble and not noble, rich and poor alike, be able to obtain their rights under the law’s justice ; and from that law let there be no deviation, either to favour the king or any powerful person, nor to raise money for me. I have no need of money raised by what is unfair. I also would have you know that I go now to make peace and firm treaty by the counsels of all my subjects, with those nations and people who wished, had it been possible for them to do so, which it was not, to deprive us alike of kingdom and of life. God brought down their strength to nought : and may He of His benign love preserve us on our throne and in honour. Lastly, when I have made peace with the neighbouring nations, and settled and pacified all my dominions in the East, so that we may nowhere have any war or enmity to fear, I mean to come to II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 325 England this summer, as soon as I can fit out vessels to sail. My reason, however, in sending this letter first is to let all the people of my kingdom share in the joy of my welfare: for as you yourselves know, I have never spared myself or my labour ; nor will I ever do so, where my people are really in want of some good that I can do them.” 55. What think you now, in candour and honour, you youth of the latter days, — what think you of these types of the thought, devotion, and government, which not in words, but pregnant and perpetual fact, ani- mated these which you have been accustomed to call the Dark Ages ? The Philosophy is Augustine’s ; the Prayer Alfred’s ; and the Letter Canute’s. And, whatever you may feel respecting the beauty or wisdom of these sayings, be assured of one thing above all, that they are sincere ; and of another, less often observed, that they are joyful. 56. Be assured, in the first place, that they are sincere. The ideas of diplomacy and priestcraft are of recent times. No false 326 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND knight or lying priest ever prospered, I believe, in any age, but certainly not in the dark ones. Men prospered then, only in fol- lowing openly-declared purposes, and preach- ing candidly beloved and trusted creeds. And that they did so prosper, in the degree in which they accepted and proclaimed the Christian Gospel, may be seen by any of you in your historical reading, however partial, if only you will admit the idea that it could be so, and was likely to be so. You are all of you in the habit of supposing that temporal prosperity is owing either to worldly chance or to worldly prudence ; and is never granted in any visible relation to states of religious temper. Put that treacherous doubt away from you, with disdain ; take for basis of reasoning the noble postulate, that the elements of Christian faith are sound, — instead of the base one, that they are deceptive ; reread the great story of the world in that light, and see what a vividly real, yet miraculous tenor, it will then bear to you. 57. Their faith then, I tell you first, was sincere ; I tell you secondly that it was, in a degree few of us can now conceive, joyful. II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 327 We continually hear of the trials, sometimes of the victories, of Faith, — but scarcely ever of its pleasures. Whereas, at this time, you will find that the chief delight of all good men was in the recognition of the goodness and wisdom of the Master, who had come to dwell with them upon earth. It is almost impos- sible for you to conceive the vividness of this sense in them ; it is totally impossible for you to conceive the comfort, peace, and force of it. In everything that you now do or seek, you expose yourselves to countless miseries of shame and disappointment, because in your doing you depend on nothing but your own powers, and in seeking choose only your own gratification. You cannot for the most part conceive of any work but for your own interests, or the interests of others about whom you are anxious in the same faithless way ; everything about which passion is excited in you or skill exerted is some object of material life, and the idea of doing anything except for your own praise or profit has narrowed itself into little more than the precentor’s invitation to the company with little voice and less prac- tice to u sing to the praise and glory of God.” 328 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND 58. I have said that you cannot imagine the feeling of the energy of daily life applied in the real meaning of those words. You cannot imagine it, but you can prove it. Are any of you willing, simply as a philosophical experi- ment in the greatest of sciences, to adopt the principles and feelings of these men of a thousand }^ears ago for a given time, say for a year ? It cannot possibly do you any harm to try, and you cannot possibly learn what is true in these things, without trying. If after a year’s experience of such method you find yourself no happier than before, at least you will be able to support your present opinions at once with more grace and more modesty ; having conceded the trial it asked for, to the opposite side. Nor in acting temporarily on a faith you do not see to be reasonable, do you compromise your own integrity more, than in conducting, under a chemist’s directions, an experiment of which he foretells inex- plicable consequences. And you need not doubt the power you possess over your own minds to do this. Were faith not voluntary, it could not be praised, and would not be rewarded. II. ALFRED TO THE CONFESSOR 329 59. If you are minded thus to try, begin each day with Alfred’s prayer, — fiat voluntas tua; resolving that you will stand to it, and that nothing that happens in the course of the day shall displease you. Then set to any work you have in hand with the sifted and purified resolution that ambition shall not mix with it, nor love of gain, nor desire of pleasure more than is appointed for you ; and that no anxiety shall touch you as to its issue, nor any impatience nor regret if it fail. Imagine that the thing is being done through you, not by you ; that the good of it may never be known, but that at least, unless by your rebellion or foolishness, there can come no evil into it, nor wrong chance to it. Resolve also with steady industry to do what you can for the help of your country and its honour, and the honour of its God ; and that you will not join hands in its iniquity, nor turn aside from its misery; and that in all you do and feel you will look frankly for the immediate help and direction, and to your own con- sciences, expressed approval, of God. Live thus, and believe, and with swiftness of answer proportioned to the frankness of the 330 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND trust, most surely the God of hope will fill you with all joy and peace in believing. 60. But, if you will not do this, if you have not courage nor heart enough to break away the fetters of earth, and take up the sensual bed of it, and walk ; if you say that you are bound to win this thing, and become the other thing, and that the wishes of your friends, — and the interests of your family, — and the bias of your genius, — and the expectations of your college, — and all the rest of the bow-wow- wow of the wild dog-world, must be attended to, whether you like it or no, — then, at least, for shame give up talk about being free or independent creatures ; recognize yourselves for slaves in whom the thoughts are put in ward with their bodies, and their hearts manacled with their hands : and then at least also, for shame, if you refuse to believe that ever there were men who gave their souls to God, — know and confess how surely there are those who sell them to His adversary. LECTURE III THE PLEASURES OF DEED ALFRED TO CCEUR DE LION Delivered 1 st and 3 rd November 1884 61. It was my endeavour, in the preceding lecture, to vindicate the thoughts and arts of our Saxon ancestors from whatever scorn might lie couched under the terms applied to them by Dean Stanley , — ‘ fantastic/ and 1 childish.’ To-day my task must be carried forward, first, in asserting the grace in fantasy, and the force in infancy, of the English mind, before the Conquest, against the allegations contained in the final passage of Dean Stanley’s description of the first founded Westminster; a passage which accepts and asserts, more distinctly than any other equally brief state- ment I have met with, the to my mind extremely disputable theory, that the Norman invasion was in every respect a sanitary, 331 332 THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND moral, and intellectual blessing to Eng- land, and that the arrow which slew her Harold was indeed the Arrow of the Lord’s deliverance. 62. “ The Abbey itself,” says Dean Stanley, ■ — “ the chief work of the Confessor’s life, — was the portent of the mighty future. When Harold stood beside his sister Edith, on the day of the dedication, and signed his name with hers as witness to the Charter of the Abbey, he might have seen that he was seal- ing his own doom, and preparing for his own destruction. The solid pillars, the ponderous arches, the huge edifice, with triple tower and sculptured stones and storied windows, that arose in the place and in the midst of the humble wooden churches and wattled tene- ments of the Saxon period, might have warned the nobles who were present that the days of their rule were numbered, and that the avenging , civilizing , stimulating hand of an- other and a mightier race was at work, which would change the whole face of their language, their manners, their Church, and their commonwealth. The Abbey, so far ex- ceeding the demands of the dull and stagnant I. ALFRED TO CCEUR DE LION 333 minds of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, was founded not only in faith, but in hope : in the hope that England had yet a glorious career to run ; that the line of her sovereigns would not be broken, even when the race of Alfred had ceased to reign.” There must surely be some among my hearers who are startled, if not offended, at being told in the terms which I emphasized in this sentence, that the minds of our Saxon fathers were, although fantastic, dull, and, although childish, stagnant ; that farther, in their fantastic stagnation, they were savage, — and in their innocent dullness, criminal ; so that the future character and fortune of the race depended on the critical advent of the didactic and disciplinarian Norman baron, at once to polish them, stimulate, and chastise. 63. Before I venture to say a word in dis- tinct arrest of this judgment, I will give you a chart, as clear as the facts observed in the two previous lectures allow, of the state and prospects of the Saxons, when this violent benediction of conquest happened to them : and especially I would rescue, in the measure that justice bids, the memory even of their 334 THE pleasures of England Pagan religion from the general scorn in which I used Carlyle’s description of the idol of ancient Prussia as universally exponent of the temper of Northern devotion. That Triglaph, or Triglyph Idol, (derivation of Triglaph wholly unknown to me — I use Triglyph only for my own handiest epithet), last set up, on what is now St. Mary’s hill in Brandenburg, in 1023, belonged indeed to a people wonderfully like the Saxons, — geogra- phically their close neighbours, — in habits of life, and aspect of native land, scarcely dis- tinguishable from them, — in Carlyle’s words, a