Yale University Library

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YALE UNIVERSITY
ART LIBRARY

SIX LECTURES
ON SOME
NINETEENTH CENTURY ARTISTS

\Photograph]

G. F. WATTS, R. A.

SIX LECTURES
ON SOME
NINETEENTH CENTURY
ARTISTS
ENGLISH AND FRENCH
DEUVERED AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
BEING THE
SCAMMON LECTURES
FOR. THE YEAR. IQO7
BY
WILLIAM KNIGHT
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in the University
of St. Andrews, Scotland

CHICAGO
The Art Institute of Chicago

copyright
The Art Institute of Chicago
1909

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER, 1909

Printed and for Sale by
RALPH FLETCHER SEYMOUR CO.
The Alderbrink Press
fine arts building
CHICAGO

NOTE
nPHE LECTURES PRESENTED IN THIS
-*¦ VOLUME COMPRISE THE THIRD SE
RIES DELIVERED AT THE ART INSTITUTE
OF CHICAGO ON THE SCAMMON FOUNDA
TION. THE SCAMMON LECTURESHIP IS
ESTABLISHED ON AN AMPLE BASIS BY
THE BEQUEST OF MRS. MARIA SHELDON
SCAMMON,. WHO DIED IN 1901. THE WILL
PRESCRIBES THAT THESE LECTURES
SHALL BE UPON THE HISTORY, THEORY,
AND PRACTICE OF THE FINE ARTS
(MEANING THEREBY THE GRAPHIC AND
PLASTIC ARTS) , BY PERSONS OF DISTINC
TION OR AUTHORITY ON THE SUBJECT
OF WHICH THEY LECTURE, SUCH LEC
TURES TO BE PRIMARILY FOR THE BENE
FIT OF THE STUDENTS OF THE ART
INSTITUTE, AND SECONDARILY FOR
MEMBERS AND OTHER PERSONS. THE
LECTURES ARE KNOWN AS "THE SCAM
MON LECTURES."

119 4

PREFACE.
The following pages contain the Scammon
Lectures delivered at Chicago in the spring of
1907, along with one or two addenda inserted,
which were promised at the conclusion of the
course. It was the lecturer's intention to develop
them into a larger volume, containing a more
complete discussion of the subject; but circum
stances have prevented the fulfilment of that
desire. Some things have been added which were
not spoken. Others have been omitted, because
they were more suited for an oral address than
for a printed book. Much of the discussion is
fragmentary, because the lectures were not in
tended for advanced scholars or mature art-
critics, but rather for students who had not pur
sued their researches very far.
The delay which has occurred in sending them
to press has been due to my wish to add numer
ous notes and appendices to them; but the de
mands of a somewhat busy life have called me to
other work. I therefore now hand them over
to the Director of the Art Institute of Chicago,
in the hope that, in their printed form, they may
be of use to some of those who heard them deliv
ered, and to others who may chance to read
them.

CONTENTS.
Lecture I  Page 13
Some characteristics of the genius of Turner.
Lecture II  Page 41
Modern Landscape Art in England and France.
Lecture III  •  Page 69
Ruskin, as Art-critic and as Moralist, with
some personal reminiscences.
Lecture IV  Page 95
The Pre-Raphaelites, especially Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, with reminiscences.
Lecture V  Page 127
George Frederick Watts, with reminiscences.
Lecture VI  Page 16 1
Edward Burne-Jones and others.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

By J. W. M. Turner
Following Lecture I, page is
Tintern Abbey .
Norham Castle on the Tweed
Crossing the Brook .
The Golden Bough
The Old Temeraire
Approach to Venice .
By J. B. Corot 
Following Lecture II, page 41
Corot: Painted by Himself
La Route d' Arras
Vue de Toscane .
Une Matinee

By Jean Francois Millet
Following Lecture III, page 6g
Portrait of Himself
Passage of the Wild Geese
The Sower ....
The Gleaners
Knitting Shepherdess
The Man with the Hoe .
The Angelus
The Shepherdess [1869] .
The Wood Sawyers
By Dante Gabriel Rossetti .

Following Lecture IV, page 95
Portrait of Himself .
Ecce Ancilla Domini .
"Beata Beatrix" .
"Aurea Catena" .
Dante's Dream .
La Donna Della Finestra
Rosa Triplex
Proserpina ....
Christina Rossetti and Her Mother
Girlhood of the Virgin Mary
Ford Madox Brown .

6 PLATES I
II
III IV V
VI
4 PLATES VII
VIII IX X
9 PLATES XI
XII
XIII XIV XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII XIX
11 PLATES XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII XXIV XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII XXIX XXX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
By George Frederick Watts . . 15 PLATES
Following Lecture V, page 127
Portrait of Himself, Aged 17 . XXXI
Dr. Joachim .  XXXII
Lord Tennyson . . . XXXIII
RUSSEL GURNEY . . XXXIV
Hope  . . XXXV
Naples and Mt. Vesuvius . . XXXVI
The Court of Death ... . XXXVII
Matthew Arnold .... XXXVIII
Robert Browning . . . XXXIX
The Dweller in the Innermost . XL
George Meredith . . . XLI
Lord Lytton . . XLII
William Morris . . . XLIII
George Frederick Watts . . XLIV
Good Luck to Your Fishing . XLV
By Edward Burne- Jones . . .5 PLATES
Following Lecture VI, page 161 .
Love Among the Ruins  XL VI
The Star of Bethlehem (fragment) . . XLVII
Vespertina Quies  XLVIII
Aurora  XLIX
The Golden Stairs  L

SIX LECTURES
ON SOME
NINETEENTH CENTURY
ARTISTS

LECTURE FIRST
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
GENIUS OF TURNER

Y aim in this course of Lectures
will be in some respects dif
ferent from that of my accom
plished predecessors, as they
have been written more with a
view to suggest than to teach;
and because I wish to open up some pathways not
yet familiar to everyone, rather than to traverse
those districts of which all students of Art have
some knowledge.
The specialty of the group of artists who will
come before us, and the abiding charm of their
work, is the way in which each — in a dififerent
manner — dealt with what I venture to call ulti
mata in Art; that is to say, with subjects which
the ordinary eye does not see, because they are
[13]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
remote from commonplace. The result has been
that, whether in landscape or in figure-paint
ing — in their representations of Nature, or of
Humanity — they have opened up new pathways
for us, suggesting much more than they have
disclosed. They have all carried us, more or
less, from the real to the ideal; disclosing higher
existences, through lower symbols; so that to
what is sometimes said in disparagement, or in
criticism — "that is not what I ever saw in
Nature," or "that is not what the man, or the
woman was, when I saw them" — the reply is
just, and adequate, "No; it is not what you then
saw, but what you might have seen, what Nature
was about to disclose to sympathetic souls, but
did not to your eye at that particular time; and,
in reference to portraiture, you missed what the
man or the woman was about to be, what they
were in the making, but had not then attained
to, and therefore did not manifest at the time to
your perception." This is most obvious, be
cause all the moods of Nature, and all the ex
pressions of Humanity, change.
It is impossible to trace out by retrospect all
the causes which have led to any great change —
whether in artistic, literary, philosophical, scien
tific or social revivals — in the history of the
world;. The threads of influence are so num
erous, and their interaction is so very subtle. But
the study is a most fascinating one ; and while of
[14]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
the two subjects which — in response to his kind
offer — I suggested to your director that I should
take up — viz., I, "The Evolution of Greek Art,
in relation to some of its antecedents in the East;
and the causes of its rise, decline and fall;"
or II, "The Art of Britain from Turner to the
Present Day, with a few Continental influences
ah extra" I chose the latter, as probably the
most useful to the audience I might expect in
Chicago; both to genuine students of Art, and
amateur listeners to lectures upon it. In the
course of these lectures I shall have to glance
at one or two other than British developments in
Europe, especially in France; just as I would
have dealt with collateral movements around
Hellas in dealing with ancient Greek Art. But
it will be mainly to English work that my lec
tures will be devoted.
After Turner is dealt with, I must speak of
Corot, and Jean Francois Millet in France. I
shall then return to England and try to trace
the evolution of British Art through the influence
of Ruskin, and the work of that remarkable
Brotherhood known as the Pre-Raphaelites —
especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti — and then
deal with such masters of English Art as George
Frederick Watts, and Edward Burne -Jones,
coming down to other workers of great merit
and contemporary fame.

[15]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
BORN in London, with the Strand for
his playground in boyhood, the effect
I of Turner's upbringing in the mighty
city has to be taken into account.
One can feel the atmosphere of London in much
of his future artistic work, its manifold throbbing
life, its alternate light and gloom. Its future
expansiveness, and its untroubled sense of
mystery, were the outcome of that early London
life. It is hardly necessary now to recall the pecu
liarities of his youth and adolescence; his un-
couthness, his taciturnity, his jealousy, or his
ignoble ambition to rival others, who were with
him (as Browning puts it) "in the artist list en
rolled. " It is not too much for his most ardent
admirers (of whom I am one) to admit that he
was "cabined and confined" within the circle of
his own subjective genius, the limits of which he
himself knew quite well. He could never have
been the member of an artistic brotherhood, even
if he had had access to one in his youth. Cama
raderie was impossible to Turner. If we com
pare him as a man with his great successors in
England — Rossetti, Morris, Burne- Jones and
Watts — we find that he always worked in soli
tude, and tried to keep himself most carefully
alone. He would never allow anyone to see
him painting, except on one or two memorable
occasions; and his strange vagaries, on "varnish-
[16]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
ing day" in the Royal Academy, have been re
corded by all his biographers. Along with his
supreme originality in water-colour, his careless
ness as to oil-painting must be recorded, his
almost reckless habit of choosing his pigments
without care; and leaving his pictures, when
finished, stowed away in wet and dusty rooms,
seemingly quite careless as to their future fate.
I am here as the advocate, and the glorifier,
of Turner. I wish to magnify his supremacy in
Art, as Ruskin did; but I shall intersperse my
eulogy with some qualifying criticism, and with
a brief allusion to his career. He inherited a
sensuous nature, and he did not bridle his pas
sions; but perhaps he could not have done the
artistic work he did, if he had accustomed him
self more constantly to the use of the bearing-
rein. Who knows ? I have tried to follow his
career from house to house in London, just
as I have followed Wordsworth in his wander
ings; but it is not so easy to trace the erratic
painter as it is to follow the great poet from first
to last. The house in Maiden Lane in which
he saw the light of day was an eight-roomed
dwelling in a street not squalid at that time. It
is now gone, having been taken down in 182 1. The
boy artist, son of a hairdresser, was not specially
well educated ; but fairly so for the time, and for
his parentage. He wrote both prose and poetry
tolerably well in his manhood; but in old age he
[17]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
lost the power of clear and accurate composition.
This was probably due to the kind of life he led,
quite as much as to anything else. I need not
refer to his early sketch of the Church at Mar
gate, or to his colouring of engravings before he
was eleven years or age. At fifteen he went to
the Royal Academy Schools, and also began to
work in Sir Joshua Reynolds' house as a privi
leged copyist. In 1793, when 18 years of age,
he left the Academy Schools, and his independ
ence began. In the previous year, however, he
commenced his "tours" as a sketcher. And
now we find him a youth of keenest observational
power, and gigantic memory, of rare imaginative
vision, sensitive and sensuous, restless, irritable,
proud, defiant, diffuse in his tastes, a knight-
errant in art, very ambitious, and curiously reti
cent because of his knowledge that there was a
strain of insanity in his family. He had to create
a career for himself, and he did it.
Before him landscape art hardly existed in
England. There were topographical sketchers
or Tenderers, but no artists, except Girtin and
Wilson. In this direction Turner struck out a
line of his own; and his numerous "tours" in
Great Britain and France were all undertaken
with that end in view, to localize what he saw in
plastic art, to memorialize the Landscape, the
Cathedrals, Castles, Rivers, Bridges, Ruins, etc.
Occasionally, however, his drawings were not
[18]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
from Nature, or what he saw before him, but
were idealizations of the work of his predeces
sors. In his tours he was mostly alone, although
he sometimes accompanied his young contem
porary, Girtin. Had Girtin lived (he died when
he was 28) he might have rivalled Turner in
water-colour; he had so noble an artistic out
look, and was so completely devoid of jealousy.
He was perhaps the most precocious of all Eng
lish artists, more realistic than Turner, more re
ceptive, less ideal; but not topographic, although
minutely true to Nature. He never exaggerated,
or invented as Turner did, glorifying the actual
by his idealization.
There is no doubt that Turner's debt to others
was very slight, and, at its utmost, almost un
conscious. He owed a little to Claude Lorrain;
but, amongst the greater landscapists of the past,
his debt to such men as Salvator Rosa, Pousin,
and to Cuyp, was almost nil.
It is easy to follow his career from his early
colouring of prints along with Girtin, to his
architectural studies; and, when a pupil of the
Royal Academy, his being allowed to copy in
Sir Joshua Reynolds' studio; and his receiving
a commission to take drawings of the places he
visited. From the first he was a great pedestrian.
He had good health, enjoyed plain living, and
could work for fifteen hours a day without fa
tigue in these early years. [19]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
In 1808 Turner was elected professor of Per
spective to the Royal Academy, a post for which
he was singularly unfitted. His knowledge of
architectural perspective was almost a blank. He
held the post for many years, but did no good
work in it. It is pleasanter to his admirers to
forget that episode, and to turn to his friendship
for, and his long residence with, Walter Fawkes,
of Farnley Hall in Yorkshire. That friendship
was a specially noteworthy circumstance in his
career, and in the development of his art.
Fawkes was one of Turner's best patrons, and
he has the honour of having divined his genius
very truly. Turner got to love Wharfedale, and
to understand its charm. The same is true,
though to a less extent, of his friendship with
Lord Egremont at Petworth; and testimony is
not lacking that he was at this time a light-
hearted, merry creature. One of his friends
writes that "his laughter and fun, when an in
mate of our cottage, was immeasurable, particu
larly with the young," while others speak of his
cheery companionship in travel.
Turner's artistic departure from the real or
actual world was due to his effort to portray a
finer kind of Beauty than the actual world dis
closed. From his boyhood he never wished to
copy Nature, to reproduce it literally; but to
glorify it by the creation of a new type or style
of Beauty, which he saw ever floating before his
[20]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
inward eye, of which the actual world only gives
us hints, or broken fragments. The creation of
a new type of Beauty thus became the end, or
aim, of his art ; not an arbitary selection of frag
ments, and their combination in a new artificial
synthesis; but the production of a fresh unity,
compacted by that which every joint of the new
fabric supplied. He began by assimilating the
work of others, by ambitious acquisitiveness.
But, in water-colour, he was an original explorer.
He was not the first to work in it, but he designed
new methods of work, and re-handled the old
ones ; and he has had no rival, or equal, in this.
It was more than unfortunate that so great a
painter was often stirred up to jealousy, and led
into efforts to eclipse other artists; not exactly
to dethrone them (he could not do that), but to
shew to his contemporaries that he could excel
them. Like Abelard, the mediaeval sophist, he
could not rejoice in a rival's success; and he
seemed to find a stimulus to his own work in the
effort to surpass that of others. It was a very
curious thing, the production of his Liber Studio-
rum, in rivalry of Claude's Liber Veritatis; for
Claude's 200 drawings were mere reminiscences
of his own pictures, jottings set down to remind
him of what he had formerly produced; Turner's
were intentional efforts to displace a rival.
But when all is said it remains a historic fact
of prime significance that there never was in the
[21]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
long evolution of the world's Art so great a land
scape-painter as Turner. His was a supremely
original genius, almost like that of Shakes
peare; or if we come down to contemporaries
in kindred arts, like Beethoven in Music, and
Wordsworth in the poetry of Nature. In the
Liber Studiorum, in the Rivers of France, in his
latest drawings of Venice and the Venetian sea
board, he is absolutely without a rival. But we
must raise the farther question: " In what did
his greatness specially and distinctively lie ? "
for vague eulogy is of no use to serious students
of Art.
Well; in all the great landscapes of Turner
you may have observed that humanity is intro
duced, just as Wordsworth introduced man into
his profoundest poetry of Nature. Almost never
in his oils or water-colours, or in the Liber, did
Turner attempt to draw Nature apart from man.
I do not now mean that he threw the spirit of
humanity into his nature-pictures, but that he
brought living humanity, as Corot did, into his
pictures. Perhaps in the very noblest landscape-
art man is excluded; that is to say, he is not
explicitly or realistically brought in ; because the
end aimed at is the disclosure of some aspect of
the outer Universe surrounding and embracing
him, which is — so to say — its secret, its inner soul,
its meaning made apparent by an apocalypse ; so
that all its phases thus revealed are allegories
[22]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
typical of man, as in the peace of evening, or the
the fury of the storm.
But there is more than this. A landscape of
the highest class must have unity in it, must be
a harmonious whole, not a number of bits of
scenery joined together in a random fashion;
and if humanity is brought into landscape paint
ing (just as landscape forms the best background
to figure-painting), it must be such humanity as
befits the place, the time, and the scene. It must
be congruous to them, and must never obtrude.
If figures occupy too large a space on the canvas,
if they catch the eye of the spectator, and detain
it from the landscape, they are out of place, and
interfere with what the latter has to tell us, or
reveal. But observe, it is not meant by this that
the great landscape-artist is thinking of artistic
unities in the old conventional sense, and that he
therefore takes liberties with Nature, bringing
into his reproductions of it conventions which are
really fictions; for he omits much, as well as in
troduces much. It is in what he omits that we
discover his mastery ; and the landscape-harmony
which Turner gave us was a blending of the scat
tered glories of light, the atmosphere of earth and
sky, in a fresh unity.
You may note in this connection the mastery
of the French artist, Millet — the underlying
humanity of his landscapes, in the Gleaners, the
Angelus, the Shepherdess, in the Girl watching the
[23]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
flight of the geese and listening to their cackle
overhead ; and later on, I shall compare the two.
But let me now quote to you the words of a great
modern English landscape artist, Mr. Alfred
Hunt, one of the most remarkable of the success
ors of Turner, who, writing of his master's work
in The Nineteenth Century (February, 1891), said,
"Turner's cows are useful or beautiful chiefly as
recipients of sunshine, or types of repose. Their
anatomy is of the wildest. They are imperfect
parts of a perfect whole. No landscape," Mr.
Hunt goes on to say (and I may tell you that my
old friend was equally great as a writer and an
artist), "no landscape, however simple in subject,
quiet in tone, and unrestful in effect, admits (so
to speak) of all-round realization ; but a poetical
landscape-painter is bound to deal with every
truth which suits his imaginative purpose, and the
moment that light and colour, and that quality of
perfect relation between them which we call
tone, have become essential to that purpose — then
the interdependence of every part, in relation to
the whole, and the most delicate pouring out ofthe
most subtle means toward that effect, become vital
to him. The power of composition is the land
scape painter's special gift. The true look of a
bewitching piece of sunlit-distance cannot be
given at all, unless the instinct of the artist has
worked into his scheme of colour, in some other
part of his picture, the very touch of colour (with
[24]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
its own relative truth) which can make that dis
tance look both intense and delicate with ethereal
light. Colours, textures, masses, shadow, spec
tacles of light are the notes of his music; the
harmonic faculty becomes supreme. The land-
scapists ofthe last generation from Turner down
wards took this view of their art, and studied
Nature in accordance with it. They liked fine
bursts of atmospheric effect, and good views with
associations of romantic intent, in which to exer
cise their powers of picturesque arrangement
and inventive design. But as 'nothing save
genius ' could do this, it is now a question whether
that mode of regarding Nature is not in danger
of passing away from us altogether."
In that same admirable article, Mr. Hunt points
out that "with photography and realism" we are
now "farther removed from the ideal of Turner
than he was from Claude;" and he adds, in an
excellent sentence — which is a key to the whole
work of the Pre-Raphaelites in landscape Art —
that "the aspirant of today will find, however
gratefully and reverently he studies the ways and
works of famous men who loved nature before
him, that his love is different from theirs, and must
be told in its own way."
He then goes on to trace a parallel between the
work of the imaginative painter and the poet;
and he asks a question which can best be put in
his own expressive words: [25]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
"In our art of poetical landscape-painting, so
far as the stir and passion of nature are concerned,
is there any set group or kind of natural aspect —
from the waving reeds of the stream to the
splendours of storm and sunset — in which any
young artist would not feel that we are far indeed
from havingyet used the full resources of Nature's
representable truths to set forth her inimitable
beauty ? " He then compares the work of
David Cox, and Constable, with that of Turner;
the "rough and ready likeness of Nature" which
the former "set themselves to win," with that
"refined expression of all subordinate parts in
fit measure of subordination, which the latter
sought for, and attained."
I have purposely lingered over this article,
which I fear very few of my audience may have
seen; but I now pass from these wise words of
my friend to tell you what I have come to think
of Turner, approaching him from the view-point
of a philosophical critic or appraiser. I may
perhaps mention that it was when I held the
Chair of Philosophy in St. Andrews that I began
my detailed study of him. It would be ex
tremely foolish for anyone to say that Turner
was the greatest of all painters; but I maintain
and proclaim (in season and out of season) that
he was the greatest landscape painter that ever
lived. It has been the fashion of some to speak
of the chief workers in any special realm of
[26]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
achievement as the Shakespeares of that realm.
If that be a legitimate way of expressing admira
tion due to insight, it may be justly said that
Turner was the Shakespeare of Landscape Art,
just as Beethoven was the Shakespeare of Music.
And why? For this reason: No other artist
ever entered into the innermost recesses of the
Temple of Nature in the same way, and brought
out her secrets with him afterwards; giving us
both form and colour in all their variety and
unity, their mystery and prodigality, their
spaciousness, their vividness, their transpar
ency. He took up, and all unconsciously
included within the circle of his genius, the
scattered excellences of many predecessors;
and he has given us such an apocalypse
of the Beautiful that of him alone is the
expression true that as a painter he has shewn
us the poetry of Nature. This is mainly due to
the fact that he gave us the humanity of Nature,
not by bringing man into his foregrounds (al
though he does that also), but by suggesting a
human element within the material framework
of Nature. And what is the result? It is this:
We see a tenderness, a grace, a radiance, in some
of his landscapes ; a conflict, a pathos, a struggle,
a revolt, even an agony, in others of them. We
see the solemn tragedy of his own life, enacted
and re-enacted on the stage of the theatre of
Nature, on sea, and land, and sky; the joy, the
[27]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
extasy, the sadness, the "riddle of the painful
earth. " The range of his sympathy with Nature's
moods has had no parallel, before or since, but
they all tend to triumph, and ultimate victory.
But just as the figure-painter must have a
model to sit to him, and so far to copy, the land
scape painter must have Nature before him to re
produce. He cannot build up a scene out of his
own inner subjectivity, his memory, or power of
invention ; nor can he trust to the reproductive
work of those who have painted before him.
He must go out into the presence of Nature,
taking with him, as Wordsworth said, "a heart
that watches and receives. " In "a wise passive-
ness, " he must wait to see those fugitive splen
dours, which the ordinary eye never sees, and
which one gifted with "the inward eye" sees
only now and then. He cannot collect, or store
up, his impressions of Nature as in a cabinet, or
register them in a catalogue. In fact, he is not,
and can never be, "a collector." The fugitive
splendour, the subtle spirit, the rare apocalypse
of Nature — transient, kaleidoscopic, evanescent
— that is what he rejoices in. But alas! he can
only record one passing mood, one transient
glimpse, and leave it to suggest a thousand more.
And here it is that the greatness of the idealist
is seen. He knows his limitations. He knows
that he cannot record the evanescence just re
ferred to; but he tries to make the little sterile
[28]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
bit of realism which he displays on his canvas
suggest these immeasurable, unrecordable, ideal
istic things.
Here, again, it is that Turner is supreme. His
drawings "might be fairly described as a series
of experiments to discover with what system of
colour it is possible to give the greatest amount
of colour-truth, consistently with truth of light and
shade; and will always remain more or less un
intelligible to those who do not love landscape
colour passionately, and see in its strength, va
riety and subtlety, the means of representing dis
tinct moods of thought and feeling. " (A. Hunt.)
I may further signalize the chief point in
Mr. Hunt's admirable article. It was this: that
in and by Art alone we cannot "reproduce
the union which subsists in Nature between
colour and light." It would require a lecture
by itself to discuss this question. I only state
what Mr. Hunt affirmed. His enthusiastic
devotion to Turner, who, he says, "first caught
a glimpse of the full scope of landscape-art,"
was paramount. He felt and taught that we
must all follow in his foot-steps. But,
said he, "gifts which would enable their
possessor to make a name as a painter of
the human form, and of the spirit which dwells
therein, must — in a landscape painter — be com
bined with a temper which will make Nature,
and the spirit which dwells tn Nature, his deepest
[29]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
love, and the reproduction of her Beauty the very
labour of his life."
Sir Walter Armstrong has said that Turner
"seldom painted the sky itself. The dome of
mysterious blue, with white cloud cathedrals
standing against its infinity, had no charm for
him. His interest was given to those vapours
and exhalations which, as it were, project over
the earth against the illimitable depths, and sub
stitute an infinite mysteriousness for external
space. The skies of the South came to him too
late to be received cordially into his scheme of
Art. Their spacious purity, their detachment
and indifference to humanity, suggested condi
tions to which his spirit could not sympathetically
turn. " *But I think that there can be little doubt
that Turner's later pictures of Nature — especially
his water-colour sketches of mountain and cloud,
of landscape suffused with mystery — were
amongst the finest things he ever did. Let me
first recall, in a sentence, some of his triumphs
after 1838, The Storm, The Slave Ship, Bacchus
and Ariadne, The Burial of Wilkie, The Carnival
of Venice, The Sun of Venice (and other Vene
tian studies), his Rain, Steam and Speed. It is
true that these glorious Venetian studies of his
latest period are no longer to be seen in that
atmosphere of glory through which they were
first beheld. What survives is but the ghost of
*J. M. W. Turner, p. 144. [30]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
the past. But take his Rain, Steam and Speed,
and I think that in it we have one of his finest
later pictures because of its symbolic unity. As
Sir Walter Armstrong says, "neither Rain, nor
Speed, nor even Steam can really be painted ; but,
of all the three the painter can give a symbol,
which is an organic whole. Turner saw his
creation as a pattern in depth, as well as in width
and height, as a pattern in mystery as well as in
assertion, in movement as well as in repose.
Through all these veils and quietudes he sends
force rushing at us concrete but indefinite. In
colour we have almost the masterpiece of Turner:
a marvellous iridescence, an opalescent multi
tude of vaporous atoms, floating in the sun, veil
ing and transforming the landscape. " *He does
not "mimic Nature, he supplements her, creating
as it were in her wake, and giving proof as he
goes of his own share in the elemental forces."f
I should perhaps here ask you to remember
the enormous number of Turner's works. It
has no parallel in the history of Art; "21,000
pictures, drawings, and sketches by his hand
are extant; or one for every day of his working
life," says Armstrong. JCompare that with
Reuben's 2,000; with Rembrandt's 400, and 350
etchings; with the 1,000 of Gainsborough, and
*Pp. 158-9.
fP. 160.
JP. 188. [31]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
the 700 of Raeburn. His life was, as has well
been said, "a miracle of industry;" his "obser
vation never slept." With him "to observe was
to absorb. "
All this continuous observation and ceaseless
receptivity, this selecting recording and assimi
lating, this sympathetic symbolic portraiture,
carried on for 50 years, has nothing like it in
the long history of Art. He knew that he could
do better than others around him ; and although
(it must be owned to his disadvantage), he did
it to outstrip them, and to be in the van, the
intensity of his taciturn love of Nature on its
mystic side, his intuitive seizure of its multi
tudinous changeful glory, was one of the causes
which kept him all these years as an industrious
worker, glorying in the symbolism of Nature,
while trying to reproduce its infinite variety and
mystery. And to the old question — which will be re
peated and repeated time out of mind — How are
Turner's pictures so fascinating to the young
idealist in Art ? this must be the reply. He was
no photographer, but he understood and was
able to reproduce the infinite variety of Nature,
its changes and its mystery, the kaleidoscopic
rearrangement of all that it shews when we first
see it. His pictures are explanations, not of that
which his senses grasped at first-sight, nor of that
which his imagination seized at second-sight, and
[32]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
projected on the canvas created by himself, but
of what lay deeper still.
I have just referred to the total absence of
photographic copying (of course his work was
antecedent to photography) or realistic repro
duction in his landscapes. But this was allied to
a very remarkable realism — that is to say, truth
ful reproduction of Nature in her most fugitive
impressions. Turner knew how to interpret
Nature by 'the light that never was on sea or
land,' without inventing either processes or pro
ducts; and so his finest landscapes were trans
figurations, in the noblest sense of the term. He
was the most receptive student of Nature that
ever traversed her river-sides, her dales, her sea-
coasts, and her mountain-tracks. By so doing he
entered into a heritage that was sent on to him,
absorbed it, and reproduced it for his contem
poraries and successors.
It is most instructive to compare him, as I
have said, with his contemporaries, as well as with
predecessors and successors in the hierachy; with
Girtin, with Daubigny, with Constable, with
Corot, with Millet, and Rousseau. In all of
these, although in very different ways, there was
a reaction from Claudism, from the stale copy
ing of the models of the past, by formal rule and
a process prescribed.
But I would require to deliver a course of lec
tures on the Liber Studiorum, and the still more
[33]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
glorious Rivers of France, or deal with his vig
nettes to Rogers' poems, and many another
book, to give you a full idea of the glory of this
one man as a landscape-artist.
Some of my audience may have heard the re
mark made by a foolish and audacious man, when
looking on one of Turner's greatest pictures, "I
never saw the like of that in Nature." "Don't
you wish you had seen it ?" was the reply. It
leads me to a farther point in the appraisal of this
great chief of landscape art. He "disdained the
real," as some put it, in his picture of Kilchurn
Castle in Scotland, and still more explicitly in his
drawing of The Chateau of Amboise, in his
Rivers of France. His was unquestionably a dis
dainful ignoring of literal accuracy. He would
have replied in spirit — could he have been
troubled to do so — to any questioner, "What do
you mean by accuracy ? A topographer is not
an artist. A great contemporary picture may be
a pictorial legend. It may have been most care
fully 'composed;' but have neither reality, nor
identity, in it."
We must admit that there was some audacity
in all this, on Turner's part. His disdain for the
reproduction ofthe actual before his outward eye,
when he saw a more glorious ideal floating before
his inward vision, was stupendous ; and explains
much of his seemingly erratic work. His exag
gerations were notorious, and his occasional loss
[34]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
of the real beauty of architecture through this
ignoring of realistic accuracy. But the question
always recurs, What is "accuracy" in Art, or
Philosophy, or even in Theology ? If there is no
imagination behind it, a great picture may be a
pictorial legend. Fidelity to what is before your
eyes does not insure a reproduction of the real,
although there must be no outrage on it, and no
discarding of it; so that, as one critic puts it, "a
tower does not look like a stack, nor an obelisk
like a factory chimney."
There is a pleasant story told of Turner's
travelling in Italy from Florence to Rome, in
company with U. R. J. Evans of Dublin. They
worked together on their way, in those delightful
days of unconventional if somewhat dilatory
travel, each ignorant of who the other was. When
they talked of their work afterwards, Evans said:
" When we compared our drawings the difference
was strange. I assure you there was not a single
stroke of Turner's that I could see like Nature,
not a line nor an object; and yet my work was
worthless in comparison with his. The whole
glory of the scene was in his."
The periods in his artistic life have been divided
out by some as parallel to what we see in Plato's
philosophical one; those of apprenticeship, of
travel, and of mastership, or lehrjahre, wander-
jahre, and meisterjahre. But while there is a
surface resemblance, the parallel may be over-
[35]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
done ; and some, who made use of it, afterwards
gave it up, Ruskin for example. It may be best
to abandon the chronological arrangement, al
though Ruskin fell back on decades; and also
the arrangement of his work in water-colour (as
Sir Walter Armstrong does) according to their
character, ingenious though it is, the first class
containing his "drawings which ran parallel to
his work in oil;" the second "his drawings for the
line-engraver;" the third his " drawings in body-
colour on tinted paper;" the fourth his "colour-
sketches and dreams of beauty on white paper,
built up with a subtlety and dexterity in the use
of transparent colour, which no other painter has
approached." It is as a Nature-painter, pure and simple, that I
have chiefly studied him; in which, however, he
always blended incident, the historic sense, and
humanity, with and in Nature. Take, for ex
ample, his Hannibal crossing the Alps. A storm
of snow and wind meets the great Carthaginian
general with his army, wending their way wearily
along and underneath. Note the complete title.
which he selected for his picture. It was " Snow
storm. Hannibal crossing the Alps," Nature
first, humanity second; and both combined in
superlative style. It is a wonderful bit of imag
inative daring, this welding of humanity with
Nature. Similarly in his glorious Bay of Baiae,
his Ulysses deriding Polyphmus, the Sun of
[36]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
Venice, the Golden Bough, the Approach to
Venice, and The Fighting Temeraire. Alas! that
the superlative Bay of Baiae, with its old wonder-
charm, is doomed. Its delicate opalescent colour
gone. The Ulysses is even worse, that mail-
suit which was the eye of the picture being
scarce distinguishable now. How terribly reck
less he was in his choice, and use, of pigments !
and how the world now suffers from his reckless
ness. And yet we are receiving from time to
time at our National Gallery in London, at the
Tate Gallery, and elsewhere, many priceless
relics of his genius.
Perhaps his most interesting landscape pic
ture in the first of these galleries is the " Fighting
Temeraire" being tugged into its last berth; its
universal popularity being due to its still glorious
colour, to its subject, its associations with Tra
falgar and the Victory, as it was next to the flag
ship in the fighting line. But it is most of all the
combination of historic incident and patriotic
sentiment, with' the beauty of water and sky, and
the tragedy of the great ship being towed away
to be broken up, and to die as the daylight is seen
dying in the west.
I am sure I am correct in saying that Tur
ner brought Humanity into his pictures of Na
ture, just as Wordsworth brought it into his poems
on Nature. The parallel was singularly close;
but I cannot work it out here and now. His
[37]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
debt to his predecessors was great, but he sur
passed them all by conquests of those territories
in which they had worked in a fragmentary man
ner before him. And the result was (as Zeller says
of Plato's relation to his predecessors) that ' 'he
was neither an envious imitator, nor an irresolute
eclectic." His work on the Liber Studiorum was a sort of
intermediate effort between his early water-
colour and his later work in oil, before he re
turned to his yet grander water-colour; and
it coincided with his wanderjahre, the glorious
series of The Rivers of France being by far
the finest of his sketches in foreign lands. I have
already said that it is interesting to trace the
evolution of his genius through all its stages to the
end, and it is noteworthy that it did not shew it
self full-robed till he threw aside the idea of criti
cizing his contemporaries and predecessors ; when
"at the last," as Sir Walter Armstrong puts it,
"he had thrown rivalry, and reminiscence, and
fear of judgment overboard," "looking neither
to the right, the left, nor behind him, but ahead."
While the greatest of water-colourists, he at
first tried to make that medium a rival to oil, and
he succeeded in doing so; but he came to see that
both were equally good for the presentation and
perpetuation of the Beautiful. They were, in
their provinces, distinct each from each; but they
were harmonious in the end they aimed at and
achieved. [38]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
It is usually a great presumption for any worker
in realms outside that of plastic Art to venture
on the criticism of a master to whom the world
is so much beholden ; but perhaps I may venture
to say just this, that he at times threw into his
work so much detail, and elaborated so much,
that he almost over-magnified its mysteriousness
while he never over-praised its glory.
Many a writer has referred to his power of selec
tion from Nature, and his frequent compression
of the scenes he has reproduced. His artistic mem
ory was marvellous, both as to form and colour,
and it would sometimes seem that he could sum
mon up from "the vasty deep" as many things
as Shakespeare's gigantic memory could, and
utilize them nearly as well ; but — and here we see
the hand of the master — he made wise choice
from that storehouse of memory ; and, as in the
sister art of literary composition, it was by what
he left out, and in that to which he gave no ex
pression, that we see the hand of the master.
It is indeed a sad reflection that the colour in
some of the finest of Turner's pictures has now
faded beyond recovery. Alas! their owners —
chance proprietors — have not all acted as Mr.
Ruskin and Mr. Henry Vaughan did — who cov
ered them with veils, or kept them in closed cabi
nets for most of the year. When the year 2000
A. D. is reached it is very likely that most if not
all of the loveliest will have disappeared. Those
[39]

SOME 19th CENTURY ARTISTS
works of ethereal loveliness, which delight us now,
will have vanished into the dim and formless
void. Let us hope that one or other of two things
— and I cannot say which is best — will occur.
Either (i) that by some new scientific process
our adepts at preservation will have discovered
one better than photography, by means of which
these treasures of the past may be transmitted to
a future age; or (2) that, out of the turmoil
and distorted outlook of the present hour, a new
race of artists will arise — as I am certain that
poets will — to rival the glories of our magnificen t
Turnerian era. If they do so, I am sure it will
be by first entering into their heritage as the
assimilators ofthe spirit of this rare "Prophet
of the Beautiful."

[40]

Plate I

Photograph by F. Hollyer

TINTERN ABBEY

Plate II

NORHAM CASTLE ON THE TWEED

Plate III

Braun Autotype

CROSSING THE BROOK

Plate IV

THE GOLDEN BOUGH

Plate V

Braun Autotype

THE OLD TEMERAIRE

5

tW'1 ' "P1

fcl

c

u

^iiiiiiiiraiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiy

immiumiHi
i
I IIIIIHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIHIII


mum  iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii  iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniii  iiiiiiiiiiiiiii  iiiiiiiui  iiiibs

LECTURE SECOND.
LANDSCAPE ART IN ENGLAND AND
FRANCE.
]OWARDS the close of my first
lecture, I reached an inter
esting point in reference to the
landscape-art of England and
ofthe world, subsequent to that
of Turner. The century which
we all recently left, and that on
which we have entered, have been able to teach us
more of the material world than any which have
preceded them. The processes of Nature have
been studied, and its laws discovered, as they
never were before. Even the nooks and corners of
the earth have been ransacked by the insatiable
pioneers of discovery. Old historic places, the
shrines of earlier civilization— in Egypt, India
and the east — have been explored with minutest
care; but our Art has not followed at the same
pace (I mean Art in combination with Science,
and as applied by its hand-maiden, Archeology)
[41]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
into these regions. Many of our artists since
the days of Turner have been content to keep
to traditional grooves, and to work along con
ventional lines; much more than our scientific
men, our philosophers, our historians, and our
historical geographers. They have continued to
copy from models; and, in consequence, have
exhibited results which only satisfied an earlier
age. I bring no indictment against them, because
they admit the fact I now assert. Our land
scape artists for many generations copied the
trees and meadows, the rocks and the river-
scenes, that delighted their predecessors. Tur
ner, as we saw, broke away from all that slav
ery; but he had no successors, and he did not
found or form a school.
I think, however, that the reaction of modern
Science upon Art has been sure, though slow ; and
it has had numerous indirect results. As was in
evitable, it brought Art back again to Nature;
and made the general artistic consciousness of
people more and more dissatisfied with blurred
outlines, nondescript inventions, the clever bun
dling together of a mass of impressions as to
Nature, instead of a faithful portrayal of objec
tivity. This has led the general mind of the race
to look to Nature afresh; and to what end ? Not
to tarry there, inspecting external beauty, how
ever clearly revealed, but to pass within and be
yond externality; finding a mystic meaning with-
[42]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
in it, due to its perpetual changes, and its apoca
lypse of what it never tarries to unfold.
The result is this. While the inheritor of old
traditions, who reverences what is venerable and
remote, is always more or less enslaved by them —
his loyalty having its euthanasia in a sort of will
ing thraldom — slowly, side by side with this, a
new spirit is at work. Old traditions are bro
ken up by a fresh perception of the meaning of
Nature, and such a new love of its mystery and
glory as we trace to a certain extent in the art of
Turner. In Turner's work there was no fidelity to Na
ture, in the ordinary sense of that phrase; and
yet, there were no abrupt departures from Na
ture. It may even be said that he was true to
the higher Nature, by being false to the lower;
because he had" the vision and the faculty divine"
of seeing the higher at one and the same time
within the lower, and yet above and beyond it.
Be it granted to all commonplace critics that
he was inaccurate as a delineator of things which
the common eye perceives ; nay, that he at times
disregarded the real, simply because he saw and
felt so much of the ideal within it. Topograph
ical accuracy had no charm for him. He was
never a maker of maps. More important still,
he put colour into most of the drawings which
he never saw; but only selected to enhance the
beauty, or glory, or suggestiveness of Nature.
[43]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
Be it admitted that Turner never painted trees
with any dexterity, that he lacked what Hamer-
ton called "the sylvan sense, the delight in forest
scenery." Hence, as we shall see, the French
idealists — Millet, Corot, Rousseau, etc. — sur
passed him in this. Mr. Hamerton adds:
"With a knowledge of landscape, vaster than
any mortal ever possessed before him, his
whole existence was a succession of dreams.
* * * * He would sit down and sketch an
other dream, in the very presence of the reality
itself." Turner "hid himself," in part intentionally;
in part because he felt that "he could not in
terpret himself except by means of the brush."*
As a rule "he would never let anyone see him
draw." There were strange opposites in him,
and these are only explainable by a simultaneous
life in two worlds, with an almost dual-conscious
ness of a most consistent life in both of them. A
royal imagination, a supreme insight, a radiancy
of touch, an ethereal poetic sense almost like
that of Shakespeare, were allied to personal habits
not always refined. He could live in squalor,
and was not always noble in his personal trans
actions. One of his admirers even ventures to
liken him to a hedgehog. But England, and the
world, owe to him, and must forever owe innumer
able debts. As Mr. Monkhouse says, he be-
*Cosmo Monkhouse. [44]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
came "the converter of topography into Art;"
and, in a much better sentence, he adds, that
he " treated buildings as valuable chiefly for the
breaking of sunbeams." His marvellous gift of
memory seems to have repelled some people,
but what was its result ? He was able to record,
to renew and perpetuate, the multitudinous im
pressions of Nature, which came to him in mag
ical troops, and then vanished into these mystic
chambers of his being; there to lie latent, se
curely locked up, without ever blending or con
fusing one another; and thence to be recalled,
and reproduced with lordliest power, when they
were needed.
It is curious that the majority of peasants, in
the most beautiful countries of the world, are
blind to the loveliness and glories around them ;
but it is not curious that peasant-people awaken
to the interest of portrait-painting, before they
are able to understand landscape-art. Probably
the chief reason has been a selfish one. Some
have thought that it would be useful to send on
to posterity the vera effigies of important, or dis
tinguished, men and women, chiefly because they
were dead and gone, and could never be seen
again; but for the transmission of landscape-art,
of scenery that was always present, or would re
turn, what need for that ? These objects do not
die as human things do.
I wish I could bring out satisfactorily the
[45]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
relations in which Turner stood to his pred
ecessor Girtin, only two years his senior, and
whom he surpassed immeasurably. They were
not friends, and yet the younger admired the
elder's painting; and, of one of his pictures he
said, "I never could have made anything like it."
But he was both selfish and secretive; and with
all his unparalleled greatness was inordinately
ambitious, from first to last, to eclipse every rival.
I have already likened him to Abelard, the me
dieval sophist — most skilful of swordsmen, most
selfish of disputants — who wished to humble
his adversary, that he might reign alone.
These were his faults and failings, over which
we need not tarry now. We think rather of his
artistic greatness and the debt we owe to him. No
artist ever had such a run of fortune in England
leading to profit and independence. How dif
ferent was the pioneer of the French school of
ideal-realists, who had so many affinities with
him. At the age of fifteen he began to exhibit
at the Royal Academy and he was elected an
associate when he was twenty-seven. He soon
became the talk of the society-folk, and so rich
that he said he did not know what to do with his
money. He was vilified by the envious; but long
afterwards he had perhaps the greatest hero-
worship that any man has ever had, in the sus
tained eulogy of Ruskin.
Now let us grant at once that Turner's tech-
[46]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
nique was often faulty, and his power of repro
ducing reality imperfect. He soon gave up all
attempt to do so. But why ? Because he came to
see that Art was to him the vehicle for express
ing what his inward eye beheld. He even came
to regard the scrupulously exact Nature painter's
as dullards; and he lived to express, and to re
produce, what he and he alone saw.
In his Life of Turner Mr. Hamerton says "he
used any colour that the experimentalizing in
genuity of modern chemistry could invent for the
temptation of an artist."1 But, as Mr. Ham
erton also remarks, "his colour, in his most
delicate work, hardly seems to be laid on the
paper by any means known to us, but suggests
the idea of a vapourized deposit."2 Mr. Hamer-
ton's criticism and appreciation are so admirable
that I continue to quote from him: "He was
always trying to paint the impossible."3 But he
also points out that Turner "excelled the artists
of all time in his appreciation of mystery in Na
ture, and his superlatively excellent renderings of
it;" while he adds that his eulogist, Ruskin, was
"the first writer on Art who explained the value
of mystery in painting."4 Again, he tells the
story of an American purchaser of one of his pic
tures. Turner asked his friend Leslie "what the
'Page 542.
8 Page 344.
s Page 345.
* Page 346. [47]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
purchaser thought of it." The reply was, "He
thinks it indistinct," to which Turner replied in a
sort of good-humoured censure, "You should tell
him that indistinctness is my fault and my merit."
Hamerton says that "the greatest technical merit
in Turner's colouring is his wonderfully brilliant
performances in the upper notes;" and he adds
that he "carried up more colour into the regions
of light than any painter."1 All this was due to
his ideality. Claude was the pioneer of idealism
in Art, but Turner outstripped him altogether.
Constable was far more realistic, and the Pre-
Raphaelities — to whom we shall soon come —
were still more so. Only note, here and now, that
the great tidal wave of idealism in Art rose to its
height in Turner.
I have already said that it is to be feared the
day is not a distant one when most, if not all, of
his great pictures will have disappeared; partly
because of the bad pigments he made use of,
partly because of the careless way in which he
left so many of them exposed to the glare of the
sun, and also because of the way in which he
sometimes mixed up oil with water-colour.
But, sad though it is, that is the ultimate fate
of all plastic art. Where are now the pictures
of Zeuxis and Apelles ? Our chief consolation
is that the art-instinct of the human race sur
vives, and is ineradicable, a Krrjfia. is ad
'Page 352. [48]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
joy forever; and that new art products, better, I
believe, than all those of the past, are certain to
arise. I may go even a step farther, and say that the
time will come when Turner will be known and
remembered mainly, not by his water-colours or
his oils, but by the engravings which he gave to
the world in the Liber Studiorum, and from those
in his Rivers of France ; while he will live longer
still in the interpretative pages of his great ex
pounder, John Ruskin. Modern Painters, and
other treasures of Art-criticism, will live and
educate mankind for generations to come.
Enough if something from our hands have power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour.
And what would the world now give if there had
been an art critic like Ruskin in Greece in the
days of Pericles, and in what Browning so hap
pily calls it, in reference to the Italian workman
ship of a later age,
Art's spring-birth, so dim and dewy.
I now pass from English Landscape Art to the
work of two great Frenchmen, Corot and Millet.
(Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, and Jean Fran
cois Millet.)

[49]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
AS in Turner's case, you have now easy
access to many books on the life work
of both men, so that I need not en
large on that.
I wish to bring out their respective excellences,
by comparing them with others, and especially
with Turner. Well; Corot never could have
painted a stormy sky as Turner did. He did
not understand it. He loved peace, pursued
it, and portrayed it. It is one of his great merits
as a landscape artist that he knew the limit
of his genius, and never tried to represent that
Nature he loved so well, either in a blaze of
glory, or in an agony of storm.
He knew his limitations, and was invariably
modest in never parading them, as some rel
atively great men — egoists at heart — have sought
to magnify themselves by enlarging on their
own infirmities. But we — who have profited
so much by him, and learned so much from
him — may perhaps try respectfully to point out
what these limitations were. We in England
instinctively compare him, as I have said, with
our own Turner; and, in doing so, we find that
Corot never opens up for us a door of entrance
into the mystery of Nature. He would himself
have disliked (or at least not cared for) an
apocalypse of Beauty flashed out upon him from
obscure hiding-places, casual glances from nooks
and crannies. It was the common ongoings of
[50]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
Nature on sweet summer days, its peaceful re
poseful face, that he delighted in. Even when
in Rome, during that visit of his young manhood,
when he painted the Coliseum, and St. Peter's
as seen from the Pincio, it was the peaceful as
pects of the scenes that appealed to him. This
was the outcome of temperamental and inherited
tendencies. Corot wrote : " I made my first drawing from
Nature under the eye of the painter whose only
advice to me was to render with the utmost fidel
ity everything that I saw before me." Another
of his teachers, Victor Bertin, taught him to in
troduce figures into his drawings, "without which
he used to say that a landscape was uninhabit
able, " but to do this by following precedent, or
the old classical rules.
When he was twenty-nine years of age he went
for three years to Rome. On his arrival there
he became, as so many become, acutely con
scious of his defects; and in a most interesting
letter he wrote, "I could not draw at all. Two
men stopped to chat together. I began to sketch
them, part at a time — the head, for instance.
They separated, and I had nothing but some
bits of head on my paper. Some children were
sitting on the steps of a church. I began again.
Their mother called them away, and my book
would be full of ends of noses, foreheads and
tresses of hair. I determined that I could not
[51]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
come home again another time without a com
plete piece of work, and I tried for the first time
a drawing par masse, a rapid drawing. I set
myself to outline, in the twinkling of an eye, the
first group I found. If it only staid a short time
I had at any rate caught the character; if it staid
long enough, I could get the details."
Returning to France, and to its northern coast
scenery, he writes thus, "With my brush in my
hand I go out nutting through the woods, in my
studio ; and there also I can hear the birds sing
ing, and the trees rustling in the wind ; and I can
see the streams and the rivers flowing on, carry
ing thousands of mirror pictures of sky and
earth; and the sun rises and sets for me in my
own house."
Corot had no struggle with adversity like his
great contemporary, Millet. He was never in
want, although he was not always appreciated,
and the judges of the Salon were sometimes
hostile to him. But that did not disturb him, be
cause he believed that he had got into close touch
with Nature in his own way, and that his hour
of recognition would come. He waited for it
without any impatience, or clamour, or chagrin at
the delay. Nothing is finer in the way of ap
praisal than his own letters on his art. He said
to one who had noted the wonderful atmosphere
of his landscapes, and the feathery grace of his
foliage: "Yes, the birds must be able to fly
[52]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
through the branches." But listen to his own
account of the life of an artist in his relationship
to Nature. He wrote, "A landscape painter has
a delightful day. He gets up about three A. M.,
before sunrise. He goes out, sits down under a
tree, and waits, watching. At first there is little
to be seen. * * * Everything is sweetly scented,
and trembles under the wakening breeze of the
dawn. * * * First one ray of sunlight then
another. The flowerets awake. The birds begin
to twitter their morning prayer. One sees
nothing, yet all is there. * * * The sun arises.
Everything sparkles and glitters, all is in full
light, still soft and caressing; and I paint! I
paint! The far distance in its simple contour
and harmony fades into the sky, through an
atmosphere of mist and ether. The flowers
raise their heads, the birds flit to and fro. A
peasant riding a white horse disappears down
the narrow path. And the artist? He paints!"
* * * As the hours advance he writes: "We see
too much. There is nothing left to the imagina
tion. Let us go to breakfast at the farm. Work,
my friends! I will rest! I will doze and dream
of my morning scene. I will dream of my
picture; and, later on, I will paint my dream."
* * * "The sun has sunk. There remains but
a soft filmy touch of pale yellow — the last gleam
from the sun which has dropped into the deep
blue of night — melting from soft green into a yet
[53]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
paler turquoise of an intangible delicacy and an
indescribable liquid mistiness. Everything is
fast fading, yet we know that everything is still
there. All is vague, for Nature is falling asleep.
* * * The illusion is over. The sun having
gone to rest, the inner sun — the sun of the soul
— the sun of art — arises. Good! my picture is
finished." As his dexterous interpreter* writes, " Here we
see the artist, the poet, the lover of Nature ; we
see also the man who never painted Nature in a
convulsion. When the sun blazes at full mid
day, when it sets in an orgy of colour, Corot will
have none of it."
From first to last, there was no tragedy in
Corot's life, no sturm und drang. He was in
variably quiet, happy, simple, kindly, peaceful,
contented. All his letters are serene; and he
was most generous in his appreciation of others,
his brother-artists whom he habitually placed
above himself. When ignored by the critics,
or the picture-dealers, his habitual consola
tion was " I have my Art; that remains."
He likened his contemporary, Rousseau, to "a
soaring eagle;" himself, to a "singing lark."
And we may never forget — posterity will never
forget — his noble generosity to the widow of his
friend, Francois Millet, not long before he died,
*Miss Ethel Birnstingl or Miss Alice Pollard; for the book is
a joint one, published by Methuen & Coy.
[54]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
when he (Corot) was receiving large payments
for his pictures. He returned ten thousand
francs to his agent, the dealer, and told him to
pay one thousand every year for ten years "to
the widow of my friend. "
He was not a cultivated artist. He read little,
and took no interest in Science, or History, or
Politics. But he went on his own way, and did
his own work. If asked what was his specialty
as an artist — what differentiated him in a crowd
of illustrious contemporaries — I would say it
was this: He never obtruded himself, or his
own subjectivity, into any picture; nor did he
ever try to photograph what was present to his
eye. He seized a passing mood of Nature, a
transient disclosure of it; and, what is more
significant, when out in the fields and woods, he
took brief — very brief — notes from Nature, to be
afterwards worked out by him, and dealt with
in a few touches. He did not try to give anything
else; because these touches revealed much more
than a canvas, daubed all over with minute
detail, could possibly do.
The changes of the seasons were chronicled
for us by him in a few rapid strokes. The
boundless life of Nature, in her ever-fluctuating
moods, was depicted with an immediacy and
vividness that was arresting and joyous; but
Corot did not allow us to linger over-long in one
mood of rejoicing, by giving us too much to see
[55]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
on his canvases. He wrote, "If you crowd in
too much, you weaken effect, or falsify every
thing in the effort to be too exact. No two hours
of the day are just alike, and you cannot put
both on one canvas." He depicted all the sea
sons, and all the hours; although he loved best
the leafy summer, in its tremulousness, its ethe
reality, its transparency, its warmth, and its ful
ness of life. Over all his pictures we feel that a
healthful breeze is blowing. But he recognized
more than any other landscape painter in France,
the glory of the changefulness of Nature, and
the difficulty into which this brought the artist.
Referring to the movements of the clouds, he
writes, "'Stop!'" said I, "trying to emulate
Joshua with the sun! But the clouds continued
to drive, the sky changing continually in form
and colour. I cried out to them to stand, if only
for a moment, that I might not paint them
wrongly; but no; as though a sky standing still
would be a sky at all!"
I have said in quasi-criticism, that in his pic
tures Jean Corot does not give us the mystery in
Nature, the remote, the impenetrable, the in
scrutable, which is so supremely fascinating in
Turner's work; but who, I ask, has ever let us
feel the secret of Nature's peace so well — its
charm, in the gentle stir of leaves with their
twinkling lights and fluttering, feathery loveli
ness, their whisperings of rest ? When I look on
[56]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
one of Corot's finest landscapes and see the pale
mist floating up from the bed of the stream,
while the light of day dies out, and the stars
begin to twinkle, I recall the lines of Keats,
There crept a little noiseless noise amongst the leaves
Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.
We thank him for a score of other things on
which I would fain enlarge, because of his intro
duction of idealism into Art, from which there has
been so sad a degeneracy in the school of the
Impressionists in France; but, I pass on to deal
in even greater brevity with one who is a still
more fascinating personality viz. : Jean Francois
Millet. THERE is no painter "in the artist list
enrolled" who fascinates us in some
respects in the same way as that French
peasant, Jean Francois Millet. He was
"a son of the soil," and other nations love him
somewhat in the same way as Scotsmen love
Robert Burns. I know how honoured he was
across the Atlantic, and also how many of you
in America recognized his greatness even before
the French or the English did so. His own
noble character, his admiration of simple pea
sant life, and his effort to transmit represen
tations of it to posterity on his canvases, his
grand struggle with adversity, his modesty —
almost unconscious of the genius that underlay
[57]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
it, and quite unspoiled by the success that
followed it — all these have been recorded for
the world by his friends, Sensier and Rous
seau, and re-told in a charming manner by Miss
Peacock. Apart from his immortal pictures — the Glean
ers, the Angelus, the Wood-Cutters, the Sower,
the Shepherdess — many of his smaller ones are
poems on canvas ; such as the Well in the Ionides
Collection at South Kensington, which tells us
as much as any well I have seen, except the
sacred one at Nazareth. The peasant genius
of this half-educated boy went back inevitably
and intuitively to Michael Angelo for strength,
and to Poussin for gentleness. The records of
his visits to the Paris Galleries, the Louvre and
the Luxembourg, are profoundly interesting.
He saw little in the latter but what was conven
tional, what Miss Peacock wisely calls the "re
pellent insipidity of invention and expression."
The greatly popular, but quite conventional,
De la Roche had no charm for him. But, in
the Louvre — that superb gallery of greatness,
which casts its spell upon and over every lover
of the Beautiful, and is to all art-lovers in Paris
the chief centre of attraction in the city — he
found a new world disclosed to him, and in it he
lived with congenial spirits from hour to hour.
The art critics of the day, who were also the
adjudicators of the honours of the Parisian gal-
[58]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
lery, were not yet in sympathy with — they did
not yet understand — those who were called " the
men of 1830," that wondrous little band of com
rades who came to be known and talked of as
"the Barbizon School;" a group quite as im
portant in the history of Art as our own Pre-
Raphaelite brotherhood. That Nature should
be a mirror of man in its most transient moods ;
that its shadowy evanescence, that its sudden
disclosures — which tarried for no eye to repro
duce — should have interest to anyone, was in
comprehensible to the academic officials of the
Salon ; and so, the works of this group of painters
were systematically shut out from view. For
more than a dozen years Rousseau was so dis
paraged, and excluded, that it is said he was
familiarly known as "Le grand refuse." It
mattered nothing. The group was not silenced.
Their hour had not yet come; but it was coming.
And slowly the art critics opened their eyes to
see what others had already seen, and the artists
themselves joined in the tribute. Diaz wrote,
"there is a newcomer, who has colour, move
ment and expression; a real painter."
But it was not yet his hour of triumph, because
his most distinctive style had not been reached.
Energy, reality, robustness of life, strength of
purpose, joyousness of work were shown ; but he
next painted the Sower, which is to be seen in
your Boston Museum, with its inimitable sugges-
[59]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
tion of patient continuous labour, of cheerful
perseverance in well-doing onwards to accom
plishment. It was now that he saw, and said
to his friend Sensier, "Art is not a partizan. It
is a battlefield. Perhaps it is suffering that
makes the artist express himself best. "
I would like to give you some idea of the Bar-
bizon district, and of its simple forest-charm, but
it is impossible here and now. I only say that
it is questionable if anyone loved the woods
more intensely than Millet did, unless it was
the great Russian musical composer Tschai-
kovsky, or your own American prose-writer
Thoreau, at Walden. But it is more important
to give you some idea of the man, as disclosed
in his own words. He wrote thus to Sensier, in
a letter which reveals his limitation, as well as
his strength:
"Peasant subjects suit my temperament best;
for I must confess, at the risk of being taken for
a Socialist, that the human side in Art touches
me the most; and, if I could do what I liked best,
I would undertake nothing either in landscape
or figure-painting that was not the result of a
direct impression, produced by some aspect of
Nature. The joyous side never shews itself to
me. I do not know where it is. I have never
seen it. The most joyful thing I know is quietude,
the exquisite enjoyment of silence, so delicious
either in the forest, or in any cultivated spot."
[60]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
And thus he wrote in numerous letters to his
friends; so that, whether he painted a sower in
the fields, or peasants going to work, or a woman
feeding hens, or a shepherd or shepherdess, all
have the indefinable air of simplest realism, of
peasant life as he knew it, in its hard toil and
cheerful labour, which he delighted to portray;
more especially the peasant shepherd-life of
France, with its solitude, its watchfulness, its
patient care. Certainly no artist ever painted
these things as Millet did.
I cannot finish my estimate of the work of
this French painter without quoting to you
some of the words of that appreciator of his
genius, Miss Netta Peacock, who writes thus:
"Touched by a sense of the sacredness of the
routine of field-life, of the mystery and miracle
of changing seasons and yielding soil, Millet
went straight to the heart of things for his mate
rial, in all humility and with the utmost sin
cerity. Solitude, real and profound, he has in
troduced into many of his pictures, but never
isolation; for his figures have grown out of their
surroundings. They are one with the Universe.
Silence he has given us — far-reaching, stretched
over the vast plains, brooding peacefully with
outstretched wings over mother and sleeping
child, or tired man and wife resting after the
continuous toil of the day. * * * His figures are
a type of the everlastingness of labour. Fate —
[61]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
large-eyed and relentless — holds the worker in
her grip; dumbly acquiescent, he waits upon
Nature's ever varying moods, and, in complete
submission to eternal law and order, lives and
dies. "Though every chapter in the great Book of
Humanity contains an idea, the only one that
appealed with conviction to the tender-hearted
peasant was that which dealt with those whose
lives are cast in rugged places. His strength
lay in his rare sense of kinship with the toilers
of the land. * * * The functions of rustic
labour, in their rythmic rise and fall, bear a cer
tain affinity to religious ritual ; they are removed
from the domain of conscious effort, and become
unconscious acts of worship. Thus it was that
Millet understood the life of the fields.
"In the most humble realities of rural life he
has shewn us eternal truths. In an attitude, he
conveys the deep pathos of renunciation; in a
gesture, the dignity of labour. His young girls
are dreamers, watching geese, tending sheep, or
momentarily roused from their unassailable tran
quillity, to follow, with outstretched neck and
straining eye, the flight of the bird on the wing.
His women are mothers caring for the little ones
with all the unplumbed tenderness of mother
hood, or housewives faithfully fulfilling ordinary
domestic duties, 'the daily round, the common
task. ' His men are workers with homes, earn-
[62]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
ing by the sweat of their brow the daily bread
for wife and child. Everything is precious, is
holy; * * * the mystery, the sense of intimacy,
the poetry extracted from little things, haunts us
with the persistence of a half-forgotten melody."
Another paragraph I may add, from its special
reference to art-criticism: "In the full swing of
the Romantic regeneration, Millet remained
solitary and apart. He was a realist, full of
stern ideals; an idealist who drew deep from
life's commonest truths. His work most con
vincingly conveys the temper of his mind and
the colour of his thought. He was essentially a
painter of character; he did not seek to portray
Beauty for itself, but managed to convey the
abiding loveliness of all that is humble, whether
in Humanity or Nature."
There have been many peasant artists, as well
as noble peasant poets, "sons of the soil," who
have risen from lowly homesteads, and done
superlative work, outrivalling all their superiors
who became famous in the lines of conventional
Art; but none, I think, have ever risen and re
tained from first to last the splendid peasant
sympathies, and permanent ideals, that J.
Francois Millet did. In most cases, the rise of
a working-man to distinction means the abandon
ment of his peasant nature. The majority for
get who their ancestors were; and cannot, or will
not, let you know anything about them. As one
[63]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
of my own clerical friends remarked, when he
was transferred from a rural parish and came to
live in a prosperous community of the nouveaux
riches, and had to minister to them ecclesiastic
ally, "These people around me here seem never
to have had any grandfathers or grandmothers,
let alone their parents. " Now, in Millet we find
from first to last in his career almost a glorying
in the peasant-ancestry whence he came; while
the constant note of sincerity and reality in all he
did emanated from that source. He had a feel
ing for Nature quite unborrowed and distinctive,
a sense of the grandeur of its ever-changing
moods, with simple peasant toil in the forefront,
hard day-labour in the fields while the sun was
shining, with evening work indoors. He also
had a perception — as Turner had — of the mys
tery as well as of the loveliness of Nature, its
latent powers of life, its bountifulness as well as
its gifts to man; and all of it an ally to devotion.
This it was which stirred up in him a life-long
effort to reproduce these things on canvas ; and
just as with the Pre-Raphaelites in England, it
was a reaction from the conventional Art which
went before it.

[64]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
RETURNING to England and to Tur
ner, I remark in closing that no artist
in the world ever had such an inter
preter and vindicator as Turner had in
Ruskin; and I go back to this subject in order
to bring out some new points in reference to both
men. I venture to say that Ruskin demonstra
ted to his day and generation that Turner — whom
so many of his contemporaries thought unnatural
— was the truest to Nature of any landscape
artist that ever lived; so that he effected a revo
lution, not only in Art-criticism, and Art-ap
praisal, but also in Art-production. He proved,
as well as affirmed, that the "real colour of Na
ture had never been attempted by any school."
He saw, and said, that "the finish and specific
grandeur of Nature had been given ; but her full
ness, space, and mystery, never." He showed that
"for conventional colour" Turner substituted a
pure, straightforward rendering of facts, not of
such facts as had been before attempted, but of
all that is most brilliant and inimitable. "He
went to the cataract for its iris, to the conflagra
tion for its flame, asked of the sea its intensest
azure, and of the sky its clearest gold." More
especially he shewed that "in his power of associ
ating cold with warm light no one has ever ap
proached him. The old masters, content with
one simple tone, sacrificed to its unity all the
exquisite gradations and varied touches of re-
[65]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
lief and change, by which Nature unites her ad
vancing hours, one with another. They give
the warmth of the sinking sun, over-whelming
all things in its gold; but they do not give
those gray passages about the horizon, when —
seen through its dying light — the cool and
the gloom of night gather themselves for their
victory." Again Ruskin writes, "Turner, and Turner
only, could follow and render that mystery of
decided line, that distinct, sharp, visible but in
extricable richness, which — examined part by
part — is to the eye nothing but confusion and
defect ; but, taken as a whole, is all unity, mys
tery and truth." And he adds: "Turner in
troduced a new era in landscape Art by shewing
that the foreground may be sunk for the sake of
the distance; and that it is possible to express
proximity to the spectator without giving anything
like completeness to near objects." Again, "if
we have to express varied light, our first aim must
be to get the shadows sharp and visible; and this
is not to be done by blackness. They must be
clear, distinct, and even shot with light," as he
puts it.
The marvellous secret of Turner's shadows is
the way in which they adumbrate the light, and
reveal its mystery. They speak to us whole vol-
lumes describing the power and glory of Nature,
whether seen in the sky or on the hills, in the
[66]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
rivers or the sea, or the grass of the field. They
interpret so much to us, and enable us to recog
nize new splendours in the commonplace.

[67]

Plate VII

COROT : Painted by himself

Plate VIII

LA ROUTE D' ARRAS

Plate IX

VIEU DE TOSCANE

Plate X

h-auu Autotype

UNE MATINEE

LECTURE THIRD
RUSKIN; AS ART CRITIC AND MORAL
IST, WITH SOME PERSONAL
REMINISCENCES AM to speak of Ruskin both
as an art critic and a moral
teacher, but I shall interweave
one or two reminiscences which
are now, alas ! among the dis
tant pr&terita.
I shall deal with general char
acteristics rather than details, and try and give
you a few photographs of character. But since
I place Ruskin so high amongst the teachers
of the Nineteenth Century — indeed very near the
summit-level — the language of praise must give
place to a strictly judicial estimate. We are all
of us the richer because he lived and taught; we
should therefore be able to answer the ques
tions, what is it that we owe to him ? and what is
the measure of our debt ?
In answer to these questions, it may be said
[69]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
first of all that no one ever emphasized more
clearly than Ruskin did the distinction between
the orovinces of the True, the Beautiful, and the
Good; whether on the map of human knowledge,
or in the realm of appreciation and attainment.
No one has shewn so well their inner affinities,
and the ties which bind them together. He
could never have written, as Keats did,
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
To a dictum so one-sided, he would have re
plied by a direct negative; and both in writing
and in conversation, from first to last, he unfolded
the distinction between the two provinces, clearly
and unmistakably. But he also knew their
correspondences; and shewed us how to pass
from the one to the other with ease, adroitness,
and inevitableness. He unfolded — as I think
few, if any, have done so well — their inner re
lationships, their underlying unity, and abid
ing harmony. This gave precision, as well as
breadth and comprehensiveness, to his teaching.
I may even say of it that it was ultimately " com
pacted" to others, by "that which every joint
supplied" to himself.
Mention should next be made of his unique
gift of varied intuition ; in other words, his power
of getting at once, and without effort, below the
surface of things — discarding their conventional
aspects, and discerning deep principles under
go]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
neath. Take this in connection with the growth
of his character, the unfolding of his genius
in many different directions, and the consequent
changes which occurred in his point of view.
You will find the germ of his latest teaching
within some of his earliest opinions, and frag
ments of his youthful judgments surviving in his
final sayings as to Nature and Man; but all of
them expanded, modified, at times transfigured.
So that, what a surface critic deems (and often
calls) an inconsistency — in matters of Art, Re
ligion, or Politics — is really a sign of its opposite,
with the added evidence of development. As one
of the best of our recent writers has said, "The
highest consistency is inconsistent. The great
est teacher cannot write twice alike; because,
from his second point of view he sees more, and
has more to say."
Some persons have thought that Ruskin's
utterances — both on Art, and Political Economy
— are dogmatic and dictatorial, having about
them an infallibilist air. It may be so; but
should we wonder at it? It is a characteristic
of all strong men that they speak with confidence
of the conclusions that they have reached, and
the principles they hold. And we should test
all that Ruskin (more, perhaps, than any of his
contemporaries) has said in the light of its evolu
tion; of the opinions that originated, and the
circumstances that gave it shape. A knowledge
[71]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
of his career, especially as unfolded in his own
fragments of autobiography — in Prceterita, Fors
Clavigera, the Arrows of the Chase, and Hortus
Inclusus — will illustrate this.
As I have alluded to his views on Political
Economy, it may be added that his teaching on
this subject — stripped of a few extravagances —
is really very simple, and at its root may be in
dorsed by those who cannot follow him in all his
inferences and practical schemes. The follow
ing are a few of his sentences on the subject:
"As Domestic Economy regulates the arts and
habits of a household, Political Economy regulates
those of a Society or State. It is neither an art,
nor a science, but a system of conduct and legis
lature." * * "The great law which is to govern
the production and distribution of wealth is the
law of Co-operation." * * "Government and
Co-operation are the laws of life ; anarchy and
competition the laws of death." * * "When I
use the word ' Co-operation, ' I use it as opposed
not to masterhood, but to competition."
The following sentences may not be so uni
versally endorsed, but they are no less true; and
if adopted, and acted out beneficently, they
would revolutionize our commerce, and raise the
whole tone of our social and national life: "Mas
ters are not to undersell each other, nor seek each
to get the other's business, but are all to form one
Society, selling under a severe penalty for unjust
[72]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
dealing, and at an established price." "And I
mean by Co-operation not only fellowship be
tween trading firms, but between trading nations."
I do not need to expound his Political Econ
omy any farther; except to say this, that it is not
only based upon, but that it overflows into, Ethics ;
and is everywhere interpenetrated by moral
truth. For example, in dealing with the true
nature of Possession, he teaches that we possess
only when we beneficially use what we have for
the benefit of others as well as ourselves; and
furthermore — paradoxical as it may seem — we
continue to possess the best part of what we have,
after we have given it away. No one understood
better than Ruskin did the truth which lies
within the apostolic paradox, " Having nothing,
and yet possessing all things;" and his unparal
leled philanthropy not only to individuals, but
to Institutions, Societies and Guilds, reacted on
himself. It made him feel a richer man than
the nominal possessor of things, with which mere
wealth may load the millionaire ; who has neither
the wit to understand, nor the sympathy to enjoy
them. His founding of Museums and creation
of Industries, his gifts to Colleges and Schools,
are proof of this. The Oxford Drawing School,
the Museum at Meersbrook Park, Sheffield, his
gifts to Whitelands Women's College, and to
the Working Men's College in London; those
to the girls' school in the city of Cork, the insti-
[73]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
tution of the St. George's Guild, and the subse
quent work of the Langdale Linen Industry and
the Keswick Art School are its farther develop
ments and outcome. These most munificent gifts
have given rise to a multitude of others, of which
time would fail me to tell you. Glass industries
in London, silver ones at Chipping Hampden,
others near Birmingham. But above all William
Morris's work and art industries. I need not at
tempt an inventory of them, but the one thing to
be noted is that the founders, and subsequent
workers cared nothing for practical return in the
way of income, in comparison with turning out
good and beautiful work. They have all caught
their inspiration from Ruskin. They are his
spiritual children. During his lifetime Ruskin
gifted the most of the fortune which his father left
him, £157,000, to public objects and ends; and
no modern Englishman has more fully under
stood, and acted out, the meaning of the motto
which became the title of one of George Fred
erick Watts' most famous pictures, "What I
spent, I had; what I saved, I lost; what I gave,
I have." And now (as perhaps you are not all familiar
with it) I quote the noble confession of faith
which the members of the St. George's Guild —
which Ruskin founded — are asked to make
(omitting only its eighth and final section) :
"I. — I trust in the living God, Father Almighty,
[74]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
Maker of Heaven and earth, and of all things and
creatures, visible and invisible. I trust in the
kindness of His law, and the goodness of His
work and I will strive to love Him and to keep
His law, that I may see His work while I live.
II. — I trust in the nobleness of human nature
— in the majesty of its faculties, and the joy of
its love. I will strive to love my neighbour as
myself; and, even when I cannot, I will act as if
I did. III. — I will labour, with such strength and
opportunity as God gives me, for my daily bread ;
and all that my hand finds to do, I will do it with
my might.
IV. — I will not deceive, or cause to be de
ceived, any human being, for my gain or pleasure ;
nor hurt, nor cause to be hurt, any human being
for my gain or pleasure; nor rob, nor cause to
be robbed, any human being for my gain or
pleasure. V. — I will not hurt any living creature need
lessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing; but will
strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and
guard and perfect all natural beauty upon the
earth. VI. — I will strive to raise my own body and
soul daily into higher powers of duty and happi
ness; not in rivalship or contention with others,
but for the help, delight and honour of others,
and for the joy and peace of my own life.
[75]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
VII. — I will obey all the laws of my country
faithfully; and the orders of its monarch, so far
as such laws and commands are consistent with
what I suppose to be the law of God; and when
they are not so, or seem in any wise to need
change, I will oppose them loyally and deliber
ately — not with malicious, concealed or disorderly
violence." I maintain that Ruskin was as great (perhaps
a greater) philosophical moralist, than he was a
teacher and interpreter of the Beautiful; but he
would never have become the ethical teacher he
was, had he not exercised his function, through
the channel of art-criticism. All that life-long
appraisal, that deft art-judgment of his, subserved
an ethical end, and was meant to work towards
a moral purpose ; not explicitly, seldom directly
or ostensibly; but always implicitly, indirectly,
and thus the more unerringly. He could not
speak of a forgotten artist, or deal with a great
picture — whether well or little known — without
introducing this. And so, in season and out of
season, all life-long, he-threw emphasis on the value
of patient toil, of conscientious and honest labour,
according to one's highest light. He believed in
the everlastingness of all that was good and true,
its endurance in the lives of others; a transmitted
power sent forth from the worker when his work
was done. He affirmed the supremacy and im
mortality of goodness. Art was nothing to him
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
if it was not an aid to a refined and noble life.
Thus his aim was to be an interpreter of the
laws of conduct, more than an appraiser of things
beautiful, and his passionate desire was to
succeed in this.
Over and over again he said to us that a well-built
character was the greatest of all possible human
treasures ; and that the supreme question for all
of us was not "what do we possess ?" but "what
do our possessions do for us ?"; not "how much
have they cost us?," but "how do they benefit
others ? " If you carefully read Modern Painters,
The Stones of Venice, Fors Clavigera, and Unto
this Last, you hear throughout these volumes the
voice of the prophet, the seer, the moralist of all
time, the teacher and interpreter of conduct. It
is in this sense that I affirm that he was a great
philosopher, not, observe, a mere lover of wisdom,
but one who lived and moved and had his being
in it; and it is for this reason that his writings
contain so much "fine gold." Who, I ask, has
unfolded the laws of the world in which we live,
in relation to human action, more clearly, ade
quately, fully; or given us a better key by which
we may for ourselves unlock its more hidden
treasures ? Wordsworth did this in many won
derful ways; but, as a teacher who has helped
to adjust for us the harmony between Man and
Nature, to bring the inner world of feeling
imagination thought and conduct into continu-
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SOME ARTISTS OF THE
ous and wise rapport with the external world in
which we live, I consider that Ruskin has done
us a still greater service.
In the mere recital, and portrayal, of the glories
of the outer Universe — in mountains, clouds,
seas, rivers, woods, meadows, and flowers — dis
closing this in magnificent and lordly prose, he
touches the inner springs of life (because the two
realms are fundamentally kindred), bringing us
out of the artificiality in which we get so often
entangled by trifles, befogged by prejudice, or
become the slaves of fashion. Ruskin has helped
us to apprehend the abiding reality of things,
and has taught us farther what to see in age with
the bright keen eye of youth, and the joyous in
tuitive apprehension of little children. It is
true that Wordsworth explained (I quote from
his preface to The Excursions)
How exquisitely the individual mind
* * * to the external world
Is fitted, and how exquisitely, too,
The external world is fitted to the mind.
and again, in the poem on Tintern Abbey, he
pleads with us: to recognize
In Nature, and the language of the sense
The anchor of our purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of the heart, and soul
Of all our moral being,
But I think we may describe Ruskin's teach
ings as to the influence of Nature over man in
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
the language which Wordsworth used of his
wonderful Sister's influence:
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble hopes and delicate fears,
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears,
And love, and hope, and joy.
He taught us that, in order to understand Na
ture aright, we must become as little children.
We must approach her with reverent wistfulness,
with thankful joyousness, and in a "wise passive-
ness." We must come to her trustfully yet en
quiringly, with tranquil solicitude and a glad
receptiveness. Then, further, while the main or central truths
which he teaches are as simple as they are pro
found, and can be easily apprehended by any
one who is docile and unsophisticated, because
they "lie foursquare to all the winds that blow,"
there is perhaps no writer on Art whose casual
remarks, and passing commentary, or obiter
dicta are so suggestive, illuminative, and in
spiring. It is a notable thing in Ruskin's career that
beginning as a student of Art, he soon saw — as
few have done — that initiation into its true
principles will lead us far beyond it; that it con
ducts, and must conduct, to the central principles
of morality. I give you a list of these as I used
to put them before the students of philosophy at
St. Andrews: truthfulness, sincerity, honesty,
[79]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
elevation, nobleness, reverence, reticence, ad
miration, magnanimity, piety, obedience. Take
the last of these. I ask who outside the roll of
Palestinian seers has taught us better, or so well,
the grand virtue of obedience to law and order ?
Who has emphasized more clearly the joy of such
submission and fealty ? Perpetual self-assertion
of our ambitious littleness tempts many of us to
rise in insurrection against the gracious limits of
that order, and leads others to rebel against the
primary laws of conduct, listening to siren voices,
and yielding to the bribe, "Ye shall be as gods,
knowing good and evil." But the glad sur
render of self to a law that is higher than we are,
joyous obedience to it, glorying in being its
servant, that — according to Ruskin — is the path
way to felicity for each individual man, woman,
and child. Nay, more, it is the royal road to the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, in the
highest degree, and for the longest time, if only
our political economists would let them know it !
Along with this, there is another duty on
which he lays emphasis, viz. : a cheerful recogni
tion of the fact that others around us are achiev
ing what we can never accomplish, that they are
now above us and will remain above us; and
therefore that our business is not to envy them —
far less to try vainly to outstrip and dislodge
them from their pre-eminence, or put in a claim
to be as good as they are — but simply to look
[80]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
with unenvious eye on their achievements, to be
taught by their successes, and to rejoice in them
even more than in our own. Were such a spirit
realized in practice, would not this be a better
world to live in, than that of jostling competi
tion, of feverish struggle, of rival interests, and
insane conflict ?
I think I am right in saying that, in respect to
these things, the influence of Ruskin is now
greater than it was while he lived. He has
stirred up hundreds and thousands of young
men and maidens, of old men and children, to
rejoice in their work, finding it "a joy for ever;"
he taught his contemporaries, and he is now
teaching his successors, the blessedness of self-
forgetful labour; he has cut out from the ambi
tion of scores of people the sordid craving for
accumulation, the love of mere display, the long
ing to be "in the swim," whether of fashion or
frivolity; he has broken up their chase of illusive
good. And so, his whole life being a protest
against the current materialism of his time, he
has put a new meaning into the words of a pred
ecessor,
We live by admiration, hope, and love.
As to his influence as a teacher in the realm
of Art, it is enough to say that he inaugurated a
new era of criticism. He succeeded in banishing
the old canons of taste; he revolutionized the
judgments and sympathies of his fellow country-
[81]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
men; he taught them that Art has a mission as
great as Philosophy, Science, and the Belles-
Lettres; that its function is to educate as well as
to delight, and to delight by educating. He thus
shews us that all noble Art is a portrayal less or
more of the inherent truth of things, of that vital
strength and beauty which underlie appearances.
He has taught us that when we apprehend the
ideal within the actual, or beyond and above it,
we ascend to what Tennyson calls "the roof and
crown of things;" or — to put it otherwise — we
pass into the Temple's inner shrine. Furthermore
that, while the perception of Beauty elicits ad
miration, it should lead on to homage, and end
in worship ; because, as he put it, "all great Art
is praise."
I shall say nothing about his poems; but, as a
writer of the most poetic prose, he was certainly
the chief Englishman of the nineteenth century,
far superior, for example, to De Quincey. Mr.
Mather has said, truly as well as beautifully,
that "as a writer, strength and beauty are in his
right hand." Mr. Spillman and Mr. Frederic
Harrison both speak of him as the chief wielder
of our English prose. It is true that he had
notable masters, and many sources of inspiration ;
the English Bible, with our noble Anglo-Saxon
Prayer-book, Homer, Hooker, Scott, Carlyle ; but
his own style is unique and unborrowed from
anyone. It is the outcome of spirit-vision, the
[82]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
language of a soul on fire, the clear, indubious
utterance of one who felt the truth of the saying,
"There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in
the world, and none of them is without significa
tion," of a spirit familiar with many an apoca
lypse of the Beautiful. His winged words were
the inevitable outcome of his "open vision."
Ruskin's language is lucid, because his thought
was always clear. Had the latter been obscure
or clouded, the former would have been intricate,
perplexed, or halting. But in all his writings the
seer, the artist, and the poet combined to make
the stylist. He used to lament that people cared
more for the form than for the substance of his
teaching. "All my life," he said, "I have been
talking to the people; and they care not for the
matter, but only for the manner of my words.
I find I have been talking too much, and doing
too little." And he was so modest as to his
success in writing descriptive prose that he said
Tennyson had beaten him entirely as a delin
eator, or "illustrator of natural beauty."
Mr. Frederic Harrison has directed our special
attention to the right noble description of the
Old Tower of Calais Church in the fourth volume
of Modern Painters, which is certainly one of the
grandest things Ruskin ever wrote. I shall not
quote it, but rather — with the same end in view
as Mr. Harrison's — read you part of a letter
written from Laon in the north of France, and
[83]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
descriptive of it, which I am sure you have never
heard, as it has not been printed. It is, I think,
equal to the best that has seen the light of day;
and it is also a good example of the length of his
sentences, which do not seem long, and which
could with difficulty be shortened. You are
perhaps aware that there is a sentence in Modern
Painters, in which there are 628 words, with 73
commas and semicolons! What I am going to
read is not of that portentous length, but it was
written at a single sitting, and it is an instance of
his earlier style surviving in later years.
"Laon, August 12, 1882.
"We had a hardish day from Calais here, and
did not get in till supper time. Clean beds, and
windows looking out on the country, freshened
us for early coffee; and we have been out from
half past seven till half past ten, exploring in real
French morning sunshine. Except Assissi, I
never saw a place like it; cathedral, for that mat
ter, out and out grander than Assissi would be
without the supporting terraces ; instead of them
it has avenues of plane trees, above a sloping
garden of mixed vineyard and flowers ; and the
town — cheerfully old-fashioned, and lively, yet
contented — with the quaintest pepper-boxes, and
cruets, and cats-ears of ins and outs on roofs, and
ups and downs in walls; and on the really old
outside walls, the houses mixed up among the
[84]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
buttresses and towers; with a window here, and
a balcony there ; and a bit of arch built in, and a
bit of bow built out ; and a peep-hole in the roof,
and a secret stair in the corner; and nooks, and
crooks, and outlooks, and sidelooks; and beauti
ful bits of garden kept gay, but not trim; and
vines, and pear-trees drooping all over with big
pears; and lovely moss and ivy, and feathery
green, and house-leek, and everything that ever
grew on walls, or in chinks; and every now and
then a cluster of spring bluebells, rooted on a
buttress angle and seven feet high themselves,
like fox-gloves made saints of, and going off into
raptures of chime ; and little wells dripping into
cisterns, and recesses with steps down and roofs
over; for all the world like Siena, with sweet gush
and tinkle and gleam of running surface, and
presently all aglow again with marigolds and
purple clematis, and scarlet geraniums, and blue
distance seen all beyond. * * *
"Yours, John Ruskin."
This letter may be followed by two passages
from Modern Painters. The first is his descrip
tion of the Roman Campagna :
"Perhaps there is no more impressive scene
on earth than the solitary extent of the Cam
pagna of Rome under evening light. Let the
reader imagine himself for the moment with
drawn from the sounds and motion of the living
world, and sent forth alone into this wild and
[85]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
wasted plain. The earth yields and crumbles
beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly; for
its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like
the dusty wreck of the bones of men. The long,
knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the
evening wind, and the shadows of its motion
shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that lift
themselves to the sunlight. Hillocks of mould
ering earth heave around him, as if the dead
beneath were struggling in their sleep. Scattered
blocks of black stone, four-square remnants
of mighty edifices, not one left upon another, lie
upon them, to keep them down. A dull purple
poisonous haze stretches level along the desert,
veiling its spectral wrecks of many ruins, on
whose rents the red light rests, like dying fire on
defiled altars ; the blue ridge of the Alban Mount
lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear,
quiet sky; watch towers of dark clouds stand
steadfastly along the promontories of the Apen
nines; from the plain to the mountains, the shat
tered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the
darkness like shadowy and countless troops of
funeral mourners, passing from a nation's grave."
(From the Preface to Modern Painters, 1843.)
One instinctively compares this with Brown
ing's characterization of the Campagna in one
of his lyrics. His poem is entitled Two in the
Campagna, of which the following are three
stanzas: [86]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt, since hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?
The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air —
Rome's ghost since her decease.
Such life there, through such length of hours,
Such miracles performed in play.
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way,
While Heaven looks from its towers!
Again take what Ruskin wrote about the
clouds of the sky. "It is a strange thing how
little in general people know about the sky. It
is the part of creation in which Nature has done
more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the
sole and evident purpose of talking to him and
teaching him, than in any other of her works,
and it is just the part in which we least attend
to her. Every essential purpose of the sky might,
so far as we know, be answered, if once in three
days or thereabouts, a great, ugly black rain-
cloud were brought up over the blue, and every
thing well watered, and so all left blue again till
next time, with perhaps a film of morning and
evening mist for dew. And, instead of this, there
is not a moment of any day of our lives when
Nature is not producing scene after scene, pic-
[87]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
ture after picture, glory after glory, and work
ing still upon such exquisite and constant prin
ciples ofthe most perfect beauty; and it is quite
certain it is all done for us, and intended for our
perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever
placed, however far from other scources of in
terest or beauty, has this being done for him
constantly. The sky is fitted in all its functions
for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the
heart, for the soothing of it, and purifying it from
its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes
capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for
two moments together; almost human in its pas
sions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost
divine in its infinity."
Again this is the way in which he describes a
cliff: "A group of trees changes the colour of
its leafage from week to week, and its position
from day to day; it is sometimes languid with
heat, and sometimes heavy with rain ; the torrent
swells or falls in shower or sun; the best leaves
of the foreground may be dined upon by cattle,
or trampled by unwelcome investigators of the
chosen scene. But the cliff can neither be eaten
nor trampled down; neither bowed by the shad
ow, nor withered by the heat; it is always ready
for us, when we are inclined to labour; will al
ways wait for us, when we would rest; and, what
is best of all, will always talk to us when we are
inclined to converse. With its own patient and
[88]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
victorious presence, cleaving daily through cloud
after cloud, and reappearing still through the
tempest drift, lofty and serene through the pass
ing rents of blue, it seems partly to rebuke, and
partly to guard, and partly to calm and chasten,
the agitations of the feeble human soul that
watches it; and that must be indeed a dark per
plexity, or a grievous pain, which will not be in
some degree enlightened or relieved by the vision
of it, when the evening shadows are blue on its
foundation, and the last rays of the sunset resting
on the fair height of its golden fortitude."
These will suffice as examples of Ruskin's
prose style. Returning now to his teaching, to
re-emphasize some of its features.
It may be said that Ruskin was as notable a
missionary as ever lived, pleading all his life, by
speech and writing, for the union of the true, the
beautiful and the good ; but he often felt that he
was only a herald, preparing the way for a con
summation and result which he himself would
never see fulfilled. He once said to me that his
was "the voice of one crying in wilderness," and
that he could not even say that "the kingdom,"
of which he desired the advent, was "at hand."
But think what we owe to him, as the appraiser
of works by the forgotten dead, the interpreter
and eulogist of artists disesteemed in the past;
Tintoret, Botticelli, Carpaccio, Luini, Verrocchio,
Donatello, and many another down to Turner.
[89]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
He said he was satisfied with appraising the work
of others, disinterring buried reputations; but
how did he teach us of this ? As George Eliot
said, "with the inspiration of the Hebrew proph
ets." And so, the dignity of labour, the bless
edness of honest toil, were taught anew. " Work,
work, work; 'tis better than what you work to
get," wrote Mrs. Browning, and Ruskin's whole
life was an illustration of it. He was by far the
most voluminous and versatile English writer of
the nineteenth century — and no one has done
so much as he did by his writings to raise the
tone of feeling and judgment as to the Beautiful
within the Anglo-Saxon race. No one has done
so much to shew what it is, and where it is to be
found; what fosters, and what retards it; giv
ing us almost a new reading and commentary on
its laws. It is not too much to say that, from the
date of the publication of Modern Painters on
ward, his two dicta that "all great Art is a Rev
elation," and that "all great Art is Praise," have
been attested by results.
Grant that he occasionally pushed the truths
he taught too far. All who originate new depar
tures do that. They cannot help doing it, and
they would not effect a change in the current
ideas of their time if they did not do it, if they
did not overstep the via media, or juste milieu.
No one ever starts a fresh movement without
carrying it at first too far; especially if he is a
[90]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
many-sided genius. Now note the range of the
subjects which Ruskin has studied, and on which
he has written to purpose; philosophy, espe
cially that of ethics, theology, political economy,
history, architecture, painting, sculpture, en
graving, agriculture, education, sociology, the
sciences of mineralogy, geology and botany,
music, mythology, prosody, criticism, topog
raphy, etc., etc. He was almost as encyclopedic
as Aristotle. Then note his varied work as a
practical reformer. Not content with merely
preaching his evangel, he formed a Society for
the spread of these ideas, which he felt to be
fundamentally true, and yet were disesteemed.
That Society he has helped by numerous gifts.
No teacher has ever been so lavish of gifts to
contemporaries, and to posterity.
There is no doubt that many of his works will
live as long as the English language is spoken;
and it is note-worthy that in them all, while
there is much trenchant criticism, there is noth
ing selfish or sinister, or envious, or cruel.
Severe as was his wrath against all that degrades
human nature, he never wrote a sentence which
he afterwards regretted; although he outgrew —
and acknowledged that he outgrew — his earlier
opinions, and his juvenile way of stating things.
It was said by him and by Matthew Arnold
(whom we may bracket together in this respect)
that they never wrote a sentence which they
[91]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
wished to hide from the light of day, or desired
the recording angel to erase. Ruskin once wrote
to our common friend, James Smetham, " I never
wrote a private letter to any human being which
I would not let a bill-sticker chalk up six feet
high on Hyde Park wall, and stand myself in
Piccadilly and say T did it!'" And his pub
lished letters, multitudinous as they are — in
the Arrows of the Chase, Hortus Inclusus, etc. —
are not a tithe of the number which he wrote.
On the 24th December 1899, I visited Brant-
wood for the last time during Ruskin's life, less
than a month before he died. I hardly expected
to see him, as he could not walk, or even speak
much; but, with the same kindliness he shewed
in former years, he asked me to come up, and I
spent some time in the delightful turret-room, so
well known to all his visitors, whence the view of
Coniston Lake and the mountains beyond it is so
grand. His favourite birds were at his window,
and — as by some subtile affinity — soothed him
by their presence, and consoled him by their
twittering song ; while the gracious silence of old
age was, in some respects, more impressive than
the many-sided speech of earlier years had been.
I was told to continue talking, though he re
sponded little, for he liked to listen, when he
could not speak. His face, his most impressive
hands, his wonderful eyes, and every motion of
his frame were expressive beyond measure. I
[92]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
knew it was a farewell meeting, but there was no
sorrow, only a sense of tranquillity and peace.
Three weeks afterward he had an attack of
influenza, and passed from the land of the living.
I went up to the funeral at Coniston. So soon
as I knew that he had died, I sent to Florence
for a "crown of wild olive" to lay upon his tomb.
It did not arrive on the burial day, and I had to
content myself with writing that motto on a
sheet of cardboard, along with "Unto this Last,"
which was laid with many another offering on his
grave. It was a rainy, wintry, day; Wetherlam,
and the surrounding mountains being all
wreathed with January mist. The coffin had
been brought round from Brantwood on the pre
vious evening, that his remains might lie in the
church for twenty hours before interment; and
those of us who arrived early saw the catafalque
with violets and lilies of the valley round the
head, the body covered with wreaths of the yel
low and red roses he loved so well, and sur
rounded with many other decorative winter
flowers. A Westmoreland lady-friend sang the
burial hymns; amongst them one by Canon
Rawnsley, who has written nothing better in
verse than the memorial lines called forth on that
occasion. The service ended, his body was
borne reverently to its last resting place, and
lowered noiselessly — "earth to earth, dust to
dust" — in a sort of cryptic columbarium, its
[93]

SOME 19th CENTURY ARTISTS
sides lined with polished stones of white marble.
It is close to the graves of the three sisters — Mar
garet, Mary, and Susanah Beaver, — to whom
we owe the Frondes A grestes and Hortus Inclusus.
Year by year, in their old age, when they
could no longer visit Brantwood, Ruskin used
to send down one of his Turner drawings to be
kept by them as long as they liked, and then ex
changed for another, just " to give pleasure to the
young old ladies of the Thwaite. " At the funeral
were many representatives of those who owed
so much to him — working-men, and working-
women, members of the guilds and societies he
had called into being; and they realized at his
grave — as perhaps never before — the significance
ofthe words, " Blessed are the dead."
Certainly, "being dead" Ruskin "yet speak-
eth." He has spoken many words that cannot
die, gracious household words, bringing out of
his treasury things new and old. His mind and
heart were ever opulent, populous with thought.
They were also marvellously opalescent, and
Caught at every turn
The colours of the sun.
Still more especially, as some one has said,
" his life was as a tree planted by the water-side,
that bringeth forth its fruit in due season."
Et folium ejus non defluit,
Et omnia quaecunque faciat prosperabuntur.
[94]

Plate XI

Braun Autotype

J. F. MILLET, portrait of himself

Plate XII

Braun Autotype

PASSAGE OF THE WILD GEESE

Plate XII [

Drawing, Boston Museum

THE SOWER

Original Lithograph, British Museum

Plate XIV

Braun Autotype

THE GLEANERS

Plate XV

Ik ^

Boston Museum

KNITTING SHEPHERDESS

Plate XVI

Braun Autotype

THE MAX WITH THE HOE

Plate XVII

Braun Autotype

THE ANGELUS [1859]

Plate XVIII

Boston Museum

THE SHEPHERDESS [1869]

Plate XTX

lonidcs Collection, South Kensington Museum

THE WOOD-SAWYERS

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll  1  Illllll  lllllllll  IlllllllllllllllllllllllllllUg

IIIIIIHIIllllllllllllllllllll

I  lllllllllllllllilllfllllllllllllllllllllllllllNIIIIIIIIIIIH

LECTURE FOUR

THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHER
HOOD, ESPECIALLY DANTE
GABRIEL ROSSETTI, WITH
REMINISCENCES.

]T is comparatively easy for
anyone now to trace the rise
and development of the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood of
England. There are scores of
books, and articles in maga
zines, devoted to it. Only
three members of the original group survive — the
veteran painter, Holman Hunt, and William
Rossetti, the brother of the artist-poet, being
the most important.
I think it may be of use to you if I outline the
main features of the movement. I believe that
a succinct, and very important record of it will
yet be given to the world in the light of all that
it has led to. But what I have now to do to the
art students in Chicago is to unfold its charac
teristics in the briefest manner possible. It was
[95]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
a reaction, a protest, and a new tendency. There
was rebellion in its earlier efforts, which were so
ignorantly dealt with by those critics whose judg
ments were enslaved by tradition and conven
tionality. A most important point to be noted,
however, is this. It was not only an artistic
but a literary revolt, and a poetical renaissance.
It was a new way of looking at, of appraising
and reproducing both Man and Nature, which
found a simultaneous expression in all the de
partments or sub-sections of the Beautiful; in
Poetry, Music, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture,
and Decorative Handicraft.
Many have asked a question which it is diffi
cult to answer, Who was the founder of the
Brotherhood ? Had it a single originator ? or
did several co-operate in starting it? I think
that the latter of the two suggestions is the cor
rect one. No one has written of it better, or so
well as, Ruskin in his essay on Pre-Raphael-
itism, first published in 1851, eight years after
the first volume of Modern Painters came out;
and from it I shall give you a brief quotation.
He refers to the ' 'instinct which was urging
every painter in Europe at the same moment to
his true duty — the faithful representation of all
objects of historical interest, or of natural beauty,
existent at the period; representation such as
might at once aid the advance of the sciences,
and keep a faithful record of every monument of
[96]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
past ages, which was likely to be swept away in the
approaching eras of revolutionary change." * * *
He goes on to say: " Know once for all that a poet
on canvas is exactly the same species of creature
as a poet in song, and nearly every error in our
methods of teaching [Art] will be done away
with. For who among us now thinks of bring
ing men up to be poets ? of producing poets by
any kind of general recipe or method of cultiva
tion ? * * * But it being required to pro
duce a poet on canvas, what is our way of setting
to work ? We begin, in all probability, by telling
the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that Nature is
full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but
that Raphael is perfection, and that the more
he copies Raphael the better; that after much
copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do
himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original man
ner; that is to say to try to do something very
clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever
something is to be properly subjected to Raphael
esque rules, is to have a principal light occupy
ing one-seventh of its space, and a principal
shadow occupying one-third of the same ; that no
two people's heads in the picture are to be turned
the same way, and that all the personages repre
sented are to possess ideal beauty of the highest
order, which ideal beauty consists partly in a
Greek outline of nose, partly in proportions ex
pressible in decimal fractions between the lips
[97]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
and chin; but mostly in that degree of improve
ment which the youth of sixteen is to bestow upon
God's work in general. This I say is the kind of
teaching which through various channels, Royal
Academy lecturings, press criticisms, public en
thusiasm, and not least by solid weight of gold,
we give to our young men. And, we wonder we
have no painters!"
Then follows a magnificent comparison of the
work of two ofthe landscape painters of England.
He supposes them "both free in the same field in
a mountain valley. One sees everything, small
and large, with about the same clearness ; moun
tains and grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the
branches, the veins on the pebbles, the bubbles
in the stream; but he can remember nothing and
invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his
mighty task; abandoning at once all thought of
seizing transient effects, or giving general im
pression of that which his eyes present to him in
microscopical dissection, he chooses some small
portion out of the infinite scene, and calculates
with courage the number of weeks which must
elapse before he can do justice to the intensity
of his perceptions, or the fulness of matter in his
subject. "Meantime the other has been watching the
change of the clouds, and the march of the light
along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire
scene in broad soft masses of true gradation, and
[98]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
the very feebleness of his sight is in some sort an
advantage to him, in making him more sensible
of the aerial mystery of distance, and hiding
from him the multitudes of circumstances which
it would have been impossible for him to repre
sent. But there is not one change in the casting
of the jagged shadows along the hollows of the
hills, but it is fixed on his mind forever; not a
flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud
about their bases, but he has watched it as it
melts away, and could recall it to its lost place
in heaven by the slightest effort of his thought.
Not only so, but thousands and thousands of
such images, of older scenes, remain congre
gated in his mind, each mingling in new associa
tions with those now visibly passing before him,
and these again confused with other images
of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flash
ing by in sudden troops. Fancy how his paper
will be covered with stray symbols and blots,
and undecipherable shorthand; as for his sitting
down to "draw from Nature," there was not
one of the things which he wished to represent
that stayed for so much as five seconds together,
but none of them escaped for all that. They
are sealed up in that strange storehouse of his ;
he may take one of them out, perhaps, this day
twenty years, and paint it in his dark room, far
away. * * * Grant to the first considerable in
ventive power, with exquisite sense of colour;
[99]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
and give to the second, in addition to all his
other faculties, the eye of an eagle ; and the first
is John Everett Millais, the second Joseph Will
iam Turner."
Farther on in the same essay we read: "To
wards the close of last century among the various
drawings executed according to the* quiet manner
of the time, in greyish blue, with brown fore
grounds, some began to be noticed as exhibiting
rather more than ordinary diligence and deli
cacy, signed W. Turner. * * * Gradually and
cautiously the blues became mingled with deli
cate green, and then with gold; the browns in the
foreground became first more positive, and then
were slightly mingled with other local colours;
while the touch, which had at first been heavy
and broken, like that of the ordinary drawing
jnasters of the time, grew more and more refined
and expressive until it lost itself in a method of
execution often too delicate for the eye to follow,
rendering, with a precision before unexampled,
both the texture and the form of every object.
The style may be considered as perfectly formed
about the year 1800, and it remained unchanged
for twenty years.
"During that period the painter had attempted,
and with more or less success had rendered, ev
ery order of landscape subject, but always on the
same principle, subduing the colours of Nature
into a harmony of which the key-notes are grey-
[100]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
ish green and brown; pure blue, and delicate
golden yellow being admitted in small quantity
as the lowest and highest limits of shade and
light; and bright local colours in extremely small
quantity in figures and other minor accessories.
"Pictures executed on such a system are not,
properly speaking, works in colour at all; they
are studies of light and shade, in which both the
shade and the distance are rendered in the gen
eral hue which best expresses their warmth and
solidity. This advantage may just as well be
taken as not, in studies of light and shadow to be
executed by the hand; but the use of two, three,
or four colors, always in the same relations and
places, does not in the least constitute the work a
study of colour, any more than the brown en
gravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the
idea of colour be in general more present to the
artist's mind when he was at work on one of
these drawings, than when he was using pure
brown in the mezzotint engraving. But the idea
of space, warmth, and freshness being not suc
cessfully expressible in a single tint, and per
fectly expressible by the admission of three or
four, he allows himself that advantage when it is
possible, without in the least embarrassing him
self with the actual colour of the objects to be
represented. A stone in the foreground might
in Nature have been cold grey, but it will be
drawn nevertheless, of a rich brown, because it is
[101]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
in the foreground ; a hill in the distance might in
Nature be purple with heath, or golden with
furzes but it will be drawn, nevertheless, of a cool
grey, because it is in the distance.
"This at least was the general theory, carried
out with great severity in many both of the draw
ings and pictures executed by him during the
period; in others more or less modified by the
cautious introduction of colour, as the painter
felt his liberty increasing ; for the system was evi
dently never considered as final, or as anything
more than a means of progress; the conventional
easily manageable colour was visibly adopted,
only that his mind might be at perfect liberty to
address itself to the acquirement of the first and
most necessary knowledge in all Art, that of form.
But as form, in landscape, implies vast bulk and
space, the use of the tints which enabled him best
to express them was actually auxiliary to the
mere drawing; and therefore not only permissi
ble, but even necessary; while more brilliant and
varied tints were never indulged in, except when
they might be introduced without the slightest
danger of diverting his mind from his principal
object. * * *
"The system of his colour being thus simpli
fied, he could address all the strength of his mind
to the accumulation of facts of form ; his choice
of subject and methods of treatment are there
fore as various as his colour is simple. No sub-
[102]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
ject was too low or too high for him. * * *
"What general feeling, it may be asked in
credulously, can forward all this? This — the
greatest of all feelings — an utter forgetfulness of
self. Throughout the whole period with which
we are at present concerned he appears a man of
sympathy absolutely infinite, or sympathy so all-
embracing that I know nothing but that of
Shakespeare comparable with it. * * * This is
the root of his greatness, and it follows that this
sympathy must give him a subtle power of ex
pression, even of the character of mere material
things, such as no other painter ever possessed."
Ruskin then notes what he calls "one other
characteristic of Turner's mind at this period,
viz., its reverence for talent in others" and his
consequent modesty. "The chief character
istic of the works of Turner's second period," he
says, were "a new energy inherent in the mind
of the painter, diminishing the repose and exalt
ing the force and fire of his conceptions, and the
presence of colour, as at least an essential, and
often a principal, element of design." "I have
no doubt that the immediate reasons of this
change was the impression made upon him by
the colours of the continental skies * * * .
Every subject was thenceforward primarily con
ceived in colour."
Ruskin enlarges on Turner's marvellous mem
ory, both as to form and colour, its unerring re-
[103]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
ports of past occurrences and experience ; his be
ing able to compose some of his greatest pictures
from memory, without a single glance at Nature.
But he also points out that towards the close of
the second, which was the central period of his
labour, "trusting for ten or twelve years almost
entirely to memory, while living mostly in Lon
don, he became conventional, and between 1830
and 1840 painted many pictures altogether un
worthy of him. But he was not thus to close his
career. In the summer of 1840 or 1841, he
undertook another journey into Switzerland.
It was at least forty years since he had first seen
the Alps, and the perfect repose of his youth re
turned to his mind; all conventionality being
done away with by the impression he received
from the Alps after his long separation from
them." * * * He adds that his work done then
and in following years "bears the same relation
to those of the rest of his life that the colours of
sunset do to those of the day; and will be rec
ognized as the noblest landscapes ever yet con
ceived by human intellect."
When Dante Gabriel Rossetti, uneasy because
of the delay that occurred before he could be
admitted into the painting-school of the Royal
Academy, wrote, in the year 1 848, to Ford Mad-
dox Brown to know if he could be received as a
student of his, the first step in the formation of
the Brotherhood was taken. ¦ Rossetti had ap-
[104]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
parently been impressed by the cartoons which
Maddox Brown had exhibited at Westminster
Hall four years previously, and by others of his
works, which seemed to him more original than
those of the teachers under whom he would have
to study at the Academy. Maddox Brown was
only a few years older than his correspondent.
He had attained to no distinction as yet, and re
mained outside the circle of art-success all his
life. He was surprised at the novel request,
and the story is current that he fancied he was
being made the subject of a practical joke; and
that, when he went to the house of his corre
spondent, he provided himself with a strong
stick, which he might use for defence if assaulted
unawares. Rossetti was received as a pupil, and
became a life-long friend. But before that mem
orable meeting he had got to know another
youth, William Holman Hunt; and they together
soon became acquainted with a third, John
Everett Millais. These three young men were
the original members of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. Others soon gathered round this
nucleus. As Wordsworth and Coleridge, the
founders of the earlier but somewhat parallel
movement in Poetry and Letters, had associates
and co-mates — many of whom were ignorant of
the source of that "stream of tendency" which
bore them all onwards — many in the new art-
world of England were influenced by the same
[105]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
tide; although they did not enter into, or were
not enrolled within, the brotherhood.
That brotherhood was moulded to a very large
extent by the time in which it arose. Its charac
teristics were partly due to the fortunate decay
of the old system by which artists had pupils in a
school which carried on, and carried out, their
work; the master forming the style of his pupils.
It was not, however, by these temporary masters
that such men as Hunt and Millais were influ
enced, but by the young enthusiasts who studied
with them. On the whole we must regard Hol
man Hunt as the leader of the School, although
not its founder. As already said, there was in
one sense no particular founder; but upon this
point you should consult the two gossipy but fas
cinating volumes by Holman Hunt, in which
you will find numerous side-lights as to the
nature ofthe brotherhood, as well as an authentic
story of its origin. It is also worthy of note that
this fraternity was not a syndicate, or aca
demic union. Being a brotherhood it was of
necessity a transient bond of union, and sympa
thetic fellowship. Those who are curious in the
search for parallels may find a resemblance to it
in the delightful University brotherhoods estabr
lished at Oxford and Cambridge in England;
such as that remarkable club nick-named "Old
Mortality" at Oxford, of which your new English
Ambassador at Washington, Mr. Bryce, was one
[106]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
of the original members, along with the poet
Swinburne, and others; and that goodly fellow
ship of "The Apostles" at the sister University
at Cambridge, which has been quite recently
described in an admirable volume by Mrs. Brook-
field. It included Tennyson, and his friend Arthur
Hallam (of In Memoriam), Monckton Milnes,
afterwards Lord Houghton the friend and biog
rapher of Keats, Frederick Denison Maurice,
and many another celebrity. But I go further
back for the best parallel to the formation of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by a process of
elective affinity. It is to the wondrous friend
ship of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and to their
superlative work — wholly ignored at the time by
the accredited critics of the hour — which dated
from the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798,
and gave rise to one of the most remarkable
changes as well as revivals in English Lit
erature since its commencement. It is in that
monumental, and as yet unexhausted, literary
revival that we find the great predecessor of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in English Art.
But it had also an artistic prototype in the French
literary movement inaugurated by Sainte-Beuve
and his friends, in their admiration for Victor
Hugo and others. A group of young enthusi
asts, scarcely out of their teens, their intuitions
of the ideal transcending all past achievement,
but with a sure sense of coming leadership, pro-
[107]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
gress and achievement, made this Brotherhood
one of the noblest ever formed. It was an asso
ciation based on common aims and aspirations,
on a return to Nature and a loyal following of
her, escaping from the bondage of convention,
and reproducing the actual world, adding the
new hints it contained of the ideal. /
Will you also note this fact that, while the
Brotherhood was composed of a remarkable
group of men, the way in which they set about
their work, and the manner in which the con
viction of their artistic mission awoke in them,
was still more remarkable.
Ford Maddox Brown wrote much in his diary
as to this. Eg., "4th September, 1847, glancing
over the pages of Sir James Mackintosh's His
tory of England I came upon a passage 'it is
scarcely to be wondered at that English at this
period should have become the judicial language
of the century, ennobled as it had been by the
genius of Chaucer', this at once fixed me. I im
mediately saw a vision of Chaucer, reading his
poems to knights and ladies fair, to the King and
Court, amid air and sunshine." He at first
thought of calling his picture The Seeds of the
English Language; and, afterwards, The Seeds
and Fruits of the English Language. As an art
ist who then, and afterwards, experienced many
ofthe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,"
it is interesting to record what he wrote of it in
[108]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
that year. "Very likely it may only add one
more to the kicks I have received from Fortune."
But " of one thing she cannot rob me, the pleas
ure I have already extracted — distilled I may
say — from the work itself. Warned by experi
ence, I have learned not to trust only to hope for
my reward, nor consider my toil as a sacrifice;
but to value the pleasure, the pleasure I daily
receive from working out a subject after my own
heart, a love-offering of my never fruitless past."
Again he wrote "27th December. Thought
of a subject as I went along, Wickliff reading his
translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt, Chau
cer and Gower present." In 1854 ne wrote in
his journal: "I began the background for
Work" — one of his greatest pictures — "in the
streets of Hampstead, painting them all day for
two months, having spent much time in inventing
an apparatus." Of his "Last of England" —
another characteristic subject, because of the
pathos and intense humanity displayed in the
farewell given to their old home by voyagers to an
unknown world — he writes, "This work, rep
resenting an outdoor scene, without sunlight, I
painted chiefly out of doors, when the snow was
lying on the ground."
To show the influence of literary criticism, or
rather of literary appraisal, on the development
of the work of the Brotherhood with which I am
dealing, I turn to Ruskin first of all, and instar
[109]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
omnium, because of his unrivalled insight into the
mannerisms, the triviality, the dreary common
place, and the dead traditions of the past. It is
a noteworthy fact that the first volume of Mod
ern Painters — the chief epoch-making book in
the annals of Art — was lent to Holman Hunt as
a boy, and by him handed on to others, and that
its influence over the Brotherhood was supreme.
Its fundamental plea "for Truth to Nature"
which alone could lead to new departures of
any value, its protest against conventionalism,
unreality, pretence, and sham of every kind, did
more than any picture did, at the outset of the
movement, to hasten that return to Nature, which
was its watchword.
There have been many movements in literary
and philosophical, as well as artistic work which
may be described as "returns to Nature." But
perhaps the greatest, because the most explicitly
formulated, was that of Ruskin. I used to hear
him talk of it with Carlyle at Cheyne Row more
than thirty years ago; and I have tried to re
produce their conversation in part. It would at
times meander through meadows of pleasantry,
then burst into torrents of invective in such sen
tences as these :
"Nature, Nature," said Carlyle, "I want to
get to Nature."
"What do you mean by Nature?" replied
Ruskin. "I want to get back to it as I saw it in
[110]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
my boyhood, when I was taught by my father
and mother," said Carlyle. "What kind of a
sight was that," replied Ruskin, "if you didn't
see that Nature reveals the supernatural; as the
whole history of Christendom has been disclos
ing a divine within the human, as its inmost
pulse." "Ah, well, ah, well," said Carlyle,
"perhaps you are right. I do not know; for, as
one of our poets has said, 'all my mind is troubled
with a doubt.' " " But," said Ruskin, "what is to
to be the end and outcome of all our present tur
moil?" "I don't know," said Carlyle; "no
man knows. But I am sure of this, the real will
survive." "Yes," said Ruskin, "but in what
form and of what kind ? The real has many
aspects, and many counterfeits." "Well, well,"
said Carlyle, "we must wait, and I am sure that
the best of everything in this world will live, even
if some of our wisdom grows out of the root of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."
But for the work and influence of this brother
hood England would not have known many an
other artist who was taught by it, and yet did
not belong to it by any outward tie of affinity,
above all, Frederick Walker.
But note this, that the Society — which was
never broken up, but which (like all societies
subsequent) dissolved by necessity — was the
parent of many artistic tendencies. Millais
broke away into a magnificent idealised neo-
[111]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
realism; Rossetti on the other side into a still
more magnificent realistic neo-idealism. Of still
living members of the Brotherhood I do not
speak; although in the one who remains pre
eminent there is much of both of these tenden
cies wondrously united, in his last reproduction
of an early effort, which will probably go down
to posterity, as his greatest work. I refer to
Holman Hunt's Lady of Shallott.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a means
to an end ; not a stepping-stone across a stream ;
but one in the sense in which Tennyson wrote,
that Men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
Rossetti, Woolner, Maddox Brown, Millais,
subsequently left it, on the ground that, hav
ing assimilated its best, they had outgrown it,
and were able to go on to other things; some
more slowly, others more swiftly; but it remained
to all of them a landmark, as it had been a rally
ing point to them as youthful enthusiasts and
devotees. They soon saw the inadequacy of the
term which had been taken to describe their
brotherhood, but it was not discarded, or dis
owned. The wistful retrospective gaze of the found
ers, who saw in those early painters who pre
ceded Raphael the everlasting merits of sincer
ity, of truthfulness, and a face-to-face vision of
[112]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
Nature, as well as a direct and generally true
reproduction of what they saw, was an unspeak
able gain to the art of England, to the century in
which they lived, and which they adorned. When
the leaders outgrew their early cult, without feel
ing its poverty or ignoring its trammels, the
average public mind was enabled to rise above
contemporary hindrance, and to see visions of
a higher ideality than the nation had previously
known. THE JOURNAL OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITE
BROTHERHOOD
In this Journal, kept by its literary member,
William Michael Rossetti, from 1849 to 1853,
and edited by him in 1900, we have the most
authentic record, although not the most graphic
picture, of the work the Pre-Raphaelites did.
The secretary writes:
"In 1848 there were four young students in
the Royal Academy Schools, John Everett Mil
lais and William Holman Hunt in the Life-
School, Thomas Woolner in the Sculpture-
School, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the
Antique-School. Woolner, born in 1825, was
the eldest; Millais, born in 1829, the youngest.
These young men were all capable and ambi
tious; they had all, except Rossetti, exhibited
something, to which (more especially in the case
of Millais) the Art authorities and the public
had proved not wholly indifferent. They enter-
[113]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
tained a hearty contempt for much of the Art —
flimsy, frivolous, and conventional — which they
saw in practice around them; and they wanted
to shew what was in them in the way of solid and
fresh thought or invention, personal observation,
and the intimate study of, and strict observance
to Nature. The young men came together,
interchanged ideas, and were joined by two
other youthful painter-students, James Collin-
son and Frederick George Stephens, and also
myself, who was not an artist. So there were
seven men forming the Pre-Raphaelite Brother
hood. * * * There was not much defiance in it,
some banter, some sense, a great deal of resolute
purpose, a large opening for misrepresentations,
and a carte-blanche invitation for abuse. After
thus constituting themselves, what they had to
do was to design, paint, and model, and one of
them in especial, Dante Rossetti, to write poetry ;
and they did it with a will.
Some little while having elapsed, it was deter
mined that one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers
should be Secretary, and should keep a Journal;
and I, as not being taken up by art-work, was
pitched upon for the purpose. I accordingly
began the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Journal.
This Journal was entirely my own affair, and
was compiled without pre-consulting any of my
fellow-members, and without afterwards sub
mitting it to them. * * * It was not in any
[114]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
sense a diary personal to myself, and was pro
ducible to any member who might choose to
ask for it. I don't think anyone ever did. * * *
The extracts here presented are something
like a half of the extant MS. It is a highly
authentic account of the early stages in a move
ment which proved of great importance."
The following is a sample of the contents of
this Journal.
"Sunday, 20th May, 1849. * * * Woolner
came in the evening and shewed us two verses of
a new Song he has begun (the first beginning of
My Beautiful Lady). * * *
"Monday, 21st. * * * Gabriel recited lots of
Patmore, Browning, Mrs. Browning, etc. * * *
" 23rd, Millais said he had thoughts of paint
ing a hedge (as a subject) to the closest point of
imitation, with a bird's nest — a thing which has
never been attempted. Another subject he has
in his eye is a river sparrow's nest, built (as he
says they are) between three reeds." * * *
"July 14th. A contemplated Magazine dis
cussed (that afterwards issued as The Germ).
The title first suggested, Monthly Thoughts in
Literature and Art. Other titles thought of
were The Seed, The Scroll, The Artist, Art and
Poetry. "Nov. 22nd. * * * Patmore said that Ten
nyson is the greatest man he ever came in contact
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SOME ARTISTS OF THE
with, far greater in his life than in his writing,
perfectly sincere and frank, never paying uncan-
did compliments. Browning takes more pains
to please and is altogether much more a man of
the world. Patmore thinks that Browning does
not value himself so highly as he is rated by
Gabriel and me."
"Dec. 8th. Gabriel read The Princess
through, and both Woolner and he pronounced
it the finest poem since Shakespeare, superior
even to Sordello. To this I demur."
"Tuesday 18th. Tennyson's poem of King
Arthur is not yet commenced, though he has
been for years past maturing the conception of
it; and he intends that it should occupy him
some fifteen years." * * *
"Feb. 26th, 1850. * * * Marston says that
Browning, before publishing Sordello, sent it to
him to read, saying that this time, at any rate,
the public should not accuse him of being unin
telligible! "Sunday 9th March, 1851. We voted to
keep, under the same obligation as a Pre-Raph
aelite Brotherhood meeting, the birthday of
Shakespeare. "May 13th. Ruskin's explanation of the
name 'Pre-Raphaelite' is very sensible.
" 'They intend to return to early days in this
point only; that, as far as in them lies, they will
draw either what they see, or what they suppose
[116]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
might have been the actual facts of the scene they
desire to represent, irrespective of any conven
tional rules of picture-making; and they have
chosen their name because all artists did this
before Raphael's time — and after Raphael's
time they did not this, but sought to paint fair
pictures rather than represent stern facts; of
which the consequence has been that, from
Raphael's time to this day, historical art has
been in decadence.' * * * "Carlyle the other
night, in talking with Woolner, was speaking of
Alfred (as he calls Tennyson) and Browning in
reference to their embodying their thoughts in
verse, when there is so great need of doing things
in the directest way possible. 'Alfred,' he said,
'knows how to jingle, but Browning does not.'
He spoke, however, of Browning's intellect in
the highest terms. He then referred to the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood: 'These Pre-Raphael
ites they talk of are said to copy the thing as it
is, or invent it as they believe it must have been:
now there's some sense, and hearty sincerity,
in this. It's the only way of doing anything fit
to be seen.' " So much for a sample of the
entries in this Journal.

[117]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
ONLY once had I a long conversation
with Rossetti, but it was significant in
many ways. I had spent a part of
the fourth of May in the year, 1871,
with Thomas Carlyle in Cheyne Row, when
he talked much of Ruskin and Pre-Raphaelites;
and I went down afterwards to No. 16 Cheyne
Walk, to see Rossetti, an illustrious member of the
group. The house is now much changed. You
then entered it from the river side, with many
of the antique boats or barges visible. No one
who ever went in through the old iron gateway
can possibly forget it. It was "The Queen's
House," traditionally that of Catherine of Bra-
ganza, the ill-fated bride of our Charles II, whose
initials (C. R.) remained in 1862, on the twisted
iron lettering of its seventeenth century back-
garden rails. The house, with its wainscot
rooms, its spiral staircase, its windows and door
ways, was said to have been the work of our
architect Christopher Wren. The garden, too, into
which I went, a relic of the royal palace-garden,
had some fine lime trees in it. The dining-
room had several mirrors, and old pictures on
the walls, with curious designs, "flower, fruit,
and thorn-pieces." The house had a strange
history, with many other literary abodes quite near
it. At number 4, both Daniel Maclise, the painter,
and George Eliot, the novelist, lived and died.
[118]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
Sir Thomas Moore, George Herbert, Smollet,
Izaak Walton, Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke,
Turner, Carlyle, the Kingsleys, George Mac-
Donald, etc., all had lived near at hand.
In this year, 187 1, John Everett Millais
painted a somewhat remarkable picture, which
was hung on the line in the Royal Academy, and
fascinated most beholders from its consummate
realism. I forget the exact title, but it repre
sented three daughters of a Mr. Armstrong, mag
nificently dressed, and playing whist within an
azalea bower on a summer forenoon. It was a
splendid specimen of Millais's colour. When
Rossetti began to talk of Art we passed from the
"Holy Families" of the past — in which he took
the greatest interest — to discuss our modern Eng
lish work; and I spoke of this picture, I fear with
the erratic impulse of youth, for I think I charac
terized it as "the incarnation of nineteenth
century worldliness." Three beautiful English
girls devoting a forenoon to whist in a gorgeous
azalea bower! What a revelation it was of
tendencies astir! Rossetti listened to what I
said; and then, in a grave staccato style, replied:
"Why do you speak in that way of my old
friend's work ? It is not his fault that this age
is a materialistic one. He finds it as God has
permitted it to be, and it is my friend's choice
to paint it as it now is." I ventured to say
that I did not think that the noblest kind of
[119]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
work to do ; that the greatest artists of the past
invariably tried to lift up their age, and all
that was in it, to higher levels; and that
it was both vulgar, and dishonouring to Art, to
paint such realistic pictures. He answered:
"I fear we shall not agree on that point; we
should all be both realists and idealists. But,
will you come out with your friend into my gar
den, and see what is to be seen there ?" So out
we went, and spent some time in that curious
place where he had collected so many strange
animals. The impression he made on me on this first
visit remained ever afterwards, viz., that his
genius was far more idealistic than he himself
knew; and yet that he was a solitary man, almost
an alien in the artistic fraternity of England.
As to his personal character, all that I saw of
him revealed a most chivalrous, sympathetic,
honourable man, generous and just, and equally
appreciative of his contemporaries as of his
great predecessors in the twin regions of Art and
Poetry. There was a temperamental intensity
in him, which struggled to express itself both in
Song, and in plastic Art; and I think that he was
at times somewhat embarrassed by his own rich
outpourings. There was a vagueness, a wistfulness, and
a dreamy languor, in much of his early work.
He lived in a world of ideality; and "followed
[120]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
the gleam," as Tennyson puts it, to the very end.
He was no copyist, or imitator of reality, not an
artistic photographer; but, bringing the light of
the ideal into all that he saw of the real, in that
glorious atmosphere his pictures were made, and
etherialised. I think, he always strove after the
ideal; caring little for the actual. And yet he was
so natural, so true to Nature at its highest, that
in him the two tendencies, were superlatively
combined. In speaking of Rossetti's house and garden I
should have mentioned his curious fondness for
strange or slightly-known animals. He brought
them to his house, placed them in cages, and gave
them at the same time the run of his garden;
whence, they often strayed into neighbouring
ones. He had owls and hedge-pigs, wombats,
dormice, kangaroos, armadillos, marmots, squir
rels, peacocks, parrots, jackdaws, lizards, and
even a zebu! It was an extraordinary collection
of nondescripts, and revealed an eccentricity in
his own character.
To understand Rossetti aright it should be re
membered that he was, in a sense, an alien in
England; not by birth, but by inheritance. He
was a man of Tuscan blood, who brought into
our English land some of the best elements of the
Italian race. If you read the record of his life,
you will see that he inherited the religious spirit
of that race, with the insight which sees beyond
[121]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
symbols to that which they shadow forth. And
then, with his gracious inheritance on both the
father's and the mother's side, he was sur
rounded in his London home by genial influences
which set him free from many a tradition, and
from the trammels of conventionality.
Hear how Ruskin writes of him: "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 it, in absolute attainment; changed
it, in direction of temper. Rossetti added to the
before accepted systems of colour in painting,
one based on the principles of manuscript illumi
nation, which permits his designs 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 intellectual force in
the establishment of the modern romantic school
in England."
I must add that the intensity of Rossetti's
feelings and his passionate subjectivity, drawn
out by the very splendour of his imagination,
gave a certain sadness and pathos to his Art.
His temperament was perfervid, and he never
escaped from the circle of his own subjectivity.
Hence there was no externalisation of his in
sight, in objective art-products. He attained,
as all the world knows, to wonderful mastery
[122]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
as a colourist; but, as to form, he kept to one
type — especially one type of female beauty -
based on that of the lady who became his wife;
and his individuality came out in his continuous
portrayal of that face, perhaps more than in the
case of any of his contemporaries, Burne- Jones
only excepted.
What he did to familiarize his age with the
work of some almost forgotten poets, such as
Omar Khyam of Persia, and our own Blake, is
too well known to require mention here. And
now I only add that when we talked of the poets
and the artists of the past and present, there
was — in every sentence he uttered — brightness,
and sympathetic insight, no moroseness, or
egotism, or vanity on his part.
HOLMAN HUNT.
OF Holman Hunt, Ruskin says in his Art
of England, when comparing him with
Dante Gabriel Rossetti : " In all living
schools it chances often that the disci
ple is greater than his master; and it is always the
first sign of a dominant and splendid intellect, that
it knows of whom to learn." * * * He speaks
of Rossetti's " sternly materialistic but deeply rev
erent veracity," in painting the life of Christ; but
in Holman Hunt's Light of the World we have
such "spiritual passion" that that life became
"the greatest of Realities, the only reality, so that
[123]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
there is nothing in the earth for him that does not
speak of it." Ruskin finds in Hunt a new "re
spect for physical and material truth;" and while
Rossetti's light was "sunshine diffused through
coloured glass," Hunt, as a colourist, gives us
"actual sunshine growing leafage, living rock,
heavenly cloud." Referring to his picture of
The Strayed Sheep, he says: "Claude's sun
shine is colourless, only the golden haze of a
quiet afternoon." But, when we see "the pure
natural green, and tufted gold of the herbage in
the hollow of the little sea-cliff" — where the
sheep have strayed — "the pure sunshine on a
bank of living grass," we are "soothed by it
and raised into such peace as we are intended
to find in the glory and stillness of summer, pos
sessing all things." He thinks that picture was
"the first that cast true sunshine on the grass."
Ruskin goes on to comment on Holman Hunt's
conception of the Flight into Egypt, and to com
pare it with "former conceptions, in which the
Holy Family were always represented as watched
over and ministered to by attendant angels.
But only the safety and peace ofthe Divine Child
and its Mother, are thought of. No sadness, or
wonder of meditation, returns to the desolate
homes of Bethlehem. But in this English pic
ture all the story of the escape as of the flight, is
told in fulness of peace, and yet of compassion.
The travel is in the dead of the night, the way
[124]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
unseen and unknown; but, partly stooping from
the starlight, and partly floating with the 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; while
water of the river of life flows before them on the
sands." Ruskin thought that "none of the
groups and processions of children in the love
liest sculpture of the Robbia's and Donatello's
can more than rival the freedom and felicity of
motion in the happy wreaths of these angel-
children."

[125]

Plate XX

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

Plate XXI

ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI

Plate XXII

"BEATA BEATRIX"
From the painting in the Art Institute, Chicago

Plate XXIII

Photograph by F. Hollycr

"AUREA CATENA"

X

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Plate XXV

Photograph by F. Hollycr LA DONX.A DELLA FINESTRA

Plate XXVI

Photograph by F. Hollycr

ROSA TRIPLEX

Plate XXVII

PROSERPINA

Plate XXVIII

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND HER MOTHER

Plate XXIX

Photograph by F. Hollyer GIRLHOOD OF THE VIRGIN MARY

Plate XXX

FORD MADOX BROWN

LECTURE FIFTH
GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS.
INCE Ruskin died, no person
ality so rare as that of George
Frederick Watts has left us.
In the following pages remi
niscences of his conversation
are inwoven with an estimate
ofthe artist and the man.
In conversation he often enlarged on the
teaching functions of Art, and on all the great
artists — from Phidias to Michael Angelo, from
Giotto to Raphael — as teachers of their time.
He said he thought that Art had greater things to
do in years to come than it had yet accomplished.
He believed in the splendid possibilities before
Humanity in this domain, as in all others open
to it; but the pathways men must take to realise
them were slow and patient labour day by day,
integrity, hard work, self-sacrifice, fixity of aim,
and joy in work. " He was not sure that we in
England" (he referred, he said, to the average
[127]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
middle-class, and those just below them) "had
the same love of beauty as the Italians of the
same class had, or that we were amenable to it in
the same way. He did not think that the English
were a decadent race; but this great and won
drous nation of ours had lived through much,
accomplishing much, and possibly it was near
its meridian, if it had not already passed it. All
nations had their rise, decline, and fall ; and how
many nations have vanished, in Egypt, Greece,
Carthage, etc." The "increasing purpose" of
the ages was referred to, but he replied, "Yes I
believe in it; but that purpose is quite consistent
with the loss of particular, and especially of in
sular, civilisations. The decay of nations was a
sad but perhaps a necessary fact, connected with
the rise of new elements, and types of greatness.
In our time there was a want of the heroic (and
yet we had many heroes, especially in humble
life), the refined, the self-abnegating, and also of
the 'high seriousness,' which Matthew Arnold
longed for. There was too much scramble, and
opinionativeness; and far too great a love of
money, and of ease." He denounced the wor
ship of athletics, the craze for sports, accom
panied by betting. "Many young children are
precocious in evil. It is sad to see them smok
ing cigarettes ; and the want of decorous living is
lamentable. Vulgarity is rampant, and there
is a change, not always for the better, passing
[128]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
over the press of the country. It is a degrada
tion to useful newspapers to admit vulgar adver
tisements into their columns. Old industries,
alas! are vanishing, especially in the rural dis
tricts of England, and in the Highlands of Scot
land. Nevertheless the world is advancing. Evo
lution is a continuous process, and better things
are in store for man than he has ever known.
The passing away of old usages is inevitable ; but
I am glad to see that in Scotland your university
students keep up their torchlight processions,
when a new Lord Rector is installed. I wish
they could wear coats of mail on these occa
sions! "
He spoke of the vast influence of school teach
ing in forming the character of a nation. The
teaching of Languages and of History was most
beneficial; but he wished there was more Art-
teaching in schools, from the humblest elemen
tary one, up to Eton and the rest. He re
ferred to the good work that was unconsciously
done in other directions, in the course of Art
teaching at school, by encouraging the chil
dren of peasant labourers to draw, paint, carve,
mould, and design. Perhaps the best teaching
of all was obtained by the daily sight in school,
or on the walls of cottage homes, of authentic
pictures of monumental men and women.
Referring to contemporary affairs he spoke
[129]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
with enthusiasm of Queen Victoria, but added
that she should have gone to Ireland every year ;
for by so doing she would have won the hearts of
the Irish people, as much as she had captivated
the Scots. Also, she left the Prince of Wales
too long out of touch with his coming sphere of
influence. She might have delegated some work
to him to do in connection with the State.
He enlarged on what we owe to the Irish
race, and to our Irish inheritance. It had done
much for the nation in literature and in war.
While he liked the Scottish translations from the
Gaelic, he liked the Irish ones better. This led
him to speak of England's frequent injustices
to Ireland, which had no doubt fostered democ
racy. If the democratic tide was flowing strong
ly, he did not wonder at it for, if we went back
to the origin of property, we would find that
many of the ancestors of our nobility came to
their estates through conquest or seizure. The
true condition of ownership was service.
Watts's appreciation of contemporary artists
was great, often enthusiastic; especially of
Burne -Jones, Rossetti, Millais, and Leighton,
but also of others; and I mention those whom I
have heard him praise especially — Holman Hunt,
Fred. Walker, Legros, Lady Waterford, Mason,
Pinwell, Whistler. Of a still living artist, whom
I may not name, he said, "His portraits are
as good as those of Vandyke or Velasquez.
[130]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
His directness and suggestion are quite as great
as theirs." Most of his friends can recall words
of eulogy spoken of his contemporaries, but
amongst them all his appreciation of Burne- Jones
was probably the keenest. I remember meet
ing him at an exhibition of his friend's pictures
in the New Gallery, shortly after that friend's
death, one day on my return from a Christmas
visit to Rome. He asked me: "Where have
you come from, and what have you seen ?"
When told, he said, with a majestic wave of his
hand round the room in which we stood: "Well,
in all Rome you saw nothing finer than this,
nothing finer than this."
As a many-sided talker he had scarce a rival in
our time. As a conversationalist his power was
greater than Ruskin's, while his artistic insight
was equal to that of his friend, and his criticism
surer-footed. It had no fads, and was buttressed
round about by a wider culture in other direc
tions. The happy way in which he brought in
his parallels and contrasts in conversation was
very striking; e. g., speaking of Lord Kitchener's
achievements as a commander, he said: "Could
Wellington have done better than he did, or even
so well ? " Referring to the wife of one of our
peers, herself of noble birth, and describing the
way in which she entered a room, he exclaimed:
"Pallas Athena wasn't in it."
Much could be said as to the authors, and the
[131]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
books, he loved best; Homer, the Decameronf
Dante, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, etc. ; above
all, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. He
spoke to me with the greatest enthusiasm of Mr.
Claude Montefiore's Bible for Home Reading.
As an artist Watts had a large and many-sided
inheritance, and many types of excellence lived
again in him. To a certain extent the spirit of
Phidias, as well as that of Michael Angelo, was
in him. So was that of Giotto, of Carpaccio,
and John Bellini, of Da Vinci and Raphael, of
Titian and Tintoretto. He was the successor
of them all, the continuator of their work, their
heir in the legacy of genius. Hence his amazing
versatility. He so imbibed their spirit as to re
produce it in oil painting, in fresco, in sculpture,
and as designer in metal. And yet he had no
master in the ordinary sense of the term. "I
followed no influence," he said, "even in youth."
And if he called no man master, he did not found
a school. As Wordsworth said of Milton:
His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,
But the most distinctive feature of his genius
was its idealism. To begin with, he dispensed
with realistic models. He elaborated subjects,
which he first saw with the "inward eye," before
he wrought them out externally on canvas, doing
this with an originality and directness that were
all his own. He said, "I paint ideas, not ob-
[132]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
jects;" but by that he did not mean that he ig
nored the real. His pathway to reality was con
structed, and carried out, along ideal lines. In
an ever-memorable sentence he wrote: "My
intention has not been so much to paint pictures
that will charm the eye, as to suggest great
thoughts that will appeal to the imagination and
the heart, and kindle all that is best and noblest
in humanity." And so great as was his mastery
of technique, and his power in draughtmanship,
it was far greater in symbolic representation,
with what may be called a character-purpose
underneath. The poet just quoted from wrote
to Sir George Beaumont, "The poet is a teacher.
I want to be considered as a teacher, or as noth
ing." Watts acted on this maxim as an artist;
and his acting on it is one key to his greatness.
And so he did more than any other nineteenth-
century teacher to refute the maxim that Art
has nothing to do with Morality, or that the
Beautiful and the Good are disparate; because
he proved the opposite by his own practice.
"Art for Art's sake alone" was to him an artistic
heresy of the first magnitude. But the mere
presence of a truth behind the form and colour
of a picture was not enough. No one realised
more fully, or proved better than he did, that the
media through which artistic truth is presented,
or conveyed, must be as perfect as technical
processes can make them; but then he also saw,
[133]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
and taught, that they must express what they
cannot delineate, and that they must suggest what
they are unable to disclose.
And here came in his surpassing use of alle
gory, of clear and noble symbolism in pictures,
where ideas are "half-concealed, yet half-re
vealed." Allegory was to Watts what his " dra
matic-lyric" work in verse was to Browning, viz. :
one of the media by which truth could best of all
be discerned, although disclosed through veils.
And in all of it, as wrought out by him, there was
nothing strained or unreal; although much was
elusive at first sight. We cannot imagine Watts
attempting such a mosaic as Raphael's in the
Chigi chapel, where the subject is "God Creat
ing the Stars", a picture full of artifice, and in
which the grotesquerie of the theme wholly over
powers the grace of the angel-boys. On the
other hand, one can imagine the uninitiated real
ist looking at his Fugue, and being as perplexed
to find its meaning, as readers of Browning's
One Way of Love and Another Way of Love occa
sionally are to understand the latter. The ob
scurity of some of his pictures to the common
eye, however, is due to the fact that the artist
saw so much to which the common eye is blind.
But most of his symbols are clear as crystal.
His Hope is like Browning's Abt Vogler, or his
Rabbi Ben Ezra, or his Guardian Angel. In
Love and Death, where Love tries to stay the ap-
[134]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
proach of the last enemy; in Love and Life, in
which the former guides and protects the latter ;
in Time, Death and Judgment, and in Love Tri
umphant, we have a single great thought pre
sented to us, unobscured by complex side-sug
gestions — as was the case in that great contem
porary picture The Light of the World. It is the
combination of this clear direct allegory, this
unambiguous ideal touching, with exceeding
fineness of contour and warmth of colour, that
has made his pictures appeal with such a charm
alike to the educated and half-educated classes.
It is also worthy of note that the subjects
chosen for his allegoric work were not sought
in the distant past, or even in the present,
but rather in the perennial and ever-present
symbolism of the world. Realizing, as he al
ways did, the impotence of language to dis
close what lies deepest in man — although his
power over the resources of the English
tongue was great — he dealt with the "open
secret" ofthe world, through the medium of Art.
In all his work he was artist first, teacher after
wards; artist pure and simple, while in insight he
was seer and prophet. No one could be long in
his presence without realizing that his know
ledge of ultimate problems was as wide, and his
acquaintance with them as deep, as that of any
of his contemporaries. His familiarity with
classical themes, with History and Antiquities,
[135]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
is seen in several of his works ; but his apprecia
tion of the great questions of the ages — their par
tial solutions and abiding mysteries — is dis
closed in many others. It is for this reason, even
more than for his versatility and many-sidedness,
that some have presumed to think of him as the
Shakespeare of British art. He was certainly
far wider in his range than Sir Joshua, Gains
borough, or Haydon; while there was an eleva
tion, a majesty, and magnificence about his
work, which was absent from theirs.
His allegoric teaching culminated in those
paintings which refer to Death and the Future.
In those already mentioned, and in Sic Transit
Gloria Mundi, The Messenger, Death Crowning
Innocence, Love Triumphant, but above all in
The Court of Death, the ever fascinating yet
mysterious subject was dealt with from many
different points of view. He wished to help men
to realise that Death was not only inevitable and
natural, but that it was a friend and not an
enemy. "I want," he said, "to destroy the notion that
it is 'the king of terrors.' " Again, "my favour
ite thought recognises Death cs a kind nurse
who says, 'Now then, children, you must go to
bed, and wake up in the morning.' " In the
Sic Transit — with its magnificent motto, "What
I spent, I had; What I saved, I lost; What I
gave, I have" — the truth is indirectly taught
[136]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
which culminates in The Court of Death. Ofthe
former picture he said, "It conveys some of the
lessons I would teach; at the end of life, a man
has simply to leave behind the things he most
prizes." But in the latter a much loftier note is
struck. The central idea of that great painting
is far nobler than what is conveyed in Love and
Death: in which we see, and feel, the pathos of re
sisting love before resistless doom. He said to
me, when expounding this later picture in Little
Holland House, and at Limnerslease, "I want
to take away the terribleness of Death, and the
irrational shrinking of men and women before
it." It is the same as that which underlies the
whole of Tennyson's In Memoriam. I ventured
to refer to the well-known lines of another poet.
Thou takest not away, O death!
Thou strikest; absence perisheth.
He said, "Yes; but my aim is to represent Death
as a gracious Mother, calling her chidren home.
You see, I could not make the central figure in
that picture a man. It is a woman, a Queen, a
Goddess, a Mother. She summons her children,
and they come to her gladly. The peer lays
down his coronet, the warrior his sword; the
maiden lies down to sleep.
The child, too, is there, for youth as well as age
must die. Above them are two figures, one on
either side. On the left hand there is Mystery,
the impenetrable mystery of death; while on the
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SOME ARTISTS OF THE
right there is Hope, hope for the future. But
the central idea, and the central fact, is the joy
ous, benignant Mother; a goddess, and more
than a goddess, calling her children home."
It is questionable if any theological, argu
mentative, or poetical treatment of the subject
of Death and the Future has taught the world
more than this picture has done. Certainly no
Platonic dialogue, or Stoical treatise, has ex
celled it. And it shows, more than his works do,
that Watts was in a really profound sense, a
religious artist; although not in the way in which
the chief Italians of the Middle Age, from Cima-
bue to Raphael, were. He did not give us
"Holy Families," "Annunciations," pictures
of the "Nativity," the "Crucifixion," or the
" Flight into Egypt," etc. He dealt rather with
the fundamental verities, and even tried to pen
etrate the arcana of belief. And so, as already
said, his message was to all the Churches. He
was too wise a man to proclaim himself a teacher,
too complete an artist to obtrude an ethical aim
into his pictures. But throughout his whole ca
reer, dealing with the deep things of our human
ity and the mysteries that underlie our common
life, his aim was to hearten his contemporaries
by unfolding those fair ideals and hopes with
which his own mind was full. Even when his
torical or legendary subjects were selected by
him, it was those which had a perennial lesson
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
that were chosen, not those which reflected a
passing Zeitgeist, but subjects which were rele
vant to any and every age.
We must not forget that he almost brought
about the reintroduction of fresco work into
England. As all who have followed his career
are aware, its turning point was his obtaining
one ofthe first premiums of £300 offered for dec
orative designs in connection with the rebuilding
of the Houses of Parliament at Westminster.
With a wise prescience, Benjamin Haydon had
said, "If the Commission heroically adopts
fresco, the effect on British Art will be tremen
dous. That province I know to be a silent vol
cano." It is unnecessary to re-tell the story
of Watts's Caractacus, or his Alfred Inciting the
Saxons to Resist the Landing of the Danes, or his
later (and greater) fresco of Justice for the Hall
of Lincoln's Inn; but his appreciation of mural
painting on a large scale dealing with historic
subjects was such that he made the most gener
ous offers towards its realisation. Many know
of his offer to the directors of the London
and North-Western Railway to decorate the
hall of Euston Station with groups illustrative
of the progress of the race. Had the offer been
accepted, and the work executed, it would prob
ably have perished by this time ; as fresco cannot
live long uninjured by the fogs and darkness of
our climate, and least of all in London. But the
[139]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
offer to adorn a railway station with pictures of
the Cosmos can never be forgotten; and had it
been realised, the result would probably have
eclipsed the Lincoln's Inn achievement of 1859.
His dreams of a great hall to be filled with
frescoes, illustrating not only English life, char
acter, and history, but memorialising the noble
deeds of all time — pictures which would be a
school of teaching as well as a source of delight
to thousands — was Utopian. Nevertheless it
was a magnificent idea; and if its realisation ever
comes, it must wait for the advent of another
artist like himself.
Ruskin spoke of him as " the only real painter
of History or Thought we have in England."
That was doubtless an exaggeration, but there
can be no doubt that he was one of the very
greatest. Since his pictures are dispersed in places
so far apart it would certainly be a great thing
for the nation if as many of them as are remov
able — and there are between 700 and 800 —
could be brought together for a time in a great
loan exhibition, similar to that of the works of
Burne- Jones in the New Gallery some years ago,
or the smaller collection of his own pictures in
in the same gallery in 1896-7.
Watts was a distinguished portrait-painter for
more than fifty years ; and most of his contempo
raries of eminence sat to him on his own invita
tion. It is doubtful if any portrait-painter the
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
wide world over ever did this in the same way,
and certainly no one has done it for a similar
reason, viz., that he might gift their likenesses
to the nation. His divining instinct told him
who were the representative men whom it was
desirable to include in his National Portrait Gal
lery, his valhalla of the illustrious. He did not
succeed in obtaining sittings from all whom he
wished to paint, but his list is a very remark
able one; and no portrait-painter was ever less
photographic. Mere outward resemblance was
not his aim, but the portrayal of character be
hind the features, a likeness hinted or suggested
rather than wrought out. As expression is for
ever changing, many varying moods have to be
combined in a unity made permanent through
form and colour. More than that, the central
dominant expression, the individuality of the in
dividual, the speciality of his character, has to be
discovered and represented. Tennyson's lines
in the Idylls of the King were written in refer
ence to the practice of Watts as portrait-artist:
As when a painter, poring on a face
Divinely through all hindrance finds the man
Behind it, and so paints him that his face,
The shape and colour of a mind and life
Live for his children ever at its best.
And how true this is of almost all his portraits.
He is said to have liked best his rendering of the
features of his brother artist, Burne- Jones; but
[141]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
others in his great gallery are quite as fine —
Lords Stratford de Redcliffe, Lawrence, Lytton,
and Tennyson, Mr. Russell Gurney, Mrs. Percy
Wyndham, George Meredith, Joachim, etc. In
a collected gallery of his works the variety of
the types presented to us would be very notice
able. We would find the innocence of girlhood,
the purity of womanhood, the strength of man
hood, the patience of age, the contentedness of
labour, the power of intellect, the expectancy of
youth, the wisdom of maturity, the serenity of
departing life. There is no doubt that had his
early wish been realised, he would have been our
fresco-painter on a national scale, par excellence;
but then the world would have never seen his
magnificent series of idylls, odes, and sonnets on
canvas; great epics pushing all these aside.
As a colourist he had perhaps his equals
amongst nineteenth-century men, but scarcely
a rival. Millais and Burne- Jones surpassed
him in some directions; but, take him for all in
all, we must go back to the Venetians — and per
haps to Tintoretto rather than to Titian — to find
canvases at once more gorgeous and more deli
cate ; while for colour, subservient to an ethereal
ideal aim, he had no rival in his time. He was
very modest in his estimate of himself as a colour
ist; and would, perhaps, have admitted that he
was conventional now and then, in the way in
which he rendered the billowy fringes of his
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
drapery, his flesh tints, or his clouds. A learner
to the very end, he once said to me in the studio at
Little Holland House, without the faintest soupcon
of pretence — for affectation was impossible to him
— "I think if I live, I shall be a colourist yet!"
He had been lamenting his own failures, and
praising the success of others when he said it.
His landscape colour was occasionally as fine as
that of Turner; while to equal its rich symbolism
we must go back to Francois Millet. As in por
traiture so in landscape-art — he was never a
mere copyist; or, while reproducing Nature, he
drew out its ideality, and combined details so as
to present us with an allegory. Like our Eng
lish Millais in his Autumn Leaves, his Harbour
of Refuge and his Vagrants, or Frederick Walker
in his Plough, or Mason in his Harvest Moon,
he was a symbolist in his landscape-art. Such
pictures as The Dove that Returned in the
Evening, The Dove that Returned not Again,
Neptune's Horses, Good Luck to Tour Fishing,
or The Mid-day Rest, are landscape-allegories.
And when he dealt with Nature pure and simple,
as in his sunset pictures of Western Scotland, his
Naples, the Bay and Vesuvius, his Carrara Moun
tains from Pisa, or his Mount Ararat, the combina
tion of strength and refinement, of meaning and
delicacy, carries the spectator beyond the actual.
Quite as much as our idealist poets do, he showed us
The light that never was on sea or land.
[143]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
His achievements in sculpture were such as to
warrant the belief that had he given himself to it
exclusively, after his early initiation through the
Elgin marbles, he might have become perhaps
the greatest in Europe since Michael Angelo.
As a youth he learned much in the studio of
William Behnes, but it was his study of the
Elgin marbles that enabled him to produce his
Clytie; and the Greek spirit of the Periclean age
breathes through all his statuary, as it does
through much of his mural painting and through
such single figures as Psyche. Hugh Lupus is a
magnificent statue, but his greatest work in
sculpture is undoubtedly that which finds a tem
porary resting-place in the quadrangle of Bur
lington House, viz., Physical Energy, originally
intended for the Thames Embankment, but to
be shortly placed near the grave of Cecil Rhodes
on the Matoppo Hills in South Africa. When
seen on a height, and from a distance, its power
will be apparent. The courtyard where it is at
present is the worst possible place for such a co-
colossal subject. Its designer and executor
worked at it on and off for twenty years, as he
worked at The Court of Death.
Of no sculptor or painter — not even of Mich
ael Angelo and Raphael — can it be said that
they never failed in their work; but there are,
perhaps, fewer failures to be recorded in the long
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
list of Watts's productions than in those of any
other
In the artist-list enrolled.
He was a master in form, design, invention,
colour, atmosphere, character, suggestion, ideal
ity. We find in him the classic and the renaissance
spirit, the ancient and the modern combined;
and yet he was pre-eminently our great nine
teenth-century English artist.
When his life is written with authority — its
story is already told in his pictures — we shall ob
tain reliable information as to many of the influ
ences which shaped and determined his career.
We shall know what Florence did for him, and
Rome and Holland House, what Halicarnasus
and Egypt did. Admired and honoured wher
ever he went, he lived an unobtrusive life; apart
from others, though not a recluse. He never
thought of "pleasing the public," or "painting
to order." He followed the guidance of his own
ideals, at first along a somewhat lonely road.
More versatile and eclectic than any of his con
temporaries, he allied himself to no school, owed
allegiance to no masters, save the great Greek
sculptors. This, however, did not prevent
him from sympathising with men, and appre
ciating movements with which he could not iden
tify himself, viz., the Pre-Raphaslites. He could
. not be one of the leaders of that cult. His fresco-
[145]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
work in the Hemic ycle of Lawgivers had been
too Raphaelesque to permit of his being swept
forward on a new current of romance, great as
it was. But he appreciated (none more so) the
aims, and honoured the successes, of Rossetti,
Maddox Brown, Holman Hunt, Millais, and the
rest of the brotherhood.
It is specially noteworthy that from the first
he did not set himself to copy even the greatest
of his predecessors. He studied them all, in
London Florence and Rome, took mental notes
of them, assimilated what was best in them,
schooled himself by their excellences, followed
their example, but did not copy them. He worked
with rarest modesty and self-abnegation ; and his
greatness came out in his silence before the mas
terpieces which he reverenced, quite as much as
in his ceaseless labour for posterity, The stren-
uousness of that labour, and his pursuit of the
ideal, found expression in the motto carved on
his sundial in the garden at Limnerslease,
The utmost for the highest.
The titles chosen by artists for their pictures
are often significant, and some of those selected
by Watts were poems in embryo. As many of
Browning's poems were both theses and pictures
in verse, so many of Watts's pictures were theses
in form, and colour-illustrations of ideal truth on
canvas. But the titles he gave them were often
studies in symbolism, and they suggested more
[146]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
than they disclosed. I once asked him if he
would give us a picture that might be called The
Strength of the Hills is His. He replied: "I
cannot use that title. It is too great for me. I
have sometimes thought of The Spirit of God
Moved upon the Face of the Waters. That I
might use, but not the other." He added: "The
first chapter of Genesis is full of titles for the
painter of allegory. So are Job, Proverbs, Eccle-
siastes, and some of the Psalms. But, of the
greatest of all time, how true it is, 'never man
spake like this man.' You read through all the
literature of the East, of Greece, and of Rome,
and where do you come across a sentence like
this: "Suffer the little children to come unto
me?' "
What he has written, or spoken, of his own
convictions as to Art, and his own practice of it,
has a special interest and value to posterity. In
the year 1890, when he resolved not to claim his
right as an R. A. to send pictures to Burlington
House, but to let his work be judged each year
by the Committee on its merits, he wrote, "In my
seventy-fourth year, I cannot be certain of being
up to my old level, and I have asked for severe
judgment from the Committee of Selection, and
the Hanging Committee, in order to be sure of
not disgracing the Academy and myself; so I
may have nothing there. Of course, it is prob
able that the Council may find my contributions
[147]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
sufficiently satisfactory to hang, but I am very
sincere in my desire to have my work judged
even severely. We have seen deplorable exam
ples of the failure of the eye and hand, and I
much desire not to be added to the number."
So late as 1895 he wrote: "I am always grati
fied when I find the drift of my efforts recog
nised. That may be accepted as a certain
measure of success. Contemporary opinion as
to the merit of technical accomplishment, I do
not find much satisfaction in; knowing how
much such opinion varies, as time goes on."
Very characteristic, too, was his habit of inter
mitting work on a particular picture in order to
take up another, and again to lay the latter
down. Doing his work by instalments, with
intervals for fresh survey and reconsideration;
this was to him the rest that fitted for toil. His
relaxation was not idleness, but change of work.
His great kindness to animals, and his sym
pathy with the Associations for preventing cru
elty to them, should not be forgotten. I remem
ber his denunciation of what he called the
"barbarous custom" of cutting, or docking,
horses' tails. He said to me, "It destroys their
beauty, and robs them of one of Nature's gifts.
On artistic, as well as humanitarian grounds, it
is to be condemned."
It was one of the aims of his life to preserve
through his art the memory of brave deeds, done
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
by brave men and women in humble life. He
planned, and in fact carried out, the idea of
erecting tablet-inscriptions to their memory in
gardens and other public places; setting forth
the heroism of acts that resulted in serious injury,
or loss of life, in the effort to save the lives of
others; and it is one of the most gratifying of
tributes to him that this will, in all likelihood,
be carried out more fully still. The inscriptions
on the memorial wall of St. Botolph's, Alders-
gate-street, are likely to be followed by the erec
tion of a hall or park at Guildford for a similar
purpose. Amongst the schemes which he cher
ished was the "Home Arts and Industries Asso
ciation," which ranks with the "Kyrle Society,"
the "Society for the Preservation of Public
Parks and Gardens," and the "National Trust
for Places of Historical Interest and Natural
Beauty," as one of the best means for bringing
the influence of Art to bear on the daily life and
surroundings of the poor. He firmly believed
that many of the working-classes could learn the
meaning of what was good and true, for them
selves and others, if they entered into these
realms by the gate called Beautiful.
He saw, as few have done, that high Art was
an inheritance for the many, not the property of
the esoteric few, but a privilege for all sorts and
conditions of men, women, and children.
Similarly, that its mission was to all sects and
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SOME ARTISTS OF THE
parties. He dedicated one of his pictures, The
Spirit of Christianity, "to all the churches;"
and certainly the truth it teaches is one which
may appeal to Christian, Jew, Mahometan, Bud
dhist, and Parsee alike.
Another of his suggestions was that frescoes or
oil-pictures, representing great men or great
events, or illustrations of great truths, should be
painted on the walls of class-rooms in our chief
public school during the long summer holidays,
when there was time for the execution of the
task. He believed that the sight, and the study
of such paintings, would be an education to the
boys and girls when they returned ; and certainly,
if mural tablets in halls or corridors of class
rooms, recording the names of prize-winners, or
of old pupils, who afterwards distinguished
themselves, or fell in battle for their country —
are useful for their successors at school, such
pictures as Watts desired to have painted and
hung up might embody lessons quite as useful.
He retained a young man's heart in old age,
while almost all his comrades had predeceased
him. Ruskin's death grieved him much. He
regretted that he had not managed to include
him in his National Gallery of Portraits, and sent
a laurel spray to Coniston churchyard — as he
had sent a similar tribute to Westminster, at the
funerals of Browning and Tennyson — remarking,
"This is the last." [150]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
At his funeral service in St. Paul's Cathedral.
the archdeacon read as Scripture lesson the ever-
memorable prayer from Ecclesiasticus, beginning,
" Let us now praise famous men, and the fathers
that begat us. Their bodies are buried in peace,
but their name liveth for evermore."
Although the immortality of all the "works
of art and man's device" is relative, and only
for a time, it is certain that the achievements of
our great nineteenth-century painter will live
and profoundly influence thousands, in the era
on which we have entered, and in the others that
are to follow it. APPENDIX
In casting additional light on the art and
ethical teaching of George Frederick Watts, the
following extracts from a " Prefatory Note " to
the catalogue of his works, on view in the winter
exhibitions at the New Gallery in London
(1896-7): along with others taken from the
" Catalogue " itself — both of which were written
by himself — are printed as an appendix:
FROM THE "PREFATORY NOTE."
THE great majority of these works must
be regarded rather as hieroglyphs than
anything else, certainly not as more than
symbols, which all Art was in the be
ginning, and which everything is, that is not di
rectly connected with physical conditions. In
[151]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
many cases the intention is frankly didactic, ex
cuse for this — generally regarded as exasperat
ing — being that it has been found, not seldom,
that the attempts to reflect the thoughts .of the
most elevated minds of all ages, even in an
unused and halting language, have not been with
out interest at least, if without profit.
Whatever type may have been used, classical,
mediaeval, or other, the endeavour has been to
impress distinctly the direction of modern
thought; and in all, except two cases, reference
to spiritual dogmas has been purposely avoided ;
the two exceptions being " Faith," and the " Ded
ication to All the Churches."
In the first, "Faith," wearied and saddened
by the result of persecution, washes her blood
stained feet, and recognising the influence of
Love in the perfume and beauty of flowers, and
of Peace and Joy in the song of birds, feels that
the sword was not the best argument, and takes
it off. "The Spirit of Christianity," dedicated
to all the Churches," needs no explanation.
The long unfinished design "Chaos" was in
tended to be the introductory chapter of a gen
eral History of Mankind, the emergence from
convulsion to evolution in material and social
conditions, typified by emblems of the great hu
man families.
In the several subjects relating to Death, the
object has been to divest the inevitable of its ter-
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
rors ; the Power has always been depicted as im
personal, and rather as a friend than an enemy.
In the large design, "The Court of Death," the
power does not act, but receives homage ; the sol
dier surrenders his sword, the noble his coronet,
the mendicant and oppressed seek relief. Sick
ness lays her head upon the knee of Death, old
age comes for repose, the child plays with the
grave-cloths unknowingly, and in the arms of the
silent figure is the youngest possible child, the
very beginning of Life being in the lap of Death.
Two powers, Silence and Mystery, guard the
entrance of the Unknown.
"The Messenger" announces repose after
life's work. The same Power takes charge of
Innocence, placing it beyond the reach of evil.
"Mammon" speaks for itself; so, also, "Great
Possessions" and "Jonah," each being espe
cially addressed to modern philosophy.
"Hope" strives to get all the music possible
out of the last remaining string.
"Sic Transit" is an illustration of a noble med
iaeval inscription, having a general application;
not symbolical of either individual Life or Death.
"Eve," in the majesty of unconsciousness,
typifies what might be hoped for humanity,
"for every human soul has, in the way of nature,
beheld true being."
" Immeshed by Temptation " and " Repentant "
may be easily understood. [153]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
The figure with the Globe of the Systems may
be called the Spirit that pervades the immeas
urable expanse.
"Love and Death" represents the progress
of the inevitable but not terrible ; Death partially,
but not completely, overshadows Love.
In "Love and Life" the slight female figure is
an emblem of the fragile quality in humanity, at
once its weakness and its strerfgth; sensibility
aided by love, sympathy, tenderness, self-sacri
fice, and all that the whole range of the term im
plies; humanity ascends the rugged path from
brutality to spirituality.
In the large monochrome, " Peace," the right
ful sovereign of an intellectual world, with ' 'Good
Will," symbolised by an innocent child, wearied
and foot-sore, regards through the dim atmos
phere a distant glimmer, dawn or conflagration.
In the design entitled "The Dweller in the Inner
most," the vague figure may be as vaguely called
Conscience. This explanation is only intended to convey a
bald and bare idea of the thread of thought con
necting the whole together, and to show that the
object in work has been to suggest, in the lan
guage of Art, Modern Thought in things ethical
and spiritual. from the "catalogue" itself.
Faith. Faith, "wearied and saddened by the result
[154]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
of persecution," is seated on a rock with up
turned face, and washes her blood-stained feet;
on her lap lie flowers, the perfume and beauty
of which inspire her with love ; she is loosening
the sword, believing she can persuade by other
means. To be presented to the Nation.
Love and Death.
Love stands upon the threshold of the House
of Life, barring the entry against the fatal ad
vance of Death. The bright wings of the God
are already crushed and broken against the lintel
of the door, and the petals are falling from the
roses that Love has set around the porch. The
pale form of Death presses forward with calm,
resistless tread, and the white, uplifted arm
passes above the head of Love in token of sover
eignty. Painted in 1887. To be presented to the Nation.
The All-Pervading.
The all-pervading Spirit of the Universe rep
resented as a winged figure, seated, holding in
her lap the "Globe of the Systems."
Sic Transit.
"What I spent, I had!
What I saved, I lost!
What I gave, I have!"
A symbol of the end of all human life, and of
the varied possibilities it brings to each to make
that life immortal. To be presented to the Nation.
[155]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
Hope. Hope, blindfolded, and clad in a pale blue
robe, is seated on the globe, and holds in her
hands her lyre, of which but one string remains ;
she lends her ear to the melody she still can
make. To be presented to the Nation.
Time, Death, and Judgment.
Time, represented as the type of unfailing
youth and vigour, advances hand in hand with
Death, while poised in the clouds above their
heads follows the figure of Judgment, armed
with the attributes of' Eternal Law. To be presented
to the Nation.
Peace and Goodwill.
Full-length, life-size figure of a woman seated
on the ground, a child on her lap, and leaning
back against a low wall; her head is turned away,
her face expressive of anxious yearning. To be pre
sented to the Nation.
The Dweller in the Innermost.
Conscience, winged, dusk-faced and pensive,
seated facing, within a glow of light; on her fore
head she bears a shining star, and on her lap lie
the arrows that pierce through all disguise, and
the trumpet which proclaims truth to the world.
To be presented to the Nation.
The Messenger.
A man, worn with suffering, leans back in his
chair ; at his side lie the insignia of the various
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NINETEENTH CENTURY
arts, now of no more avail; and near him stands
the Messenger of Death, who, holding an infant
on her left arm, touches him with her right hand
and bids him Come. To be presented to the Nation.
The Court of Death.
Death, the sovereign power, holding in her lap
an infant form that has been claimed before its
life had well begun, a symbol that the beginning
and end of life lie in the lap of Death, is seated
enthroned upon the ruins of the world. On
either side stand two angel figures, guarding the
portals of the Unknown beyond the grave, and
at her feet are gathered all sorts and conditions
of men, who have come as faithful subjects to
render their last homage to the Universal Queen.
The warrior, still in the pride of strength and
manhood, loyally surrenders his sword; the no
bleman, with bowed head, lays down his coro
net; and the poor cripple comes to crave of
Death a final respite from pain. On the other
side of the throne a young girl, wearied with
suffering, rests her head, as though in sleep,
upon the winding sheet, while a little child half,
in sport, draws it over his head, and the Lion, as
the type of physical power, crouches at Death's
feet. To be presented to the Nation.
The Spirit of Christianity.
The Spirit of Christianity is represented by
an impersonal figure, clothed in red garments
[157]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
and enthroned in the clouds, who enfolds the
children of all creeds and races within one man
tle, and looking up to heaven, pleads on behalf
of suffering humanity. Painted in 1875. To be
presented to the Nation.
Love Triumphant.
Time and Death, having travelled together
through the ages, are in the end overthrown.
Love alone arises on immortal wing.
Love and Life.
Love, with protecting half-outstretched wings,
leading Life, represented as a trembling and
fragile maiden, up the rocky mountain side, and
helping her gently over the rugged ground. He
looks down on her, his face full of tender care,
whilst she, with upturned face, trusts herself en
tirely tO his guidance. To be presented to the Nation.
Chaos. The intention of this picture is to convey in
the language of symbol an idea of the passing of
our planet from chaos to order. The condition
of the several periods is more or less distinctly
described by the movement of the presiding
genius of each; and the modifications may be
traced from the earliest periods, on the left of
the picture, to where the reposeful giants on the
right are suggestive of a state of stability and or
der. From the center of the picture, at first sep
arately, denoting an interrupted record, the
[158]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
forms representing the cycles of time become
linked in an unbroken chain, to indicate a per
ception of the permanent establishment of order.
To be presented to the Nation.

[159]

Plate XXXI

GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS, aged 17

Plate XXXII

From the painting in the Art Institute, Chicago

DR. JOACHIM

Plate XXXIII

Photograph by F. Hollyer

LORD TENNYSON

' Plate XXXIV

Photograph by F. Hollyer

RUSSELL GURXEY

Plate XXXV

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Photograph by F. Hollyer

HOPE

Plate XXXVI

Photograph by F. Hollyer

NAPLES AND MT. VESUVIUS

Plate XXXVII

Photograph by F. Hollyer

THE COURT OF DEATH

Plate XXXVIII

Photograph by F. Hollyer

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Plate XXXIX

Photograph by P. Hollyer

ROBERT BROWNING

Plate XL

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Photograph by F. Hollyer
Plate XLI

Photograph by F. Hollyer

GEORGE MEREDITH

Plate XLII

Photograph by F. Hollycr

LORD LYTTON

Plate XLIII

Photograph by F. Hollyer

WILLIAM MORRIS

Plate XLIV

[Portrait by himself] GEORGE FREDERICK WATTS

Plate XLV

Photograph by F. Hollyer GOOD LUCK TO YOUR FISHING

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LECTURE SIXTH
EDWARD BURNE- JONES.
HE recently published Memor
ials of Edward Burne-Jones,
by his widow, if not an epoch-
making biography, is cer
tainly a monumental one. It
is conspicuous in many ways,
amongst the lives of nine
teenth-century artists in England ; and is unique
as the work of a woman-writer, the wife of the
remarkable man whom it memorialises. It is al
ways difficult for a near relative to do justice to the
life of a great man, saying neither too much nor
too little; and if, in the memoirs of the late Bishop
of London, and the author of John Inglesant, by
their respective widows, we have exceptionally able
biographies, it is no slight to them to place these
volumes by Lady Burne-Jones on a still higher
level of interest and of literary merit. They are
full of brightness, illumination, pathos, abundant
humour, and verisimilitude from first to last.
There is no effeminacy in them, or gush of super-
[161]
SOME ARTISTS OF THE
fluous praise, but a dispassionate record of fact,
set forth in a brilliant and most charming man
ner. Copious extracts from letters throw a flood of
light upon the writer of them, and on many con
temporary artists, poets, and literary men be
longing to the latter half of the nineteenth cen
tury. Although an original artist's work is
always his best memorial, Lady Burne-Jones
is to be congratulated on raising so noble a liter
ary monument to her husband.
Its primary interest to us, and to posterity, is
the disclosure it gives of the character and art of
one so singularly gifted and original as Burne-
Jones was; but it is also extremely valuable for
the light it casts on the men by whom he was
surrounded, whom he attracted and influenced;
on their genius, their insight, and their friend
ships. It was indeed a remarkable company
of illustrious and unenvious men, each of whom
rejoiced in the achievements of all the rest. It
may be doubted if there ever was such a group in
the previous annals of Art. There was certainly
nothing like it in Greece and Rome, and through
the long developments of Mediaevalism. Ed
ward Burne-Jones, William Morris, Dante Ga
briel Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown, Holman
Hunt, John Ruskin, George Frederick Watts,
William Bell Scott, with many another kindred
spirit, were a right noble brotherhood of workers
[162]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
for the beautiful; while outside the special artist-
group were some distinguished men, with whom
the reader of these Memorials becomes familiar.
The camaraderie amongst these friends was
great; and although their influence on the future
was not equal to that which Coleridge, Words
worth, and Lamb exerted at an earlier date — in
the poetic springtime of the nineteenth century —
it was perhaps more intense, one upon another,
within the circle itself. The fact is that the art-
production of Burne-Jones and his friends was
poetic work; and the movement which they in
augurated, and helped forward, was similar in
character to that literary renaissance for which
the Lyrical Ballads prepared the way. Both of
them were stupendous and inevitable reactions
from past convention and commonplace.
The story of Burne-Jones' life has now been
told with minute and loving care. His child
hood and youth at Birmingham, his early rever
ence, his loneliness, his Celtic inheritance, his
sense of the mystery of the world, his vivid ap
preciation of romance, his precocious and
abounding humour, are all recorded. iEsop's
Fables was the first book he loved, his " treasure-
house." He rose rapidly at King Edward's
Grammar School till he was head of the English
department, and got to love his books as Eliza
beth Barrett Browning did, Ossian and Burger
being early friends; while his love of fun and boy-
[163]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
ish pranks was early developed. At the age of
fifteen a quaint religiousness comes out in his let
ters to his cousin, written from the "urbs fumi."
He went to Hereford, where the influence of the
Cathedral and its services told upon him, and
led him to think of taking clerical orders. An
other visit to London, however, opened his mind
simultaneously to the wonders of ancient Art in
the British Museum. The books which most
influenced him were those of Scott, Dickens,
Humboldt, and Newman. In his twentieth
year he entered Exeter College, Oxford; and,
although he did not work in the beaten tracks of
scholarship so much as in the collateral paths of
literature, he imbibed some of the best things in
the Greek and Roman classics, without being
captivated by them. Oxford did much for him
indirectly; but so far as fellowship went, he was
at first almost an alien, except for the one man
who became his closest life-long friend, William
Morris. As he read with Morris, his first ambition was
to take part in forming a new community, which
would be devoted to "the organised production
of religious art." Simultaneously his sense of
humour increased, and he wrote delightful letters
personifying other people. The one he sent to
his friend Price — in the character of "Edward
Cardinal de Birmingham" — has not been ex
celled in juvenile composition. But in the
[164]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
midst of Oxford scholarship he was disturbed,
almost as keenly as Wordsworth was amongst
the Cambridge wranglers, by
A strangeness in the mind,
A feeling that he was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.
It was not the subject-matter of what was
taught that made him desolate, but the way in
which it was imparted. The city itself — with
its wondrous medievalism — attracted him, and
he had a strong natural bent towards Logic and
Metaphysics; but his cravings were not satisfied.
And in these undergraduate days he came in
creasingly under the influence of one who was
almost a contemporary, and supremely original
amongst the teachers of the hour, John Ruskin.
In a letter to Mr. Price he said: "In aesthetics
he (Ruskin) is an authority. Above all things
I recommend you to read him. He will do you
more good in twenty chapters than all the math
ematics ever written." (Vol. I., p. 79.) Again,
in August, 1853: "Ruskin has published the
second volume of his Stones of Venice, entitled
'Sea Stories.' His style is more wonderful than
ever; -the most persuasive oratory I ever read.
His acme is to come. There never was such a
mind and soul so fused through language yet.
It has the brilliance of Jeffrey, the eloquence of
Macaulay, the diction of Shakespeare (had he
written in prose), and the fire of Ruskin; we
[165]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
can find no other." (Vol. I., p. 85.)
At length, in his twenty-second year, the foun
tains of the great deep were broken up for him,
and he writes from Oxford: "I have just come
in from my terminal pilgrimage to Godstow
ruins, and the burial-place of fair Rosamond.
The day has gone down magnificently; all by
the river's bank I came back in a delirium of
joy, the land was so enchanted with bright col
ours, blue and purple in the sky, shot over with a
dust of golden shower, and in the water a mir
rored counterpart, ruffled by a light west wind —
and in my mind pictures of the old days, the
abbeys and long processions of the faithful
banners of the cross, copes and crosiers, gay
knights and ladies by the river bank, hawking-
parties, and all the pageantry of the golden age —
it made me feel so wild and mad, I had to throw
stones into the water to break the dream! I
never remember having had such an unutterable
ecstasy; it was quite painful with intensity, as if
my forehead would burst. I get frightened of
indulging now in dreams, so vivid that they seem
recollections rather than imaginations, but they
seldom last more than half an hour; and the
sound of earthly bells in the distance, and pres
ently the wreathing of steam upon the trees
where the railway runs, calls me back to the
years I cannot convince myself of living in."
(Vol. I., pp. 97-8.) [166]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
Here were
Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things
Falling, from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
as truly as in Wordsworth's case.
In a letter of the same year, written to his
friend MacLaren, he gives an account of a visit
to the Royal Academy, in which we see the signs
of new insight into Art. He criticises Landseer,
Maclise, and others, for the kind of subjects to
which they confined themselves: "What with
silly, unmeaning subjects, and those of more
questionable character devoted to the hero-
worship of traitors and robbers, or the prettiness
and romance of a heartless religion, I saw that
the Pre-Raphaelites had indeed come at a time
when there was need of them." (P. 101.)
And during the same time in London he thus
describes a visit to the Crystal Palace: "I had
only time to visit Sydenham once. As I looked
at it in its gigantic wearisomeness, in its
length of cheerless monotony, iron and glass,
glass and iron, I grew more and more con
vinced of the powerlessness of such material
to effect an Architecture. Its only claim to our
admiration consists in its size, not in those ele
ments in which lies the true principle of appreci
ation, form and colour; its form is necessarily
rigid and mechanical, its colour simple trans-
[167]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
parency and a painfully dazzling reflection ; it is
a fit apartment for fragrant shrubs, trickling
fountains, muslin -de-laines, eau-de-Cologne,
Grecian statues, strawberry ices and brass
bands — but give me 'The Light of the World,'
and the apse of Westminster." (Vol. I., p. 101.)
N. B. that this is the language of a youth of
twenty-two, in the year 1855.
His discovery that the clerical life was not one
that either he or Morris should enter was made
gradually, and with no revulsion from his old
ideal even of a religious brotherhood, such as
"the monastery" he once dreamt of; but he
found that a magnet which they did not create,
but only felt, drew them in a different direction.
I think, however, that the unhappy expulsion of
Frederick Denison Maurice from King's College,
and the traditionalism of many in the English
Church, weakened the hold which the latter once
had upon him ; while a more inward religion was
developing in him apace — a religion, not with
Art attendant as a handmaiden, but interpene
trated with it over its entire area, and entered by
"the gate called Beautiful." His character, too,
was now growing in nobility, not passing through
a period of Sturm und Drang, but evolving fea
tures of rare dignity, self-effacement, reserve,
and consideration for others. No reader of
these volumes can fail to note such character
istics of the man. How few have felt, as he did
[168]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
in his twenty-second year at Oxford: "I hold it
a point of honour with every gentleman to con
ceal himself, and to ease life for everyone."
He thought of a military life, but was rejected
as unfit for the army on the score of health. He
went instead to London, and soon got to know
the charm of the art-brotherhood of the Pre-
Raphaelites. But a still richer experience awaited
him. In July, 1855, he made his first visit to the
Continent with Morris. They went from Bou
logne, by Abbeville to Amiens and Beauvais.
Of the Cathedral of Beauvais he wrote, so late
as the year 1892: "Do you know Beauvais,
which is the most beautiful church in the world ?
It is thirty-seven years since I saw it, and I re
member it all — and the processions — and the
trombones — and the ancient singing, more beau
tiful than anything I had ever heard, and I
think I have never heard the like since; and the
great organ that made the air tremble — and the
greater organ that pealed out suddenly, and I
thought the day of judgment had come — and
the roof, and the long lights that are the most
graceful things man has ever made. What a
day it was, and how alive I was, and young; and
a blue dragonfly stood still in the air so long that
I could have painted him. . . If I took account
of my life, and the days in it that most went to
make me, Sunday at Beauvais would be the
[169]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
first day of my creation." (Vol. I., p. 113.) In
1897 he wrote of "the holy beauty of vast Beau
vais church."
They went on in that year (1855) to Paris, to
see the Louvre; returning by Chartres, and
Rouen, to Havre; and it was "while walking on
the quay at Havre at night that we (Morris and
himself) resolved definitely that we would begin
a life of Art, that he (Morris) should be an arch
itect, and I should be a painter. That was the
most memorable night of my life." On his re
turn to England he went to Oxford and Bir
mingham, Poetry as well as Art engrossing him.
He read the poets and novelists, for their own
sakes, but also that they might inspire him with
subjects for his art. His first work in his chosen
field was a series of designs made for Mr. Mac-
Laren's Fairy Family; and he became one of a
brotherhood of seven, who wrote for the Oxford
and Cambridge Magazine.
He returned to Oxford to find it devoid of
life. Its greatness was that of the past. When
he came to see — as Morris did — that to take or
ders was not his vocation, and that for both of
them Art and Literature were their calling, he
went up to London; longing to meet the author
of The Blessed Damosel, the man who had drawn
the Maids of Elfenmere. He wrote to Ruskin,
and received a reply which led him to say: "I
am not E. B. J. any longer. I'm the man who
[170]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
wrote to Ruskin, and got an answer by return!"
The influence of all the men of the renaissance,
of Carlyle and Kingsley and Ruskin, of Malory's
Morte d' Arthur, the study of the poets Chaucer
Tennyson and Browning, changed his ideal.
More especially the sudden hero-worship of
Dante Rossetti as art-worker and colourist, the
first sight of him at the Working Men's College
in Great Ormond Street, and their subsequent
meeting and interview, decided his career for
Burne-Jones. He was allowed to visit Ros
setti's studio, and "to see him at work some
thirty times." It was a momenjtous time in the
evolution of the character of each; and we can
not exaggerate the rare wisdom of Rossetti in
letting the genius of his friend develop in its own
way, without his interference. His quick per
ception of what that genius might produce
showed him that to prescribe the lines on which
it should work would be detrimental.
Every young artist runs the risk of being de
flected from the pathway prescribed to him by
nature, through excessive hero-worship, and of
thus becoming a copyist instead of an originator.
But when Burne-Jones subsequently imbibed
the spirit and influence of some of his contem
poraries — notably that of Watts — he improved
both in his drawing and his colour.
His own account of the first days with Rossetti
is one of the most memorable things he wrote.
[171]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
"How we worshipped him! He was an in-
spirer of others, a finder of hidden things, a
revealer of light and discoverer of beauty, who
fired hundreds with the same enthusiasm, and
kindled the divine spark in every breast. He
it was who first taught me not to be afraid of my
own ideas, but always be myself, and do the
thing I thought best. And then how boundless
was his generosity, how royal the praise with
which he blessed our feeble efforts, how untiring
the pains he took to help us .... of which a
beautiful and golden record is somewhere writ
ten. What a world it was! and he the centre
and light of it all!"
At an earlier date he had written to a friend:
"Don't be afraid of being independent in
thought. It is a prerogative of man. This is
the time for us to think highly of our species,
to dream of development and the divinity of
mind; we shall soon wash away fancies in get
ting our beard. It is a glorious thought that in
our nature's ruin we yet possess our identity,
and stand isolated as beings with mind. It is
grand to be in such peril as we are, to be born
with free will," etc. (Vol. I., p. 89.)
He also said that what Rossetti taught him
was "to design perpetually, to seek no popu
larity." And again: "I never knew anything
that could encourage the superstition that some
people have that the gods are jealous of the pos-
[172]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
sible achievements of great men, as in Rossetti's
case. Everything was ready for the making of
a glorious creature — the perfect hunger for Ro
mance that was spread abroad in the world at
the time when he came into it, the mingling of
blood in him, his own admiration and discrimi
nation for all that was splendid, his surround
ings, and the things he was brought up among,
the people of all sorts of cultivation that he must
have known from his earliest days — never was
anyone so started, so ready for a great career."
(Vol. I., pp. 149-50.)
A long article might be written on Burne-
Jones' appreciation of his brother artists and
contemporary poets — as this, of a veteran com
rade, still happily among us, written in 1856:
"A glorious day it has been, one to be remem
bered by the side of the most notable in my life,
for whilst I was painting, and Morris making
drawings in Rossetti's studio, there entered the
greatest genius that is on earth alive, William
Holman Hunt — such a grand-looking fellow,
such a splendour of a man, with a great wiry
golden beard, and faithful violet eyes — oh, such
a man! And Rossetti sat by him. * * *
and all evening through Rossetti talked most
gloriously, such talk as I do not believe any man
could talk beside him." (Vol. I., p. 139.)
In March, 1857, ne wrote thus of Browning
to Miss Salt: [173]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
"You won't at first like him much, perhaps.
He is too different from anyone else to be liked at
first sight by most, but he is the deepest and in-
tensest of all poets, writes lower down in the
dark heart of things, rises up to the clear surface
less often. Oh, how ten lines of him help one!
Paraceslus, and the Soul's Tragedy, and King
Victor, and the Unknown Painter, and the fifty
Men and Women that follow, all sung out as if
Browning sat continually at the roots of human
life, and saw all things." (Vol. I., p. 153.)
In the same letter, after mentioning. Ruskin,
he says: "One seems to want no guide now,
but to flow down with the course of great spirits
new and old, and understand them without an
interpreter." This is on Tennyson, written after his funeral
in the Abbey:
"There should have been street music, some
soldiers and some trumpets, and bells muffled all
over London, and rumbling drums. But, as he
sleeps by Chaucer, I daresay they woke up and
had talks in the night, and I have spent much of
the early dark mornings making up talks for
them. I suppose he'll be hurrying off to Virgil
soon." And as a final sample of the charm of his
correspondence, take this, written in his twenty-
fourth year to a girl who became his sister-in-
law: "I want to teach you so much History
[174]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
that your sympathy may grow continually
wider, and you may be able to feel and realise
past generations of men just as you do the pres
ent, sorrowing for them when they failed, and
triumphing with them when they prevailed; for
I find this one conviction never changing but
always increasing, -that one cannot live a life
manfully or truthfully without a very wide world
of sympathy, and love, to exercise it in. So long
as I had no heroes, but all times and generations
of the past and present years were as one dead
level of interest or indifference, I then knew
nothing truly or enjoyed deeply, nor loved
strongly ; but now that I have set aside my heroes
for peculiar reverence — all such as have been
highly blessed with imagination, and have la
boured nobly and fought valiantly, hundreds of
them up and down great centuries — since then
I have seen things more truly than ever before."
(Vol. I., pp. 143-4.)
To trace the sure though gradual rise of Burne-
Jones as a painter is perhaps less necessary than
to trace the expansion of his friendships and his
influence. But the recognition of his genius, his
success after reiterated discouragement, was the
reward of patient toil and unflinching loyalty to
his ideals. And to the historian of British art
in the nineteenth century the chief thing to be
noted is the way in which he has educated two
generations of his fellow-countrymen. He
[175]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
worked joyously when he was very poor, feeling
that outward poverty was no evil and no dis
grace, when the riches were within. He scarcely
ever felt it an impediment to work, while he
scorned everything that was sordid, and de
spised a merely ephemeral and spectacular suc
cess. Nor must we forget in this connection his
noble ethical teaching; both in his familiar let
ters, his conversation, and through the symbol
ism of his art.
No one who has once come under the spell of
his genius can afterwards care for the trivial or
sentimental, scarcely even for the commonplace.
His painting was never didactic, any more than
his letters were; but he taught by opening up a
new world of ideality, with far-reaching vistas of
suggestion on every side. Then he was so sim
ple at times, so quaintly humorous; the "airy
fairy" grace of his fancy blending with the royal
power of his imagination, and both together
leading him to a truly imperial constructiveness,
in which he stood alone. He was never satisfied
with what he had achieved; and probably none
of our modern artists ever worked so easily
with so many different kinds of material; oil,
water-colour, glass, tapestry, fresco-work, cray
on, pen and ink. His perpetual aspiration was
also seen in his habit of having many pictures in
his studio, at different stages of progress towards
completion ; like some authors who have habitu-
[176]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
ally several books in hand, at which they take
turns, setting one aside and taking up another
for a rest. In all his work he saw the possibility
of new development, fresh attainment in store.
Dissatisfaction accompanied all his successes,
but this contained a prophecy of future realisa
tion. We see it in his Love Among the Ruins. It
comes out in the Godhead Fires, in the Pygmalion
series, and in Love Leading the Pilgrim.
And so, if there is a good deal of sadness,
there is also a preponderance of joy in his work.
Much is disclosed, but more is kept back in a
sublime reserve, and only hinted at, as was the
case in all the noblest art of Watts. Nothing is
obtruded; there is no pronouncement or parade.
The simple ideality of some of his single figures,
such as Vespertina Quies, or Aurora, or The
Wood-Nymph, is unrivalled; and no modern
British artists, except Watts and Rossetti,
were so far removed from the photographic
world of the actual. None ever worked more
sedulously toward the ideal; and so, even
when landscape is brought in for a background —
as in Green Summer, or Venus's Mirror — we
have not a reproduction of the actual, but its
idealisation. Therefore it is that, with all the
weird elements of his genius eliminated, we find
that Burne-Jones invested everything he touched
with an occult radiance, a joyous poetry, a far-
off mysterious significance, helping us to see the
[177]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
highest types of Beauty through the veil of won
drous allegory.
It is easy to criticise the sameness of type in
his woman's faces, but the same may be said of
almost every great artist; and Burne-Jones'
typical woman- face is superlatively lovely.
Unlike the common monotonous reality that we
usually see, it is at once a glorification of the act
ual, and a revelation of what transcends it.
There was a delightful saying of his, which
many of his contemporaries would endorse —
and which applies to much beyond the sphere of
plastic art — "When is a picture finished ? Nev
er, I think; and it is a symbol of life itself in that
way ; so when I say it is finished I mean it is cut
off, and must go away." He used to add that
it was only the van coming to take it away that
finished a picture for him.
There is no need to enlarge on his work in
starting the Art Company, along with Morris
and his friends, and the fortunes of the com
pany, which has done so much for the refine
ment of decorative art in Britain. But his con
stant and strenuous love of work, his finding his
best recreation within his own studio, is note
worthy. He agreed with the poet who wrote: '
Work, work, work.
'Tis better than what you work to get.
And he once said: "I thank the Lord in heaven
He gave me a savage passion for work." His
[178]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
knowledge and love of flowers was another
memorable thing; but it is on the man and his
work that emphasis must be mainly laid. A
discriminative writer in Blackwood's Magazine
once called attention to his affinity in some
things with Wordsworth. "They have much in
common. The repose of mind, the sincerity and
sobriety of temper, the sense of the infinite in
simple things; all these and other points they
touch." This is true, but it is of what is dis
tinctive in him that we are in search; and one
thing comes out in an early letter, which he wrote
in his twenty-fifth year, to that kind Miss Samp
son who had looked after him from infancy:
"Don't let any person persuade you that you
have been a fool for not looking after your own
interests. God doesn't call such people fools.
It's right to do it, but it's not wrong not to do it.
I have worked very hard at Art for two years,
and find it difficult to live ; but there are so many
things to be grateful for, that it is not right to
name anything as unfortunate." (Vol. I., p. 185.)
Mention must be made of the wonderful effect
of foreign travel upon him, especially of his visits
to Italy, of the way in which- he instinctively as
similated the best things in mediaeval art, and
at once felt at home amongst its treasures. As
Browning wrote,
Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it Italy.
[179]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
as Matthew Arnold felt, "Every year in which
I do not visit Italy is a year lost;" so Burne-
Jones said, "I walk about in London, but all
the while I live in Italy." It was by his repro
duction of the spirit of the great Florentines and
Umbrians that he taught his generation, as
others wrote of them; and he thus initiated thou
sands into the secrets of Botticelli, Luini, Car-
paccio, Bellini, as much as Ruskin did by his
lectures and writings. Not that he failed in
description, for he had a wonderfully retentive
memory, and the way in which he unfolded the
excellence of pictures at Florence to Miss Gra
ham, and those at Venice to Miss Gladstone,
was marvellously vivid. Mention of Ruskin
recalls their temporary misunderstanding. There
was, however, no real breach at any time with
his old friend and teacher, only a slight differ
ence in sundry ideals, because the art-impulse
in him was working for a time on other lines.
He felt that, to unfold character, he must devote
himself to the delineation of the human form,
and therefore to the study of draperies. Ruskin
wrote: "Nothing puzzles me more than the
delight that painters have in drawing mere folds
of drapery, and their carelessness about the folds
of water and clouds, or hills and branches.
Why should the tuckings in and out of muslin
be eternally interesting?" (Vol. II., p. 68.)
Burne-Jones wrote: "He [Ruskin] quarrels with
[180]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
my pictures, and I with his writing; and there is
no peace between us." But, so soon as they
again met, he said: "I forgave him all his blas
phemy against my gods, he looked so good
through and through." And this is how Ruskin
wrote to him, after a return from Switzerland in
1 863 : " I want you to do me a set of simple line
illustrations of mythology and figurative crea
tures, to be engraved and to make a lovely book
of my four political economy papers in Eraser,
with a bit I'm just adding. I want to print it
beautifully, and I want a Ceres for it, and a
Proserpine, and a Pluto, and a Circe, and a
Helen, and a Tisiphone, and an 'Ai/ay/cr/, and a
Prudentia, and a Sapientia, and a Temperantia,
and a Fortitudo, and a Justitia, and a Caritas,
and a Fides, and a Charybdis, and a Scylla, and
a Leucothea, and a Portia, and a Miranda, and
an 'A/3ctt), and an Ophelia, and a Lady Pov
erty, and ever so many people more; and I'll
have them all engraved so beautifully — and
then I'll cut up my text into little bits, and put it
all about them, so that people must swallow all
at once, and it will do them so much good.
Please think of it directly." (Vol. I., pp.
271-2.) Now, although this, if taken as pre
scribed, might have given to most people a very
bad fit of artistic indigestion, it is noteworthy
as showing to whom Ruskin turned as a fellow-
worker in the domain of the beautiful. Not
[181]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
less interesting is the correspondence with Rus
kin about Whitelands College, its May Queen,
and its hawthorn cross.
Much has been said of Burne-Jones' inability
to work along with brother-artists, and it was
true of some of them, although much exagger
ated. What he most prized removed him from
the sphere in which many others worked. He
broke with the Old Water Colour Society, and
with the Royal Academy, in the most courteous
way; and when he thought the management of
the Grosvenor Gallery had declined, he did not
scruple to say so, and to act on his conviction.
But it was all due to his sense of "the high call
ing" of "creative art." The same ideal which
led him to denounce the modern "restorer" —
whether of buildings or of pictures — the tamper
ing with the glory of St. Mark's at Venice, and the
architectural misconstruction of many modern
picture-galleries, induced him to discourage
"loan museums" of Art in provincial cities,
which often led to the injury or loss of priceless
things; and to encourage instead the local estab
lishment of "lasting collections of works of Art,"
in which the people could see "the best copies
procurable of the recognised masterpieces of
the world still left to us." Returning to the
architectural faults of picture-galleries, he in
sisted that pictures should be so hung as to admit
the light most favourable to them, and that each
[182]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
picture should, if possible, be separated from
others by some inches of space. But this was
quite as much in the interest of the spectator as
of the artist. He felt strongly that some of the
architects of our galleries were to blame for the
results. In the National Portrait Gallery, for
example, how impossible it was to see Watts'
portraits to advantage. "They seem all lumps
of paint and ribs of canvas. There is no chance
of a ray of sentiment penetrating them." (Vol.
II., p. 79.)
The details of life and work at the Grange are
lovingly told in these Memorials; his joy in his
work, and in the many friendships which ad
vancing years brought him, and confirmed.
Visits from George Eliot, Charles Norton, Mad
ame Wagner, and many others, are delightfully
recorded; and their appreciations cast light on
every side. It is thus that Mrs. Lewis wrote of
him: "I want to tell you that your work makes
life larger and more beautiful to me. I mean
that historical life of all the world, in which our
little personal share often seems a mere stand
ing-ground from which we can look all around,
and chiefly backward. Perhaps the work has a
strain of special sadness in it — perhaps a deeper
sense of the tremendous outer forces which urge
us, than of the inner impulses towards heroic
struggle and achievement; but the sadness is so
inwrought with" pure elevating sensibility to all
[183]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
that is sweet and beautiful in the story of man,
and in the face of the earth, that it can no more
be found fault with than the sadness of midday,
when Pan is touchy, like the rest of us."
The wealth of curious dicta on many of the
great questions of the ages which occur in these
volumes, scattered amid its biographical details,
gives us some rare glimpses into the character of
those who uttered them, and turns what might
have been a mere miscellany of dry facts into a
hortus inclusus of wisdom. While "Morris
never faileth, and Ruskin always flourisheth,"
there are scores of others, less known but quite
as interesting, to whom the reader is introduced
in the most natural and delightful manner.
Much light, moreover, is cast on the origin,
progress, and completion of that "great series of
allegoric pictures in which Burne-Jones' art is
enshrined, and a separate descriptive article
might be devoted to each of them. There was
so much of a sane realism from which the mystic
idealism sprang, and which it outsoared. The
man who wrote: "I was born at Birmingham,
but Assisi is my true birthplace," had by that
time attained to his artistic majority; and he
realised, as truly as Wordsworth did, that his vo
cation was to be "a teacher, or nothing;" not
a doctrinaire expounder, but a symbolic inter
preter of truth. We may go back to one of the
earlier pictures which marks his discovery of the
[184]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
path in which his work was to be carried on,
remembering that he wrote thus to a friend: "I
mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream
of something that never was, never will be, in a
light that never shone, in a land no one can de
fine or remember, only desire; the form divinely
beautiful." It is his picture of The Merciful
Knight, painted after he came under the early
delicious influence of Tuscany; and in no work
of his later years has he more nobly extracted
the truth which lies at the heart of a legend. An
admirable critic (Fortunec de Lisle) has written
thus of it:
"It is taken from the Florentine legend of San
Giovanni Gualberto, who, riding forth on a cer
tain Good Friday to accomplish his vow of ven
geance on the murderer of his brother, came
upon him alone and unarmed in the desolate
road which leads to San Miniato, and stayed his
uplifted sword, and forgave the assassin, when,
extending his arms in the form of a cross, he
begged for mercy in the name of Him who, dy
ing on that day, forgave his murderers."
"The legend says that, letting his enemy de
part, Gualberto entered a wayside shrine, and
knelt before the crucifix, and that the figure of
Christ bent down and embraced him, "in token
that his act had pleased God." From that mo
ment all earthly passions and desires fell from
him; he forsook the world, and entered the mon-
[185]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
astery of San Miniato, and later became the
founder of the Order of Vallombrosa. * * *
No picture of a miracle that has ever been
painted carries with it a more intense and awe-
inspiring sense of the reality of a supernatural
event than this one ; and the tour de force the
painter has accomplished is this, that the im
pression left on the mind of the beholder who
has gazed entranced on its mystic beauty is not
of the strangeness and impossibility of the
event, nor of mere admiration for the skill with
which it is depicted; it is an all-pervading sense
of the mystical element which so impregnates
the atmosphere of the picture as to compel ac
ceptance of the facts presented, in the simple
unquestioning spirit of the Middle Ages. The
mind is exalted into a region of spiritual mys
teries where all things are felt to be possible,
and an overpowering conviction is borne in upon
one, that in such a place, at such a time, and
under such circumstances, at the great crisis of
his soul's history — whether the statue in very fact
turned itself towards him becomes immaterial —
Gualberto felt that embrace, which changed the
current of his life."
It is interesting to compare The Merciful
Knight with the finished story of Pygmalion
and the Image, which was first exhibited in
1879, especially with the third of the four pic
tures which he called The Godhead Fires, of
[186]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
which the same critic writes:
"It shows the completion of human work by
divine power. Pygmalion has gone to the tem
ple to pray; and, human passion having with
drawn itself, the divine presence enters; and the
goddess of Love, herself borne on a cloud, doves
fluttering beneath her feet, heaven's sphere-like
radiance about her head, with uplifted right
hand sends a thrill of life quivering through the
marble limbs. Half woman, half statue, yet
with bewildered soul gazing from the awakening
eyes, Galatea bends forward with swaying
motion, and her outstretched hands find support
on the raised arm ofthe divinity." (Pp. 118-
It is easy to indicate in what Burne-Jones fell
short of the very highest attainment. No one
knew it better than he did. But he had no rival
as an idealist in art, in that glorious realm of
poetic insight where imagination and fancy com
bine with reason and the most delicate percep
tion of the senses, except his great contemporary,
Watts; and as I mentioned Watts' oral tribute
to his friend's greatness, I may add Rossetti's
verdict written to another than myself. "If,
as I hold, the noblest picture is a painted poem,
then I say that in the whole history of Art
there has never been a painter more highly
gifted than Burne-Jones with the highest qual
ities of poetic invention." [187]

SOME ARTISTS OF THE
I conclude with two extracts from his letters.
In one he wrote to me:
"I am without any exception the very worst
correspondent that ever lived." In an earlier one,
he refers to an introduction to him which I had
received from a common friend, who had given
me a letter to him and another to Watts at the
same time; and as — when I called at his resi
dence, at Kensington — I had inadvertently sent
in the one addressed to Watts, I afterwards
asked for its return. He wrote from the Grange :
"Here is the introduction to Watts. To say
truth it is the one I read when the maid brought
me your card, and I thought it was nice of you
to feel that it was interchangeable! Don't for
get us in June." CHICAGO.
IN closing this course of Scammon Art Lec
tures in Chicago, I wish to say in a single
farewell sentence that it has been a real
pleasure to me to revisit your great city
after some years of absence from it, and more
especially to note the signs of advance which you
are making along artistic as well as literary and
scientific lines. I hope that some of the thoughts
submitted to my audience may be as seeds which
will bye and bye develop and bear fruit. It is the
aim of every lecturer, especially a University one,
to diffuse as far and wide as he can any of the
ideas which he has himself reached, or the con-
[188]

NINETEENTH CENTURY
elusions he has come to. In this short course
we have been traversing some of the inter
related sections of the three great realms of the
True, the Beautiful, and the Good; and I trust
that you all feel with our great poet Tennyson
that they are
three sisters
That dote upon each other, friends to man,
And never can be sundered without tears.
I trust that none of you have been wearied by
my treatment of the problems, and the
personalities that have come before us ;
but that, some of you have been
refreshed, and others of you
stimulated.

VALE QUI LEG IS

[189]

Plate XLVI

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THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM [fragment]
Photograph by F. Hollyer

Plate XLVII1

Photograph by F. Hollycr

VESPERTINA QUIES

Plate XLIX

Photograph by F. Hollycr

AURORA

Plate L

THE GOLDEN STAIRS